Matt Zeitlin

Peter King, the New York Congressman, should probably start leading seminars for his fellow Republicans on how to must effectively stir up resentment against liberals and their cultural and educational elite supporters in as few words as possible. This is from Politico:

“I wouldn’t have gotten involved if the president hadn’t used the word ‘stupidly.’ I know the pressure cops are under. Whatever Sgt. [James] Crowley did here, it was well-intentioned, and he conducted himself as a gentleman throughout,” said King. “If race was injected, it was injected by the Harvard professor. I don’t see it as a racial issue. The underlying issue here is the arrogance of the Harvard professor toward a working cop. It’s the academic elites who look down on firefighters, cops and the military. It’s a class issue, not a race issue.”

The guy manages to say “Harvard professor” and “academic elites” three times in four sentences. Also, throwing in “arrogance” is a nice touch.  But one would think that Republicans who say things like “It’s a class issue, not a race issue” wouldn’t be so quick to denounce marginally more progressive economic policies as “class warfare.”

I don’t often say this about Weekly Standard writers, but Jonathan Last is really on fire here. It’s interesting how selective many conservatives are in opposing violations of constitutional rights, autonomy and liberty. It’s almost as if it’s a political movement that draws much of its support from the grievances of white men or something.

A little more than two months ago, David Broder wrote a column complimenting a few Senators and Congressman who proposed a “bipartisan commission to examine the big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

As Broder well knows, the idea behind these independent comissions is to fashion a plan to reduce entitlement spending, which means reducing benefits from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but do so in a way that gives Congressmen and Senators political coverage to cast a vote that will piss off the old people who are the biggest voters. The way it usually works is that the comission draws up a bill, and then Congress votes yes or no. The sad thing for Broder was that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi had no interest in such a commission and so Broder lamented that “the nation” had “missed an opportunity.”

Fast forward to July 26th, where David Broder devotes his column to trashing Obama’s proposal to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council which would, instead of Congress, “recommend to the president updated fees that Medicare would pay doctors, hospitals, rehab centers, nursing homes, labs, home-care and ambulance services, equipment manufacturers, and all other providers” and “annually recommend a set of broader reforms to improve the quality or reduce the cost of medical care.” What makes IMAC so nifty is that the President would sign off on their recommendations, and Congress would have to explicitly overrule the board and the President if they disagreed with the recommendations.

For someone who’s so obsessed with entitlement spending, this should a dream come true. Broder even admits that one of the reasons Medicare spending is going out of control is that Congress sets the fee schedules and their decisions are affected by “the lobbying by potent hometown individuals and institutions.” It’s basically a problem of having a legislature determine entitlement spending. Because no congressman wants to be the person to screw their hometown industry or be the man who gave old people less money, Medicare and Social Security spending continues to grow. This is why entitlement hawks want to de-democratize the process as much as possible, with things like IPAC or an independent comission.

But Broder, when faced with a liberal president pushing for a mechanism which would be a potent weapon in reducing Medicare costs, finds a reason to oppose it. Namely, he’s “uncomfortable” with these decisions being placed in the hands of “five unelected IMAC commissioners.” Nevermind the fact that the commissioners would have to be approved by Congress and that Congress would have the opportunity to strike down their recommendations, Broder is still “uncomfortable.”

This gets really embarrassing when you actually look at what the SAFE Act, which is the piece of legislation Broder was so in love with in May, actually entailed. Here’s how AEI described it in a write-up of a talk by the SAFE Act’s two cosponsers, Jim Cooper and Frank Wolf.

The sixteen-member SAFE commission–composed of administration officials, members of Congress, and outside experts–would hold town hall meetings across the country and form recommendations to balance the federal government’s long-term fiscal obligations. These recommendations would be presented to Congress for an up-or-down vote, forcing members of Congress to go on record with their constituents and giving them cover to make difficult decisions.

Although there the commissions are composed slightly differently, these two proposals — IPAC and the SAFE act — are essentially the same. An independent commission has wink-wink, nudge-nudge mandate to make recommendations that would reduce entitlement spending, and the  recommendations would face an up-or-down vote which could give individual congressman “cover to make difficult decisions.” So far as I can tell, the only difference is that President Obama opposed and  supports the other.

I must admit, even I’m slightly taken aback by the rank intellectual dishonesty on display here.

It makes sense for one to think that their particular policy preferences are perfectly reasonable, and if it weren’t for hidebound, interest group driven ideologues, more people would agree with them. Or, more cynically, people will often put forward that their ideas are totally reasonable, just to score some rhetorical points.

I imagine something like that is happening when Jonah Goldberg says “The healthcare bill looks more and more like a stimulus bill redux. Obama seems to feel he must placate the Democratic party’s base more than win Republicans which would give him centrist cover.”

This doesn’t make any sense on two levels. One, in crafting the stimulus bill, Obama preempitvely put in $275 billion in tax cuts, as a sign of good faith to get Republican approval, and then when Senate centrists held the bill up, Obama and his congressional allies shaved off $200 or so billion to get the bill through. What made the bill so partisan and liberal was that Republicans decided it would be better for their political standing to be (nearly) universally opposed.

On health care, Obama has once again, preemptively moved towards the center, presenting a hybrid plan that achieves the liberal dream of universal coverage, while still, at least in the short-to-medium term, doing relatively little to change the health care system in the way that liberal dreamers might like. And, besides trying to expand coverage, the proposal to reform the Medicare Advisory Board so that the onus is on Congress to reject its recommendations by a two-thirds vote, is an admitted ploy to make it easier to give old people less entitlement money. Hardly seems like something a hard-core leftist in the vice-grip of liberal interest groups would do.

There’s also public opinion. In a June poll which was hardly an outlier, 72% of respondents said that they supported a public option, 57% said they would be willing to pay higher taxes, while 65% said they more concerned with expanding coverage than constraining cost. So it seems like a health care plan that makes coverage universal and is paid for partially by tax increases would be right in the middle of public opinion. But just because something matches up pretty well with what the public wants doesn’t make it easy to pass, thanks to both the perverse nature of our legislative institutions and the bizarre, unintelligible posture of the Blue Dogs.

Considering that the Republican party has basically been boiled down to its Southern, conservative core and conservative ideology has gone right there with it, it makes sense that Goldberg can’t recognize relative moderation when it is right there in front of him.

This happened a little while ago, but Chris Bodenner , blogging at Andrew Sullivan’s, said this:

In my mind there is no equivalency here, but the reader does raise a good point: there is, and never will be, a white equivalent to the N-word, but “racist” – when unsubstantiated – comes close.

Besides the obvious point that even someone who’s been accused of being a racist does not live with the historical and social legacy of being a black man and, more immediately, does not, for example, draw extra suspicion from police officers on account of his inalienable characteristics, there may be something of a point here. People don’t like being called racists, and being accused of racism baselessly can be quite hurtful.

But I still don’t think there’s much of a real problem of people being called racists and then having their lives ruined. Just look at plenty of people who have done real racist things with no damage to their careers. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were basically unrepetent, noxious white supremacists who were lauded by the conservative movement and Republican party after they died.

Trent Lott said that if Thurmond’s single-issue segregationist candidacy in 1948 had been successful “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” He had to resign as majority leader, but he remained a senator and is now a high-profile lobbyist. John Stennis, a Democratic senator from Mississippi served for 41 years, signed the Southern Manifesto, opposed all major civil rights legislation, opposed making Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, and as a prosecutor, sought the conviction of three black men whose confessions had been elicited through torture. So, what’s Stennis’s legacy? He has a Nimitz-call supercarrier named after him.

So, until we do a better job of recognizing the fact that hard-core segregationists were lauded and respected members of the Democrats through the late 1980s and the Republicans through the early 2000s, then I’ll be concerned about the plight of white people who are baselessly called racists.

My favorite hawkish foreign policy writer — and that’s a real compliment, honest — finally has a blog. My feeling is that this blog will only make someone with whom  I disagree with on just about every major foreign policy issue seem more and more appealing. That’s because I imagine that the blog will have a lot more hip hop than foreign policy commentary. But anyway, just check out. Eli may be a hawk, but he’s certainly a mensch.

A big part of blogging, for me at least, is opining on issues that I have a pretty shallow understanding of. By that, I mean, I haven’t done the requisite background reading on all sides to really come up with a conclusion. But, of course, that doesn’t stop me from opining! The entire method kind of sucks when I write a blog post about a book based only an interview with the author, and the author responds. Well, without further adieu, here’s Douglas P. Fry, author of Beyond War, below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

John McWhorter, who has made his career saying that racism is not what’s holding black America back, says, in response to the Skip Gates incident that “The relationship between black men and police forces is, in fact, the main thing keeping America from becoming “post-racial” in any sense.”

This strikes me as incredibly important. The argument that many make — and that McWhorter rejects — is that the structure of American society, from a cultural, political and economic perspective, specifically makes it harder for black Americans to succeed. Without getting into the truth claims, it’s pretty clear how, in a visceral sense, the constant suspicion one gets from the police, simple on the account of being a black male, will make one mistrustful of society at large.

That’s because police, in America, are more than just enforcers of the laws, they are supposed to uphold our social order and strengthen our social fabric. When you hear language about “keeping the peace” or about preventing “disorder, ” or in Gates’s case “disorderly conduct” that’s “unruly behavior likely to set off wider unrest,” imagery and symbols are being evoked that are much more than simple legal codes and regulations. Instead, police have the combined function of fulfilling the state’s most basic imperative, the monopoly on violence, and, more generally, in establishing the conditions under which peaceful, orderly society can operate. And if black men, from a very young age, have experiences which tell them (rightfully or wrongly, it doesn’t matter) that these frontline defenders of society will hassle them solely because of their skin color, then it’s much easier for them to have a wider mistrust of institutions and social norms.

This is one of many reasons why good police work is so important, and why police officers who arrest people becuase they embarrass and irriate them should be disciplined harshly. Anything else would be showing a lack of seriousness about the work they do.

There are some polls out there showing Joe Sestak and Arlen Specter not doing too well against Pat Toomey, the presumed Republican nominee for the Pennsylvania senate race in 2010. This has lead some smart people to be worried. Don’t be.

Sestak’s defecit can be pretty clearly attributed to name recognition — as Daniel (who’s the “smart people” linked to earlier) has already said. Toomey has 39% right now, which is partially the 44% of the state that voted for McCain, some independents all rounded off by the fact that Toomey has been a big name in Pennsylvania politics since his primary run in 2004. Sestak can’t boast any of that. He’s not the natural or unified choice for Democrats and is relatively new to the statewide political scene.

But if he wins the primary, he’ll have the full support of a very large and effective state Democratic party, and a president who won 55% of the vote in 2008. And most importantly, Pat Toomey is a GOP demagogue’s GOP demagogue. If an average Democratic candidate (which, by all accounts, Sestak would be) can’t be the former head of the Club for Growth, then we’re going to have much more serious problems than losing Arlen Specter’s seat.

Look, I understand that it’s tough to be tasked with doing the dirty work that democracies don’t really want to know about, and then getting a ton of blame when stuff goes wrong. But still, I think a big reason concerns about the CIA’s “morale” get such elevated importance in policy debates is because journalists and opinion writers let CIA sources dictate to them how much their morale matters. The CIA knows that whenever a new director or president insists on some restraints in their behavior or limits the extent of how secretive they are, they can complain to their favorite writers, who, wanting to be well sourced within the intelligence community, will uncritically air the complaints.   Check out this Gerald Posner piece in the Daily Beast, where he got a bunch of CIA vets to complain about the expectation, set down by Panetta and Obama, that they minimally follow the law:

And despite the President’s promise that CIA officers who relied on the Justice Department’s advice wouldn’t face prosecution, the worst fears of those in the Agency might be realized: Holder is now debating whether to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether the CIA operatives who questioned ranking Al Qaeda operatives exceeded the legal guidelines that had been developed by the Justice Department. Holder is considering whether, for instance, the CIA interrogators used waterboarding with a greater frequency and a larger volume of water than what was approved by the Justice Department.

“This is precisely the type of shit that makes you want to do nothing,” says one of the current employees. “You get people coming in afterwards, who are suits sitting at desks in Washington, and trying to judge what was happening in the field under conditions of extreme stress and pressure. Everyone seems to have forgotten what it was like after 9/11, how we all thought the next capture had information about where the follow-up attack to 9/11 would be.”

Now, if Posner wanted to do more than just quote annoymous CIA vets, he would emphasize (he does mentio it, though) that Holder was contemplating prosecuting those agents whose interrogations went outside the very broad and generous guidelines set out by the Bush administration. Or, to phrase it Posner’s way, those who didn’t follow the “Justice Department’s advice,” might be investigated. They had rules which were pretty exact in saying what they could and could not do, and if CIA agents broke those rules, they might be held to account. At the very least, if you’re quoting a spook doing his best Jack Nicholson in a Few Good Men impression, you should try to get his thoughts on when, if at all, the CIA has to follow rules.

I got an obit of the deceased anchorman up at Campus Progress. Please, do check it out.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Dylan thought of titling a post about Walter Cronkite with an Xzibit lyric a little less than a year ago. May he be recognized for his originality and wit. I stand on the shoulders of giants (no, seriously, Dylan is pretty tall).

I’ve expressed before that I think Tucker Carlson is a much better written than TV host. But putting it that way seems like the damning the Formerly Bow-Tied One with the faintest of praise. I’ll rephrase: Tucker Carlson is an excellent magazine writer. I was tooling around the Esquire archives — i.e. browsing their website after my friend sent me link informing me that one could see Mary Louise Parker’s ass cheeks and left breast in her recent photo shoot for the magazine– and I found this excellent piece Carlson wrote in 2003 about Al Sharpton’s trip to Liberia in an attempt to mediate the end of the civil war that drove Charles Taylor out of power. If there were ever a story for a good, well-natured conservative writer to cover, this was it. Anyway, if you have some time to kill, check it out.

Also, if you have even more time and are interested in Carlson’s travels with other fringe political figures, his Ron Paul piece that he wrote during the campaign for The New Republic is also excellent.

Can someone explain to me why the Times is writing publicity material for a Disney star?

Horgan, who has been doing amazing, obsessive work on the question of human nature, history and violence has another great piece in New Scientist that’s a great summary of the research being done in this field. Check it out. Horgan deserves some money or a fellowship or something for delving into this incredibly important, yet recently neglected, area of scholarship.

The WSJ has an excerpt from David Wessel’s new book, In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic,  which documents, well, Ben Bernanke actions in the great panic. The entire piece is interesting, but this one paragraph jumped out at me:

When the search for a successor to the then-venerated Mr. Greenspan began in the spring of 2005, Mr. Bernanke’s proximity to President Bush heightened the public speculation that he would be among the finalists, and he was. Others were Harvard’s Greg Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, Stanford’s John Taylor and a dark horse whose name never surfaced in the press: Stephen Friedman, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive and White House economic-policy coordinator. Each man was interviewed by a small search committee in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office for about 90 minutes.

It was bad enough for the credibility of the government’s response to the financial crisis that a former CEO of Goldman Sachs was running the Treasury Department, but the shitstorm that would have resulted from both Treasury and the Federal Reserve being run by two CEOs of the same investment bank would have been orders of magnitude worse. Now, I imagine that progressive critics of the Bush-Obama-Paulson-Bernanke-Geithner response to the financial crisis think that having Friedman at the Fed — or anyone else who came up in right wing policy and economic circles — wouldn’t have made that much of a substantive difference in the actual policy decisions, but I think everyone can agree that some sort of emergency, large-scale action by the Fed was necessary, and having someone with as solid a reputation as Bernanke at the helm was probably for the good.

I think, when all is said and done, the appointments of Gates and Bernanke will be seen as Bush’s best moves.

John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, has a nice op-ed in the Journal advocating for a range of reforms in the procurement process that would hopefully lead to fewer embarrassing and pointless cost overruns. And, as someone who thinks these overruns are bad, I support his ideas. But, it’s worth pointing out the temporary coalitions liberals, libertarians and reform-oriented hawks like John McCain can form around these issues are likely to be just that: temporary.

That’s because Lehman isn’t angry that the money spent on the F-22 is a waste and that, more generally, we spend too much money on weapons systems, but that the contracting process has made it so the military can’t get enough weapons. With the F-22, the problem is that “the Navy cannot buy sufficient numbers.” Apparently, only having 187 next generation Air Force jets at a cost of $350 million each is objectionable — he wishes we could get all of the original 648 at their original projected price. Not having them, he says, is “disarmament without a treaty.” Later in the piece he says “We are rapidly disarming ourselves, even as defense spending grows.” And no where does he call for cuts in overall defense spending.

This is an important distinction. Liberals and libertarians oppose the F-22 and other weapons programs because we think they’re pointless and are part and parcel of a budgeting and procurement process which has gotten entirely out of whack and lavishes way too much money on the Pentagon. So that’s why we support, in addition to procurement reform, less military spending.

This “dumb reform” of just spending less would probably do a whole lot to actually improve the procurement process in the way Lehman envisions, because the Pentagon and the services would have to become more efficient in their spending because they knew they didn’t have access to an unlimited supply of government largess. Any number of reforms which still leave the basic political set up intact — Pentagon asks for huge amounts of money, Congress gives it to them — are still likely to be gamed by defense contractors.

Dave Brockington at Lawyers, Guns and Money has an oldie but goodie complaint that you hear from anyone who thinks about tax and budget policies in a serious manner — that taxpayer funded stadiums are giant scams. Specifically, Jerry Jones has claimed that the new Cowboy stadium, which the city of Arlington contributed $325 million of the total $1.12 billion cost, will “be its own stimulus package that will help “the country and this world” dig out of the recession.”

And while the explicit subsidies cities give teams and their corporate sponsors for the construction of new stadiums is quite egregious, the far more common subsidy is exempting business or stadiums from paying taxes. Brockington points out that cities and states routininely exempt business from paying taxes in an effort to lure them into their jurisdiction. Everrett, Washington, for example, ‘”afforded Boeing large subsidies” to assemble the 787 there.

Now, of course, this is a very thorny problem because of its collective nature. While everyone would be better off if cities didn’t compete by slashing taxes (and thus their revenues) to attract businesses, it will generally be rational for a single city or county or state to do so. The real solution would be a total federalization of the tax code, which could only real happen if we had a federalization of budget and policy making, which for a variety of reasons, isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

This Gabriel Arana post at TAPPED confuses me, first he discusses Obama proposal for 12 billion dollars of increased spending for community colleges, but then goes on to saying that while the new money is a “welcome and necessary change” it doesn’t do enough to “address the larger structural problems facing higher education” which are, Arana argues, increased tuition which funds administrative and support positions, and “venture partnerships with corporations” while “spending on instruction has remained stagnant as both community colleges and four-year universities have turned to poorly paid adjuncts as cheap labor.”

This diagnosis strikes me as slightly off. First of all, the venture partnerships, as I understand them, bring money into the schools, but I could be wrong. Secondly, I don’t know if Arana has the causation right on the connection between higher tuition and “administrative and support positions.” It seems just as likely that students or potential students want all the stuff that requires more administration, and so colleges, competing for those students, establish the programs that require them. And even if that’s not the case, it hardly seems like unionizing adjuncts, and thus paying them more and giving them more benefits, will keep costs down.* A good Times story covering this phenomenon broke it down like this:

In the 20-year period, the report found, the greatest number of jobs added, more than 630,000, were instructors — but three-quarters of those were part-time. Converted to full-time equivalents, those resulted in a total of 939,00 teaching jobs, up from 614,000 in 1987.The largest number of full-time jobs added, more than 278,000, were for support staffs, and grew to more than half a million positions in 2007, from 292,000 in 1987. Colleges also added some 65,000 management positions, almost all of them full time; all told, they had 185,000 managers in 2007, up from about 120,000 managers 20 years earlier.

*I want to be clear here: I support adjuncts efforts for better pay and benefits. But I do because of the benefits it will bring adjuncts, not because it will make the higher education system any better.

These aren’t really defenses, so much as arguments against Goldman being the Moloch/Cthulhu/Palpatine of American economic and political life. For what it’s worth, I found this from Free Exchange, this from Yglesias and this quite interesting. I think there’s ample room for saying that the administration’s Wall Street friendly policies in dealing with the immediate crisis were not perfect, but also necessary and the best response in a very difficult circumstance, and also insisting that their regulatory and tax policies should be much less Wall Street/finance friendly. Or, at least, that’s what I think.

In response to Goldman posting huge earnings– and most obscenely, setting “$11.36 billion for compensation and benefits during the year’s first six months, enough to pay each employee $386,429″ — Matt Taibii has a very Taibbi post, which, while useful in providing a certain perspective that’s part of a healthy debate, seems to get something pretty basic wrong.

Taibbi says that Goldman is going back on their promise to “take steps to reduce leverage” because their Value at Risk — “an estimate of how much the firm could lose in a single day” — has “soared since last year.” There are two problems here. The most obvious is that Value at Risk and leverage aren’t the same thing. In fact, Goldman’s leverage has gone down dramatically. According the Journal story Taibbi cites elsewhere in the post “Goldman reduced its leverage ratio, a measure of how much it is using borrowed money to magnify bets. That ratio fell to 14.2 at the end of the quarter, from 27.9 at the beginning of 2008.” Also, it makes sense that VAR would go up in the past six months. In 2008, the financial world was on fire, so it made very little sense to make huge risks every day, now that things have settled down a bit, Goldman’s risk tolerance goes up.

This is just a quibble, really. I think Goldman’s massive profits and compensation reflect decades of bad policy and a bad political culture, and also the government’s refusal to extract concessions from financial institutions it kept alive through a variety of programs and assurances. But that’s an argument that one can make without fudging the facts.

Also, while we’re talking about people unhappy with the financial world and the US government’s policy towards it, it should be noted that Simon Johnson and Russ Roberts sound pretty nutty when they say CIT, a medium sized bank with $80 billion in assets, was denied more federal support its CEO, Jeffrey Peek, donated money to McCain’s campaign and not Obama’s.