The Pickle

Where Is My Fox News?

2010-06-29T11:06:00.004-04:00

On a roadtrip last week from Portland, OR to Las Veges, NV, I stopped for the night in a Motel 6 in Redding, CA. The following conversation was overheard by someone in my party. It occurred in the lobby of the Motel 6 between a customer and the front desk person:

Customer: Hi. There are two things you need to help me with. (Spreads out map of Redding). Show me where I can find a McDonalds...and show me where I can find a Wal-mart.

Front desk: I can show you where you can find a McDonalds INSIDE a Wal-mart.

Customer: Okay, fine. And one more thing: I've got a little piece of advice for you. Not everyone who stays here is as liberal as you people in California. There is no Fox News on your TV. I suggest you do something about that. I mean, is there no Fox News at any Motel 6?

A couple of things struck me about this rather humorous conversation. First, it suggests that, given the customer's political framework for the conversation, going to Wal-mart and McDonalds might be, at least in part, a political act, and not only about low prices. I'm sure we are all familiar with NOT going to Wal-mart as a political act, but it may be that the opposite is also a practiced phenomenon.

The second is that it is a good example of how segregated the world has become in terms of where we get our information. And of how that information is so often politically biased. It is an oft talked about phenomenon that, sadly, I find hard to refute: people tend to want their ideas and attitudes re-enforced rather than questioned, and they go out of their way to make sure they expose themselves exclusively to information sources that parrot their already-hardened attitudes. And I don't think this holds true only for conservatives. It's not too hard to imagine a liberal having a similar conversation in, say, Texas. "Not everyone is as conservative as you people in Texas. The only news channel you have in this motel is Fox News. I suggest you carry another news channel."

Who Would Be a Better Progressive President?

2010-06-10T12:56:00.003-04:00

Progressives are still pissed at Obama. Scratch that: by the looks of this post by Glenn Greenwald, they are lately even MORE pissed at Obama. After passing health care. After passing financial reform. After passing a very unpopular stimulus that saved jobs and helped stave off a great depression. After doing some very smart things in the foreign policy arena, including hitting the re-set button with Russia and trying in good faith to stand up to Israeli settlements (and, yes, failing miserably; but he deserves credit for effort). After nominating two highly competent women to the supreme court. I could go on.

But rather than try to defend Obama by arguing over his record, which can get tiresome, I'd like to ask a simple question of those liberals who are unsatisfied with Obama: who, in the great pantheon of American politicians, WOULD satisfy you? And I don't want to hear about some hypothetical/mythical politician constructed from scratch, or rather constructed from a progressive policy wish-list. This is not the movie "Weird Science." I want to hear a name of a real human being. Who, as president, would be better for progressives--and for the country--than Obama? I'll even allow retired politicians to qualify. Who would be better?

Hillary Clinton? Bill "triangulation" Clinton? Al Gore? John Edwards? John Edwards before we found out he was an adulterer? Dennis "I believe in UFOs" Kucinich? Nancy Pelosi? Howard Dean?

Who?

Gaza Flotilla Link

2010-06-03T15:36:00.003-04:00

If you want to read something smart about the Gaza flotilla incident, read this.

And this.

Gall Talk

2010-05-17T20:37:00.002-04:00

I find it more than a little galling that corporatists/free marketeers have, throughout the financial crisis, justified bailouts by appealing to the too-high social cost (unemployment) of sticking to free market principles. Probably someone who finds it more galling than I do comes from a community decimated by the social costs associated with sticking to principle in the war on drugs. Oh, unrelated note - one out of nine African-American men aged 20-29 is behind bars right now, one out of three young black men can expect to be behind bars at some point in their life, and "as incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%." From that Marxist rag The Economist.

Some Vexations on Illegal Immigration

2010-05-04T14:06:00.003-04:00

Just want to vomit out a few thoughts on illegal immigration, the first of which is that, in this debate, it's hard for me to take seriously someone who is completely unvexed. It's vexing as hell - how can you find your way to an extreme position through all those vexes?

Let's start with the extreme "lefty" position, one which I'd rather call the "super forgiving" position because this debate doesn't split awfully neatly into right vs left. The super-forgiving position is characterized by rejection of all interdiction efforts and heavy reliance on the "illegal immigrants do jobs Americans don't want to do" argument. The most nagging vexation about this position is that, while there's no explicitly categorical rejection of interdiction efforts, the rejection is functionally categorical, and it really seems like a lot of its proponents don't want to enforce laws prohibiting illegal immigration at all. Take, for example, arguments about fence-building. A border fence may be stupid and costly, but I don't think it's on its face cruel or morally wrong. (Though it may remind us of things that are cruel and morally wrong.) The implication of making such arguments is that we ought not to do anything about illegal immigration -- also one of the implications of the "do the jobs Americans won't do" argument. This one holds no water for me at all; unquestionably, illegal immigration lowers the wages for these jobs by increasing the labor supply (and exacerbatingly increasing the supply of "shadow labor" enabling wages to be even lower). A final vexation that doesn't get a lot of play is the fairness vexation -- doesn't get a lot of play because the aggrieved group are legal immigrants, not famous for their franchise. It was brought to my attention by my legal immigrant parents, who jumped through many hoops to immigrate, and who would love to have our family members join them here, but they (the family members) have been rejected many times by our very complicated immigration system. Naturally they (the parents) are nonplussed about the circumvention of that system.

There's really only one vexation about the extreme hardline position, but it's a blockbuster: it's simply coded racism. This is not even taking into account arguments that are explicitly racist, although there are plenty of those, and the line is blurred by the "take our country back" sentiment. Rather I'm talking about instances when hardliners make appeals to nominally innocuous things like law enforcement and safety, but there's a scent of racism because some of the arguments are hokey and you start to suspect it's just about not wanting to see as many Mexicans. Take, for example, John McCain's claim that illegal immigrants are "intentionally causing traffic accidents on the freeway" and that "Arizona residents are not safe." The only people endangered by illegal immigration are illegal immigrants. McCain's engaging in demagoguery of the worst kind and the mongering of many bad things. And frankly the coding on this racism is shit.

The arguments of both extremes tend to be made in bad faith, though for me, the hardline position tends to be made in worse faith. Vexing, very vexing. Lindsey Graham's decision not to contribute to his party's implosion over the issue strikes me as totally defensible, but it's not like it's a cakewalk for Democrats either.

Thank goodness there's always an election somewhere in the world

2010-04-30T13:10:00.001-04:00

We all know that it’s a hotly contested election that really gets The Pickle motivated, so I thought I’d take the opportunity of an unusually exciting campaign in the UK to get Pickle Nation up to my ankle-deep understanding of what to look for next week. Based heavily on a brain-picking conversation with my brit friends Max and Sophie, at least one of whom is a political reporter, as well as close attention to the Times, and my serendipitous watching of yesterday’s 3rd and final debate between the three major party candidates – Gordon Brown for Labour, David Cameron for the Conservatives, and Nick Clegg for the Liberal Democrats – here’s how I handicap it.

First and foremost, Gordon Brown has the Mark of Cain on his forehead. This much is clear. It takes about 8 words of listening to Nick Clegg to understand what all the fuss is about – he makes me feel like the dad in “An Education.” His core message seems to be the right one: Hey all you people who wish it was viable to vote Lib Dem? This is your chance. He’s right. It’s also hard to argue that David Cameron and the Tories aren’t up to the challenge of governing; you may not like what they stand for, but Brown’s distasteful fear-mongering about how it’s risky to go with anyone other than the party in power does more to undermine that case against Clegg – the Lib Dems actually might not know how it all works – than to infect Cameron. You know how I hate to pile on, and I think Gordon Brown might be an excellent prime minister, but how can you not want to take a break from that guy?

Second, as it has been explained to me, just based on how each party’s voters are distributed, the Conservatives will win more seats than their share of the national vote, Labour will win about the same seats as their share, and the Lib Dems will be under-represented. So if they all get the same share of the national popular vote, no one will have an outright majority, but the Tories will have the most seats. It seems clear that Tories are going to get the most votes nationwide, and there is some possibility that they will get an outright majority, though my sense is that it’s a slim chance. I would also bet that the Lib Dems will get the second most votes (though that’s up in the air), but probably win fewer seats than Labour.

If the Conservatives get an outright majority, we’re done: David Cameron is the PM. It will be interesting to see what happens after that – how coalitions shift, now that the Lib Dems have proven a healthy measure of viability – but I’m badly out of my depth there.

If the Conservatives don’t get an outright majority this is where it gets interesting. Two things you have to know. First, Labour, as the party in power, is constitutionally entitled to the first chance at forming a government. Second, what the Liberal Democrats really want – need, in fact – is for the UK to switch from a system of single-member districts to one of proportional representation, so that Britain’s left-leaning majority will no longer have to countenance a Conservative government as the price of voting their conscience by voting Lib Dem. This is also the nightmare scenario for the Conservatives, who would be badly frozen out for a very long time if the process were to be changed in that way.

This will be Labour’s price of power, if, as is looking increasingly likely, they are roughly tied with or behind the Lib Dems in the final result. Labour will have to offer a national referendum on election reform to bring the Lib Dems into a governing coalition. But the question for Clegg is this: after telling British voters that the power is in their hands, what would it mean to hand the premiership back to Gordon Brown by political fiat after the country votes to throw him out? Would they be better off claiming “will of the people” to deny Labour another run, and trying to build on this cycle’s success for next time?

As far as I can tell, that’s the drama. Stand by for an update after a bunch of British people set me straight…

Who Needs Liberries?

2010-04-23T14:27:00.004-04:00

This morning I woke up with the intention to visit the recently constructed Silverlake branch of the LA public library. Well, intention frustrated: there's a big fat lock on the door. For a moment, I thought "Arbor Day already?" but no - as of last week, the city's libraries are open only for half-days on Fridays owing to our gaping budget shortfall.

Obviously, we need to cut things from the budget. No-brainers, like laying off some but not all of the city-employed calligraphers, are few and far between, and they're fairly niggling cuts. Our city calligraphy budget was only a million dollars per year. There are also no-brainers, or near-no-brainers, on the other side of the necessity spectrum - yesterday, Mayor Villaraigosa affirmed his commitment not to cut non-civilian police or fire personnel.

But where on this spectrum do libraries lie? I think I'm not alone when I say closer to calligraphers than firemen - but just barely. Access to libraries does seem to be one of those luxurious civil rights, but a right nonetheless, and important for democracy, especially now that public libraries are increasingly becoming internet access providers for the most disadvantaged members of our society (and more especially because public libraries are often the first stop in a job search, and who needs them more during an economic downturn).

The reduction in hours is slim and doesn't seem to be a serious threat to democracy. But technology is changing the role of public libraries more than this temporary budget crisis will, and as this role shifts permanently from "warehouse of information that everybody needs" to "access point to information for people who don't have access at home," it seems like there will be more pressure to limit public funds spent on libraries.

Boston Taco Crawl, 4.10.10

2010-04-20T15:27:00.004-04:00

Winging my way across the country from Massachusetts (where I used to marvel at how angry - really angry - my Texan friend in college used to get at the Border Cafe's salsa, until I lived in Texas myself) to California (easy to find good Mexican food), I thought I'd take the opportunity to write-up the results of this past Saturday's Boston Taco Crawl, an event that had some beautiful beginner's luck, featuring bikes, sun, beer, and at least three tacos that were delicious by any standard, but on which we (me, Stacy, Annie, and Carter made all the stops; four others made some of the stops) will shortly improve.

The first stop - and the unanimous winner, even controlling for hunger - was Taqueria Cancun, right by the Maverick stop on the blue line (the bikes waited patiently by city hall). Carne Asada. It was simple - just beef, cilantro, onions, and a little self-administered salsa - probably no other taco we ate had as few ingredients. This was where we were first introduced to Carter's taco rubric, featuring the question, "When you smell this taco, how badly do you NEED to eat it." Badly. Points for serving cans of Tecate. I actually got a little shorted on meat, but that did not seem to be the universal experience.

Taco number two was just efing terrible. For years, I've been hearing about the burrito lady in the gas station on Cambridge Street by the Charles MGH T stop. Certainly going to the back of a gas station convenience store is a promising start, and since they didn't sell beer, we innovated our way to a winning setting, eating tacos and putting down a 6-pack, creatively hidden by mittens/cozies, on a couple of benches by the water. Unfortunately, Annie has the best review of our Carnitas: "At best, a vehicle for beer; at worst, a cat food sandwich." Stay away.

Taco number three, after the longest bike ride of the day, led to civil strife for the first and only time. Taco Loco, in Sullivan Square, is a place to which I would go back - everything looks delicious. For me, though, the steak in our steak tacos just played too small a role. This was the opposite approach to Taqueria Cancun - this taco was a massive mixture of wet ingredients. Tasty ingredients, though, and while Stacy and I were underwhelmed by the featuring of so much guac and sour cream, Carter and Annie really enjoyed it. We also threw in some plantains on the side, which were delicious.

Fourth was the by now well renowned Tacos Lupita, at the wedge of Elm and Somerville in Somerville. These people do a mean Al Pastor. Stacy was appropriately focused on the density of taste in those pink, crispy bits of pork. Also, like Taqueria Cancun, a spare taco, with delicious salsa, especially the green one. Stacy says she’ll ask for no tomatoes next time. She’s not wrong.

Next up was a late-breaking addition, which was on the list as "The one to the left of the Independent in Union Square," as described by my friend Allison the night before - she raved about it. It was later revealed to be El Potro (no relation). Orders were split between fish and steak, and both were fantastic - I think the fish actually got the slight edge. With a different horse painted on every chair, it was a very colorful setting. Even more beer points than Taqueria Cancun, because though they didn't serve beer, they let us bring it in, and by that point we were ready to be waited on. Carter ate two, which, at this point in the crawl, was impressive. I ate half of Annie's.

Finally, after almost 6 hours, we reached Olecito, an old favorite. This is the little taco stand cousin of Ole, in Inman. I've long been partial - whenever I'm in that area around a meal time, I stop in for a Carnitas and a Shrimp. Here, at the end of a long day, we sat at the little table they provide in the driveway, drinking another beer, and despite our fullness, managing to enjoy this neat trick they pull off - the sauce is incredibly buttery, and just makes the Shrimp taco so rich and meaty and tasty. Carter thought we could get margaritas there, and had been talking about it since probably 4 pm, so I think he left a little bitter.

Plenty of ground to explore for next time - more East Boston, Dorchester, and from Fenway to points west...

Post Postpartisan

2010-03-27T16:41:00.002-04:00

First, a little throat-clearing. Don't call it a resuscitation. Okay, do. Apologies for The Pickle's lack of pulse. It's just that there hasn't been much going on in the political world.

Second, a quick and dirty thought about Obama's post-partisanship. Promises of PP were part of what garnered support from independents, and for much of the past year, moderates pointed to these promises in an effort to keep progressives from rocking the boat. Ultimately, the story goes, Obama threw PP aside after a year wasted on chasing down Republican support that would never come. My little thought is this - perhaps the administration should pitch PP policymaking in the larger context, ie in the context of the President's entire agenda. Within the context of one specific issue, chances are it's hard to pursue policy that's "post partisan" when the parties want things that are mutually exclusive. If you're setting out to universalize health care, there's no way Republicans ever come on board. But if the context is broadened, Obama can point to policies in other areas where traditionally Republican ideas are being taken very seriously (specifically in education) (and in a great way, in my opinion).

Third, a quick little point to undermine the second point. The cost-savings component of HCR was totally traditional Republican turf, so while it's true they'd never come around on universal coverage, this at least was a bone that should have enticed them. You know, if intransigence wasn't their top policy priority.

Fourth, most alliterative post ever. Look at all them P's!

The first day of calming down

2010-01-30T20:09:00.001-05:00

I got angry at President Obama when I found out that Scott Brown had won the MA Senate race, but not because Scott Brown had won the MA Senate race. I was away for most of the campaign, but by all accounts Martha Coakley and Scott Brown lost and won that race, respectively, all on their own. But I was nevertheless annoyed at Obama, because he didn’t find a way to get us this damn health care bill in a year with 60 senators. And all of a sudden we didn’t have 60 senators anymore, and the window was at least a little bit smaller, and we didn’t have anything to show for it.

I have since tempered, though – and of course Barack knew I would – for a couple of reasons, two of which I submit here.

One, I like the new tone. I liked it when he called out the GOP a bit in the State of the Union, and I liked it more when I watched this today: Obama taking it to the House GOP caucus on their turf. It won’t work – he’s not going to get Republican votes in the house for jack – but I just can’t believe that we’ve allowed 60 to become the new 50 without making the Republicans pay any political price. The last time the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate was 1979, and though I suspect that no one thought that enough Americans were stupid enough in 1979 to ask this question, so there are no data for historical comparison, what if we polled “How many votes does it take to pass legislation out of the United States Senate?” Gut check – what percentage of Americans today would say that the answer is 60? No, if this is the way things are going to go, then Obama should spread a bunch of quicksand on the floor of the Senate, and then make those 41 Senators stand in it until they get out or get sucked all the way in.

Second, the fact that we are not there on health care and nowhere on climate (and oh boy, are we nowhere on climate) is really, it’s important to remember, the opposition’s talking point. In fact, a lot has happened this year, and it was nice to get a reminder from Friend-of-The-Pickle Parisa that the Obama administration is still turning the ship of state in a wide arc. Witness this tidbit about the game face that the Civil Rights Division at DOJ has on.

Reform: Back to the Drawing Board

2010-01-25T14:30:00.004-05:00

Here's an interesting, fun, pie-in-the-sky idea for electoral reform: redrawing state lines such that states all have more or less the same population (5.6 million, based on the 280 million figure from the 2000 census).

www.fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/

Missouri seems to be the only state that's more or less intact.

Ezra Klein on Obama's Anniversary

2010-01-20T13:37:00.002-05:00

Klein's analysis of Obama's first year in office is right on the money.

That there is a wide gulf between Obama the Candidate and Obama the President is middle-aged news. Of course, the constraints of campaigning are far different that the constraints of governing. For one, there's the Constitution. For another, particularly with regard to security issues, the stakes are higher and information is better. But with regard to financial regulation, climate change, and health care, Obama's adoption of an "insider" governing style is puzzling, given that the strengths/lessons of the campaign, the reasons Obama beat Clinton and then McCain, were 1) control of the narrative, and 2) running an end-around the traditional communications apparatus/establishment to make direct contact with voters. My guess is that the administration has judged that the electorate would be exhausted by that approach, but in rejecting it has committed the cardinal sin of not dancing with the one that brung it. Governing is different from campaigning, but it's still politics, right?

Coinage: Hipster Garbage

2010-01-07T22:19:00.003-05:00

My friend, Dave Bennet, posted on Facebook the following update: "Where the Wild Things Are. Boo. Hipster Garbage."

I had always wanted a pithy phrase to describe my antipathy towards Wes Anderson movies, and there it was! Hipster Garbage!

What, exactly, qualifies something as hipster garbage, of course, should vary from person to person, but I sense that everyone has a clear concept of what it means. It need not even be particularly negative. Some things that are clearly hipster garbage may have real value (for example, The Royal Tannebaums.)

My best (working) definition is:
Hipster Garbage (n.): a work of popular culture that displays some or all of the following characteristics: it is pointless, boring, and technically impossible. Yet hipsters think it is genius.

Wes Anderson is my quintessential hipster garbage auteur. Who are your favorite creators of hipster garbage? Bands? Movies? Books?

What? Slang? Yes.

2010-01-05T10:21:00.002-05:00

Time to dust off the ol' "slang coinage" label - we have a doozy from Friend of Pickle MR, who refers to smartphones as "wonder killers." Granted, not a Pickle original, but it's excellent, and MR's mom apparently uses "Dundos" for Dunkin' Donuts, which is my top slang integration into the vernacular priority.

A Palpable Hit

2009-12-21T20:48:00.002-05:00

Just in time for the holidays, a little departure from our normal programming:

A few days ago, I was hit by a car as I was walking crossing the street (I'm totally fine). A friend and I had stepped out at around 10:45pm, and though this mostly residential street is mostly empty, we are on the crosswalk and wait for a "walk" sign. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a Toyota Forerunner enter the intersection and start to turn left. I think, "This guy is really waiting for the last second to start braking -- oh shit, he's not!" He's headed right for us. My friend jumps forward with alacrity. I jump backward with ineffectiveness, and he gets me at about 8-10 miles per hour. Not really that hard. I land on my feet (though I do get some Pinkberry on my jacket). I bang on the hood and let loose a stream of oaths. The driver has stopped but doesn't seem to register what has happened. In fact, he starts to take off, and I angrily fumble for my phone to take a picture. But then he pulls over and gets out of the car. I'm still fuming as he walks over to us when I see that he's shaking like a leaf. He doesn't speak a lick of English, just Spanish, and he's extremely sorry, thanking God that I'm okay and offering to take me to the hospital. I explain angrily that I'm not hurt, but it was just lucky, and... I'm sputtering at this point, partly because my Spanish is a shadow of its former self, but mostly because the driver is starting to cry. "No licensia," he keeps repeating. He had been driving from his first job to his second job, again thanks God that I'm all right, and at this point, I can no longer keep up the hardass act - I tell him to calm down.

Suddenly, a man comes running up. "I saw the whole thing! You drove right into him! Do you even speak English, buddy?" He asks if we've called the cops yet. The driver's eyes widen and he starts repeating "No licensia" again. The witness has heard enough. "No license? He's either got a DUI or he's illegal, either way you gotta call the cops." It turns out the witness is an ex-cop. At this point, the driver is weeping, begging us not to call the cops. "They'll deport me, I have two little kids." I turn to my friend, who's a lawyer, and ask her what she thinks we should do. What can we do? Neither of us wants to call the cops. I really think I'm fine, and the small chance of me later developing something doesn't seem to stack up against the great chance of the driver getting deported. "Okay, I don't think I'm hurt, so..." We decide to just get the driver's information. The ex-cop looks at us with disgust. He came over thinking he was being a good samaritan and now these bleeding heart yuppies are making HIM the asshole? We get his information too - he hands us his card, shaking his head. Once he leaves, I tell the driver that he "should not to sleep during to drive" but that I'm not calling the cops. He's too rattled to feel relief, and he takes off.

Avoiding this kind of situation is precisely the motivation behind efforts to license all drivers, regardless of legal status. And actually, the LAPD has a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to legal status - it was just reconfirmed by new LAPD chief Charlie Beck today - but that's more geared towards witnesses of crimes rather than people alleged to have committed them.

Mike Capuano for Massachusetts Senate

2009-12-03T23:48:00.000-05:00

I’ve decided to vote for Congressman Mike Capuano in this Tuesday’s Democratic primary to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, and briefly, here’s why:

There are four candidates in the race: Capuano, Attorney General Martha Coakley, Bain alum and Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca, and City-Year founder Alan Khazei. Survivor Massachusetts Senate:

Pagliuca is the first to go. He lost me when I started seeing his ads during Celtics games a month ago, which suggests he ever had me, which he didn’t. Grainy photos of men in suits handing off cash-filled briefcases, with voiceovers demagoging against Wall Street greed. No thanks.

My opening bid was “I’ll give Khazei every chance to win my vote.” But I’m not the only one with whom he never caught on. In a short special election, it’s hard to make a grassroots campaign work; there’s little time for a movement. I think if he were really special, he could have caught fire. And the Globe did endorse him, which is remarkable. And we do elect Senators for 6 years, so it’s permissible to grow into the job. But from what I’ve heard, I just don’t think the guy has a realistic idea of how to be a Senator. The idea isn’t to be a mini Barack Obama. The idea is to be a mini Ted Kennedy.

The seat doesn’t belong to Ted Kennedy, but the fact that it’s Kennedy we’re replacing reminds us of some of the criteria for being a good Senator, and I think Capuano meets more of them than does Coakley.

He understands the legislative process better than she does – she could learn, but he seems more suited to being a legislator than she is. He seems to be an effective hybrid; fiercely principled and passionate on the one hand, but a deal-maker on the other. To the extent that he’s put the Kennedy comparison at the center of his campaign, that’s the comparison he’s making, and I buy it. Coakley, on the other hand, seems well-suited to being an AG; she’s clearly fierce, smart, and confident. But I suspect she’d be frustrated by the legislative process, and by the inanity of what is often the world’s most inane building.

And then there’s just the matter of their politics: Coakley is a good Democrat; Capuano is a Liberal. His leadership on Darfur is meaningful to me. He has won me over by talking about unemployment as a true crisis that must, as a moral matter, be tackled my spending public money on underfunded jobs programs. When he talks about 10% unemployment, you get the sense of a Congressman who knows what he’s doing there. And though I would hope our next Senator would vote for the health care reform bill in whatever form it is likely to take, and I trust that he will, from the north or south side of the Capitol, he has convinced me that now is the time to stand up against the Stupak amendment. This, of course, is a position that Capuano and Coakley share. A position they don’t share is the one she expressed by leading the campaign against Massachusetts’ recent successful ballot measure to decriminalize possession of a small amount of marijuana. Even if those were Massachusetts’ values, which they aren’t, they wouldn’t be our priorities.

So that’s my vote: Because I think he’s to her left, but probably more importantly because I think he’ll simply be more effective at making American laws better than they otherwise would be, which ultimately is the job of a Senator, and we’ll leave the hope and whatnot to the President, I’m voting for Mike Capuano.

Obama Speech Reaction

2009-12-01T20:47:00.002-05:00

The good news from tonight's speech is that Obama seems serious about wanting to get out of Afghanistan. I actually believe him. He recognizes that the costs are too high for an open-ended commitment. In short: he is a "reluctant warrior."

Looking at the situation in Afghanistan today, he has judged that the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal today would be unacceptable. He is hoping that an Afghanistan surge will provide America the opportunity to leave without everything going to hell in a hand basket in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. I don't really buy this line of thinking--the fear of a resurgent Taliban/Al Qaeda threatening the United States I think is overblown.

But I do understand why making a decision to leave now is so unpalatable, especially when we have a new team of military leaders who have a new strategy that they say will work. Pulling the plug even before they have an opportunity to succeed, and risking pulling the plug and then potentially watching things fall apart, would be a very difficult thing to do. The right thing to do, perhaps, but very difficult.

Of course, the new strategy probably won't work, and that is where the bad news come in. If and when the Afghan surge doesn't work, what speech will Obama make in 2011 when we are supposed to be bringing the troops home? If the situation does not improve, does Obama have the guts to pull out in 2011 and, in essence, admit defeat? Perhaps. But I wouldn't bet on it.

In Defense of Obama--Again

2009-11-18T16:42:00.003-05:00

In a past post I expressed bafflement at the left-wing disillusionment with Obama. These days, I’m not only baffled, I’m getting upset. There is an emerging narrative in left-leaning circles that Obama is spineless, in league with big corporations (particularly Wall St.), and afraid to stand up to the war hawks. This attitude would be forgivable if it had any relation to the truth. But it doesn’t.

THE ECONOMY

False narrative: Obama and Bernanke don’t care enough about jobs and are overly worried about the deficit. We need a second “jobs” stimulus and an explicit policy of higher inflation to get us out of this economic slump. We can’t worry about deficits right now until America gets back to work.

Reality: after the first stimulus successfully stopped the economic meltdown (success for Obama!), now is, in fact, the right time to start worrying about our debt. Sustainable job growth in America depends on the re-balancing of the world economy: Americans need to save more, consume less, and make more stuff that the world wants to buy, while the Chinese needs to buy less of our debt and consume more of our goods. This transition will run smoothly only if the Chinese agree to devalue their currency in relation to the dollar. But the Chinese will do this only if they believe America is serious about cutting back on its debt. That’s the bargain. If the Chinese lose faith in our ability to cut our debt, there are only two possible outcomes: a Chinese-American trade war (instigated by the U.S. because the Chinese will refuse to devalue their currently) or a U.S. dollar currency crisis (instigated by the Chinese who will stop buying our bonds). Both of these would be disastrous for the world economy.

Also, inflation as an explicit policy prescription is totally insane: inflation punishes most the one group of people we should be most eager to help—that is, middle class savers. And it is most kind on those who know how to handle money, who also happen to be the same folks liberals want most to punish--that is, Wall St.

REGULATION

False narrative: Obama bailed out the banks and now is too chicken to regulate their bonuses. The financial regulatory package making its way through Congress will be watered down so much as to be virtually worthless. Even the Democrats are in bed with Wall St.

Reality: Barney Frank, who is leading the charge against bonuses and fighting very hard for more financial regulation, is a rock star. Watch how Ed Shultz, a proud member of the putting-Obama’s-feet-to-the-fire club, doesn’t listen to a word Frank says about what he and Congress is doing about bonuses. Read this Barney Frank speech, which lays out his plans for financial regulation. He may not get everything he wants in the end, but there is no doubting his determination and the soundness of his thinking. Regulation will happen.

HEALTH CARE

False narrative: Obama failed to step up to the plate when we needed him, he compromised away the public option because of pressure from corporations, and now the bill will only enrich insurance companies and won’t even insure everyone in America. The bill may be so bad, we might be better off with the status quo.

Reality: the public option is decidedly not dead yet, Obama is in favor of said public option, and regardless of whether or not a public option is in the final bill, the reform will be a big step forward when compared with the status quo. At the least there will be no more penalties for pre-existing conditions and many more people will get coverage, with insurance for lower income folks subsidized by increased taxes on upper income folks. It won’t be a dream bill, but getting a dream bill was always pie-in-the-sky.

AFGHANISTAN

False narrative: Obama is escalating the war and is too chicken to stand up to the warmongers.

Reality: despite painting himself into a corner with his hawkish talk on Afghanistan leading up to the election in 2008, Obama, I believe, is trying to wriggle his way out of this growing quagmire. He rejected all of the options for escalation, with explicit instructions to include a clear “end-game” in all future proposals. Obama is increasingly worried about the cost of an open-ended, never-ending war in Afghanistan. The reality in Afghanistan is grim, but Obama is thinking clearly about the issue and should be commended for that.

I admit that on the issues of cap-and-trade and Israel-Palestine Obama does look to have genuinely failed us. That said, it’s clear that on both those issues Obama’s heart is in the right place. If he gets a second term there is hope for the future on these tough issues, too. Patience, my friends, patience.

In a future post I will speculate on why liberals are so pissed at Obama when it seems so obvious (to me, at least) that we should be happy with him.

An Illustration of why we need an overhaul of national health care policy

2009-11-12T12:04:00.002-05:00

Adapted from an email I sent to a friend yesterday:

I’m in a class this semester called “Writing and Reporting on Politics and Policy.” The thrust of the class is that each of us has picked a beat to cover for the semester, and mine is the city government of my hometown: Newton, MA.

Here’s the most interesting thing I’ve found: The city's costs have been increasing and will continue increasing at about 5.5% per year, and its revenues have been increasing at about 3.5% per year. Municipalities in MA are prohibited from having deficits, so they've kept the budget balanced by cutting city staff, deferring needed capital maintenance and investment, and not funding long-term pension liabilities. As a result, the city has a skeleton crew in city hall, a $300 million backlog of capital expenditure (ie roads and schools and fire-stations) and a $400 million unfunded pension liability. If the city were to start making incremental, responsible investment in capital and pension fund, there would be cumulative deficits of $174 million over the next 5 years, on a budget of $262 million for this fiscal year.

Here's the punchline: It’s all health care. The whole structural gap - growth in uses exceeding growth in sources - comes from health care. The city's health care costs have grown at 9.4% per year for the past 10 years. Together with the health care portion of pension benefits, it now makes up 20% of the city budget. If the cost of health care had grown at the same rate as revenues over that 10-year period, the city wouldn't have this structural gap at all. The increasing cost of health care has ripped the city's budget to shreds.

Sour Grapes

2009-11-07T16:49:00.000-05:00

Friend of The Pickle Justin King called my attention to this column, by Joe Posnanski, which is an oldie but goodie: the Yankees buy championships.

One of his main points is that baseball is better at hiding competitive imbalance than are other sports. Whereas in football it’s not uncommon for a great team to win more than 90% of its games, and in basketball a great team can win over 80% of the time, the best baseball teams only win around 65%. The best winning percentages in the last 100 years of pro football, basketball, and baseball are, respectively, 100%, 88%, and 72%.

Which naturally made me wonder why, and I developed a little theory that I think isn’t bad, and perhaps is of some interest: The outcome of a baseball game is determined by fewer events.

Each of the three sports can be thought of as a sequence of zero-sum events, in which each team is doing to try to do something to help it win the game, and that better teams are better at doing. In football, the event is a play from scrimmage. In basketball, it’s an offensive possession, and, ultimately in most cases, a shot. In baseball, it’s a plate-appearance.

When two evenly-matched teams play each other in any sport, what we mean by “evenly-matched” is that, on average, each team will prevail in each of those individual events roughly an even number of times. Perfect example: The 2008 Wimbledon Final, in which Nadal won 209 points, and Federer won 204. The greater the disparity between the two teams, the greater the probability that the better team will prevail in any given trial.

And here’s the rub: For a given probability that the better team will prevail in any given trial, the probability that team will win the whole game is higher the greater the number of trials. And there are fewer trials in baseball than there are in other sports.

In football, each team runs about 70 plays from scrimmage. In basketball, each team has the ball about 100 times. But in baseball, the average game sees each team send about 40 players to the plate.

It’s just a shorter game. There are fewer random trials of an event with probability p. And that means that it’s less unusual for a bad team to beat a good one.

That, and the fact that there are Zach Greinkes on Kansas City Royalses. And I hate the Yankees. And thank you, Peter, for taking me to my first ever world series game.

New York makes us stop and think

2009-11-04T00:10:00.003-05:00

I would have voted for Bloomberg today if I lived in New York. But let me ask this question: When a gajillionaire spends a brajilion dollars to get re-elected for an election-law-alteration-enabled third term, yet he still only wins by 5 percentage points, does that mean the democratic thing would have been to wave goodbye? Does it mean he shouldn't be there?

I think it probably does. If he didn't have a jagriblion dollars, he wouldn't be the mayor...

Friedman is Right for Once

2009-10-28T09:07:00.003-04:00

Holy mackerel! Thomas Friedman actually wrote something sensible in this don't-escalate-in-Afghanistan column. More than sensible, actually. A must read. (If only he had had this attitude leading up to the war in Iraq...)

Money quote:

The message: “People do not change when we tell them they should,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “They change when they tell themselves they must.”

Thank You, Scientist

2009-10-24T17:48:00.003-04:00

So, H1N1 is officially a national emergency, and vaccine production is not where it should be. Count as unworried Bill Maher, who, on his show last week told a flabbergasted Bill Frist that people should not take the vaccine because it is net harmful. In fact, the questioning of the scientific establishment by what I'll call populist lay "science" seems to be an, er, epidemic. (Examples include the linkage of other vaccines to autism and most notably the denial of global warming and evolution.) What is the proper role of the lay person when it comes to science?

In my opinion, it's one of complete deferral on scientific matters. However, the laity has an important part to play with respect to evaluating the social impacts of science. This part is especially important when enthusiasm might lead scientists to sweep larger social considerations under the rug. For example, lay worries about the potential moral pitfalls of human gene therapy strike me as valid and legitimate. I also think it's appropriate for laypersons to weigh in on economic considerations relating to science, particularly if it's government science we're talking about. Most of us would consider cost-benefit objections to, for example, a manned mission to Mars, to be legitimate (regardless of whether they're right or wrong). We should also criticize and question scientists if claims they offer are scientific really aren't. A great example of this is overutilization in the health care system; it is legitimate to worry that the amount of care prescribed by a physician is motivated by profit rather than expertise.

But the fact of the matter is most of us don't have enough expertise to evaluate the actual science of vaccines (less so global warming, and less less so evolution). In fact, it seems that the lay questioning of these theories can often be traced to some other ideological commitment - skepticism (bordering on paranoia) of the drug establishment on Maher's part or Christian doctrine on the part of evolution doubters.

I suppose I am granting scientists almost priest-like status. Bad when that's combined with the fact that the scientific establishment has, in the past, believed things that are just plumb crazy. But the operative word is "almost." Science contains within it the self-limiting safety valves of verifiability and falsifiability, unlike religion. Science is prepared to be wrong.

The Pickle series entitled "Treating people like people." Voting Rights Edition

2009-10-13T23:18:00.001-04:00

Many people – and I was one of them until two days ago – don’t know that non-citizens for the most part had the right to vote in this country until the middle of the 19th century. I discovered this while reading for a class I have this semester at the Kennedy School, called “Reasoning for History.”

That only citizens can vote is an orthodoxy that is rarely questioned. Question it, though, and it is at least apparent that it should be questioned. My neighbor is a permanent legal resident whose kids go to the Cambridge public schools. Shouldn’t she be allowed to vote for the school committee? I try to imagine an argument for why she shouldn’t, and I suddenly remember the debate I bellicosely and ungracefully got into a few years ago with a Republican friend of a friend at a bar in Washington about why DC should or should not have representation in Congress. I dared him to answer the question, and he took a deep breath, and then began “DC was never intended to be…” and seconds later I had to be peeled off the ceiling.

My permanent-resident neighbor is only the least ambiguous on an increasingly ambiguous spiral staircase of cases asking who should be allowed to vote in what elections. But her case is really unambiguous; there is no standard by which she is not a fully interested member of our community who should be allowed to have a say in how she is governed.

Recently, some cities have allowed non-citizens to vote in local elections. It’s a movement we should all pay attention to and encourage.

A great choice by the Nobel Committee

2009-10-12T16:42:00.002-04:00

Charitably, giving the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama for the reasons it was given was naively aspirational and politically stupid. But the Nobel Committee redeemed itself a teeny tiny bit today (though I imagine it’s a different Nobel Committee) by giving the economics prize to one of my intellectual and academic heroes, Elinor Ostrom.

Ostrom, a political science professor at Indiana University, is the author of Governing the Commons, a book I first read in college, and then re-read a few years ago. Her work was the first to encourage me to think deeply about what the “commons problem” nature of climate change means for the parameters of the problem and the hope of solving it. It is still the book that influences me most when I think about a bit of climate policy and ask the question “Is this going to help? Is this going to work?”

Of note, Ostrom is also the first woman to win the economics prize, and the fifth woman to win a Nobel this year, which is a record for a single year. So congratulations to Elinor Ostrom, who bent the arc of history a bit today, and whose life’s work may yet bend it quite a bit more.

On Sleep

2009-09-30T16:36:00.004-04:00

I heard a pretty simple but amazing thing today on Fresh Air, while I was driving to pick up my new suit from the tailor, for my brother's wedding this weekend. (You may email me with congratulations.)

The guest was talking about how important it is for children to get a good night's sleep. He said that while adults spend only 4% of the night in what is called "low-wave" sleep, kids spend 40% of the night in low-wave sleep. Makes you want to know what's going on in low-wave sleep, right? You're not alone. According to his research, this is when your brain is chemically converting short-term memories into long-term memories.

Sick, right? Way to go humans!

Putting the public in option

2009-09-26T10:03:00.003-04:00

I thought that only two things were clear from the New York Times poll on the front page of yesterday’s paper. First, everyone is confused. Second, people want the public option.

I was shocked by the second part (not the first part – I am also confused). Asked “Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare, that would compete with private insurance plans?,” 65% or respondents favor such a program, 26% oppose, and 9% have no opinion. And to the first point, that is the only concrete statement about health care reform that more than two-fifths of respondents were able to answer. Has Obama explained it well enough? 37%. Do you understand what’s under consideration? 37%. Does the GOP have an articulated alternative? 14%. 14% is a coin flip among the 28% who weren’t listening to the question. And on all specific details, the preponderance of answers are “don’t know enough.”

But people seem to want the public option. From this poll – and it is only one poll – that strongly emerges as the only conclusion that people have drawn about what’s on the table. Seems like we should do it, then, huh?

By the way, 26% still think there are death panels.

Big is Beautiful

2009-09-24T14:34:00.002-04:00

Paul Volcker says the administration is planning to continue the policy rationale of "too big to fail," implicitly promising future bailouts should the need arise.

I'm slightly disappointed, but that sentiment is starting to have a certain gnawing familiarity. There is an obvious public interest in keeping private institutions from becoming "too big to fail," but these megacorporations make so much money just based on scale - and spend so much of that money on Democrats - that I know I'm kidding myself to think anything would or could be done about it. By the way, donde estan Republicans on this? Where is your budget freakout about exposing taxpayers to these potential outlays? Where are your costumed nutjobs and their misspelled signs protesting government takeovers of things? You're really missing out on some out-of-power minority rock-throwing here.

On balance, I am actually okay with keeping the rationale - so long as the administration comes through on some kind of banker compensation rule such that it rewards long term growth as opposed to short-term stock price gains. Otherwise, bankers are just playing with house money.

If bringing up "excessive" banker compensation serves a polemic purpose in this fight, then fine. And if we have to ridicule the banking establishment's claims that the market is rewarding "talent," which I do find rankling, then so be it. But there's no real public interest in forestalling "objectively" high compensation, whatever that may be. If compensation is a market price arrived upon within bounds of the rule above, then great.

Obama's "correct and brave" decision

2009-09-19T13:58:00.002-04:00

The Obama administration’s decision to scrap missile defense in Eastern Europe has shed some light on the following items of note:

--Despite claims to the contrary, the missile-defense shield, as originally conceived under the Bush administration, was intended to counter Russia, not Iran. Or at least that was the understanding of the Poles and Czechs. How else are we to explain their vehement objections to losing this supposedly anti-Iranian defense-shield when everyone agrees that Iran has zero intention--now or ever--of threatening Poland or the Czech Republic with missiles? Clearly, and somewhat understandably, the Poles and Czechs are worried about their historically not-so-friendly neighbor to the east.

--The right-wingers in America have been forced to show their hand that they, too, intended the shield to counter Russia. How else are we to explain the hissy-fit they are collectively throwing given that Obama’s new missile-defense plan will, in theory, be better suited to the Iranian threat than the former Eastern Europe-based shield, though it will be useless against Russia? If they really were worried about Iran--and Iran only--they should be cheering this change in course.

--The right-wingers have also revealed the degree to which they are still trapped in Cold War thinking. Their favorite word for describing Obama’s shift in policy is “appeasement.” They employ this highly-charged word so as to harken back to another “retreat from Czechoslovakia,” when Neville Chamberlain handed over the Sudetenland to Hitler’s Germany in 1938. The use of the word “appeasement” implies that the party being “appeased” is uncompromisingly aggressive, as Hitler was leading up to WWII. To assume that today’s Russia is belligerent in the same way as Hitler, or in the same way as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, shows a poor understanding of the nature of Putin’s regime.

--This near-hysteria displayed by the neocons brings me to, perhaps, the most interesting aspect of this episode. It centers on Putin’s description of Obama’s decision as “correct and brave.” Why “brave?” To my mind, Obama’s decision displayed more common sense than bravery. Because I assume that Russia has zero interest in attacking or otherwise threatening Poland, because I’m dubious of the shield’s technical viability, and because I’m disgusted by the shield’s cost (both financially and in terms of pissing off the Russians), missile-defense in Eastern Europe strikes me as worse than useless, and its scrapping as a no-brainer decision. Putin likely agrees with my above assessment, yet he recognizes the decision as “brave.” The bravery comes in when we consider the intensity of the heat Obama is getting from the “appeasement”-crying crowd. Putin knows how difficult it is to stand up to “appeasement” talk because he has his own neocon-types in Russia to deal with. The Russian paranoids, like their American neocon counterparts, assume that America is Russia’s enemy, and that if Russia gives America an inch, it will take a foot. With the Cold War still dominating the mind-set of these paranoid brains (in both countries), it takes serious balls to unilaterally make a change in policy that will incite these folks’ ire. Thus, the “brave” comment.

Regardless of whether or not Russia reciprocates by dropping its opposition to possible sanctions against Iran, Obama’s decision to scrap the Eastern Europe missile shield was, indeed, “correct and brave”. The Bush administration had set American-Russian relations on a track towards a renewed Cold War. With this act, Obama opens the door to much friendlier relations between the two countries, which if achieved, will pay great dividends in the years to come.

Card Playin'

2009-09-17T01:12:00.002-04:00

Certainly there were ample displays of racism during the so-called "9/12" protests - Maureen Dowd brought to our attention

such classy placards as, with a picture of a lion, “The Zoo has an African and the White House has a Lyin’ African;” “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy;” “We came unarmed (this time)” and “ ‘Cap’ Congress and ‘Trade’ Obama back to Kenya!”

But I don't agree with President Carter that "You lie!" involved racism (at least, it didn't involve racism against Obama, as Carter suggested - whether or not it involved racism against Mexican people is another matter). And to any extent that it did, Carter was not being particularly strategic in making this charge, a point very cogently made by Michael Tomasky in the Guardian.

In our attempt to explain certain anti-Obama statements, I suspect we are led to racism in part because of a phenomenon called the "solipsism of the present moment." This is the feeling that whatever is happening right now is way more intense, way more revolutionary, way CRAZIER than anything we've ever seen before. We're appalled by what we take to be the extraordinary coarseness of political rhetoric and are driven to think there must be some extraordinary, previously unseen cause at work. To be sure, much of the "criticism" of Obama is straight-up racist, like the bits cited above, and much of the "criticism" is pretty much racist, i.e. the "birthers" movement. But a lot of it - the bulk of it - fits in with the generally ugly tone of the way we've historically talked about politics. Bush was constantly compared to Hitler. His legitimacy was constantly questioned. (Not to conflate those claims with birther claims - they're obviously not in the same ballpark - but they are the same sport.) Oh, and Andrew Jackson's wife was called a prostitute.

Squaring the Circle of Two Rigged Elections

2009-09-10T14:40:00.002-04:00

It increasingly looks like the Afghan elections were rigged by Karzai and his cronies. While that fact doesn’t surprise (newsflash shocker: Afghanistan is full of corrupt politicians and does not have the social and political infrastructure to support free and fair elections!), the reaction in Washington and in the media to Karzai’s rigging does serve as a useful reminder of the hypocrisy that infuses our differing treatment of different regimes.

I’m comparing, of course, the differing treatment of the rigged election in Iran and the rigged election in Afghanistan. While the two riggings are certainly not perfectly equivalent (there was no widespread protest and subsequent violence in Afghanistan, for one), it is almost laughable how different the two election frauds have been presented to us by politicians and by reporters. The rigging in Iran was, by and large, treated as an affront to all humanity that deserved, at the very least, strong rhetorical intervention from Washington. The Afghanistan rigging, on the other hand, has been decidedly under-reported, and has inspired barely audible mumbles and grunts from some of the same folks who were on the rooftops calling for Ahmadinejad’s head. Something has got to give here.

But it’s hard to say where, exactly, the consensus view of these two events went awry.

One possible way to square the circle would be to loudly denounce Karzai for being the corruption machine that he is, suggest that Obama withdraw support from the Karzai administration, and call for new elections in order to restore legitimacy to the fledgling democracy of Afghanistan. But no one is suggesting we go down that path, and for good reason. It doesn’t make a whole lot of practical sense, given that Karzai’s opponents are no better than Karzai in the corruption department, and another go at an election in Afghanistan is unlikely to result in a more legitimate outcome anyway. The democracy infrastructure is simply not up to the task.

A second possibility would have been to treat the Iranian rigging with the kid-gloves we are using in Afghanistan, and to greet the Iranian fraud with the same deafening silence we are hearing from the chattering class after the Afghan elections. This also doesn’t feel right, particularly in light of the inspiring and brave protests that erupted in reaction to the rigging injustice in Iran.

The only somewhat satisfying way to justify this differing treatment requires a cold, hard look at when and where democracy is a useful way of government. I would suggest that having an election in Afghanistan was a bad idea from the beginning. It was never going to accomplish anything positive on the ground, and was useful only for window-dressing purposes. Afghan society may one day be ready for a legitimate and functioning democracy, but that day is not near. A warlord-driven, pre-industrial, poverty stricken country with a drug-based economy and a tribal-based political infrastructure is not a good place to suddenly have an election. The failure of those elections, while unfortunate, was to be expected, and can therefore somewhat justifiably be greeted with cynical resignation rather than principled outrage.

Iran, on the other hand, is a wholly different story. With its large, young, highly educated, and technologically savvy middle-class population, Iran provides fertile ground for legitimate democracy. The crushing of that democratic spirit was rightly perceived as unjust, even tragic.

But because it is highly unpopular to suggest that democracy might not be appropriate in every circumstance and in every country and at any time, many pundits and politicians are left embarrassingly tongue-tied when asked to talk about Karzai and his election fraud. And the rest of the world can be forgiven for criticizing the U.S. for its hypocrisy: outraged when its “enemy” rigs an election, but silent when its “ally” does the same.

What Should Be Done About Afghanistan?

2009-09-03T20:16:00.003-04:00

My man, Anatol Lieven, has some interesting ideas that make a lot of sense to me. They are particularly worth considering for those of us who want our troops to get the heck out of there because we believe more troops do more harm than good, yet we have no good plan for how to leave responsibly.

Afghanistan is such a mess, it's almost too depressing to think about. Is the earliest we can safely get out of there really 5 years from now, as Lieven suggests? It sure looks that way...

Blast Off with Reggie Watts at Spaceland

2009-09-01T19:13:00.004-04:00

Angelenos, next Friday, Sept. 11th, one of my favorite performers will be performing a performance at Spaceland. That's the only word I can use, because it's very difficult to explain what Reggie Watts does - it's a blend of music and comedy that are both improvised at facebreaking speed. I guess that was a pretty good description. Check out this video as well as the live performance on the 11th.

In Oblique Defense of Obama

2009-08-28T14:33:00.003-04:00

Death Panel Advisors - watch more funny videos

In Defense of Obama

2009-08-23T16:05:00.003-04:00

Obama has bungled health care and the left is pissed. Many heavy-hitting, left-leaning pundits—including Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and our own Luvh Rakhe—have all voiced strong and reasoned reservations about Obama’s handling of health care, and have even gone so far as to float the idea that other like-minded lefties should contemplate open revolt against the feel-good, faux-reform, bipartisan-at-any-cost presidency. But this rash abandonment of Obama, or even just a loss of faith in him, would be a big mistake.

I never imagined I would find myself on Obama’s side of this particular debate. After all, I was one of the original Obama skeptics back in the primaries when it was already apparent that he wanted to please all peoples, all of the time, and was willing to sacrifice his principles to do so. And I certainly do not want to defend Obama’s pathetic political strategy for health care reform. I whole-heartedly agree that deferring to Congress and seeking bipartisanship was a big mistake. He should have been out front on the issue and using his rhetorical skills to their fullest potential.

But I do want to defend Obama’s presidency more generally, forgive him his political failings, and try to put the political jockeying around health care in the proper perspective.

Frankly, I’m puzzled that the left has decided to place almost all of the blame for the watering down of health care reform on the shoulders of Obama. Why not blame Congress!? While Congress is packed to the gills with spineless, clueless, compromise-obsessed Neanderthals, it’s clear to me that Obama’s heart is in the right place. Obama’s failure is not one of intention, but one of execution, which is a much lesser transgression.

And the left’s expectation that real universal health care reform was within reach because of big Democratic majorities in Congress was always a little pie-in-the-sky. The U.S. government is an inherently conservative body--not in terms of ideology, but in terms of its ability to legislate sweeping changes. The game is essentially rigged against radical reform, and always has been. The idea of universal health care has been around since the original Progressive Era; and back then it was stymied by the same forces Obama is struggling with today—a do-nothing Congress that is beholden to special interests and beholden to local, parochial constituents.

Teddy Roosevelt, the “radical reform” president of that Progressive Era, was able to pass a number of important reforms (including strong regulation of the then-powerful railroads, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and strong environmental protection policies), but could do so only in his second term after much of the conservative opposition within his own party had been neutralized (sound familiar?). And even in that second term, he was unable to pass other reforms that would have created an eight-hour workday, inheritance and income taxes, and would have regulated the stock market. In short, Obama’s difficulties with instituting sweeping reform are to be expected, and any reforms that are hard-hitting enough to satisfy today’s progressives will likely come in a second term—if Obama gets one.

We should also recognize that, when it comes to foreign policy, a political arena in which Congress has very little sway, Obama is delivering the goods (with the notable exception of Afghanistan). The fact that he has stumbled out of the gate on the domestic front is no reason to abandon him. Liberals should, instead, rally around him, recognize that Rome wasn’t built in a day, make sure he gets re-elected (especially because the likely alternative to an Obama second term is too horrifying to even contemplate), and then make a big push for more radical reform in 2012 and beyond.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat has an interesting piece that places blame for the bungling of health care on the Democratic Party's "inability to govern." I blame Congress more generally (the special interests, that power is skewed towards non-populous states, etc.--and after all, it's not just the Democratic Party that has shown an inabilty to govern!); but he is right that it makes no sense for Obama to take all the heat for a failure that is not entirely of his making.

The only mistake was calling it "Public"

2009-08-19T11:53:00.001-04:00

It must be tough being a Republican wading into the health care debate. How are you supposed to know which of your ideological guideposts to navigate by? On the one hand, your whole life you’ve been convinced that government can’t do anything right – that everything government does is bloated, inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful. On the other hand, you just know in your heart of hearts that there’s scarcely a problem that private markets can’t handle, if they are truly allowed to roam like the grass-fed, free-range bison that we would all subsist off of if Washington hadn’t screwed it all up.

But here in the midst of the health care debate – and seriously, can you ever imagine a time when we’ll be talking about anything else? – the ideologically pure Republican finds himself in a bad quandary.

The Public Plan. The second word is “Public.” Let’s go burn down a town hall meeting. And we’re not too wild about the word “Plan” either.

If the machinery of public process were ever about anything other than partisan warfare, for just a day, wouldn’t we see that the rationale behind The Public Plan seems to be exactly the coin of compromise in which we’d all rather be trading? As far as I understand it – which maybe I don’t – here’s the basic idea:
• Make a health insurance company.
• Have the government run it like Medicare (which is one of the best-run insurance companies in the country).
• Let people stick with their existing policy, but give them the choice to switch to The Public Plan if they so choose.

Insurance companies hate it. They – some of the most fantastically profitable private companies in the country – say that they can’t compete against a low-cost government-run new market entrant. But here’s where the ground begins to give way underfoot for the ideologically pure Republican. If you don’t think government can ever do anything right, then the insurance companies are wrong – they can compete against the government, because the public sector won’t be able to provide what people want, and even if it could, it wouldn’t be at a price that beats the private sector. But if the insurance companies are right, and they can’t compete with The Public Plan, well then I’m giving that one of my all time biggest WTFs. What ideology is it that tells any elected official to protect insurance companies from a cheaper plan to which people choose to switch?

There are two answers, as far as I can tell. First, and obviously true and part of the answer, is that it’s the ideology of getting campaign contributions from rich people who require government intervention to stay rich. Second, though, maybe some people think that the end of that story is that we are again left without competition and choice – that some people would rather not be on Any Public Plan, but that they would have no choice after most or all insurance companies are driven out of business (again, by a government insurer that offers quality care for less). In that sense, those who cry foul when President Obama says “if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it” may be right. You may have to switch to a plan that is cheaper and better, run by your choice of the government or a new insurance company that can, through American-style creative destruction and innovation, compete with a cost-effective, science-based, market-driven alternative, probably by being cost-effective, science-based, and market-driven itself.

The Public Plan is such a sensible compromise. It essentially says, OK, let’s not be deterministic about whether The Public Plan is right for none or a few or most or all Americans, let’s just dip the public toe into the marketplace, and let’s let the market figure it out.

Shouldn’t this appeal to the ideologically pure Republican? Perhaps co-ops could do this just as well. Hopefully we’ll get to at least try something.

Health Care: Change We Can...Not Do?

2009-08-17T01:09:00.005-04:00

I was shocked the other day to find myself IMing the following to a friend: "I'm on the verge of wishing I had voted for Hillary."

You could be forgiven for thinking I'm just trying to be provocative, and - full disclosure - I was totally delighted by my dad's reaction to my complaint: "You brought me to Obama-land! Don't leave me here." But it's true. I am on the verge. To me, the single best reason for nominating Obama over Clinton was his ability to wield the soft power of the presidency, to control the national conversation, to be teacher-in-chief - stuff that would be especially helpful in a health care debate. Instead, Obama's relative silence in the debate (until recently) has been deafening, and the "public option" is getting skeletonized before our very eyes.

I am unwild about the "learn from 1993, majorly defer to Congress" idea. This isn't 1993. The Democrats have surged back into power, and Americans are mighty disgusted with the corporate behavior they've seen over the past ten years. It would have been a great time for Obama to be out front on this issue, not to ram a bill down Congress' throat, but to give weaker members of the donkey herd some cover. Instead, we're waiting for Senator Baucus, who represents about 450,000 people, to make up his mind about a few things. Frankly, I'm not even sure what is being referred to when the press mentions the "Obama health care plan."

Things do seem to be changing now, but I think it's too late. Obama gave speeches in New Hampshire and Montana, but now they just seem to be responses to the town hall yahoos. He's sharpened his rhetoric against the insurance companies - and I do give him credit for bringing them in and neutering the Harry and Louise threat - but they seem to be getting what they want (a dead public option).

P.S., Tom Daschle, I've never wished more that you had remembered to pay your taxes.

I break my long silence on steroids

2009-07-31T15:52:00.002-04:00

Peter Gammons – the best baseball journalist alive, and maybe the best ever, though we should caveat that by saying that this is the steroid era – had a conversation with Alex Rodriguez at ARod’s home this winter, after word got out that Rodriguez had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, and was on The List of 105 players who had done so, in the Mitchell Report. Gammons reports that Rodriguez told him “you know, now that it’s out, I almost feel relieved.”

It's time to stop this nonsense and out everyone.

I am perplexed by the reaction to yesterday’s revelation that Big Papi has been caught juicing. Journalists and fans are acting as if baseball players are entitled to a presumption of innocence until there is some hard evidence that they used steroids, as if the court of public opinion in the arena of sports is subject to the same rules as the actual criminal justice system. “Innocent until proven guilty” applies to baseball sluggers in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s about as much as “free speech” applied to John Rocker.

In society at large, we grant those protections because we’re playing with live ammunition. These are the rules that provide for a free and fair society, such as we have. But baseball is a game, and fairness comes by a different standard. So I say this: People – they were all using steroids. Those who pound their chests and wail about the fall of Big Papi are either disingenuous, or have been willfully naïve, or are kidding themselves about who else is on The List, or are simply using the public revelation of each individual on The List as a heuristic for actually being on The List, which is stupid. Really stupid. They were under-reacting then, and they are over-reacting now. Dan Shaughnessey, I'm looking at you. You suck, Dan Shaughnessey. You really suck.

Do you know why I hate the fact that steroid use has now obviously been so pervasive? It’s because the numbers 714 and then 755, and 60 and then 61, were so hallowed for so long, but now I can’t even tell you how many home runs Barry Bonds has over his career without looking, and I don’t give a rat’s ass that he hit 73 in a season. (It’s 73, right?) Baseball records have always been special – mythical, hallowed. Heroic individual performance in the midst of a team effort has been a hallmark of our special American pastime. And steroids has ruined that, for now. As a Red Sox fan, I love to hate ARod, but the reason I was upset to learn he tested positive was that I had hoped he could set things right again and give us a clean career home run record.

But as integral as individual accomplishments are to the gestalt of the game, they are not the most important thing. The game is about winning championships. The game is supposed to be contested by the rules, and when the rules are not followed, we feel that the outcome is tainted. But it’s important at this moment to note the different levels of tainting that can be achieved. When the rules are not followed to the benefit of one team and the detriment of another, that’s some pretty serious tainting. When the rules are not followed more or less universally, though, the tainting is less severe. And that’s what we have here. As George Mitchell himself has said, there aint no team that isn’t implicated by The List.

If you watched the 2004 American League Championship Series between the Red Sox and the Yankees, you know it was a gift. It was perfection in sports. Does it tarnish and sadden that great memory to know that some players on both sides were cheating? Yes, a little bit, it does. But what happened happened; I watched it, and I felt it. The Red Sox were as low as you can be, in the deepest hole you can be in in sports, and they faced impossible odds and won. That is mostly everything that matters.

I love sports – no, I like sports; I love baseball and I live by the Red Sox – but it is a game. It is what we feel when we watch it. It is a comeback win at Fenway Park. The memory of it is nice. The experience of it is sublime.

What’s important now is to get clean:
1) Release The List all at once;
2) Test everyone all the time;
3) Please, idiot baseball players, just say this:

“I used steroids, as is now clear to everyone. It was wrong, and I wish I hadn’t done it.

“To my younger fans, let me just say this: if you become a major leaguer and hit a home run in the World Series, or if you just only ever get one hit in little league, try, on the field as in life, to take satisfaction from doing your best, from having fun in the process, and from accepting and learning from the result. Don’t take steroids. Know what you’re putting into your body. Take responsibility for knowing the difference between right and wrong. Play the game by the rules. And maybe most importantly, when you make a mistake, own up to it and learn from it.

“I didn’t follow that advice. I hurt the game of baseball, and I lied to you. I can’t undo that. All I can do is promise to get it right in the future, and argue for the strictest possible testing program for all professional baseball players. I screwed up. No excuses. I’m going to learn from it, and move on, and baseball will too.”

Back At It

2009-07-27T17:17:00.000-04:00

Pickle Readers, I'm once again running for the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild, so if you'll just indulge me in a little politicking...

I'm running primarily because I want the union to remain a place of activity, energy, and democratic engagement of the membership. I go on at length about this in my official candidate statement, which can be found at LuvhForWGABoard.blogspot.com.

If you're a WGA member, I need your endorsement. You can do this simply and quickly here. I'm running with Carleton Eastlake, who in addition to being a talented writer is also an attorney and was also an FCC regulator.

Unexpectedly, this election has turned out to be quite pivotal, because the current president has been termed out, and the two candidates vying to replace him have pretty different beliefs. I'm supporting Elias Davis because I share his vision of an energetic guild. Check out his site here, and endorse him and his running mates Tom Schulman and David N. Weiss here.

Biden is Wrong About Russia

2009-07-27T17:16:00.002-04:00

What Biden said:

The reality is the Russians are where they are. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

There has been lots of talk about how Biden should just be quiet because what he said needlessly pisses off the Russians and embarrasses Obama, especially after Obama’s relatively successful charm-offensive while meeting with Medvedev and Putin. This is true enough; but no one ever questions Biden’s analysis of Russia’s current situation. They should, because Biden is mistakenly painting Russia as being in a overly crippled position. This faulty analysis, if it is shared by Obama, could serious hinder the prospects for American-Russian cooperation going forward.

Yes, Russia has a well-documented shrinking population. But interestingly, all the Russian statistics (as opposed to, say, the U.N. statistics) forecast stabilization in the Russian population because of a large increase in immigration. This may be wishful thinking on the part of Russia, but I don’t see why the Russian stats would be wrong on this score, since it is the Russian government that will be controlling the level of immigration through their immigration policies. And, believe it or not, a lot of people want to immigrate to Russia, especially from the former Soviet Republics that have real basket-case economies (yes, MUCH worse than Russia’s).

As for the “withering economy,” it’s not nearly as bad as Biden thinks. Commodity prices (and Russia has tons of commodities, not just oil, but virtually all the metals, as well as natural gas) are rising and are currently at levels that make the general economy stable, and also make the Russian government’s budget deficits very manageable. In fact, this year's deficit looks miniscule ($23 billion) compared with the U.S. budget deficit ($1 trillion, as far as the eye can see), and it is on par with the U.S. deficit as a percentage of GDP (both around 4%). The rainy-day fund that was built up in Russia when oil prices were well north of $100 a barrel is depleted, but not gone. And if the currency markets are to be trusted, investors seem to think that the Russian economy is now on much more stable ground—the Ruble has appreciated considerably against the dollar in recent months.

Russia’s banking sector is in trouble, for sure, but the Russian government is doing the same thing the U.S. government is doing to support our troubled banks—that is, providing an implicit back-stop. I expect Russian banks to have as good of a chance of survival as the big American banks.

Biden’s last clause (“they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable”) expresses a common misperception in the west: that Russia is a very unstable place and is on an unsustainable path that will ultimately end in disaster. By this narrative, Russia has, supposedly, been on the verge of breakdown for a very long time now. In reality, things in Russia are far from chaotic, and are very much sustainable. Putin enjoys high approval ratings (although not from me); the Medvedev-Putin partnership, while confusing, seems to be working just fine; the economy has been growing rapidly up until this year, raising the standard of living for many Russians; and this year will be the first year in a decade that the government will run a deficit. Things are not about to fall apart.

Biden is, however, right about one thing: relative to the United States, Russia is indeed still very weak—and will remain very weak for the foreseeable future. So Biden is right when he says that the Russians want to work with America because of this relative weakness. But, in this sense, Russia is no different from every other country in the world that has a strong interest in trying to cooperate with the most powerful country in the world. The Russians would be foolish to slap away Obama’s extended hand.

But Biden will be badly disappointed if he expects the Russians to crumble at the slightest American pressure. I suspect Russia will, unfortunately, show itself to be quite stubborn when it comes to the Iranian nuclear issue. There is a better chance that Russia will be cooperative on the Afghanistan issue; but Obama and Biden should expect to make some concessions (probably on missile defense) before they see any large shifts in Russia’s level of cooperation. Bottom line: Russia is not in as weak a position as Biden thinks, and America should not expect Russia to roll over in the face of American pressure.

Realism in Central Asia

2009-07-24T00:46:00.003-04:00

Below is the full text of Stephen Walt's latest post. The topic is Georgia and the poor prospects for human rights-centered foreign policy. Walt, as usual, is absolutely right. He highlights the number one reason why I am so thrilled with Obama's foreign policy--more "realism," less "idealism."

Welcoming Joe Biden to Tbilisi yesterday, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili declared that "in America, as anywhere on earth you can find lots of cynics and realpolitik followers. But in America, idealists ultimately run the show."

It's easy to understand why Saakashvili said this: he's desperate for American backing and that requires portraying Georgia as a beacon of democracy and freedom and making a none-too-subtle appeal to America’s commitment to defend these values everywhere. Why? Because it requires real creativity to divine a powerful strategic interest for an alliance with Georgia, especially when Washington is trying to get Russian cooperation on issues that clearly matter more, like Iran. It also requires overlooking Saakashvili's less-than-democratic behavior in the past, and the foolish war that he launched a year ago.

In any case, I hope Saakashvili also read the Times piece on U.S. policy in Central Asia, where human rights and other idealistic considerations are taking a back seat to strategic interests (i.e., the need for regional backing for the U.S. war in Afghanistan). It suggests that Saakashvili has got American foreign policy exactly backwards: yes, you can always find lots of "idealists" trying to get the United States to take on various philanthropic projects overseas, and of course U.S. leaders will always invoke cherished U.S. ideals when describing their policies. But in the end, realpolitik tends to win out, even if we don't like to say so too openly. To be sure, sometimes various special interest groups succeed in getting their pet projects onto the policy agenda, especially if they know how to work the American political system, and sometimes hubris leads U.S. leaders to take on grandiose plans to spread democracy or human rights, or other admittedly desirable things. Indeed, because the United States is so strong and comparatively secure, it's been able to take on more of these projects than anyone else, and probably more than it should.

But when push comes to shove, U.S. leaders usually fall back on the less sentimental calculations of realpolitik, and they are rarely willing to risk much blood or treasure on behalf of purely moral concerns. I hope the Georgians keep that in mind.

And here is my favorite quote from the NYTimes article Walt cites in his piece (the Times article is well worth reading in its entirety).

How to react to crackdowns like Mr. Bakiyev’s is a longstanding challenge for American diplomacy, here and around the world. Some American officials stress that rebuking governments over human rights is often ineffective because they lash back, and tighten things further.

The administration is mindful that a neighboring former Soviet republic, Uzbekistan, closed an American military facility there after American officials condemned an attack by the security forces in 2005 that killed hundreds of people. The Obama administration is trying to repair that relationship.

When "realists" scoff at the idea of the U.S. government arm-twisting foreign governments into treating their people better, they are often accused of having cold hearts and only caring about the potential consequences to U.S. interests of human rights-centered actions. But, as this quote suggests, the real problem with trying to improve human rights through coercion is that, not only does it usually hurt U.S. interests, but it also usually doesn't improve human rights in the oppressive country!

Tom Friedman in Kirkuk

2009-07-15T15:55:00.002-04:00

Almost on cue, Thomas Friedman has produced an embarrassing column that starts him well down the road towards: “We tried our best. We brought them democracy. Too bad they can’t behave like adults.” And although he was reporting from Kirkuk, he made no mention of the recent Kurdish claims to that disputed city. That may be because he has been a big Kurdistan cheer-leader, and Kurdistan's claims to Kirkuk are what diplomats like to euphemistically call “not helpful.”

Money quote:

I am amazed in talking to U.S. Army officers here as to how much they’ve learned from and about Iraqis. It has taken way too long, but our soldiers understand this place. But what about Iraqis? There are now many Iraqis embedded with U.S. forces in Kirkuk. In the dining hall on the main base, I like to watch the Iraqi officers watching the melting pot of U.S. soldiers around them — men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics — and wonder: What have they learned from us? We left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, but we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together.

We are going to find out just what Iraqis have learned soon. As Admiral Mullen told the Iraqi leaders around that table: “The U.S. is not going to solve” Iraq’s problems. That is the job “of a sovereign nation.” So Iraqis better get to work, because “on the current withdrawal plan, coalition forces will not be here in 18 months.”

So let me get this straight: America is to be praised for: messing everything up in Iraq, then finally learning a few things from and about Iraqis…and then leaving? I’m sorry, but after all we ruined in Iraq, deciding to pat ourselves on the backs for “learning“ things is ridiculous. And then to scold the Iraqis for not seeming to be able to “learn from us?” And then to deliver a paternalistic threat that “the U.S. is not going to solve” their problems? Please.

Yup: “better get to work,” you Iraqis. America certainly left you all a doozy of a mess, for which we will be taking zero responsibility.

Sarah Palin pushes my buttons again

2009-07-14T15:04:00.003-04:00

If you haven't already seen it, it's probably worth checking out lame-by-virtue-of-self-infliced-wound-duck Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's op-ed on climate change in the Washington Post. Actually, we'd better call it an op-ed on energy supply, since it doesn't mention climate change - it doesn't even countenance the idea of the existance of climate change.

What it does do is:
1) Argue that cap and trade will cause some people to lose their jobs;
2) Say that poor people will pay more for electricity;
3) Characterize investment in coal as ever-cleaner;
4) Claim that cap and trade will outsource our energy supply to China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

All of which is true, if you ignore the facts that:
1) Though some people will lose their jobs, they and other people will get more and better other jobs, which is what happens when you fix and modernize broken parts of the economy;
2) Though poor people will pay more for electricity, they will get more than that amount rebated back, making the policy that passed the House a net gain for the poorest quarter of Americans;
3) Coal is only getting cleaner relative to its own horrible standard, and not with respect to greenhouse gas pollution;
4) I can't figure out this one, actually. The only fuels we import are the carbon-intensive ones.

It's a mess. It's dishonest and ideological, which is of course not surprising. Above all, it is not an alternative proposal. It blatantly fails to address the real tough issues at stake.

Bashing Sarah Palin feels a bit mean-spirited. Everyone is either already watching agape at this impossible spectacle - a person whose presence on a major party presidential ticket is ever more horifying, like a narrowly-escaped car accident - or, if they aren't, heuristically branded as un-talk-to-able. So calling her names is pointless and undignified. But holy crap. This quest (2nd parapgraph) that she imagines to be populist, wherein she speaks to the true heart of the people, who know that the media is enslaving them and are waiting for her to lead them out of bondage...it's creepy. Also, does anyone actually imagine her to have written this short paragraph? "The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics." Does anyone imagine that she read it? Or that if she did read it, she had the self-confidence or curiosity to ask someone to explain to her what it meant? What a slow-motion melt-down.

Whew, that was undignified and mean-spirited. I regret it. But not enough to not hit "publish post."

Now, it remains to be seen whether Obama can get any Republicans for cap and trade, and he can't get cap and trade without some Republicans. But I sure don't think the Republican Party will be led back in from the wilderness under this kind of banner.

On the other end of the spectrum, here's a post that hits the nail on the head in terms of an analysis of Waxman-Markey. I agree with almost all of this. Thank you Chris for pointing it out.

Misha Saakashvili is at it Again!

2009-07-14T01:34:00.002-04:00

Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, visited South Ossetia yesterday to send a signal of support to the breakaway Georgian province. The NYTimes reported the following reaction from Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili:

Georgian politicians reacted angrily, saying Mr. Medvedev’s visit had been planned to embarrass Mr. Obama — or as a response to a Monday ceremony initiating Nabucco, a planned natural gas pipeline that would run through Georgia to Europe, circumventing Russian control. Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was in Ankara for the signing of a intergovernmental agreement for the pipeline, called the visit a “shameful and immoral precedent” for Russian diplomacy.

“When the leader of small Georgia left the country to settle very important issues, the president of big Russia silently stole into one of the smallest regions, and personally met with an unwashed, corrupt criminal and killer of humans,” he said, referring to Mr. Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia.

As I’ve said before (see here), Sakaashvili is a shameless character assassin; but the above comment has got to be a new low.

I do, however, have to admit that Misha sure does know how to employ colorful—and dare I say, humorous—language. “Killer of humans” is a particularly nice flourish. But “unwashed?” Yikes. What is that about?

What it’s about, alas, is the Georgian chauvinism that underpins Saakashvili’s rather virulent form of nationalism that he and his government promote. It is this chauvinistic ethnic nationalism that, in large part, provides fuel for his aggressive stance (read: invasion last summer) towards restive ethnic minority provinces. South Ossetians, like most all people who live in the Caucuses, are what one might call (and I mean this in a non-derogatory way) simple folk. They live very different lifestyles than the relatively more cosmopolitan ethnic Georgian elite who reside in and around Tbilisi. Saakashvili is one of these ethnic Georgian elites—he was actually educated at Columbia University. His “unwashed” comment should be seen in the same light as we would see a similar comment made by, say, John Kerry about an imaginary Senator from West Virginia who grew up in coal country.

And just to dissect Saakashvili’s remark a little more, he is absolutely wrong about Georgia being the “little guy” in this equation. While Georgia is small when compared to Russia, the proper comparison would be matching Georgia against South Ossetia (as the protagonists in the territorial fight), and then matching Russia with the United States (as sponsors of the protagonists). In that equation, Georgia-America is the clear Goliath, with the South Ossetia-Russia alliance clearly the weaker of the two.

One last note: Saakashvili faces increasing pressure from the disparate political opposition groups who are finally beginning to coalesce into a more unified force. Protests against him and his government continue in the streets. He’ll hang on for a while longer, but as I said before, his days as Georgian president are numbered.

Meanwhile, someone please tell me why the United States continues to support this guy.

Ukrainian Public Opinion

2009-07-12T17:02:00.002-04:00

Linked here is an article that provides some hard data on Ukrainian public opinion. Although it does not specifically address my often-made claim that Ukrainians do not want to join NATO, it does give some useful background about where Ukrainians stand in terms of their views of Russia, and of Russian politicians.

Opinion polls show that Ukraine is a Russian-leaning country, very different from the one described by Western media and the Ukrainian foreign policy elite. “If we were to fantasize, and pretend that [the Russian Prime Minister] Vladimir Putin would run for the post of Ukrainian president, then according to opinion poll results he would win right off,” sais Alexei Lyashenko, an analyst at Kiev’s Research & Branding (R&B) polling institute. “His only serious competitor would be [Russian President] Dmitry Medvedev.”

The R&B poll published on May 25 shows that for all the rhetoric about the Westward-bound Ukraine breaking free of Russia’s malignant influence and Putin’s imperialism, the reality on the ground is very different. “In fact, Vladimir Putin’s high rating in Ukraine is nothing new, but quite steady,” Lyashenko added. “It was over 50 percent even during the ‘Orange Revolution’.”

Opinion poll results published in May indicate that 58 percent of Ukrainians have a positive attitude toward Vladimir Putin, and 56 percent approve of the current Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Twenty-one percent take a neutral stance, and 16 percent think of them negatively—25 percent disapprove of Putin and 14 percent of Medvedev.

As for the regional breakdown of public opinion, it should be noted that the article tries to paper over a very clear regional distinction in attitudes towards Russia:

According to Lyashenko, the Ukrainian affection for Putin and Medvedev is most concentrated in Eastern Ukraine, where 75 percent think of them positively. However, even in the Western Ukrainian districts where Russian is hardly ever spoken, around 25 percent of respondents described their attitude toward the Russian leaders as favorable.

While 75% of Ukrainians in the eastern regions think favorably of Putin and Medvedev, it seems that 75% of Ukrainians in the western regions do not think favorably. Given that the thrust of the article is to present some sort of union between Russia and Ukraine as a distinct possibility, this clear regional disparity was, not surprisingly, downplayed. A more even-handed reading of this data would suggest that, although the western media's portrayal of Ukraine as a western-leaning country is clearly false, this article’s suggestion that most Ukrainians would be perfectly happy with some sort of union with Russia is equally false.

At this moment in time, a sharp move in either direction—towards a union with Russia or towards NATO/EU membership—is sure to inspire a strong backlash in either the eastern or western region of Ukraine. Political instability in Ukraine and tension between the U.S. and Russia would be sure to follow.

There Will Be Blood in Kirkuk

2009-07-10T13:30:00.002-04:00

Today’s NYTimes has a piece reporting the shocking(!) development that the Kurds in northern Iraq have written a constitution, to be put to a vote in Kurdistan, that will create a formal autonomous region for the Kurds that would cripple any chance of Iraq becoming a centralized, coherent state. It also claims the disputed oil-rich region of Kirkuk to be within the bounds of the Kurdistan region.

This supposedly shocking news is only shocking in that it arrived on the front page so quickly after the beginning of American disengagement. It is no secret that the Kurds have always and forever coveted a state of their own; and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any new state would be thrilled to have oil-rich land within its bounds. It was only a matter of time before the Kurds made their move. And now they’ve made it.

The infuriating thing about all this is that, since before the Iraq war even began, it has been obvious that this would eventually happen. The Turks were screaming at the top of their lungs that this was in the cards. But, of course, they were ignored, along with common sense. The amount of willful ignorance that American government officials can display is truly astounding. This inevitability should have been planned for from day one of the Iraq war. Or better yet, considered as a strong reason to not go to war in the first place! Also, the Kurds should not have been held up as “the stable, peaceful, and responsible” part of Iraq, and as examples for the Sunni and Shiite populations of Iraq to try to emulate. Now it is the Kurds who are the ones causing instability in Iraq. And let’s not kid ourselves: this is a major problem. As was predicted by many observers years ago, blood will likely be shed over Kirkuk.

But I guess no one in America really cares anymore. America is on the way home and the coming internal conflicts will be the Iraqi’s problems to solve. Brace yourselves: we will soon be hearing the following: “We tried our best. We brought them democracy. It’s too bad they can’t behave like adults.”

All I can say to that is: shame on us.

Obama in Russia

2009-07-07T14:47:00.002-04:00

More kudos to Obama for yet another nuanced and pitch-perfect speech—this time in Moscow. It felt very much like his remarkable Cairo speech, only for a different audience. Step 1: show respect for the culture and history of the country you are visiting (quote Pushkin, note Russia’s great WWII sacrifice); Step 2: highlight a few areas of shared interest that are not terribly controversial (nuclear non-proliferation, fighting terrorism); Step 3: boldly talk up the thorny issues of human rights and democracy, but then make clear that these values will not be imposed by America and that, most importantly for Russia, state sovereignty will be respected; and finally Step 4: emphasize a grand vision of an integrated world based on mutual respect, free trade, shared prosperity, and non-bloody conflict resolution, making pains to contrast this cooperation-based future vision with the Cold War and imperial-era paradigms that were rooted in zero-sum thinking where one country’s gain was another country’s loss. Oh, and let’s not forget about a few well-written jokes (about Moscow being cold as sh*t).

On the tricky question of NATO expansion, which the Pickle has followed closely (see here), Obama only referred to it obliquely, embedded in a discussion about state sovereignty:

State sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order. Just as all states should have the right to choose their leaders, states must have the right to borders that are secure, and to their own foreign policies. That is true for Russia, just as it is true for the United States. Any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy. That's why we must apply this principle to all nations -- and that includes nations like Georgia and Ukraine. America will never impose a security arrangement on another country. For any country to become a member of an organization like NATO, for example, a majority of its people must choose to; they must undertake reforms; they must be able to contribute to the Alliance's mission. And let me be clear: NATO should be seeking collaboration with Russia, not confrontation.

The take-away from the above quote, which may go largely un-noticed in Washington but will be duly noted in Moscow, is that Obama understands that Ukraine has no chance of joining NATO anytime soon. Although it is never mentioned in the Western press (because it never occurs to us to consider what the Ukrainian people think about NATO), polls consistently show that Ukrainian public opinion is firmly in the “let’s NOT join NATO” camp. Pro-Western government elites are the ones spearheading the drive to join. By saying that “a majority of [a country’s] people must choose to” join NATO, Obama is stealthily throwing NATO expansion in Ukraine under the bus, at least for the time being. But he is leaving NATO expansion open as a possibility for the future. This is absolutely the right policy.

As I’ve said before, the proper orientation of Ukraine is neither exclusively towards the West, fully integrated into NATO, nor exclusively towards the East, as part of a Russian “sphere of influence.” The Ukrainian people will be best served by a government that leverages Ukraine’s strategic geographical and historical position at the crossroads of what we traditionally think of as “East” and “West.” After all, the name Ukraine translates as “borderland”—a name that reflects a reality that the Ukrainian government should embrace.

Will the Real Obama Please Stand Up?, Revisited

2009-07-06T13:28:00.006-04:00

Thinking about Dan's defense of the cap-and-trade bill and the various skeptical responses in the comments section, including my own, I was reminded of the election-era Pickle post "Will the Real Obama Please Stand Up?" It featured Dan and I squaring off on whether Obama was a politician of principle, or simply a pragmatist who would compromise away all the meaningful and effective elements of legislation. Early in Obama's tenure, it is still an open question. Is Obama's pragmatism just an excuse to sacrifice his principals for political "victory?" Or is it really the best way to go--taking baby steps forward rather than go down in flames like Hillarycare?

Clive Crook, a columnist for the Financial Times, weighs in on the subject, and thoroughly skewers Obama. I have strong sympathy for his argument. The whole piece is great, but here is the money quote:

The president has cast himself not as a leader of reform, but as a cheerleader for “reform” – meaning anything, really, that can plausibly be called reform, however flawed. He has defined success down so far that many kinds of failure now qualify. Without hesitating, he has cast aside principles he emphasised during the campaign. On healthcare, for instance, he opposed an individual insurance mandate. On climate change, he was firm on the need to auction all emissions permits. Congress proposes to do the opposite in both cases and Mr Obama’s instant response is: “That will do nicely.”

It is very hard, however, to square my sympathy for Crooks critique with my over-all satisfaction with Obama as a president. This largely is a function of my (so far) nearly complete satisfaction with Obama's foreign policy. I also am highly sympathetic to Dan's argument in favor of the cap-and-trade bill.

But it's always good to remember what Obama could be doing, but has chosen--for political reasons--to compromise on. It might be political suicide to stand up against the insurance companies or against coal producing states, but the constant lowering of the bar of success is troubling. Three (or seven) more years of achieving rather modest goals is not something to celebrate.

Update, 2:41 pm, From Dan: In support of Peter's point, see Kevin Baker's cover story in Harper's' July issue. I read it this weekend, and it's worth a look, if mostly because it will tell you you didn't know who Herbert Hoover was. Also, can anyone tell me the correct way to possesivize Harper's?

Still more on Waxman-Markey

2009-07-01T11:25:00.002-04:00

Now to Chris’ comment:

If you read my last post, in response to Anonymous’ comment, the answer to Chris’ comment (hidden in the humidity post) is related. Yes, the best way to reduce carbon usage is to increase the cost of carbon. But beyond simply increasing the cost, it is also beneficial to increase the cost relative to non-carbon alternatives. Without getting back into the morass from the last post, a cap and trade program that doesn’t rebate the allowance value to consumers in any direct way does both, but even a cap and trade program that does rebate the allowance value directly as a function of energy usage can do the latter – it can raise the cost of carbon-based energy relative to non-carbon alternatives, even if it doesn’t raise the overall cost of using energy.

Now, with respect to the CBO study to which you refer, a couple of points.

First, I don’t see $28/year anywhere in that study, nor is that a figure with which I’m familiar, having spent more time with this document in the past week than I care to remember. It does say that the expected price of an allowance in 2020 is $28. Is that what you’re talking about? For those who don’t have an intuitive idea of what a ton of carbon dioxide should cost, I’d say that’s a low but not wholly insignificant cost, relative to the kind of stimulating figure we should be looking for. It’s at the bottom of the useful range.

Second, CBO estimates the average cost per household in 2020 to be $175. That figure is NOT the cost of the allowance value necessary to meet an average household’s share of compliance obligations under a cap and trade program – that’s $890, a goodly sum. Rather, $175 is the net cost, once the allocation of allowance value and certain other benefits are factored in. Again, not to belabor the point, but the full impact of that $890 would be felt in the policy’s environmental impact if the allocation of allowance value were done on the basis of something other than greenhouse gas emissions or energy use – say, for example, if it were simply a flat tax credit, or as one particularly smart and creative GOP staffer proposed to me the other day, a payroll tax reduction. But that is the kind of winners and losers creating formula that the US Congress can’t stomach. (I mean winners and losers among ordinary taxpayers. Of course, the US Congress has an insatiable appetite for making winners and losers out of special interests and the general public.) If the allowance value is rebated based on volume of energy consumed, not greenhouse gas intensity, you get some of the environmental benefit – ie, the environmental benefit that flows from the comparative advantage that carbon-free sources of energy have over carbon ones, but not that which would flow from an overall increase in energy costs. And finally, if it’s rebated based only on greenhouse gas intensity, you get very little environmental benefit at all. The cap and trade scheme in Waxman-Markey has elements of all three.

Third, the CBO analysis goes deeper into that $175 figure and divides it up by income quintile. Bottom line: the poorest fifth of households see a net benefit of $40, and the second poorest – the lower middle class – see a net cost of only $40. In other words, the burden of the program falls on those most able to pay. That’s good. And by the way, the CBO study does not include all the benefits of the program; it leaves out the simulative effect of the growth of good new clean industries, and the avoided costs of adapting to climate change. Both are significant.

Fourth, Chris, you say “even out to dates as far as 2020,” but 2020 is just the beginning. The best thing about the cap and trade scheme is that it plots a trajectory all the way out to 2050. Don’t judge this policy by our absolute emissions level in 2020 – judge it by the rate at which we are reducing emissions year over year in 2020, and beyond.

Finally, your question about why cap and trade over tax. Two things. One, a tax is no simpler than a cap. It just seems like it might be because the cap has gotten so complex. But the same people who demanded relief from the cap would have done so with the tax, and you’d be left with something just as complicated. Two, the most important way in which a cap differs from a tax is that those who get allowances freely allocated to them still have a compliance obligation. That is a crucial point. If a coal plant operator is exempted from paying a tax, they have no incentive to abate. But if that same operator instead gets allowances freely allocated in an amount equal to their compliance obligation under a cap and trade scheme, the incentive to abate remains. From the perspective of a shareholder, no difference. From the perspective of a Bangladeshi, very important difference.

More on Waxman-Markey

2009-06-30T12:26:00.002-04:00

Anonymous, in his/her/its/their comment to the last post makes a good point that I hadn’t considered carefully enough in my argument, which boils down to this: opportunity cost is not everything. I partially agree.

Yes, electricity providers generally pass variable costs through into rates, and Waxman-Markey’s free allowance allocations to utilities are accompanied by structural measures that are intended to make sure those “negative variable costs” get passed through too. So rates should not go up to the extent that permits are freely allocated, whereas if permits were auctioned, we would expect rates to go up.

Anonymous goes from there to make two points. First, the higher the rates, the more frugal the average consumer with his or her electricity usage; higher rates means less electricity consumption. Second, higher electricity bills for coal and natural gas makes renewables (and nuclear, btw) more cost competitive.

Before directly engaging those points, let’s be clear about something: whether you freely allocate or you auction, you have the same fundamental question: What do you do with the allowance value? Either way, there’s a store of value created by the policy – it’s the market price of an allowance times the number of allowances. It’s a transfer from the people who have to pay for the permits to the treasury, and policymakers are immediately faced with the question of what to do with that value. If the permits are auctioned, that value comes in the form of cold hard cash. If you don’t auction the permits, the value stays in the form of the allowances themselves. On a balance sheet, the difference between cash and a liquid commodity is not very different at all.

Here’s a political reality: If you are going to inject a multi-billion-dollar cost into every nook and cranny of the economy, and if taxpayers are going to see their share of it every single month on their electricity bill qua direct mail campaign advertisement against every incumbent congressman, you’d better find a way to ease the pain as best you can. It’s hard to imagine getting a bill through congress wherein most of the allowance value does not flow back to consumers.

With that under our collective belt, we can get to Anonymous’ point. The environmental objective of cap and trade comes from two things: A) the relative price of energy from carbon and carbon-free sources, and B) the overall price of energy. It’s not hard to get A right without raising electricity prices in the aggregate. You simply slap a price on carbon emissions, and then send all of the allowance value back to consumers, either by auctioning allowances and rebating electricity customers based on volume, or by handing out allowances, again based on volume. Waxman-Markey is a partial success in this respect – about half of the allowances that are allocated for this purpose are distributed as a function of volume, and half on the basis of greenhouse gas intensity. To the extent that they are distributed on volume, A is very cleanly achieved, though B is not, and Anonymous’ second point – about renewable – is not correct. But if you allocated purely based on volume, then people whose electricity usage now is especially greenhouse gas intensive get shocked. Hence the 50-50 compromise. For the permits that are distributed based on greenhouse gas intensity, A is still achieved, because the coal generator still has something to gain from reducing emissions and selling permits, but Anonymous’ point about renewables is correct – the policy does not help them. It’s a true giveaway to coal and its consumers. However, per my last post, I think that 50-50 split in the early-going is fair.

As for B, Anonymous, you are right, I was painting with too-broad strokes. Free allocations under cap and trade should keep prices overall lower than if we had 100% auction, so the potential efficiency gains are foregone. Point well taken. I guess I would just say a few things in response to that, in defense of the bill. One, Title 2 is all about energy efficiency. Two, I think objective A is more important than objective B. And three, as evidenced by what a gut-wrenching cave-in to the all powerful agricultural lobby was made to get this thing passed, you can only do what you can do.

This post is too long to respond to Chris’ point (which he artfully hid under the wrong post.) That’s next.

Waxman-Markey, and in defense of coal and the people who use it

2009-06-27T14:26:00.002-04:00

The House passed comprehensive climate change legislation yesterday, and despite the fact that we still have a steep hill to climb before cap and trade becomes law, and despite the fact that it is a far, far cry from what the IPCC says needs to be done to stop global warming before it gets unmanageable, it is a signal moment. In 2007, the judicial branch said EPA had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide, in 2008 we elected an executive who intended to do it, and in 2009, this from the legislative. Even the GOP opposition, during yesterday’s debate, almost all of which I watched, and almost all of which was intolerable, did not dispute the premise that something has to be done. This was, simply a big step in the right direction.

A few things about it, though:

First, 219 votes. It was a squeaker, for sure, but that makes it appear just a bit closer than it actually was. This was a hard vote for lots of congresspeople, and I suspect there were probably 10 or so more votes that the leadership could have had had they been needed. Once they got to 218, I think about 5-10 Democrats with tough races were grateful to be cleared to vote “no.”

Secondly, and more interestingly and importantly, I’ve been getting a lot of questions in the past couple of days, from the left, about whether or not Waxman-Markey was actually good enough to support. A month ago, I wrote that it was, despite the fact that it was loaded up with giveaways to industry. A month ago, it was less loaded up with giveaways than it is now. In fact, the Democratic leadership scheduling it for a floor vote despite the fact that they weren’t sure they had all the votes was like yelling sub-prime mortgage in a pool of hungry derivatives traders. Market price of a vote: a new $50 million taxpayer-funded hurricane center.

A lot of what was horse-traded in the last three days was in a 300-something page amendment that came out about 16 hours before yesterday’s vote, so it will take the next week to put a real figure on the aggregate price of bribes paid to get this deal done. The worst of it as probably the deal that Waxman had to make with Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson to get a dozen or two aggie Democrats to come along, giving the USDA the lead role in making a determination about whether a farm project to sequester carbon meets the exacting environmental standards to earn offset credits that can be substituted for emissions allowances under the cap. In truth, that deal really does weaken the cap and trade program significantly.

Nevertheless, I continue to support it. The crux of the matter is this: From an environmental standpoint, it doesn’t matter (much) whether you give people emissions allowances for free, or whether you auction them off. Either way, the market price for the right to emit a ton of carbon is about the same (despite the claim to the contrary in today’s NYT, a mistake a find remarkable), and firms will choose to abate when they can do so for less than that price. Same result. I think a lot of the complaints from the left don’t understand that. A lot of people seem to think that by giving away allowances to polluters, you undermine the environmental objective of the bill, and that simply isn’t so. There are things to complain about – things that do undermine the environmental objective, and the fact that the environmental objective really should be stronger – but that isn’t one of them.

The difference between free and auctioned allowances is in who pays, and here again, I think the complaints from my left get it wrong, though more subjectively so. Auctioned allowances are what has come to be called a “polluter pays” system, whereas with free allocations, we all pay; taxpayers pay.

But step back. Generating electricity from coal is not an evil act. Certainly, pollution from coal plants and other sources can be a public health risk, and some of the most pernicious sins of private industry have been and continue to be the protection of private wealth over public health, sometimes by lying and cheating. But carbon dioxide pollution is not that. People who own businesses that emit carbon dioxide have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Coal is cheap and abundant, and though those who profit from its burning must make a transition, it is wrong to saddle them with too much of the burden of that transition. Especially since Americans who depend on coal-fired electricity are disproportionately poor, it makes sense that we should all pitch in. “Polluter pays” isn’t exactly right when it comes to carbon dioxide.

This is a complex topic. I got an up-close look at the process over the last two weeks, so post a comment if you want to know more about a piece of it, and I’ll do my best.

Notes on Humidity

2009-06-24T21:24:00.004-04:00

I’m in Washington DC for the summer, and I have to wear a suit to work, which, with the humidity, feels more or less like a stillsuit from Dune. (Emergency on the internet: I’m pretty sure that is a wiki entirely devoted to Dune.) I keep wondering, why is our nation’s capital so god damn humid?

Well, the unsatisfying answer seems to be that the humidity is mostly just due to the closeness of several water sources (the Chesapeake, the Atlantic, the Potomac and Anacostia rivers), and the flatness of the general area. But the more exciting answer that we hear all the time is that Washington was built on a swamp. How deliciously counter-intuitive that our shining capital city would be sited on festering ground. How cynically metaphorical that our seat of government would be the literal home of snakes and lizards.

Alas, it isn’t true, if you believe the esteemed Bob Arnebeck, which I have no reason to do other than that this explanation sounds really really authoritative.

Swamp or no swamp, the place is disgusting, a fact that has been noted by countless internet commentators. Here’s my favorite, of recent vintage. And here’s my second favorite. And, for old time’s sake, here’s Two Live Jews with their 1990 classic off of As Kosher as They Wanna Be, “Oy, It’s so Humid.”

Fun Is With Us Still

2009-06-18T04:21:00.003-04:00

More good fun - this choir covers Toto's "Africa." The simulated storm at the beginning really takes the cake.

What the Green Revolution in Iran Tells Us About Democratic Change

2009-06-17T01:09:00.004-04:00

There has been much discussion about how Obama should react to the surprising, and inspiring, events taking place in Iran. He has, per usual, orchestrated a perfectly calibrated, nuanced response to a very complex and delicate situation. He has expressed concern about Iranian government violence against protesters, but he has stopped short of explicitly siding with the opposition, or explicitly calling the election a sham. He has been consistent in saying that what happens over the next few weeks and months “is something for the Iranian people to decide.”

But if the election was indeed rigged, and it almost certainly was, why not call a spade a spade? Why not use this opportunity to throw America’s weight behind a budding revolutionary movement that has an outside shot at ending a repressive and despicable regime? Republicans, most notably John McCain, think Obama should weigh in strongly against Ahmadinejad.

This would be a big mistake, as many pundits on the left have been right to point out. They correctly claim that making a firm statement in support of the protesters would likely backfire and give the Iranian government an opportunity to taint the protesters as “agents of the Great Satan.” This is a strong enough argument to end the debate right there.

But there are a few further points that need to be made.

Obama saying that what happens in Iran “is something for the Iranian people to decide” is not simply a prudent tactical statement that will best serve the protesters on the ground and thereby more effectively undermine the Iranian regime. It also happens to be a powerfully true statement that many people would prefer to gloss over.

As this so-called Green Revolution reminds us, all true revolutions are local. They are begun and fought by those who actually live in the community that desires a new government. Those who so vigorously support democracy promotion from afar—let’s call them “armchair revolutionaries”—often fail to recognize this self-evident point. Iraq recently experienced what could be called a democratic revolution; it was not begun in the streets of Baghdad, but rather in the airspace thousands of feet above those streets, by American fighter planes bringing “shock and awe.” And we know how that revolution ultimately turned out. If the Iranian people want to fight to change their regime, that is ultimately their decision, and their decision only. We should get out of their way and stop fooling ourselves that we are the ones who can, or ought to, deliver them to freedom.

Over-zealous democracy promoters like McCain should take note of Iran’s Green Revolution for another reason, which may seem counter-intuitive: the events in Iran reminder us that oppressive regimes do actually change. They must change. All governments—whether authoritarian or democratic—ultimately serve, to one degree or another, at the will of the people. If there is enough discontent in society, that discontent will out. And if there is no democratic mechanism available to throw out the incompetent bastards, the people will create their own mechanism—and that is revolution. The intensity and breadth of discontent with the Iranian regime, which has been so movingly expressed by the protesters, has come as a surprise to almost everyone—most certainly to the Supreme Leader of Iran. He will have to respond and adapt to that discontent, or face more upheaval in the future.

You can also bet that high officials in Moscow and Beijing have been closely watching--and frowning at--what is happening in the streets of Iran. They know full well that they are only able to stay in power without true democracy, without freedom of speech, and without respect for human rights, because a large portion of their county’s population is relatively content (or at least not extremely discontent) with their leadership. As time goes by, these regimes will have to adapt as well. And indeed, looking at the regime in China, that system has undergone many changes over the last twenty years, ever since they were served notice by the students who gathered at Tiananmen that the government did not have the support of the people.

It is quite possible that this Green Revolution in Iran will fail to bring about a true change in regime. Iran may become an even more repressive place to live. But have no doubt that, whatever happens over the next weeks and months, it will be a victory for democracy. It will bring the Iranian people a good measure closer to the day when they can enjoy a more accountable and more democratic form of government. And their brave actions will have accomplished more than any amount of arm-twisting or pressure that the “armchair revolutionaries” here in America could ever muster on their behalf.

A Creator's Paradise?

2009-06-14T15:55:00.002-04:00

In the halls of the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild, and on the streets of Hollywood and everywhere, you're likely to hear that New Media is a complete "game-changer," and some eagerly anticipate that right around the corner is a world in which content makers can cut out the middlemen who currently stand between them and their audiences, a sort of creators' paradise. I'd like to dispel that notion.

The story is that with traditional media, you needed a lot of capital to distribute content - broadcasting equipment, affiliates, whatever - and distribution was the limiting agent, so whoever controlled distribution (studios, networks) called the shots. But now, with the advent of New Media, distribution costs have become negligible. Now content producers can directly reach their audiences and cut out the meddlesome and exploitative middlemen - excitement about this is understandable.

But what would this New Media world, this creators' paradise, really look like? For one thing, it would be a mess. 7 billion audience members. However many hundreds of millions of "shows." As a consumer, what do you do, wade through every single bit of content on your own? That's not even possible, let alone a pain in the ass. No, the mess wouldn't last long, at least not on a massive scale. You'd go to a portal, or a channel, or a gatekeeper, or whatever you want to call it.

Distribution itself may not cost anything, but these portals have devoted resources to creating a brand and being consumers' first stops once they board the New Media train. And since they will control the flow of audience to content, we can expect them to act like the same old middlemen. Take a look at how self-publishing works at Amazon. You can upload your novel on Amazon and sell it directly to Kindle users, totally bypassing the traditional publishing establishment. Oh, and Amazon takes seventy cents on the dollar.

I don't have a completely apocalyptic view of the New Media world. It would be possible, after all, for creators to buck this new system in a way that they couldn't before - you can start your own portal, and portals are only as good as their content. But building an audience from scratch involves a huge amount of risk. Portals are a hedge against that risk, since they have a built-in audience, and there's no such thing as a free hedge.

Hearteningly, the Amazon self-publication model may not be the world's most applicable example. It's not that it's capital intensive - which it probably isn't, in the grand scheme of things. It's that it's completely proprietary and currently the only (major) way to do it - it's a monopsony not unlike Wal-Mart's, and Wal-Mart-like behavior should come as no surprise.

Credit Default Swap Market Insanity, Squared

2009-06-11T01:14:00.002-04:00

A few months ago I posted about the strange practice of gamblers buying credit default swaps on bonds that they did not own. I wrote how this practice was like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house, thereby giving the buying of this insurance the incentive to then burn down said neighbor’s house.

Well, it seems that planet finance has come up with a new, and even more insane, “innovation.” Eric Kraus, who writes colorful commentary on Russian finance at this website (I particularly like what he has to say about the embarrassing state of Western media coverage of Russia), notes that a recent hedge fund bought a bunch of CDS for bonds issued by the Kazakhstan government—that is, bonds that are the equivalent of US Treasury bills, but for Kazakhstan. Ok, sounds good. But there’s a small catch: it turns out that there is no such thing as a Kazakhstan government bond! None have ever been issued. Zero.

It’s one thing to buy insurance on something that you do not own. But it is quite another to buy insurance on something that doesn’t even exist! To return to my fire insurance analogy, it’s as if I bought fire insurance on your house…that you hadn’t even built yet! And I bought that insurance, let’s remember, in the hopes that your house would burn down IMMEDIATELY after construction was completed.

In actuality, the buyer of these phantom CDS do not intend to get paid when Kazakhstan defaults on its non-existent bonds (that is, your un-built house burns down immediately after it is constructed). These gamblers are simply counting on selling their CDS to other gamblers at a profit. They think that the perceived/imaginary risk of default of Kazakh government debt is going to increase in the future because, presumably, the Kazakh economy will go into the tank. They will then be able to sell their CDS contract at a higher price than they bought it for...provided that they can find someone else crazy enough to buy insurance on something that doesn’t exist.

More Good Fun

2009-06-09T03:30:00.002-04:00

This is from a 1941 movie called Hellzapoppin. I don't know how many takes it took or which one this is.

My Favorite Part of Obama’s (Great) Speech in Cairo

2009-06-04T13:17:00.002-04:00

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere. --Barack Obama

The above quote outlines the perfect middle way forward when it comes to democracy promotion. It basically takes coercive democracy promotion techniques off the table, particularly military options. But it does not abandon the cause of human rights. It sets the United States up to lead by example, rather than through force. Just as Obama says, a few sentences later, that individual state governments must “maintain…power through consent, not coercion,” Obama understands well that America must follow that same principle when it relates to other countries in the world. Cooperation to solve international problems is his modus operendi; arm-twisting is anathema. This is a 180-degree turn away from the ways of Bush. And it is also a message to those in the human rights community who hope to harness the power of the American military to bring about the regime change of despotic leaders that he is not on board with that project.

UPDATE: David Brooks takes issue with my favorite part of the speech. He doesn't like that Obama's idealism seems like a facade, whereas his realism seems to be what actually drives his foreign policy decisions. (I happen to like this arrangement, because I think it works best for achieving even highly idealistic goals like democracy promotion). Specifically, Brooks takes issue with how Obama seems to be giving Egypt a free pass on its lack of democracy. Two points on that: first, I don't remember ANY President in recent memory giving Egypt (or Saudi Arabia) a hard time about democracy. Not even the most idealistic of all our recent Presidents--George W. Bush--did so in a major speech. Iran and Syria consistently get bashed with the "you-are-authoritarian" stick, but never our friends Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There are good reasons for this, which Brooks is foolish to ignore. Furthermore, visits to Egypt usually feature U.S. Presidents heaping PRAISE upon Hosni Mubarak. Obama did not even mention his name once. This will be interpreted by Egyptian elites as a snub of Mubarak, and a far cry from a free pass. Brooks also seems to have missed the last 10 minutes of Obama's speech in which he talked extensively about women's rights, a highly idealism-driven issue that countries like Egypt would very much prefer Obama would ignore.

Pinko Pantywaists

2009-06-02T18:41:00.003-04:00

Obama has just nominated Congressman John McHugh to be Secretary of the Army. The letters that come after McHugh's name are R-NY.

Between this, the Dems completely rolling over on the Guantanamo issue (as Peter and I have been freaking out about), and Gates, a Republican, being the Secretary of Defense, it really seems the Democrats aren't interested in combating the notion that they're national security weaklings and that a non-chest-beating security policy is a weak one. Hey, sounds like great ground to concede to a Republican Party in shambles.

Terrorists In Our Backyards!

2009-06-02T03:39:00.004-04:00

Anonymous comments on Peter's last post that Cheney's opposition to prosecuting "enemy combatants" here in the United States isn't about the ability of prisons to contain them, but rather about their fate here were they to be exonerated.

I think this is a fair characterization (although I am not sure this is true of Congressional Republicans, reprehensibly spineless Congressional Democrats, and huge chunks of the public, and Cheney has clearly crafted his message to garner the support of these misguided people). But Peter's larger point stands.

Let’s draw a clearer picture of the kind of person that would be “freed” by US legal proceedings. First off, practically speaking, I don’t believe we’d let any of these guys, even if they were exonerated, out onto the streets. As the only brown people we hate more than illegal immigrants, I have trouble believing they’d get better treatment. We'd at least try to extradite them, and if their nations of origin refuse them, then that’s something to be sorted out. And that might resemble what we’re doing to them now – locking them up and throwing away the key - but the resemblance would be only superficial. They would have determinate status, with a clear way out.

But let’s say they are suddenly walking the streets of Philadelphia, having been exonerated because of flawed, insufficient, or nonexistent evidence. Cheney and Anonymous worry that they’ve expressed a determination to attack Americans, and that they now will. First, and this ties in to the hysteria Peter referenced in his post, the popular depiction of terrorists endows them with powers verging on comic-booky. Clearly, pulling off a terrorist attack is no simple matter. Ostensibly there are lots of people trying, but it’s logistically challenging and we have been able to interdict them. And that lead to the second point - it's not preemptive prison or nothing. We can still police them. Seems like we’d have probable cause in spades.

Harder, yes, and riskier, yes, although not to the extent Cheney would have us believe. But rule of law, which always costs effort and risk, would be intact, and to me that’s worth it. Sure, there are times to throw away this crowning achievement of human civilization, but those times are when society is completely dysfunctional – not what’s happening here – and then for only as long as you have to. Supposing, however, you don’t believe there is a moral dimension/metaphysical good to upholding the rule of law, I’d submit that tossing it out in this case is, practically speaking, bad decision making. It elevates and legitimizes hysteria as a rationale (oxymoronically), and it promotes it to the top of our values scale, and we'd be sure to make bigger, stupider decisions down the road.

Good Fun

2009-05-26T16:34:00.001-04:00

This is a real joy to watch. It is all one take - the 30th one apparently.

Nyle "Let The Beat Build" from Nyle on Vimeo.

Dick Cheney is a Coward. And so is Obama?

2009-05-26T12:46:00.002-04:00

“I…believe that – too often – our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight.” -Barack Obama, Thursday at the National Archives

The above quote gets to the heart of the torture issue. Dick Cheney, in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, made some rather provocative claims that reveal the paranoid mindset that has been driving policy for the past eight year. Cheney implied that putting Guantanamo inmates in maximum security prisons in the U.S. will somehow endanger our communities. He claimed that disavowing torture will somehow show us up as weak and give terrorists renewed opportunity to strike us. He suggested that all other concerns must be secondary to making the country even just a little bit “safer.”

All of Cheney’s ideas flow from a distinctly American kind of paranoia and cowardice. The Brits know how to respond to terrorists—with a stiff upper lip, recognition that it will probably happen again, and steely determination to try to prevent that next attack. Why must Americans resort to mad hysteria at the thought of terrorists residing in “supermax” prisons in their community? Why must we empty the shelves of ammunition all across the country when the threat level is raised to yellow? Why must we, in the wake of 9-11, resort to torture and invade countries that have nothing to do with terrorism when these drastic actions, at best, only make us marginally safer? It’s because we have been governed by a bunch of cowards—foremost among them is Dick Cheney.

Going back thirty years, Cheney has shown a remarkable ability to conjure up threats to the United States that don’t exist. He opposed detante with the Soviet Union because he imaged the Russians to be militarily much stronger than they actually were. His support for increased presidential powers (“imperial presidency”) stems from a fear that only a strong executive can act decisively and speedily to protect the country from our many (non-existent) threats. Post 9-11, Cheney convinced himself that the terrorists posed an “existential” threat to the United States. He began traveling with a full biohazard suit, convinced that a biological weapons attack was imminent. He recommended that the entire population get vaccinated for smallpox. He often worked out of the secret vice-presidential “undisclosed location.”

And now he tells us that we must torture people if we wish to remain safe. Once again, Cheney is letting his overblown fears get in the way of sound policymaking. If you, Mr. Cheney, are so afraid of terrorists that you are willing to scrap our constitution and our values in order to make us a just a little bit safer, I suggest some further lifestyle choices for you: don’t ride in airplanes, don’t visit New York City or Washington D.C., and certainly don’t ride the subway in those cities, and give some serious thought to moving to Canada or perhaps Switzerland or a Nordic country. You will then be 100% safe from terrorists, and torture will cease to be of concern to you. Meanwhile, back in American cities that will one day certainly suffer from another terrorist attack, the non-cowards who live in those cities will choose to not torture anyone. We will take on that small burden of being a little less safe. We will know that we didn’t cave in to our base, cowardly, irrational, fears; instead, we will have stayed true to our humanity and to our constitution.

As for Obama, he may be wary of making decisions based on fear, but his decision to support what he calls “preemptive detention” is rooted in just this type of irrational fear. I haven’t seen the rap-sheet on these supposedly “too dangerous to release” terrorists, but I doubt they are so dangerous that we need to forgo due process in order to protect ourselves. At some point, Obama must trust the American people to be brave enough to take on a marginal increase in risk from terrorism so that we can uphold our principles. Obama may be more afraid of the political implication of releasing terrorists than the actual implications of releasing terrorists. But either way, he is acting like a coward.

The Inevitability of Gay Marriage

2009-05-25T14:07:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow morning, the California Supreme Court will announce its decision in the Prop 8 case, and though the actual issue it's deciding, whether Prop 8 is more properly considered an amendment or a revision, is procedural rather than substantively about gay marriage, it still occurs within a political context.

Which is... what? Proponents of gay marriage are jubilant. The winter of our Prop 8 discontent is a distant memory, seemingly now made summer by a spate of advancements of gay marriage in Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, and most notably Iowa. Proponents and opponents alike have, just to shuffle up the metaphor, identified these events as a long-awaited, much-prophesied avalanche, soon to cover the country in a cleansing coat of powdery, snowy civil rights. Democrats are dancing on the grave of the Christian Right, and (younger) Republicans publicly acknowledge that they've long known being the party of homophobia is a demographic dead end.

I believe in the inevitability of gay marriage. I'm just not sure we're quite mid-avalanche yet; I'm not sure a permanent demographic shift has suddenly come in to being. Sure, we've stacked up some victories in rapid fashion, but the forces that brought us Prop 8 are still around. It was only seven months ago, and it was in CALIFORNIA. In what was otherwise a sea change of an election. It was a thumping.

What if the court holds Prop 8 is constitutional, as many say it is likely to? Worse, what if the voters of Iowa decide to overturn their court's decision? After all, Iowa is the crown jewel of the so-called avalanche because it's a "heartland" state as opposed to godless Vermont and Maine. Indeed, the advancements in those two states came from the legislature, the "people's branch," making them much more stable (Vermont's in fact from an override of a gubernatorial veto), whereas Iowa's came from the courts, albeit unanimously (unlike Connecticut's 4-3 decision).

I don't really think Iowa's voters will overturn their court's decision. It can't go to ballot there till 2012, and the avalanche may be real by then. My larger point is that the left's "inevitability" prophecy also functions as an excuse for complacency, sometimes to the point, as we sometimes saw during the Democratic primary last year, of regarding gay marriage as an unimportant distraction. Avalanches don't require work, after all, and in the meantime, we get out-hustled by gay marriage opponents (which is exactly what happened) on our own turf.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Economic Meltdown: Part II, The Future

2009-05-22T16:12:00.002-04:00

Here is a run-down at some potential long-term changes that, if they come to fruition, could mean real hope for the future. And we have the economic crisis iceberg to thank, at least in part, for making them possible.

On the Economic Front
1.) Milton Friedman and his fanatical free-market disciples have gotten the comeuppance they have long deserved. Say goodbye to unregulated derivatives, unregulated hedge-funds, naked short selling, golden parachutes, priceless office trashcans, and off-shore corporate tax-havens; say hello to a boring banking industry that poses no systemic risk to the economy, consumer protection for usurious credit card practices, and the closing of corporate tax loopholes.
2.) When you say “hummer“ I no longer think of the four wheel vehicle…! Say goodbye to SUV dominated roads, Enron dictated energy policy, and a non-viable American car industry; say hello to low-emission vehicles, cap-and-trade, wind and solar energy, and all things green.
3.) Get rich quick is out. Good old-fashioned hard work is in. Our future will not include nearly so many condo-flippers, day-traders, internet/house/credit bubbles, credit-default swaps, or 100k first-year-out-of-college jobs.

On the International Front
1.) Economic dire straits have already transformed, and will continue to further transform, our foreign policy for the better. Moral crusades are so 20th century. We no longer have the luxury to contemplate what we might LIKE to do (overthrow every tin-pot dictator in the world, bomb Iran into submission, ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, push around Russia and China, turn Afghanistan into a flowering democracy, etc.). We are now forced to think only about what we MUST do, and what we CAN do.
2.) The need for frugality in government will eventually mean a much reduced military budget, thereby further eroding the militaristic culture at home and adventuresome foreign policy abroad.

On the Domestic Front
1.) OBAMA, baby! The election of Obama, which was greatly assisted by the economic meltdown in the middle of the election home-stretch, means so much for the future it is hard to count the ways. I’ll let you make your own list.
2.) The idea that “America is in decline,” which was evident well before Bush’s re-election in 2004 but could not be acknowledged unless you wanted to be labeled as “unpatriotic,” is now one of the dominant narratives of our time. This (albeit belated) recognition that America will not always be the only cock of the roost will concentrate our collective minds on how to prevent America’s relative decline from turning into an absolute decline—think, “the decline and fall of the American experiment.” This means we will give serious thought to the paltry state of education in this country, we may have greater recognition that we need sensible immigration reform (being a “nation of immigrants” has always been a great strength of America since new arrivals often bring renewed cultural and economic vitality to a community), and we will have a more humble and sensible foreign policy, discussed above.
3.) In the arts, poverty breads creativity, as this NYTimes article highlights.

Thanks to this economic crisis, America will be a place with smaller cars, smaller McMansions, a smaller financial industry, a smaller military, and full of people with smaller egos who are less militaristic. Yes, we all have smaller bank accounts. And that sucks. But at least we will be getting something for our money: a new and improved direction for the country.

Times Reader

2009-05-21T15:52:00.003-04:00

My day today started in my favorite way for a day to start - at the diner around the corner from my house, with a delicious egg and cheese sandwich and the New York Times. Today's paper had an add for the new Times Reader 2.0, which is designed to simulate at least part of the experience of reading the actual physical newspaper. It does. Part of the reason I don't like reading the paper online is that, perhaps antiquatedly, I think there's a reason the editors put the stories in the order they put them in in the actual paper, and I'm inclined to follow their expert advice, at least to a first approximation. This is similar to my feeling that legislators are there to make laws and pass budgets, so California might want to focus more on electing legislators who share their priorities and less on negotiating those priorities line by line at the ballot box. But I'll leave that to Luvh and stick with the point of my post, and just say that after downloading the Times Reader and checking it out, it does address that issue quite well.

But the other reason I like to read the actual physical newspaper it just that it feels better. I stare at this damn screen enough as it is. I like that the first hour of my day is a pre-computer hour. And at least for the moment, it's not very enjoyable to take my mac to the diner and surround it with food and beverage. It's not very practical, either - my waitress poured coffee all over A11 today.

They tell me my days are numbered, but I just don't see it. Maybe they'll stop giving me an actual physical newspaper soon, but I really don't think I'm about to stop wanting one.

CA Special Election Today

2009-05-19T04:01:00.003-04:00

Again, I have found the analysis at Your Political Friend enlightening and persuasive, summary of which is Yes on 1A, No on everything else.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Economic Meltdown: The Titanic Analogy

2009-05-18T11:20:00.002-04:00

In the darkest days of the Bush administration, not too long after our cowed media failed us in the run-up to the Iraq war, after countless “left-leaning” politicians and pundits supported the Iraq invasion, after a scared public inexplicably voted for four more years of Bush stupidity, after Abu Ghraib, and with Katrina coming up just over the horizon, I remember thinking the following: “It feels like the American steam ship is headed straight for a giant iceberg, and the funny thing is, a part of me believes it might be better—for the long run—to go ahead and hit that iceberg head-on rather than try to maneuver around it. That way, after hitting it and suffering the painful consequences, the spineless apes currently running the show (in both parties and in the media) will be thoroughly discredited, and we can more easily mend our wounds as best we can and then head in a new and improved direction. Missing the iceberg would mean the country would avoid disaster but would continue on its downward trajectory. We need a wake-up call, followed by big changes.”

Be careful what you wish for, right? Sure enough, the iceberg was there and America hit it going full-bore. And the consequences have been terrible for countless individuals, as well as for the country as a whole.

But when we finally come out of this mess, we may be thankful for the changes that this terrible shock will have engendered. We can no longer fool ourselves that we are making progress by simply re-arranging the deck chairs. Real changes must, and I believe, will be made.

The improved direction in which we may be headed can already be mapped out today, even though we are still in midst of the crisis, with much more pain to come. My next post will outline some of these changes on the horizon that can, at least in part, be attributed to the U.S.S. America hitting the economic crisis iceberg.

Gut check

2009-05-17T18:46:00.002-04:00

Here's a way to visualize the job losses of the last year or so. Note that it is more or less like a Katrina in every major metro every month for the last 6 months.

Employee Free Choice Act Video

2009-05-16T23:11:00.003-04:00

I wrote many parts of this video and helped produce it:

The part I'm proudest of is the one emphasizing the value of having control over your own life. My worry is that the labor movement generally doesn't make this sort of emotional pitch in its public relations. The EFCA is supposed to help the labor movement take the next great leap forward, and accordingly labor should break out of what is often, in my opinion, a very dated way of talking. In particular, "worker" is not a word that plays - many of the people whose support this campaign is supposed to elicit don't think of themselves as "workers."

Californians: currently, every member of our Congressional delegation supports the EFCA - except one. Guess who it is? You're right, Feinstein guessers.

Waxing Waxman

2009-05-16T10:07:00.000-04:00

I’m reading up on the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill this morning, and I have a lot of thoughts about it. For starters, now that I’m finally tuning in, I’m a little shocked at how badly the cupboard has been raided. I know, shame on me, that’s a helluva lot of naïveté for someone who has seen first-hand what big business can do to a legislative process, but I did think Waxman would protect his turf a bit better than it appears he has.

The most important thing about domestic carbon legislation is that we have a price on carbon in the US marketplace; that we make everyone pay for the global warming externality of greenhouse gas emissions. (For those who haven’t thought about it, it’s a simple concept. If the computer on which I type this post is drawing 60 watts of electricity generated by burning coal, it’s contributing a little to global warming. If it’s drawing 60 watts generated by a wind turbine, it isn’t. By charging a price for that pollution, the market can capture the social cost of contributing to global warming, and my decision as a consumer – or, more realistically, NStar’s decision as a producer – will factor that cost in, giving lower-carbon options a competitive advantage over higher-carbon options.)

That’s the fundamental policy tool here, and this bill would get that job done, so I guess I’ll continue to be for it. But if that’s the primary goal, then the secondary goal is to give that price teeth. We can better chase the policy aim by spending some of the revenue from a cap and trade system on things like R&D and new energy infrastructure. We can also use some of the revenue to give rebates to the people who are hit hardest by higher prices as a result of the carbon price.

But to do that there has to be revenue. In principle, the “price the externality” policy tool works just as well whether you make a polluter pay for a permit up front or whether you give it to them and let them trade it. Either way, once they have the permit in hand, there is money to be made from not having to use it. The difference is that if you auction the permits at the start, revenue flows to the government that can be used for other purposes. If you just allocate the permits for free up front, no revenue, no spending on R&D and infrastructure, and no helping poor people with higher electricity bills.

There are two good reasons to allocate permits for free. The first is that some industries would experience too much of a shock from a carbon price, so you have to gradually wean them off their carbon addiction. I’m not sure about the economics, but I think that partial free allocation of permits to the electricity sector, declining over time, makes some sense. Other sectors – like steel, for example, which competes as an internationally traded commodity – have competitiveness concerns. They don’t want to all of a sudden have to compete against other producers with one hand tied behind their balance sheets. One way to deal with that problem is to allocate permits for free. (Another way would be to charge a tariff on imported steel, equal to the effect of the carbon cost. Some say that wouldn’t be legal, but I think it would be.)

The second good reason to allocate permits for free is that it’s a good way to pay a political bribe to the powerful special interests who still run this place.

The question has been how much of a bribe you have to pay to squeeze this thing through the US Congress. I thought the answer was somewhere between 25-50% of permits; 25 to 50% of permits would have to be freely allocated to deal with competitiveness and political issues, before you could cobble together enough support to auction the rest and have the carbon price. President Obama evidently thought so to, since there is a lot of revenue in his budget projections from the sale of permits under a cap and trade system.

In the first year of Waxman-Markey, though, it looks like we’re giving away 85% of the permits for free. It’s a buffet table. Environmental groups are urging Congress to scrap it and start over. I’m not sure. Remember, the primary objective is to get that price in place. But here again, we have a nice little lesson in who controls Washington. There are a lot of captains of industry who are going to have a nice new revenue stream from selling freely allocated emissions permits.

By the way, this post was supposed to be about the smart grid. We’ll get to that, hopefully.

Edward Sharpe and a New Pickle Direction

2009-05-15T05:18:00.003-04:00

Banner night for downtown LA. In addition to an Atomic Pickle, I ate an astounding lamb French dip sandwich at Cole's, en route to the Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros show at the Regent. Here's a catchy one from them:

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros - Janglin

Horses: Dumb Design?

2009-05-14T15:59:00.005-04:00

We’re in those few weeks of the year when the ancient and royal “sport” of horse racing bubbles up into public consciousness. That, combined with me wondering recently if I broke my finger playing basketball, has led me to wonder why racehorses have to be euthanized when they break a leg.

There are some unsurprising answers and some surprising ones. The unsurprising ones are that breaks suffered by racehorses can be quite catastrophic, due to the extreme race forces their legs are subjected to. The fractures can result in shattered bones or, as in the case of Eight Belles in last year’s Kentucky Derby, compound fractures that quickly can involve infection due to dirty race track getting into an open wound.

The surprising answers stem from the follow up question “Why can’t they just let them heal?” And sometimes they can. But apparently, horses aren’t great at sitting still, and moreover, adult horses are so bulky that if they lie down for too long, it puts too much pressure on their internal organs. They have to stand, and with a broken leg, their weight is distributed unevenly, leading to a condition (generally in the leg opposite the broken one) called "laminitis." It's basically the destruction of the tissue connecting the hoof to the leg. Once laminitis sets in, that leg is lost and the horse is completely immobilized.

At that point, it's a question of the horse's quality of life, such as it is, and given the rampant anthropomorphism in horse establishment, I think we can safely count on owners not to dispose of horses too cavalierly. (Although there is unquestionably an economic component to euthanasia - if a horse can no longer "produce" for you, and you think you can't even get any stud fees for it, you may not want to waste money keeping the horse alive - something like this looks expensive.)

Is it possible that ancient wild horses pretty much died every time they broke a bone in their lower legs? I guess so, but that's pretty dumb design, especially for an animal that reproduces so rarely (generally one offspring, and gestating in something like eleven months). More likely, domestication - generations of it, designed to make horses (leg breakingly) faster and (organ smushingly) stronger - is to blame here.

UPDATE: Accidentally published too early. I was going to explain/add that I'm not anti-domestication, and that if you have to tolerate a few public horse executions in exchange for powering the past 5,600 years of human civilization, that's a bargain.

Newsflash: Obama is Not Perfect

2009-05-06T01:04:00.002-04:00

I couldn’t be happier with Barack Obama and his first 100 days as President of the United States. He is everything I had hoped he would be—an intellectual titan, emotionally steady, a man of sound judgment—and nothing of what I feared he could be—too quick to compromise his principles, and too inexperienced on foreign policy, making him easily influenced by the human rights intervention-mongers in the Democratic Party. Like most of the rest of the country, I am a big fan.

But, as usual, I agree with Frank Rich, who has found the one area where Obama may be vulnerable: he could become a victim of his own success. Because of the lack of opposition from the GOP, and because of all the Obama hagiography going on right now, Obama must be extremely vigilant about checking his ego at the Oval Office door. I trust that Obama will learn quickly if he makes the mistake of drinking his own Kool-Aid. But Rich rightly worries when he writes:

We need more than one functioning party, not just to ensure checks and balances and pitch in ideas at a time of crisis, but to temper this president’s sporadic bursts of overconfidence and triumphalist stagecraft. No one is perfect. We must remember that there is also an Obama who gave us “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” a faux presidential seal and a convention speech delivered before what Sarah Palin rightly mocked as “Styrofoam Greek columns” hauled out of a “studio lot.”

And, speaking of checks and balances, I’ve stumbled upon something Obama has done that, in my mind, is pretty troubling. Obama, the former constitutional law professor, has been issuing signing statements—that most pernicious of practices that epitomizes all that was wrong with the Bush-era imperial presidency. And they have not been the kind of benign signing statements that Presidents have always used to simply clarify ambiguous sections of laws that they are about to sign. He seems to be trying to make real end-runs around Congress. His actions expressly contradict the promises he made on the campaign trail about signing statements.

Although I trust Obama not to use signing statements as egregiously as Mr. Bush used them, I’m quite certain that America will not be so fortunate as to always have someone as clear-headed as Obama sitting in the White House. It rests on his shoulders to nip the practice of signing statements in the bud, or else Bush’s executive power grab could become permanent. Arlen Specter, in an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books entitled The Need to Role Back Presidential Power Grabs, points out some other instances in which Obama has been suspect on this issue of executive power. Notably, Obama’s reassertion of the “state secrets” privilege to block lawsuits against warrantless wiretapping is worth a raised eyebrow or two.

Obama is such a clear upgrade over Mr. Bush that it’s hard to muster much criticism of him. But let’s not forget that Obama is a politician, and politicians practice…politics. It’s a dirty game, and the players are well known to be fallible human beings who tend not to make their best decisions when showered with too much praise, power, and trust.

Hate List

2009-05-05T12:20:00.005-04:00

This morning finds me empowered by self-righteous anger as I've finally deleted a Facebook friend whose updates were far too frequent and self-promoting. I'm going to ride this wave of emotion right past the irony of a blog post decrying self-promotion and right to what I'm calling the Hate List, a compendium of slang and slang formulations I hate:

- "Hearting" anything

- The McAnything nickname (hatred predating but exacerbated by Grey's Anatomy)

- Use of the -tastic "suffix" to make an ornate fake adjective, e.g. "craptastic"

- Gratuitous "Yes please," most notably when replying in the "Yes" section of an Evite

It's going up on the right, lest we forget. Suggestions welcome.

UPDATE: Reader PF is not into the negative energy resulting from the prominent position of the word "hate" on the right. Ever responsive, I have changed the name to "Nemesis Club Membership Requirements."

The Treason of the Hawks

2009-04-28T23:11:00.002-04:00

A great post by Stephen Walt on the tough choices ahead for Israel.

What Walt doesn't say (though probably knows) is that there is virtually zero chance Netanyahu will come to his senses about the desirability of a two-state solution. This is not necessarily because Netanyahu is unable to recognize the virtue of a two-state solution when compared with the other options. Rather, his inclination towards an apartheid-style solution has much to do with the nature of domestic politics and Israeli elections, which make it virtually impossible for a sitting Prime Minister to get serious about pursuing a two-state peace with the Palestinians. Israel has an electoral system based on proportional representation that makes it much easier for smaller and more radical niche parties to break up governing coalitions. A rightward shift of even a small minority of the Israeli electorate can result in meaningful constraints on a Prime Minister interested in making peace. And it seems as though the Israeli electorate has, indeed, shifted rightward in recent years.

The Israeli style system stands in sharp contrast to the American electoral system, which is called first-past-the-post. As we saw today with the defection of Arlen Specter to the Democratic party, our system does not accommodate political parties that cater to citizens with fringe beliefs (either right of left). With Specter now a Democrat, the far-right dominated Republican Party finds itself in the political wilderness and facing a filibuster-proof Senate.

Neither electoral system is perfect. But a first-past-the-post system is highly desirable when a policy decision needs to be made that will be vehemently opposed by a small but significant minority of the electorate--as is the case today in Israel. Given the Israeli proportional electoral system, I'm not sure how a two-state solution is possible without Obama basically forcing it upon an Israeli government by threatening to dismantle the American-Israeli special relationship. I highly doubt that will happen, at least not until an Obama second term. Let's hope that if and when Obama does win a second term, the two-state option is still a viable possibility.

At the Intersection of Politics, Pop Culture, and Attemped Slang Coinage

2009-04-23T17:45:00.003-04:00

America Tortures

2009-04-20T16:15:00.002-04:00

Or rather, did torture during the Bush administration.

If you only read one article all year, read these excerpts from the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It will make your hair stand on end. But read it all the way through. Every citizen has a responsibility to know about—and react to, on a visceral level—what our government does to other human beings in the name of our national security.

I also recommend reading this follow up article by Mark Danner, also in the New York Review of Books. It makes a very strong case for addressing head-on the crux of the matter: determining just how well torture “works.” Luvh makes a strong argument that even indulging the idea that torture might “work” cedes too much ground in the debate. I agree with his sentiment. But I fear that if we don’t cede that ground, those who defend torture might prevail because they will be politically empowered following the next Al Qaeda attack, if and when it comes.

From the point of view of Al Qaeda, Bush’s torture policies were a godsend that continues to fuel their movement and help them recruit. And the best way to push America back towards those policies would be to show up the Obama administration as “weak,” unable to stop another attack. If we don’t soberly and seriously consider the question of what valuable information—if any—was attained through torture, the next attack (or even attempted attack) could be politically devastating for Obama and his anti-torture friends.

Bargain basement prices for detecting and destroying asteroids

2009-04-18T18:23:00.002-04:00

Pickle Nation, DO NOT read this article unless you want to be badly bored. Or unless you are a PhD-level economist or statistician. DO, however, take note of what I found to be a shocking point therein.

This is a paper by William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, in the midst of a peer-reviewed conversation with Harvard economist Martin Weitzman about the use of cost-benefit analysis for figuring what to do about climate change. The substance of the debate comes over how to value really horrible things that have a very low probability of happening. It's a fascinating and important question, about which I hope to say more soon, though I am in no position to be promising Pickle Nation anything at all.

Anyway, the point of this post - not of the paper - is that Nordhaus illustrates one of his points by talking about the generally accepted idea that there is a 1 in 100,000,000 chance each year that a huge asteroid will hit the earth and kill us all. Now, I have been vaguely aware of this, and have ignored it because I have figured that them's the breaks. Why worry about it? Live every week like it's shark week.

But lo and behold, Norhaus has shocked the hell out of me. He says it would cost $1 billion per year (for how long he doesn't say) to reduce the chance of that kind of event by 90%. What?! And all we're spending is $4 million per year to track potentially threatening asteriods? For that matter, isn't spending $4 million a classic "you buy cheap you buy twice" situation? Isn't that just $4 million to ensure that in the moments before we are incinerated or freeze to death or have our heads explode from the loudest sound imaginable or whatever awful way a huge asteroid kills you we get to experience the thrill of looting?

In any case, I thought we were talking about science fiction here, but by all means, let's spend $1 billion to shoot those suckers down. I mean, is it shovel-ready?

Georgia, Russia, Iran…Afghanistan (Obama Saves the World)

2009-04-15T11:28:00.002-04:00

My favorite punching bag is back in the news! Disgusted citizens of Georgia have taken to the streets for a sixth straight day, demanding the resignation of Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia and professional character assassin. Facing a rather pathetic and divided opposition political establishment, Saakashvili will likely stay in power for a while longer, although I highly doubt he will make it all the way to 2013 when his term officially expires. One protester pithily described Saakashvili's political predicament thusly: “Georgians are proud people, and we cannot stand this humiliation. In any country, a leader who loses a war, resigns. We need to make him understand that.” There are very few base-truths in politics. The idea that "if you lose a war that you start, you're days in power are numbered" is definitely one of them.

But the Saakashvili story is a mere sideshow these days. The real news is being made in US-Russian relations. With his “reset button” campaign, Obama has indicated that an improved relationship with Russia is a top priority. Georgia, meanwhile, will likely get sold down the river during this thawing process, and its hopes of joining NATO will be dashed. This may not be a terrible thing for Georgia, given how poorly Saakashvili’s hyper-nationalist, militantly pro-Western/anti-Russian stance has served the country.

Interestingly enough, the thawing of US-Russian relations is, in turn, its own sideshow. The grade-A, top-tier, supersize-me foreign policy action is, of course, in the Middle East. One of the main reasons Obama wants to hit the reset button with Russia is that he needs as much Russian backing as possible when he sits down at the table with Iran to discuss the nuclear issue. There are clear signs (see: U.S. May Drop Key Condition for Iran Talks) that a long term negotiating process between Iran and the US is about to begin. And make no mistake: a grand bargain-type agreement is possible. Roger Cohen, who has been on fire with a number of excellent columns about Iran (here, here, and here), offers up the following as a possible compromise:

Iran ceases military support for Hamas and Hezbollah; adopts a “Malaysian” approach to Israel (nonrecognition and noninterference); agrees to work for stability in Iraq and Afghanistan; accepts intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency verification of a limited nuclear program for peaceful ends only; promises to fight Qaeda terrorism; commits to improving its human rights record.

The United States commits itself to the Islamic Republic’s security and endorses its pivotal regional role; accepts Iran’s right to operate a limited enrichment facility with several hundred centrifuges for research purposes; agrees to Iran’s acquiring a new nuclear power reactor from the French; promises to back Iran’s entry into the World Trade Organization; returns seized Iranian assets; lifts all sanctions; and notes past Iranian statements that it will endorse a two-state solution acceptable to the Palestinians.

Obama is making a huge bet that both Russia and Iran are not “revisionist powers”—that is, they are not interested, first and foremost, in transforming the world power structure to their singular advantage. He is betting that they are open to acting as respectable global citizens and are open to compromise. Many people believe the Russia-Georgia war was indicative of Russia’s expansionist ambitions. But I believe Russia’s deputy ambassador to NATO, Ivan Soltanovskiy, when he says the West should not overreact to Russia’s new found swagger: “There is a new sense of self-assurance in Russia, but don’t confuse it with aggressive nationalism. We see in the West a lot of mistrust of my country. But this is a self-confident Russia open to negotiation.” Iran’s willingness to play by the rules is much less obvious (Tom Friedman, for one, doesn't think Iran is serious), but Obama is absolutely right to take the chance. In fact, I think it will prove more difficult to keep Israel from doing something stupid, like bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, than it will be to entice the “mad mullahs” to negotiate in good faith.

And finally, to connect the dots just one step further, in two years when a grand bargain is reached with Iran and the Georgia-Russia war is long forgotten, Obama can leverage up the support from those two former enemies and focus all his energy on the absolute primo #1 problem of our time (which will undoubtedly still be a mess): Pakistan-Afghanistan. With Russian and Iranian cooperation, he just might be able to pull off something of a victory there as well.

LA Men's Jail "Medieval," "Drives Men Mad"

2009-04-14T14:47:00.002-04:00

The ACLU of Southern California just issued a report on conditions at L.A. County's Men's Jail - it sounds pretty awful, especially considering that jailed inmates haven't yet been convicted. They're awaiting trial, and they're there because they can't afford bail.

My expectation is that fixing a jail would be politically radioactive in a state with a budget crisis like California's. And I'm not even saying it should be a priority. But surprisingly, the crisis may actually require the jail's closure, according to L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca, who cites its huge expense ($50 million a year, housing 6,700 inmates at any given time). It doesn't seem there's space for 6,700 additional inmates - one third of the county's jail capacity - so what's the alternative? Perhaps a reform of drug laws?

Indeed, the ACLU's press release states that its report comes

as the county investigates the death of John Horton, 22, who was found hanging from a noose in his cell on March 30 after spending more than a month in Men’s Central Jail following his arrest on a drug possession charge. The ACLU also released a letter from a witness detailing the events leading up to the death of Horton, who was held in solitary confinement in a dimly lit, windowless, solid-front cell the size of a closet. His body was already stiff by the time security staff discovered it.

“Men’s Central Jail is so grossly overcrowded, dangerous and dungeon-like that it puts intolerable stress on the jailed as well as the jailers,” said Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

Here is a copy of a letter from Horton's jail neighbor giving an account of some of the circumstances surrounding Horton's death. It is harrowing. For me, the humaneness reasons for not treating drug possessors like this are convincing. But if it's economic reasons that will do the trick, so be it.

T9onyms

2009-04-09T15:26:00.002-04:00

The lesson from elementary school in which we learned about venerable Synonym and brave Homonym no longer cuts it for the times in which we live. Students of the present and near future would be better served by learning about T9onyms, words that are spelled with the same numbers in predictive text.

Generally, T9onyms lead to plain-jane confusion, as with "me-of" or "if-he" T9onymy. T9 will occasionally provide an alternative that works, or even an upgrade. When I wanted to ask a friend about the whereabouts of his "peeps," T9 came up with "peers." Fine, and actually thanks. However, just as it giveth, it also taketh away - when recently responding to a friend's bailing, I wanted the confident "booooooooooo," but T9 gave me the desperate "comonononon," and I pressed send before I realized what was happening.

Coinage

2009-04-06T01:44:00.002-04:00

A rare post about someone else's coinage: "flip-flopping," which I guess would be Karl Rove's. I was listening to a report about whether or not Obama would label the Armenian genocide as genocide, and since he campaigned on doing just that, the commentator referred to the possibility of him not doing that as a flip-flop. She also referred to Clinton and George W. Bush's breaking similar pledges as flip-flops.

I don't doubt that there exists such a thing as a flip-flop, and certainly when a campaign promise is both made and broken for political expedience, it would be a candidate for being a flip-flop, but ever since the 2004 election, "flip-flopping" has really muscled genuine mind changing and reconsideration out of the way and out of the picture. It may very well be that both preceding presidents judged labeling the Armenian genocide as genocide wasn't worth giving up whatever they wanted from Turkey at the time, and if that were the case, I think that's great. I don't need a campaign promise kept if it's leading us into one of them nose-face-spite situations.

If real flip-flopping is anything, it's a pretty intense charge because it amounts to alleging that a promise was made falsely. If Clinton, Bush, and Obama all knew that they'd never be delivering on the promise to the Armenian-American community that they'd label the genocide as genocide, THAT would be a flip-flop, but it would also be straight up cold.

Andy Stern is Funny

2009-04-02T18:32:00.002-04:00

I'm listening to Andy Stern - President of SEIU - give a talk right now, and he just illustrated the point that GDP growth, job growth, and wage growth are not all the same thing thusly:

"President Clinton used to say that his administration created 20 million jobs. Yeah, and as one of my members said, 'And I got 3 of them!'"

How to stop being the most innovative economy in the world

2009-04-02T18:28:00.002-04:00

Stopping these people from coming to America to work is utter suicide.

Gouge Watch

2009-04-01T14:05:00.002-04:00

As if publicly trash talking the President's basketball game weren't charming enough, Attorney General Holder has further endeared himself to us by putting the brakes on a proposed merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster, i.e. the company I might hate the most.

I don't know about the technicalities of anti-trust, but if those technicalities are supposed to convince me NOT to be worried that the company resulting from this merger would have an 80% market share, then those are some pretty impressive technicalities.

On BrandTags.net, users are presented with a brand name or logo and are then prompted to enter the first phrase or word that comes to mind. The more common an entry, the bigger it appears on the page for each brand. The Ticketmaster page is revealing.

The Bermuda Triangle is for Real!, Part II

2009-03-25T13:09:00.003-04:00

As much as I would like believe that my plane got lost in the Bermuda Triangle, a little research on the interwebs has led me to the conclusion that, like pretty much every other urban legend or conspiracy theory, the Bermuda Triangle is an invention of book authors and other folks who are out to make a buck. There simply is no empirical evidence (aside from my personal experience!) suggesting that there is anything special about the Bermuda Triangle. Plus, there are all kinds of truly cacamamey ideas about aliens abducting ship captains and the like. What the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon basically boils down to, in my opinion, is that flying an airplane long distances over open water is no walk in the park. With zero land-based markers to use when navigating, it is easy to get disoriented and lost. And if navigation equipment malfunctions, as they are wont to do, then a pilot is in deep trouble. The Caribbean has a high density of air and ship traffic. This leads to a high number of accidents.

As a side note, there is a rather fascinating story about a squadron of fighter pilots getting lost over the Florida keys during a training mission and having to ditch into the ocean, never to be found. The piecing together of what might have happened to “Flight 19,” as it is now called, is worth checking out.

My Bermuda Triangle experience aside, I’ve been struck recently by the number of people I meet who buy into conspiracy theories. The most popular is the 9/11 theory that it was a missile that hit the pentagon and not an airplane. Another one I heard recently was from a Minnesota resident who tried to convince me that Paul Wellstone’s plane was taken down by a U.S. military fighter jet on orders from Dick Cheney. This was supposedly done because of Wellstone’s upcoming re-election and his strong opposition to Gulf War II. With all due respect to Mr. Wellstone, I’m hard pressed to believe that Cheney and Co. were really all that afraid of one Senator from Minnesota, however outspoken. The war train was well on its way to leaving the station at that point and Mr. Wellstone was not going to be able to stop it.

The appeal of conspiracy theories is that they seem plausible at first glance and are usually impossible to definitively prove as false. (You can’t prove that something did NOT happen.) A useful way to immunize yourself from silly theories is to think about the conspiracy theories out there that you know are just plain wrong. My favorite is the idea, popular in the Middle East, that 9/11 was a conspiracy of the Israeli government. Didn’t you know that many of the Jews who worked in the twin towers got phone calls that morning not to go in to work? Clearly preposterous. But a lot of people believe in it for the simple reason that it fits into their framework for how the world works, plus it is impossible to know that, for sure, those calls were NOT made. The pentagon missile theory and the Paul Wellstone-Dick Cheney theory are popular here in the United States for the same reasons. Casting Cheney or the CIA as the evil doers fits nicely into the framework for how many people have looked at the world over the last 8 years. And hey, you can never know for sure that Cheney didn’t give that order.

Coinage: Gracism

2009-03-24T14:28:00.002-04:00

A more extensive SXSW post is waiting in the wings, but in the meantime, its preeminent coinage: gracism, which means positive (or "good") racism. Still mostly racist, which is why "racist" gets the lion's share of the portmanteau.

The Bermuda Triangle is for Real, People!

2009-03-19T11:21:00.002-04:00

I was in Puerto Rico a few weeks ago celebrating my cousin Philippe’s wedding. On the flight home, my plane got lost in the Bermuda Triangle. No joking. Here’s what happened:

The American Airlines flight I was on from San Juan to JFK started off with some massive turbulence during the accent caused by some rough tropical weather near San Juan. Once we were up above most of the bumps, the plane seemed to continue to maneuver around more that usual, like we couldn't get our proper bearings. I figured we were just avoiding more choppy air. But then, about 90 minutes into a roughly 3.5 hour flight, the plane takes a very serious and prolonged left turn. A few minutes later, the captain announces over the intercom that “two of the three navigation systems on the aircraft have… ceased to function properly, so we will be flying back to San Juan.” We descended to 10,000 feet, which is the altitude at which a plane flies when it is in an emergency-type situation. And off we went towards what the pilot assured us was San Juan. But looking out the window there was absolutely nothing to see, only the deep dark ocean below. No land, no boats, no markers of any sort.

Naturally, my mind went to that unhappy place where I started imagining that the pilot was lying to us and that, in fact, we had NO working navigation equipment whatsoever and we were flying off into the wide blue yonder until we would eventually run out of fuel and crash into the ocean. I am usually a skeptic when it comes to urban legends like The Bermuda Triangle. But when suddenly thrust into a situation in which I am on an airplane with malfunctioning navigation equipment flying over the middle of nowhere Atlantic Ocean, I couldn’t help but think that maybe we really could be caught up in some sort of magnetic irregularity that occurs only in the Caribbean Atlantic. I happen to be an avid watcher of the TV show LOST, which no doubt contributed to my wild imaginings. Adding to my sorry state was the fact that I am very much afraid of flying even with all three navigation systems functioning properly. Needless to say, I was shitting bricks.

To make a very long story a tad shorter, the plane did land safely back in San Juan after going through that same awful storm on the way down that we had gone through on the up. But I didn’t care about another dose of terrible turbulence, I was just happy to see land and still have fuel in the tank. We then sat on the tarmac for three hours while they fixed the navigation systems. And then, after enduring a near rebellion by the passengers when we were informed that we would not be getting any food while we waited (eventually they gave us some sandwiches), and after waiting yet another hour for the crew to clean out the lavatory because some stressed out nicotine addict decided to smoke a cigarette, nearly getting himself arrested, we took off again and landed at JFK after an uneventful flight (aside from the third encounter with that storm hovering over San Juan). I took off (the first time) from San Juan at 10:30am New York time. I landed at JFK at 11pm, having never left the navigationally challenged plane.

So do I now believe in the Bermuda Triangle? Stay tuned for a post on my thought about the believability of urban legends and conspiracy theories.

Kristof and Sudan

2009-03-16T14:41:00.002-04:00

Two weeks ago, The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Bashir of Sudan, who responded by expelling many of the humanitarian organization that provide life-giving necessities to impoverished and war-ravaged Sudanese citizens. Here we are, a mere two weeks after the arrest warrant, and there is nary a peep in the press about Sudan or the ICC. Bashir remains recalcitrant and comfortably in power. What has the ICC action accomplished? The short answer is: nothing good, aside from making human rights activists (and Nicholas Kristof) feel better about themselves. We “tried our best.”

I may be too harsh in that indictment, but I have to say it really angers me when sensible people like Mr. Kristof allow their emotional response to atrocious behavior and their naïve faith in the power of the idea of human rights to cloud their judgment about what is the prudent action to take for the sake of the Sudanese people.

Let’s consider the actions Kristof proposes that the United States take to further pressure Bashir in the wake of the ICC arrest warrant. From his March 4th column:

The first step is to insist that aid groups be reinstated immediately to prevent this genocide in slow motion. A second step could be to destroy one of Mr. Bashir’s military planes with a warning that if he takes his genocide to a new level by depriving Darfuris of food and medical care, he will lose the rest of his air force.

Okay. Consider the “insistence” made. And when Bashir shrugs his shoulders in response to that insistence, what next? Well, bomb Sudan, of course!

No way in hell is Obama going to bomb Sudan. For starters, Sudan is a Muslim country—with oil! Bombing Sudan is not going to jibe too well with Obama’s carefully planned PR offensive in the Muslim world. And I’m no military expert, but I feel pretty confident that the generals in the Pentagon will not look kindly upon the idea of bombing even a single measly little plane in Sudan. What happens after you bomb one plane and Bashir doesn’t budge? Bomb 10 planes. Bashir still in power? What then, invade Sudan? Where does it end? And there is also the fragile peace in southern Sudan to consider when mulling the idea. Kristof is simply not thinking clearly about this issue.

But I don’t want to single out Kristof. He is only too typical of the short sighted thinking that goes on in human rights circles. At the core of the human rights community’s myopia is an obsession with justice that often comes at the expense of stability and peace and welfare for those we are trying to help.

The human rights movement was born out of the revolutionary—and noble—idea that individuals have a direct relationship with international law that is unmediated by the layering of a sovereign state. This revolutionary idea is championed by people who, not coincidentally, possess what could be called the revolutionary spirit. It is that spirit which drives Kristof and company recklessly and unthinkingly into the painful truths of reality. It is that revolutionary spirit that must be tempered, for the sake of the people of Sudan and for the greater cause of human rights.

Bashir has been in power for a long time now. I’m afraid that the issuing of an ICC arrest warrant plus some scolding and even some bombing will not change that painful reality.

UPDATE: in today's NYtimes there is an op-ed decrying the idea that Obama might talk to the Taliban. It documents many of the truly horrific deeds the Taliban perpetrate. But it also makes a slip up and reveals what lies at the core of the argument against talking with the Taliban. (This is also, I believe, what is at the core of the argument for bombing Sudan). The author says "And when I heard that the Taliban proceeded to shut down nearly 200 Swat Valley schools — well, it’s been keeping me up at night." Memo to those who don't want to talk to the Taliban and to those who want to bomb Sudan: it's not about YOU! Whether or not you can sleep at night is neither here nor there. The only relevant questions are: 1.) what is best, under the admittedly poor circumstances, for the Afghan or Pakistani or Sudanese people and 2.) what is best for the interests of the United States.

If talking to the Taliban or refraining from bombing Sudan will result in less death and more stability, then that is what should be done. Please don't talk to me about your insomnia. I'm sorry, but I don't care.

Jack and Diet

2009-03-16T05:00:00.003-04:00

What are you saying to the world when you order a Jack and Diet Coke? It's a contradiction in a cup. Still, I will sometimes drink them, with an admittedly self-deceived eye towards, of all things, health. Taking this dumbness into account, along with the fact that, while it's no apple martini, it's a "girly" drink, here are two possible slang names:

Jack and Diane

Princess Jack (Diet --> Di --> Princess)
(and here I don't mean "princess" in the titular sense, i.e. that Jack himself is a princess, but rather in the adjectival sense, that this is the princess version of Jack, in the way that dungeness crab is a version of crab.)

Unedited Jim Cramer on The Daily Show

2009-03-13T14:36:00.002-04:00

This interview is incredible. Stewart is a master, and credit to Cramer for agreeing to it and sticking through it with an even keel.

I do wish every now and then that Stewart would tell his audience to just relax with the clapping. Seems a little mobby.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Over the past few years, The Daily Show seems to have drifted away from the substantive satire of its heyday and towards the more abstract satire of the now more zeitgeisty Colbert Report. It's a pity, partly because its form doesn't lend itself to that kind of humor, but mostly because TDS is at its best when it mixes humor with a little bit of wonk. I can't help but think of this when Stewart holds Cramer's feet to the fire regarding where CNBC stands on the content vs. entertainment spectrum. Of course, whenever Stewart is asked about any sort of greater responsibility his show has to the public, he insists that it's merely a comedy show. Whether that's said with a wink or as a cop-out, I don't buy it. I'm not saying TDS is making the same compromise on the spectrum as CNBC, or is even in the vicinity, but maybe this CNBC experience will make them want to return home.

NPR on the EFCA

2009-03-12T20:48:00.002-04:00

I just had one of those "driveway moments" you hear about so much during NPR fundraising weeks. I was listening to an All Things Considered report on the Employee Free Choice Act, one of my favorite acts and just reintroduced into Congress, and even though I had already arrived home, I couldn't tear my ears away from the radio. Because the report troubled me.

As I explained in the post linked to above, the EFCA proposes a bypass of the National Labor Relations Board union certification process - instead, employees can just sign certification "cards" and if a majority wants to form a union, there you go. Proponents believe this is a necessary improvement due to employer abuses of the NLRB election process. There are plenty of good faith arguments available to opponents (challenging the allegations of abuse, say, or preferring an alternative such as sanctions against abusive employers), but it's not their primary objection. No, they "worry" that workers will get strongarmed by unions because of a lack of secret ballot, and out of concern for the workers oppose the EFCA.

It's fairly and rather obviously galling. But I knew that already, and it was not the reason I was dismayed into staying in my car for a couple minutes. That happened because NPR seems to buy this crock. When Michele Norris asks Ron Elving why businesses oppose the act, he just parrots back the patronizing secret ballot nonsense (and it is nonsense) instead of simply saying "They're businesses! Of course they're against anything that will help workers unionize!" Ok, realistically, he could have just said businesses believe they will lose a lot of money if they have to deal with a more unionized workforce. Also troubling was that there was also no mention of proponents reasons for the bill whatsoever - not even couched as allegations of abuse, which would have been fine by me.

The headline of the story was that the EFCA is launching a lobbying "spendathon" in the coming weeks. Thinking about this saddens me further, because if this is the story from ostensibly non-corporate NPR, what chance is there that any other outlet will call out the opponents on their silly argument? Furthermore, I think the ugly tone of the conversation about the mortgage bailout indicates a rough road ahead for pitching the EFCA during a recession. If only one of its Senate co-sponsors during the last Congress were now sitting in the Oval Office! Oh wait, one of them is. There may be hope yet.

Dinga Dinga Dee

2009-03-10T21:18:00.003-04:00

Look, Dan and Peter aren't the only ones who post things relating to India.

This is a promotional video created by Rafael, an Israeli government owned/operated defense contractor, trying to get India to gatt up with them. Please also note that the performers are dancing around missiles, and that Rafael may soon be sued by Shakira.

If You Would Be So Kind

2009-03-02T16:48:00.001-05:00

To Angeleno would-be Pickle commenters: No Cussing Week is now officially observed in Los Angeles County the first week of March. Please comport yourselves accordingly.

What About Bobby, Episode 2

2009-03-02T16:36:00.002-05:00

PREVIOUSLY, ON BOBBY JINDAL:
Luvh felt unmoved by "superficial fun stuff" as well as by identity-based objections (that Jindal is a "coconut," and also that he's a misleading representative of the South Asian community).

My objections are policy-based, but those are also probably the most well-voiced objections on your basic "South Asians Against Bobby Jindal" page. So the question is, why couch your policy objection in your ethnicity or his?

My primary policy objection is that Jindal is a quite stereotypical "shrink the government/privatize everything" guy. But that issue doesn't seem to have much resonance with South Asian-ness, from either side of the debate.

This is not true of two other areas of policy objections. One is immigration. Jindal votes for things like fences and diverting military forces to border protection, and he is rated 100% by U.S. Border Control. To be sure, South Asian-ness is front and center for this one, but in a peculiar way. At first glance, it seems awfully Clarence Thomasy for a first generation American to want to pull up the ladder behind him, so to speak, but that analogy, though seductive, doesn't exactly apply; it's more like he's pulling up a different ladder than the one he climbed.

As can be gleaned from the Rakhe family dinner table, immigration policy is a thorny area for South Asian Americans. It's hugely difficult for South Asians to immigrate. Visas are tightly capped, and the only way to do it illegally is to overstay a visitor visa, but the Man is onto that. Consequently, my family, like many other South Asian American families, has lots of relatives in the motherland who wanted to come here but couldn't. Naturally, this is a recipe for resentment and vehemently held anti-illegal immigration positions.

But I, and plenty of South Asian Americans, don't feel this way. I see the vehement anti-immigration position as a striking failure of imagination and empathy, especially when Jindal sponsors bills to have government services offered in English only. Yes, it just so happens that almost 100% of South Asian immigrants to the United States speaks English, but is it that hard to think of how difficult things would be if you can't? You're South Asian!

I think it comes down to a dispute over assimilation and breaking out of quasi-tribal thinking. And for that reason, when the audience of the Facebook group is actually fellow South Asian Americans, I do think it's appropriate and important to couch my objections to Jindal in terms of our shared ethnicity.

The second policy area is centered around Jindal's extreme religiosity, but I think in this case objections are best left UNcouched in ethnicity, or rather, in this case, once-shared religion. In fact, pairing an objection to, as an example, Jindal's curiously strong anti-choice position with a dismissive "no faith like the converted" sentiment, or worse, an embittered "why are you so Christian?" sentiment robs the objection of a lot of substance, and in fact might make it boil down to the charge that Jindal is a race-traitor or an infidel, which is not where I want to be.

That being said, I think I'll join the group and just be vigilant about rock throwing.

A Tale of Racism

2009-02-28T19:34:00.003-05:00

Jindal post part two will be coming to this page soon, but in the meantime, a tale of racism.

Thursday I went for some late night pho with my friend PS, who is African American. We were the only customers who weren't Vietnamese or Korean, and at one point, a group of diners were pointing and laughing at us. I didn't really notice, but PS and I had the following exchange:

PS: Did you hear what they just said?
LR: What?
PS: It was so racist.
LR: I'm sorry, man, that sucks.
PS: No! It was racist against you!
(pause)
LR: Well, I guess I was just being a little racist against you.
PS: They were calling you "slumdog."
LR: Bummer.

UPDATE: Upon further review, I think I was also being a little racist towards the racists, for making a generalization about their racism.

Humpty Dumpty Finance

2009-02-27T23:13:00.002-05:00

Everything you need to know about the financial crisis and how to fix it (and how not to fix it) can be found in this essay at the Huffington Post, written by my father David Richards. It's rather long (non-brevity, it seems, runs in the family!) but is chalk full of indispensable information and insight. It covers a lot of ground and you'll be happy to have read it.

What About Bobby

2009-02-26T20:54:00.002-05:00

Bobby Jindal’s speech Tuesday attracted a lot of ridicule and ire, in no place/space more than Facebook (most hilariously from the groups Bobby Jindal is Kenneth the Page and Volcanoes for Bobby Jindal). I want to concentrate here on the ire of one particular population: South Asians. For a while, dating back to Jindal’s Congressional stint, there have been groups with titles like South Asians Against Bobby Jindal, Bobby Jindal Doesn’t Represent Indians, etc, and since the speech, their numbers (both membership and number of groups) have grown, and more so than groups of Indians for Jindal. Do I join? I’m not sure. Keep in mind I’m constantly worried whether I’m Indian enough.

Near as I can tell, these groups’ objections to Jindal fall into one of three categories: superficial/fun stuff, identity-based, and position-based.

Superficial stuff includes things like the exorcism thing making the rounds (don’t wish to link), or little “gotcha” tidbits like “Jindal went to Disneyworld the day after making fun of Disneyland!” Now, I’m not ramping up into some giant objection to the inclusion of this kind of stuff – it’s par for the course for most any political group’s page, and why should South Asian discourse be held to a higher standard?

Things get a little meatier when you consider some of the identity-based objections. There is a widely held perception that, because of his changed name (Piyush to Bobby, though not legally) and religion (Hinduism to Catholicism), Jindal is at least a “coconut” and at worst a poser. The charge leaves me cold, because it basically begs my question, and also because it’s a kind of second-guessing that strikes me as super emotional. I can see how it might seem like a repudiation of Indian-ness/Hindu-ness, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who joined those groups out of anger/suspicion about that, but there are also plenty of people on the groups’ message boards repudiating this charge as a proper objection.

Also under the identity rubric, however, is concern over whether and how Jindal “represents” South Asians. Even this strikes me as a sort of strange thing to worry about, because that concern typically revolves around a negative or overly reductive stereotype, that everyone will think “we” are “like that.” But that’s not what’s going on here – to paraphrase Pickle Reader AS, his whole gestalt Tuesday was bizarre, and even the most committed racist would find it a stretch to suddenly extrapolate that all South Asians are stilted and twangy. Ok, I just wanted to make that joke, but I do think – perhaps naively– that very few people are going to look at that speech and thinks he speaks for South Asians.

This post is approaching Bollywood length, so I’ll make it a two-parter. After intermission, policy-based objections, the audience of these groups, and the final answer as to whether I’m joining!

Shameless Plug

2009-02-25T09:16:00.002-05:00

That's me in TimeOut New York magazine. Check out the article, here. Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant is sold out for this weekend. But come dine with us in April! The show rocks.

My favorite part of the almost state of the union

2009-02-24T23:08:00.002-05:00

The characterization that if you drop out of high school "you are not just quitting on yourself, you are quitting on your country." I like that. I like that a lot. It feels retro.