Month: November 2008

Persona Non Grata

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by publius I think Kathleen Parker is officially off the NRO cruise invite list: To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party . . . . So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become … Read more

Somethin’s Better Than Nothin’

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by publius The Detroit bailout obviously raises several thorny questions. But Sebastian raised a more basic one – why do anything? It’s a fair question, so I’ll bite. First, I think the bailout makes sense even if you concede many of the critics’ arguments. For instance, let’s stipulate to the following: (1) the Big Three … Read more

Rumors Of Appointments

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by hilzoy Today’s rumors seem less speculative than most, so I’m going to break with normal practice and report them. First, the National Journal reports that Obama will make Peter Orszag to head up the Office of Management and Budget. Orszag is now at the Congressional Budget Office; I think he’s very good. Second, all … Read more

AP Calls It For Begich

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by hilzoy In the Alaska Senate race, Mark Begich now leads Ted Stevens by 3724 votes. The AP has called the race for Begich: “Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, narrowly lost his re-election bid Tuesday, marking the downfall of a Washington political power and Alaska icon who couldn’t survive a … Read more

Ingrates

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by Eric Martin Credit where due, Andy McCarthy is rather forthright in lamenting the collapse of our neo-imperial designs in Iraq in a piece discussing the SOFA/Framework Agreement that is now on the fast track to ratification.  While refreshingly honest and, at times, stripped of the exceptionalist sentimentality often used to sell modern day manifest … Read more

Comment Trolling on the GM Bailout

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—by Sebastian I figure comment trolling is ok when the comments are your own. In response to this, I wrote: "I thought I was just making the point that most people who favor things like the bailout do so not because they are unaware of the virtues of markets, but because they think that there … Read more

The Only Story That Matters

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by publius The new Google mobile iPhone app is out. I can now do voice-enabled Google searches. Please cue the big drums from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I predict we’ll soon solve the dark matter mystery, and possibly reconcile the theories of gravity by Thursday.

The Rule Of Law

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by hilzoy From the AP: “Barack Obama’s incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, who has criticized the use of torture, is being urged by some constitutional scholars and human rights groups to investigate … Read more

I Am Baffled

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by hilzoy Over the weekend, I wrote that Will Wilkinson was wrong to think that a general recitation of the virtues of free markets was sufficient to show that bailing out Detroit was a bad idea, and that in order to make his case, he needed to consider the specifics of this situation. Now Jonah … Read more

Credit Crunch

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by hilzoy From the WSJ: “All around Washington, policy makers are scrambling to figure out how to get banks lending again. Lawmakers have criticized banks for not using new federal money to make loans and have threatened to place conditions on additional money. Regulators last week sent out a directive, encouraging banks not to hold … Read more

Faith And Works

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by hilzoy An awful story from the Washington Post: “Rob Foster was 16 when his family unraveled. He had told his parents that he wanted to leave Calvary Temple, the Pentecostal church in Sterling the family had attended for decades. But church leaders were blunt with his parents: Throw your son out of the house, … Read more

Save the Soft Money Ban

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by publius

One of the most important post-election stories is the RNC’s lawsuit to strike down soft money bans as unconstitutional. Specifically, the RNC wants to restore unlimited donations for “state” or “non-federal” purposes (pdf complaint here – via Hasen). This is a huge story – particularly given the looming redistricting state elections of 2010.

Two quick observations: First, the suit is a blatant attempt to relitigate the issue before the new Roberts Court. The Court – on a 5-4 vote with O’Connor – decided this precise issue in 2003 in McConnell, and upheld the ban. The RNC is politically gaming the Court – and I fear the conservative Justices will play along.

Second, make no mistake – unlimited state donations will effectively eliminate the federal soft money ban (which the RNC technically isn’t challenging). As I’ll explain below, the federal/state issue is a distinction without a difference. If the state ban is lifted, the federal ban will be completely gutted.

After the jump, I’ll first discuss why soft money bans are good ideas generally. Next, I’ll get into some of the more specific legal issues with the RNC’s complaint.

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Lieberman

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by hilzoy From the Hartford Courant: “Senate Democrats will decide by secret ballot Tuesday whether to take away Sen. Joe Lieberman’s chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — a post from which he oversees U.S. security issues, as well as the operations of a wide segment of the federal government.” To my … Read more

More On Sparrows

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by hilzoy Just to build on publius’ post: what bothers me about Will Wilkinson’s argument is not exactly its callousness so much as the sense I have that he is arguing with people who do not exist. Specifically: “There is nothing that helps people more than high rates of economic growth, compounding, compounding. But everyone … Read more

The Poor Sparrows of Michigan

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by publius This Will Wilkinson post has got to be one of the most callous and condescending posts I’ve ever read. Not only is it obnoxiously indifferent to human suffering (thankfully, DC conservative think tank jobs are free from pesky quality concerns), but it elevates a primitive Econ 101 worldview to the level of religion. … Read more

Iceland

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by hilzoy Via Paul Kedrofsky, here’s a gorgeous and heartbreaking account of economic collapse in Iceland: “Trust in the banks had evaporated and people were trying to find a safe haven for their cash. One man had waited for six hours in a bank while his life savings, more than £1m in kronur (at IKr200 … Read more

Reality Debased Community

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by Eric Martin The IRS reports on the difference between the statutory corporate tax rate and the effective corporate tax rate (the amount actually paid, on average, after deductions and other loopholes are applied against the statutory rate): The Internal Revenue Service found that U.S. companies paid federal income taxes on their reported U.S. profits … Read more

Cocaine Blues

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by Eric Martin Have I mentioned how utterly nonsensical, wasteful and destructive the so-called war on drugs has been?  Oh yeah, I did – in the context of discussing the corrosive effects on Mexican society (which, by the way, is getting worse).  As widely reported, our effort in Afghanistan have been bedeviled by the conflicting … Read more

“On The First Day Of School, Nothing Happened”

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by hilzoy The American Prospect: “In Loveland, Colorado — population 61,000, 92 percent white and heavily evangelical Christian — Michelle didn’t know what to expect when she began to work with the school to facilitate her daughter’s transition from a boy to a girl. At first, it was difficult. The school “freaked out when I … Read more

Alaska Senate Update

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by hilzoy Mark Begich is now leading Ted Stevens by 814 votes in the Alaska Senate race. Nate Silver Sean Quinn: “The remaining votes come from Begich-friendly districts. Mark Begich is now an overwhelming favorite to win the Alaska Senate seat.” We might be spared the question what to do if a felon is elected … Read more

Irresponsibility

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by hilzoy Peter Suderman does not know what this statement by Sarah Palin means: “Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states … Read more

Health Care Reform . . . ON!

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by publius As others have noted, Senator Baucus’s “white paper” is very big news. As one of the most conservative and business-friendly Dems, the fact that he’s signed on to such an aggressive Clinton/Edwards-type plan means that health care reform is on. The battle is really coming this time. And it’s incredibly exciting. There are … Read more

Which Came First, Kirkuk or the Egg?

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by Eric Martin The always insightful tandem of Michael Hanna* and Joost Hiltermann have an op-ed out on the thorny issues surrounding the status of Kirkuk.  The authors rightly contend that Kirkuk has the potential to either erupt, thus destabilizing security gains by opening up a new front, or provide an impetus for the adoption … Read more

Project for the Next American Catastrophe

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by Eric Martin

In a recent post discussing a conservative post-mortem/where-do-we-go-from-here roundtable, Brad Reed at Sadly, No! had this to say about his own wish list for the reconfigured GOP:

If I could pick one faction of the GOP to be forever purged from public life, it would have to be the neocons. As much as the Christian Right and the anti-tax wingnuts bug me, neither of them is as heinous as people whose sole political ambition is to start unjustified wars.

I agree entirely, but one should not confuse such desires with reality.  I’m not accusing Brad of such delusional optimism, but rather Timothy Burke in the post that Hilzoy linked to over the weekend.  Said Burke:

[T]here’s little need to take the really bad-faith conservatives seriously now. For the last eight years, we’ve had to take them somewhat seriously because they had access to political power…You had to listen to and reply to even the most laughably incoherent, goalpost-moving, anti-reality-based neoconservative writer talking about Iraq or terrorism because there was an even-money chance that you were hearing actual sentiments going back and forth between Dick Cheney’s office and the Pentagon. […]

But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut."

But this is, sadly, a short-sighted view of political cycles and movements.  Neoconservative thought is not dead – nor its political viability extinguished – simply because Cheney will be out of office come January.  After all, neoconservatives were forced to deal with a hostile Vice President during the Clinton years, and yet neoconservatives were not stewing in their own juices as much as concocting a recipe, agenda and strategy for the ensuing decade (even if 8 years of Bush fell somewhat short of the hoped for "New American Century"). 

While neoconservatism will inevitably, and out of necessity, take on a different posture during the Obama years, progressives must not confuse hibernation for death.  Already, the old fortresses are being refitted, as William Kristol alludes to in an interview with Hugh Hewitt:

HH: And I think he will be very concerned with the two issues I’m going to raise with you – national security and immigration. Now I believe the Committee On the Present Danger filled a need in the 70s which we need to reorganize an equivalent now. But what do you think, Bill Kristol?

BK: Oh, I agree, and we did a little of that in the 90s with the Project For the New American Century. And I actually think there are people talking about this. And there’s a lot of good foreign policy and defense thinking on our side, the Fred Kagans and Bob Kagans and Reuel Gerechts of the world, Victor Davis Hanson, et cetera. But a little bit of a political organization for them wouldn’t be bad. And I think we should support Obama, incidentally, if he does the right thing. [emphasis added]

Right on schedule, Mordor is stirring.  The ring website has awoken in response to it’s master’s call:

Since May, visitors to PNAC’s website were informed that “this account has been suspended,” but now the website is back up, though it does not seem to have been updated with any new material.

Further, what does it mean to say, as Burke does, that "pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut" for neoconservatives?  Neoconservatives comprised the upper echelons of the team advising the GOP’s presidential nominee. While McCain didn’t win, it’s not as if the Scowcroft wing has emerged victorious as the new foreign policy gurus of the Republican Party.  Quite the contrary: the Hagels, Powells, Zakarias, Fukuyamas and other alienated right-leaning foreign policy thinkers have gravitated toward the Democratic Party, rather than mount an intra-party power grab. 

While the New York Sun recently went kaput (good riddance), neocons still control – or dominate – two large think tanks (the AEI and Hoover Institution), and have access to, or control of, multiple media venues (Murdoch’s vast media empire – including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Kristol’s spot at the NY Times, Krauthammer and the Editorial Board at the WaPo, etc.).  In many ways, neocons have a larger support network now than they did in the 1990s – a period during which they were able to lay the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq, as well as greatly influence a shift toward a more belligerent posture vis-a-vis the Israeli peace process.  Not bad for a group then-lacking a "pipeline to real political power."

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If You Build It, Good Stuff Will Come

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by publius

China doesn’t care much for Roy Blunt’s theories of economic stimulus. It announced this week that it would spend over half a trillion on public infrastructure projects such as highways and railroads. More broadly, the whole thing provides yet another example of the institutional GOP’s poverty of thought on domestic policy.

The theory of infrastructure-as-stimulus makes a lot of sense. And the WSJ provides a good overview of the benefits China expects to reap. First, infrastructure projects help fuel growth, particularly in downturns:

[D]omestic investment contributes far more to growth [than exports]. In recent years, spending on everything from public works to housing to factory equipment has accounted for about four to six percentage points of China’s 10% average annual growth rate.

More importantly, building better infrastructure is a long-term investment that creates numerous ancillary benefits – or positive externalities if you prefer.

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Veterans’ Day

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by hilzoy Today is Veterans’ Day. It’s not the only day when I am grateful to our veterans, and certainly not the only day when I remember those who died or were injured in combat. But it is one of the days when I try to say: thank you. My thoughts are with you. I … Read more

The Battle of the Pauls

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by publius Contra Krugman, Professor Paul Light in the Post urges Obama to think small: Obama would be wise to recognize these limits on his first-year agenda. Instead of throwing a super-size agenda at Congress, he should start with a few tightly focused progressive initiatives that will whet the political appetite for more. His best … Read more

One Clear Channel to Bind Them

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by publius Media consolidation is a tough issue for me. Lots of very smart people I respect think it’s a serious problem. And while I’m not crazy about it, I don’t think it’s an area demanding government action. But in the spirit of learning more, I just finished Alec Foege’s “Right of the Dial,” a … Read more

Excuse Me?

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by hilzoy Here’s a disturbing story: “The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration’s request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention. But corporate tax lawyers … Read more

The CRA — The Best Law You’ve Never Heard Of

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by publius

Obama may need to send former Congressman Bill Archer a Christmas card this year – it should read “thanks to you and yours for helping me reverse Bush’s last-minute regulations.” Archer, you see, sponsored a little known 1996 law that could soon become Obama’s new best friend.

As you probably know, the Bush administration is implementing a series of “midnight rules” before they leave town. And as Hilzoy noted earlier, the incoming Obama administration is examining ways to reverse these and other Bush rules. Interestingly enough, an obscure Gingrich-era law called the “Congressional Review Act of 1996” (CRA) could help the Dems prevent these rules from taking effect. It’s been used just once – by the Bush administration to overturn last-minute Clinton ergonomics regulations. But maybe it’s time to dust it off and take it for a spin.

By coincidence, I was doing some administrative law research, and came upon this law in a treatise – I had never heard of it. And I suspect I’m not alone. (Though when I got home, I googled and noticed that Professor Peter Shane had beat me to the punch. He has a good backgrounder there.)

Long story short – the CRA potentially helps Obama repeal last-minute regulations in two ways: (1) it extends the “effective date” of Bush’s “major” regulations; and (2) it gives Congress a limited window to veto any newly-enacted regulation, regardless of whether it’s already become effective. I’ll expand on both below.

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Trusting Obama

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by hilzoy I’ve been mulling over the election, and it occurred to me that liberal blogs are about to be faced with an interesting question, namely: how much should we trust Barack Obama? I assume that the answer is obviously not: completely, let alone: blindly. Even were I tempted to blind trust, which I’m not, … Read more

Goodbye To All That

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by hilzoy A few days ago, Timothy Burke wrote: “It’s schadenfreudey fun to read the ongoing psychotic meltdowns at various far-right sites like the Corner, I agree. But there’s little need to take the really bad-faith conservatives seriously now. For the last eight years, we’ve had to take them somewhat seriously because they had access … Read more

Change We Can Believe In

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working … Read more

About That Swing

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by publius I generally agree with the Drum/Yglesias argument that, in examining exit polls, we should look at a given group’s swing relative to the national swing. For instance, under this assumption, Kevin argues that the “weekly churchgoing” Obama swing isn’t particularly newsworthy because the swing (+10) is almost perfectly consistent with the broader national … Read more