Nation-Building

Tiller's killers

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:00:00 +0000

The reaction to the murder of George Tiller from the pro-life community is mostly one of horror and condemnation - but there is a substantial minority who aren't quite as interested in principle so much as vengeance.

Some of the raw emotion and hatred lurking beneath the surface erupted into public, ugly view on Twitter, where pro-lifers thought nothing of praising the death of "Tiller the Killer" and tagging their posts #tcot. There's also a lot of chatter about Tiller's murderer "performing a late-term abortion" - a moral equivalence argument intended to blunt criticism.

But the lunacy is not just confined to the Twitter fringe. World Net Daily, a mainstream conservative forum, is running a poll with some truly disturbing results - I just took a screenshot and with 2264 votes, a shocking 16% approve of the "baby killer being brought to justice", praising Tiller's murderer as a "righteous hero" or applauding the fact that the murder helps the pro-life cause because it "sends a signal to other abortionists". Another 14%, even though given other choices to denounce or disavow the murder, chose instead to lament that it was merely "bad news for the pro-life movement", in other words, more concerned with the PR aspects than the moral implications. And there's an additional 12% who admit the murder was wrong, but still "can understand how some might justify" it. This means 42% are simply unable to bring themselves to denounce this act of terrorism, full stop, as others with far more intellectual honesty have done immediately and without reservation.

Here's my screenshot of the poll results, as of this writing (with 2,337 votes). Note that you must be a registered forum member of WND to particpate. I myself voted for the first option, "Murdering any human being is wrong, period."

spare change we can believe in: the case for a VAT

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:42:00 +0000

So much economic hand-wringing, yet all its good for is to reiterate the same tired stale posturing from liberals and conservatives alike. Here's the basic problem.

1. Domestic spending can't go down. It's a fantasy to imagine that even draconian cuts would be tolerable or politically viable. Like it or not, Americans want their social services and safety nets. All the conservative handwringing about Socialism is a Red herring, pun intended. Anyway discretionary spending (non defense, non medicare, non social sec) is a tiny fraction of the overall budget anyway so theres very little to cut; American services are actually an incredible bang for the buck, especially compared to European counterparts.

2. Defense spending can't be cut. The world is a bad place. We have to spend a lot of money in a lot of places for basic reasons of security and global policy. Isolationism doesnt work; 9-11 proved that. Bottom line: we need resources to deal with the crap out there and that cost will only go up.

3. Social security and medicare will not be cut. Fuggedaboutit. It would be nice if we could avoid adding new pieces to it, though, like President Bush did (wouldnt it be great if a president had some constitutional authority to stop legislation in some way? ahh, fantasy...)

(I will admit here that I favor a single-payer insurance system, btw, and am absolutely opposed to social security "reform". Neither one will ever happen.)

So, what are we left with? Its wonderful that conservatives are now concerned about deficits, though they were not quite so worried about them when the cost of going to war in Iraq was being discussed back in 2002. Cheney then invoked Reagan in saying deficits dont matter; its hilarious how libs and cons alike have inverted their positions since then).

Still, we seem to be somewhat on the same page now, at least. Deficits do matter; they make the Chinese unhappy and we cant have that!

So what's the bottom line? We have deficits, and we have spending. So, we need more revenue. 20 years of conservatives arguing that tax cuts are the holy grail for increasing revenue have been shown to amount to essentially nothing; the Laffer curve is discredited. And the less said about "trickle-down" economics the better, voodoo indeed.

However, theres something to be said about reducing (or abolishing outright) corporate tax rates - along with steamrolling out any possible loophole for evasion in offshore tax havens or whatever. Pay less; but pay your fair share. Or, stop using the United States' roads, airports, postal system, electricity grid, water, internet, EM spectrum, etc to do your business, your call.

But ok I've just said we need more revenue, not less. How does cutting corporate taxes help? Well, it doesn't, in a vaccum, but actually cutting corp tax rates (dunno, by half?) might be almost revenue neutral once you factor in the cessation of rampant tax evasion and cheating. Maybe not, but it still needs to be done. Still, the real reason to throw the dog this bone is to help soften the blow for the real medicine: a value-added tax.

"aiieeeee!" scream the fiscal conservative warriors, but they seem to forget that the VAT is the best antidote to assuredly higher corporate taxes down the line. Rep. Bill Thomas (R) tried to start a debate on this back in 2005; presumably he had his own arse handed to him on a platter, but kudos to him for the effort. In fact there are two kinds of VAT, one the European system (which would essentially add a new layer of accounting to our system here) and the subtraction method used in Japan (where the VAT is a modest 5%), which could easily be applied here in the US using the existing corporate tax machinery. We might want to consider a reduced VAT, say half, for the housing industry, though. Plus, leveling VAT on imports and exempting all exports would be a great equalizer for our industries, especially the automotive one.

How much? well, taxes tend to increase over time, and its best to start out small and grow as needed. So, I'd favor a 15% VAT (half that for housing, none on food), with exports exempt. In addition, the AMT should be repealed and the corporate tax rate cut in half, as well as personal income tax reduced to zero on family incomes below $100,000. Plus, by law 50% of all revenue from the VAT would be required to pay down the deficit for the first ten years.

Who am I kidding? Obama wont dare break his sacred moderate mold - he's already taken single-payer health care off the table (even though its by far the best bang for our healthcare buck, and preserves the best aspects of the present system including consumer choice). So its no surprise that a VAT is off the table, at least until his second term. But I doubt Congress will play along either even then, thanks to that annoying two-year turnover on the House which guarantees that our elected representatives are always focused on the elected part instead of the representative part.

And the political establishment is not going to be any better - see here for a preview of the knee-jerk anti-tax attitude from Republicans, and Dems will also chime in in sorrowful tones about the regressiveness of it all upon the poor. Still, in principle a VAt is just a tool, and there should be some way of reaching bipartisan agreement about how to implement it for maximum benefit to actually solve the problems we have instead of just exploiting them as grist for our endless political mills.

The Specter of Souter's replacement

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:26:00 +0000

The news just broke an hour or so ago that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will retire. Souter was appointed by George HW Bush and proceeded to drive conservatives insane by refusing to bend to the right-wing agenda. Instead he has been what I consider a moderate voice on the court, though in general he has voted along with the liberal bloc. He was not as unpredictable as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was, for example.

Naturally this gives President Obama an opportunity to leave his mark by appointing a judge early on in his term - and thanks to Sen. Arlen Specter's party switch a few days ago, the Republicans are in a uniquely powerless position to interfere with Obama's selection.

Unfortunately, this golden opportunity is kind of wasted, since Souter was already a member of the liberal bloc on the Court, so any pick Obama is likely to make probably won't vote much differently than Souter would have, on average. A real coup would have been for a conservative justice to be retiring, which would then allow Obama to shift the balance of power, something that President Bush was never able to achieve despite having two opportunities to appoint new justices.

Still, if Obama picks a woman justice (as is being rumoured) then there still will be a shift in perspective in the Court - the decisions that SCOTUS renders are important not just for the end result but also for the opinions and dissents therein, and a female voice in all of that will be a good thing. Since Justice O'Connor was the first woman to serve on the Court, and after her retirement was replaced by another male (Justice Alito), there's an opportunity here to bring some of that balance back. Plus, she was of an earlier generation, so Obama's hypothetical female Justice pick would probably be someone younger for whom the equal rights battles of the Sixties are history rather than experience. So we can assume that the replacement would be more, ahem, militant in some respects when it comes to womens' issues. I think that is fantastic; of course the Republicans are going to freak out accordingly.

Overall, President Obama has a chance to influence the Court in a more subtle, yet nevertheless profound, way. Let's hope he doesn't botch it and pull a Harriet Miers...

respect, but don't fear, the Tea Parties

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:47:00 +0000

Yesterday's nationwide Tea Bagger tax protests seem to have been reasonably successful, with total turnout probably at least a couple of hundred thousand people. Despite dogma by the conservative blogsphere that the media was ignoring them, it seems that coverage was everywhere - including on NPR, which even interviewed Glenn Reynolds.

One of the more fairly written articles about these protests was at The Daily Beast, which pointed out that there was also a substantial Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS) mentality running through them:

But when I saw the giant placard which read “Hussein = Commie,” the time had come for some counseling. The guy holding the sign looked like he could have come over on the subway from Williamsburg, wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, and an iPod. I asked him if the sign was serious. Oh, yes. “Every-time he opens his mouth he spouts textbook Marxism, Communism, Socialism,” said the man who initially gave his name as “Barry Soetoro”—Obama’s name when he lived in Indonesia as a child. After some prodding, it turned out the protester was named Ted Houvouras, a Manhattan real estate executive with a degree in economics from Georgetown. The pedigree didn’t make his analysis any more persuasive, but it hammered home one point clearly. Hating President Obama has already become a cottage industry for a hard-core fringe, as it was for Clinton après-Monica and Bush after the invasion of Iraq.
[...]
The conservatives organizing these events kept studiously repeating the apparently poll-tested line that these rallies were not about Republicans or Democrats, but their appeal is self-evidently partisan. It’s part of the “patriotic resistance” recruitment drives that started popping up online days after the election. It brings to mind loaded old slogans like Nixon’s “silent majority.” And when the president is cast as somehow un-American there is a rank ugliness to the sentiments that are being stirred. It may be good for ratings, but it’s bad for the country.

Given that these people were essentially protesting the expiration of tax cuts that President Bush intended to expire, amounting to a few percentage points for the topmost tax bracket, the stated rationale for the protests comes across as rather selfish, the antithesis of "Country First". Still, there is a real policy difference at the heart of these protests, the belief that government should be smaller, and thus the tax burden should be lower. However the fundamental problem with this philosophy is that "big" government is not the problem, it's bad government that is. The simple truth is that government is not going to get smaller, and rightly so; the challenges of the modern world require it. In a sense these protests are a denial that elections have consequences; to expect a liberal president to pursue a course of government reduction is absurd, and given that he won't (and the American people prefer it that way), then either he raises taxes or he doesn't. Not raising taxes, the fundamental goal of these protestors, would inflate the deficit far, far worse than raising them a minor amount (as Obama is proposing to do). And yet it is deficit spending that these protestors claim to be against.

A simple rebuttal to the tax parties is this: why weren't you worried about deficit spending when you supported the Iraq War? They have no answer other than to point lamely to their signs now accusing Bush alongside of Obama for being "part" of the problem, but again, there were no protests on Tax Day the past eight years.

Related: Dear Conservative Teabaggers at Daily Kos.

Nick Lampson for NASA Administrator?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:51:00 +0000

Eric Berger, science blogger at the Houston Chronicle, points out that NASA remains a headless organization under Obama's administration:

It's clear Obama is unhappy with NASA's plan to rely on Russian support for five (or maybe even six) years while awaiting results from its work-in-progress Constellation program. He also just doesn't seem all that interested in space.

These are hard times for folks at Johnson Space Center. They support manned spaceflight. But the shuttle program is coming to an end in a couple of years and the new boss may not support a robust manned spaceflight program in the future. That's bad for Houston.

Perhaps even worse right now, NASA doesn't even have a new boss and the uncertainty over the future is palpable and damaging. The message to NASA from the President, whether intentional or not, is pretty much: "You're not a high priority."

The comment thread is interesting however, pointing out that NASA's Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake is now represented by a freshman Republican, Pete Olsen, who narrowly defeated incumbent Nick Lampson (D). As a result, NASA lost a huge amount of political capital, to the detriment of the entire Houston region.

As it happens, this hasn't gone unnoticed by the residents of the Clear Lake area, resulting in a grassroots effort to draft/pitch Lampson for the job as NASA's chief. The Bay Area Houston blog has a post on Lampson's qualifications:

Prior to re-redistricting, Nick served the Galveston, Beaumont, area and a small part of Harris County which included NASA/JSC. He has always been an advocate for the space program and during his last term forged bipartisan support for long term funding. Unfortunately, he wasn't a republican, so the voters elected rookie Pete Olson.

NASA/JSC lost a tremendous amount of clout when Olson was elected. With a Democratic Administration and a rookie Congressman, JSC had no voice in the White House. Lampson was in line for the chair of the Space Subcommittee which oversees NASA. Olson, as a rookie, is now the ranking republican on the Committee. The chair, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is a Democrat from Arizona and a good friend of Nick. Gabrielle is married to an astronaut, which just can't hurt.

Nick, as a Congressman, had always been one to reach out to everyone in his district. During his last two years, he had townhall meetings across his district, including a monthly event at a local NASA restaurant to discuss space policy. The crowd was a great mix of young, old, engineers, administrators, republicans, and Democrats. There was never a screening process on attendance, or a screening process for questions and answers.

And notes that Pete Olsen himself is supportive of Lampson taking the post. The Houston establishment is coalescing around Lampson, in fact - a Houston Chronicle story reported that Lampson was a finalist contender for the spot, and the Texas Congressional delegation has already written to Obama in support.

Lampson himself is on-board, as well - a local news station, KFDM News, spoke with Lampson on the phone about it:

KFDM News spoke with Lampson by telephone Thursday morning. He told us he hasn't been contacted by the Obama administration nor spoken with anyone in the administration about the NASA post.

"They are keeping it real close to the vest," said Lampson. I don't know anything about it. I'd be flattered if I were asked. I'd certainly give it consideration. I'd be honored to serve if I'm asked."

Lampson says he's aware that some time ago lawmakers wrote letters supporting him for the position.

There are other candidates, including a former astronaut, but it's clear that NASA needs a politician rather than a technocrat at the top if the agency is going to thrive and make tough choices ahead.

It's so hard to find good help these days

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:52:00 +0000

The Obama Administration's woes in filling political appointees are getting a lot of attention in the media. However, it should be noted that Obama is doing better than average when compared to previous presidents.

Much of the problem is that Obama's ethical standards are so stringent that qualified candidates with relevant experience are forced to screen themselves out of consideration. For example, Obama's ban on lobbyists sounded great in theory, but often people with the right skills do have lobbyist gigs on the side. There's a good story at NPR on this, too.

Plus, there's a decent amount of scalp-hunting at work here that ultimately goes against our national interest - as Megan McArdle puts it,

This new tradition of bulldogging every appointee in the hope of embarrassing the president has to stop. We should be focusing on whether or not the nominee can do the job, not whether there is some small breach of an onerous regulation in his history that can possibly be dug up. It feels good in the short term, but when ability to find a native-born nanny becomes a more important qualification for the presidential candidate than experience relevant to the job to be done, it's time for a national rethink.

Global warming: is relative humidity increasing or decreasing?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:31:00 +0000

I am not a global warming expert but I do follow the debates with reasonable attention to detail. I think my scientific training provides me the tools to assess the scientific claims to a reasonable degree even though I lack the training to go much deeper than abstracts, figures, and conclusions of papers on the topic.

Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit (the global warming skeptic's counter-site to the Real Climate project) points to a new paper that purports to show that the relative humidity of the upper atmosphere is declining rather than increasing as one might expect based on climate models. The implication pertains to how much feedback there is with increase in atmospheric CO2 - a positive feedback (increasing relative humidity) would imply greater temperature change per doubling of CO2 concentration increase, ie making global warming worse, whereas a negative feedback would imply the opposite, that global warming is less of a threat. Note that the debate is only about the magnitude of the increase in temperature change with increased CO2, not a repudiation of global warming outright. In fact the whole issue of relative humidity essentially validates the main assumption of global warming as caused by CO2 in the first place.

Still, the paper is getting attention from committed GW skeptics like Dave Price at Dean's World, who interprets the results as a "collapse" of a "central pillar" of global warming theory. Anthony Watts, another GW skeptic, also suggests that the paper's findings "could be significant". However, a reading of the paper's abstract and conclusions show a far milder assertion, related to data collection protocols using balloons in the atmosphere, rather than any such monumental toppling of the central GW dogmas.

The paper makes the following claims (see the abstract reprinted at Climate Audit):

- relative humidity has been thought to be increasing with global temperature (ie, positive feedback)
- in the upper atmosphere, according to balloon data, the paper reports that relative humidity has actually been decreasing (ie, negative feedback, with the warming trend that the authors explicitly acknowledge exists)

the authors themselves do acknowledge in the abstract itself that balloon data must be "treated with great caution, particularly at altitudes above the 500 hPa pressure level", though Anthony Watts does not mention this admission in his summary. The abstract only reports a negative feedback trend above 850 hPa for the tropics and southern midlatitudes, and above 600 hPa for the northern midlatitudes. The abstract goes on to explicitly state that the humidity trend is "significantly positive below 850 hPa in all three zones" - which is where the vast bulk of the water vapor in the atmosphere resides.

the main conclusion of the paper is not as bold as Dave implies - they merely state that the data suggests that there might need to be a review of data collection protocols using balloons, since the data is so iffy indeed and at odds with satellite measurements (which contrary to Watts' assertion, are probably more accurate for annual average measurements than spot measurements by balloon. see notes below for an analogy as to why). Here's the first paragraph of the conclusion proper from the article full text (courtesy of Watts):

It is of course possible that the observed humidity trends from the NCEP data are simply the result of problems with the instrumentation and operation of the global radiosonde network from which the data are derived. The potential for such problems needs to be examined in detail in an effort rather similar to the effort now devoted to abstracting real surface temperature trends from the face-value data from individual stations of the international meteorological networks. As recommended by Elliot and Gaffen (1991) in their original study of the US radiosonde network, there needs to be a detailed examination of how radiosonde instrumentation, operating procedures, and recording practices of all nations have changed over the years and of how these changes may have impacted on the humidity data.

emphasis mine. The conclusion goes on to state that "trends of water vapor shown by the NCEP data for the middle and upper troposphere should not be “written off” simply on the basis that they are not supported by climate models". I agree, but they should heed their own advice when they state a few sentences later, "it is important that as much information as possible be retrieved from within the “noise” of the potential errors." If the balloon data is inherently noisy (partly due to collection protocols that the authors themselves acknowledge must be refined and reviewed) then making claims about the trends of relative humidity from that data alone is essentially treating noise as data. In light of the problems with the balloon data - again, explicitly acknowledged by the authors in their own abstract and conclusion - it's perfectly reasonable that review papers continue to assert that there is a scientific consensus that water vapor provides a positive feedback.

The authors have made a good case for a review of balloon data collection protocols, but have made no claims on whether the data we have from balloons so far is of any value. The "central pillar" (not really) of GW theory has certainly not been "collapsed" by this paper in any sense.

Incidentally there is a lot more information about humidity and water vapor effects available from other science bloggers. See:

Water vapour: feedback or forcing? at Real Climate
Evaporating the water vapor argument at Skeptical Science
Anti-global heating claims: Myth #18 at Scholars and Rogues

As far as the meta arguments about science go, note that the paper in question was accepted but according to Watts is being "ignored". As far as i am aware, publication is the exact opposite of being "ignored". One of the authors of the paper in question points to a single vitriolic and political comment by a reviewer as evidence that the paper's refusal at a more prestigious journal is evidence of a deeper agenda at work; he may not be aware that reviewers are also human, that sometimes prestigious journals refuse perfectly valid papers for trivial reasons. Since they haven't released the full text of the reviewers' comments, we are not able to discern whether there were perhaps more substantive reasons for the refusal of the paper at the big journal.

At any rate the simple fact of the paper being accepted (granted, by a "lesser" journal than the author's ego would prefer) puts the truth to the lie that anti-GW skeptics are being shut out by the all-powerful, money-grubbing GW consensus conspiracy.

finally, one note regarding satellite vs balloon measurements for long term averaged regional data. Balloons provide a single spot measure whereas satellites can integrate over a far larger area. The former are very vulnerable to local variation and noise whereas the latter can average these out by simple virtue of broader field. It's like trying to assess whether a patient has fatty infiltrating liver disease by taking a liver biopsy: you take a tissue sample over here, but what if the diseased tissue is over there? if you image the whole liver at once (analogous to satellites), then you get the broad picture and can make a global (liver) assessment more accurately and safe from measurement variation.

Do the Marines respect the Commander in Chief?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:18:00 +0000

One of the strategies of the conservative right has been to try and politicize the military. The confuse their own military fetish and partisan self-interest with genuine patriotism and the public good (because in their view, they hold a monopoly on both). In so doing, they disrespect the very troops they allegedly revere. For example, the Bush Administration paid great lip-service to veterans on the field but left them hanging out to dry when they got home.

Now, the right is taking their insult to the military to new levels, by promoting this video which allegedly shows that the military does not respect Obama the way they did Bush:

At Redstate.com, the bloggers crow that this is the "Semper Fi Zone" which is about as gross an insult to the professional ethics of the Marine Corps as you can imagine. In the fevered imaginings of the conservative right, a military that shows a preference for one political party over another is actually a desirable thing, instead of the incredible threat to democracy it would actually represent. But turning America into a banana republic is apparently one of their political goals.

Grayhawk, one of the most level-headed military bloggers - and a genuine conservative instead of these Republican hacks at RedState - took serious issue with the video above:

I'm concerned it might be one compiled to give the impression that the current President of the United States lacks the support from the military his predecessor had. That is not the case, and to imply otherwise is an insult to the integrity of the US military, and in my mind reflects both wishful thinking and ignorance on the part of anyone making the claim.
...
it's worse than what I thought. The first video above is the cheapest of cheap shots. Marines in the Obama video have been clearly called to attention, and are standing at attention when he enters. Whooping it up for the Commander in Chief therefore is not an option. Period. As for the fadeout, cheers can be heard (and they aren't 'tepid') until the audio is cut to go "back to the newsroom".

Unfortunately, principled conservatives like Greyhawk are increasingly being drummed out of the GOP and the conservative ranks. He's feeling the pressure right on his own site.

And as far as the Marines go, they stand above these cheap attempts at stealing their honor for political gain. Here's the proof:

Zakaria on The Curse of Oil Wealth

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:12:00 +0000

In Fareed Zakaria's book The Future of Freedom, he makes an extended argument for why the possession of oil resources has historically been a barrier to liberalization and freedom. He made a condensed version of that argument in an essay in Newsweek back in April 2003 when the Iraq war was just beginning:

A 'SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGE'

Vice President Dick Cheney recently remarked that Iraq's oil resourcesóthe second largest in the world--will be a "significant advantage" when building democracy. This is a common refrain, echoed by many within and without the administration. Unfortunately, the opposite is closer to the truth. With the exception of Norway, virtually all the worldís oil states are dictatorships. This is not an accident. Oil--like other natural resources--does not help produce capitalism, civil society and thus democracy. It actually retards that process.

Countries with treasure in their soil don't need to create the framework of laws and policies that produce economic growth and create a middle class. They simply drill into the ground for black gold. These "trust-fund states" donít work for their wealth and thus don't modernize--economically or politically. After all, easy money means a government doesn't need to tax its people. That might sound like a good idea, but when a government takes money from its people, the people demand something in return. Like honesty, accountability, transparency--and eventually democracy.

This bargain, between taxation and representation, is at the heart of Western liberty. After all, that is why America broke away from Britain. It was being taxed but not represented in the British Parliament. The Saudi royal family offers its subjects a very different bargain: "We don't ask much of you [in the form of taxes] and we don't give you much [in the form of liberty]." It's the inverse of the slogan that launched the American Revolution--no taxation without representation.

THE CURSE OF OIL

Far from limiting state power, oil actually strengthens it. There is always enough money for the army, the intelligence services and the secret police. Saudi Arabia, for example, spends 13 percent of its annual GDP on the military, four times America's level. Oil also means that corruption infects every aspect of the society. Businessmen are valued not for what ideas they have or how hard they work, but for who they know. Oil states have a courtier culture, not a commercial culture.

The only thing Zakaria is missing here is that part of teh reason for the above is that oil wealth also invites interference from other nations and powerful entities (corporations, crime syndicates, etc) and these also play a role in retarding the process of liberalization. in fact the entire history of the Middle East is one long excercise in interference by the "free" countries to keep the region under autocratic rule, the better to ensure "stability" with respect to the supply of oil. One wonders just how much of our freedom depends on the lack of it for others.

Republican strategy: party before country

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:05:00 +0000

The GOP is in full obstructionist mode regarding the economic stimulus plan - there's an excellent summary at myDD of the GOP's general strategy:

The GOP's main contention has been now for over 30 years that by reducing the top tax rate on personal and corporate income that a large increase in aggregate total savings would result. Yet the savings rate of American households has been declining for more than a decade and it now stands at the lowest level of the post-WW II era. Since 2003, the combined annual net savings of households, businesses, and government have declined to about one percent of gross national income. So if increasing the savings rate is the goal so as to thus increase investment, cutting taxes hasn't worked.

And yet the GOP continues to pitch the idea that tax cuts lift the economy. Well, the Democrats are batting now and they shouldn't swing at balls outside the strike zone. To continue the metaphor, this is the GOP's set up pitch. They want the stimulus to fail and they know full well that the gravity of the situation portends an extended economic downturn that they will look to blame increasingly on the Democrats on the hope that Americans have short memories when it comes to assigning blame. That's their game plan. They want the President and the Democrats to strike out. Tax cuts pacifies their base but not ours and doubly does next to nothing when it comes to lifting the economy. For them, it's a win-win. But it's a lose-lose for the American people.

The reality is the tax cutting regimen has been a race to the bottom for most Americans. The top 300,000 Americans collectively now enjoy almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980 and equaling levels not seen since just before the onset of the Great Depression. Earlier this year, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report finding that 70 percent of the benefits of the capital gains and dividends loopholes will go to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers in 2009. Same as it ever was for the GOP. The game is the same as always, starve the government of funds and you might just prevent a national health care system. It's time for a different course.

A different course indeed - and Obama has the popular mandate to do so. As Obama said to the GOP leadership (in a meeting on his second day as president - unprecedented!) - "I won."

“We just have a difference here, and I’m president,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Cantor, according to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who was at the meeting.

Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Obama was being lighthearted and that lawmakers of both parties had laughed.

Mr. Cantor, in an interview later, had a similar recollection. He said the president had told him, “You’re correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won, so we’re going to prevail on that.”

“He was very straightforward,” Cantor added. “There was no disrespect, but it was very matter-of-fact.”

In other words, it's time to try something different and there isn't any reason to play by the GOP playbook anymore. That's what winning entails: elections have consequences, regardless of what the sore losers whine about.

Sore Loser watch: wanting Obama to fail

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:42:00 +0000

More Obama Derangement Syndrome, this time from Leon at RedState, who labels Obama as "corrupt" and "morally deparaved":

as we will remember in two short days, all is not morally well in America. Barack Obama is sure to have a lengthy honeymoon with many people, who will be willing to overlook his essential moral emptiness for as long as it appears that he is doing a competent job of running his Administration. As for me, it is my hope for America that Obama’s moral emptiness will be exposed through his actions for all to see, and in such a way that we will not continue to allow ourselves to sweep it under the rug.

I anticipate that after Obama's (second) term as president ends, these will be the same voices calling for him to be impeached.

The Obama Administration policy on nuclear power

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:02:00 +0000

The Senate testimony of Steven Chu for Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration gave a very specific, detailed look at how the new Administration will treat nuclear energy as a priority. The NEI Nuclear Notes blog, which follows the commercial energy industry, has compiled a list of excerpts from the testimony in which Chu is questioned on specifics about how he would promote nuclear power. Chu answered a number of questions from Senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, about the various issues including waste storage and loan guarantees. I think this final back and forth with Senator Mary Landrieu served as a good summary:

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA): My question is, to follow-up, and I ask this, because, not because it hadn’t been asked ten times to you this morning, but I think, in asking, you’ll understand how many of us feel about nuclear. You’ve had a least six or seven questions. Mine’s going to be the eighth. It’s just apparent to us, mainly based on the great leadership of Senator Domenici, who is with us, I think, this morning, and others, the importance of getting off the dime on nuclear. So would you just briefly state again what are your number one, number two, and number three strategies to move us forward on nuclear?

Steven Chu: The first is to accelerate this loan guarantee program for the several [new] nuclear reactors, their need to start, to restart the nuclear industry. So that, certainly, you’ve got to get going as you say. I agree with you, Senator. The other question, and it’s a concern of other Senators, is that we need to develop a long range plan for the safe disposal of the waste. And this is something that’s the responsibility of the Department of Energy. And that has to go forward as well, because you have to develop that concurrently with the starting of this industry again. And so those are [inaudible], in my mind, the two highest priorities. The third is that there is research that has to be done. Again, because reprocessing has the potential for greatly reducing both the amount and lifetime of the waste and to extend the nuclear fuel.

Sen. Landrieu: Well can we, can this committee count on you to go to bat in the atmosphere of these troubled financial markets? Can we count on you to go to bat with the Administration to make sure that the energy sector of this country is given priority, in terms of stabilizing markets so that we can get a lot of this done with government, you know, not being done by the government but supported by the government?

Steven Chu: Yes. It’s been said again and again on the importance, for example, of that $18.5 billion loan guarantee program that to start moving in that direction.

That's a very refreshing attitude. It should be noted that we are, as seemingly always, behind the Chinese when it comes to commercializing nuclear energy:

While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People's Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won't be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.

To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.

The pebble-bed design is the future of nuclear energy and as the excellent article in Wired points out, makes the traditional nuclear industry obsolete. We need to catch up, and quickly.

ODS: "Obama is evil"

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Obama Derangement Syndrome is here to stay. This lunatic says that Obama is "evil" and prays for the President to fail:

I do not hesitate today in calling on godly Americans to pray that Barack Hussein Obama fail in his efforts to change our country from one anchored on self-governance and constitutional republicanism to one based on the raw and unlimited power of the central state.

It would be folly to pray for his success in such an evil campaign.

I want Obama to fail because his agenda is 100 percent at odds with God's. Pretending it is not simply makes a mockery of God's straightforward Commandments.
...
Nowhere in the Bible does it teach us to obey evil rulers. Nowhere.

This is a time for principled biblical resistance, not phony Christian appeasement.

To summarize, Obama wants "unlimited central government" and he is evil because this conflicts with the Commandments (I must have missed the one where it says, Thou Shalt Not Vote Democrat).

This is rather poor sport of me, nutpicking like this, but it serves a useful purpose in pointing out that there is a regressive resistant core of idiocy, racism, and intolerance in every society, no matter how enlightened the mainstream is. This guy's ravings would do Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden proud.

good blood: Obama and McCain put Country First

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:59:00 +0000

During the election, the McCain campaign slogan was "Country First". This was seized upon with glee by GOP partisans as a rebuke against Obama, who (it was implied) put himself first instead of his country. Now, however, in losing the election, these same fair-weather patriots would prefer that McCain put Party above Country - clearly their concept of Country was a subset - the so-called "Real America" - that shared their political views and agenda. John McCain's principles and patriotism have now become a point of contention instead of pride for these small-minded partisan fools.

Case in point - RedState has already told McCain to go "suck a lemon". A more official rebuke comes from Rick Santorum, former GOP Senator for PA, who frets that John McCain might seek to re-burnish his credentials as a maverick by working amicably with president Obama:

McCain was once the mainstream media darling, back when he joined Democrats on a host of issues. He prized his maverick moniker and used it to propel himself onto the national scene in the 2000 Republican presidential primary. Early in the Bush years, he shored up his status as the media's favorite Republican by opposing Bush on taxes and the environment.
...
In McCain's mind, however, losing the presidency will not be the final chapter of his life story. He knows the path to "Big Media" redemption. Working with the man who vanquished him in November will show them all the real McCain again.

Remember, it was this onetime prisoner of war who led the charge to open diplomatic relations with Vietnam. If that past is prologue, and McCain's legislative record is any guide, he will not just join with Obama but lead the charge in Congress on global warming, immigration "reform," the closing of Guantanamo, federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, and importation of prescription drugs.

Santorum's concerns are well-founded, as it turns out. The New York Times has more detail on the evolving Obama-McCain relationship:

As contenders for the presidency, the two had hammered each other for much of 2008 over their conflicting approaches to foreign policy, especially in Iraq. (He’d lose a war! He’d stay a hundred years!) Now, however, Mr. Obama said he wanted Mr. McCain’s advice, people in each camp briefed on the conversation said. What did he see on the trip? What did he learn?

It was just one step in a post-election courtship that historians say has few modern parallels, beginning with a private meeting in Mr. Obama’s transition office in Chicago just two weeks after the vote. On Monday night, Mr. McCain will be the guest of honor at a black-tie dinner celebrating Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Over the last three months, Mr. Obama has quietly consulted Mr. McCain about many of the new administration’s potential nominees to top national security jobs and about other issues — in one case relaying back a contender’s answers to questions Mr. McCain had suggested.

Mr. McCain, meanwhile, has told colleagues “that many of these appointments he would have made himself,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a close McCain friend.

Fred I. Greenstein, emeritus professor of politics at Princeton, said: “I don’t think there is a precedent for this. Sometimes there is bad blood, sometimes there is so-so blood, but rarely is there good blood.”

Reaching out to a former rival is unprecedented in American politics, but that's the entire point of Change. Obama is wise to solicit McCain's counsel, because the real solutions ahead will require working together for the sake of the nation rather than any one party or electoral cycle.

Related - discussion at myDD and at Washington Monthly.

What Bush did right

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:15:00 +0000

The Bush Administration is essentially over:

The president will be the president until 12 noon Tuesday, but most of his employees will be gone by the close of business Friday.

They’ll turn in their BlackBerrys, laptops, building passes and gym keys.

And by the time the weekend is out — before the new administration can reverse course on waterboarding or SCHIP or anything else — teams of painters and carpet cleaners will have wiped away any hint that they ever set foot in the White House

The moment did not pass unnoticed at Daily Kos, either:

It's 5:00 PM in the Eastern time zone, which includes Washington DC. 5:00 PM is the standard end of the workday. It's Friday, the end of the week. Monday is a federal holiday, so the mass of federal employees will not be working. On Tuesday President-elect Barack Obama will become President Barack Obama, our nation's 44th president.

Some White House staff will be kept on for the next few days. Certainly in the defense, foreign policy and domestic security areas there are Bush appointees who will--and should--remain on call or at their desks between now and Tuesday. The could still be some late-night activities happening with some of the legal staff. But in terms of devising, implementing and enforcing policies, as of this moment, the Bush administration is effectively over.

I watched the President's farewell address yesterday and found myself somewhat nonplussed by the rather muted final curtain call. The President (yes, still THE President - until Tuesday!) emphasized the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as one of his main achievements, which only underscores just how rarely a President ever has to travel by commercial airlines. I assume Citizen Bush will sing a different tune the first time he takes his shoes off at IAH.

It is important to credit the President where due - we may have disagreed on the means, but it is certainly true that no terrorist attack followed the events of September 11th 2001 on American soil. Of course, the rest of the world is another matter, and Osama bin laden remains free and alive in the hinterlands of Pakistan, so should another terror attack from Al Qaeda take place again (god and justice forbid), then the failure of the Bush Administration to take bin Laden to justice will be a partial responsibility. Hopefully President Obama's increased focus on Afghanistan will make it a moot point and bin Laden will finally face justice. But even then the threat won't end. Still, the fact that we did not suffer an attack again here at home is an important one.

Also, I think the President deserves much credit for his sensitivity to Islam. I know many muslims will read this statement and be aghast, but I've argued before that President Bush did everything he could to keep the rhetorical war aimed squarely at terrorists and not muslims. The fact that the Republican Party waged a war on muslims anyway provides excellent contrast to the President's actions, and muslims should recognize and applaud him for it. The story of the Eid stamp alone sis evidence enough.

The other major area in which President Bush deserves kudos I think is in Africa policy. As many have pointed out, the Bush Administration has provided billions in aid to fight AIDS, as well as other initiatives that have had a significant and non-negligible impact on the lives of millions of Africans. As the BBC notes,

Since [2003] the US has pumped $18bn (£12bn) into fighting HIV/Aids - much of it in Africa.

By 2007, 1.3 million Africans were on medication, much of it paid for by the Bush administration.

Not that Pepfar is without its critics.

Some have attacked the US for preventing any funding for programmes that support abortion in any form.

Others suggested that it has downplayed the need to promote the use of condoms.

But no-one denies that the funding has made anti-retrovirals widely available, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

The story on aid is much the same.

The US has backed programmes to cancel $34bn (£23bn) worth of debt for 27 African states.

At the same time aid to Africa has risen to $5.7bn (£4bn) dollars a year by 2007.

And, as anyone who has ever been to a refugee camp in Africa will testify, almost all the food aid to be seen comes from American farmers - aid worth $1.23bn (£0.85bn) in 2007.

Mr Bush's Malaria initiative has seen the disease halved in 15 African countries.

I think that Africa is a quiet victory for the president - one that earned him no votes or popularity ratings, but which was indeed a mission of mercy and compassion. President Bush did not erase African suffering outright but he did help ease a portion of it, for a time, and that is a truly great thing.

In fact, I recall this political cartoon from the early days of the Bush Administration:

One might redraw that cartoon today with Barack Obama and Joe Biden instead, and ask just what they have in store for Africa. I hope they step up to the plate and exceed President Bush's example and commitment. Africa deserves no less.

Farewell, President Bush. And first advice to President Obama - check the White House keyboards for missing O keys.

Why does public campaign financing matter?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:55:00 +0000

An editorial in the Washington Post argues, counter-intuitively, that Barack Obama's fundraising success over the internet is not a death-knell for the public financing system, but rather all the more reason to reform it:

According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute of the fundraising totals through August 2008, the percentage of people whose total donations to Mr. Obama aggregated to $200 or less was 26 percent. That almost matches President Bush's 25 percent in the 2004 election. But Mr. Obama relied less on donors who gave $1,000 or more (47 percent) than Mr. Bush (60 percent).
[...]
Mr. Obama must lead a serious conversation about the role of the public financing system and how Internet fundraising should affect its structure. In an op-ed last month in The Post, Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer championed a new campaign finance system centered around the Internet. He proposed matching funds for small donations up to $200 per donor, increasing the campaign spending limit to $250 million, reducing the individual contribution limit and closing the loophole for joint fundraising committees, which allowed supporters of Mr. Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), to skirt the current $2,300 limit.

A few notes here. First, Obama's percentage of small-dollar (sub-$200) donors may have been comparable to Bush's, but in absolute dollars Obama raised far more, because Obama attracted so many more new, first-time donors overall. Obama's campaign really was The Perfect Storm predicted by Joe Trippi and prototyped by the Howard Dean campaign.

Second, the requirement that sub-$200 donors be made public, and also forcing bundlers to be public, is a good one. But that has very little to do with the public finance system; these are general reforms that would apply regardless of where a candidate is getting their money from. The need for more donor transparency is essentially orthogonal to the question of public finance.

But finally, why exactly do we need to have any public financing system at all? As John McCain can attest, any candidate who submits to the system will be at a severe financial disadvantage, and what's more will be forced to run a much less internet-aware campaign (Obama's lavish spending on Internet outreach, especially the crown jewel of his YouTube channel, was only because he could afford to spend money and take that risk. McCain had a much more modest online operation partly because he simply needed to hoard his funds for the expensive media markets). Even putting into place all of Wertheimer's proposed reforms would still leave a candidate who accepted public funding at a severe disadvantage.

The one truly innovative idea though is small-dollar matching of donations under $200. However, this has the potential to balloon out of control, and really is not compatible with the proposed spending limit of $250 million (Obama raised $750 million total; if %25 of that was small-dollar donations, then we are talking about $188 million right there!). A better solution would be for candidates who accept public funding to be restricted to sub-$200 donations online. That way, a candidate who opts into teh system would not be prevented from raising organic money to compete, but would also not be chasing after the bundlers.

There is a role for public finance, but it can never again be the sole source of a viable candidate's funding. Every candidate must be free to raise money online directly from the people. There's simply no better expression of free speech and personal democracy than the principle of the Perfect Storm that such online donations represent.

Illinois Governor Blagojevich arrested by the FBI: Obama's Senate seat for sale?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:58:00 +0000

Wow - I knew that Gov. Blago had ethical issues and was under investigation, but this is just disgusting if true - he was just arrested this morning by the FBI on suspicion of trying to sell President-Elect Senator Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder:

From the complaint we have some details. Most intriguing, perhaps, those involving Blago seemingly trying to sell off President-elect Obama's Senate seat. (Read the complaint HERE and the press release HERE.)

"The breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering," said U.S. Attorney Patrick "The Untouchable" Fitzgerald in a statement. "They allege that Blagojevich put a 'for sale' sign on the naming of a United States Senator; involved himself personally in pay-to-play schemes with the urgency of a salesman meeting his annual sales target; and corruptly used his office in an effort to trample editorial voices of criticism."
[...]
Ultimately, it appears that neither PEBO nor Jarrett were willing to discuss any of Blago's various notions of how he could sell them the seat. Talking to his chief of staff on November 11, Blago said he knew PEBO wanted Jarrett to get the Senate seat but "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. F--- them."

At one point, discussing what he could get from PEBO for the Senate seat, Blago said his general counsel believes that PEBO could get Blago's wife on paid corporate boards "in exchange for naming the President-elect's pick to the Senate."

The general Counsel asked, "can [the President-elect] help in the private sector... where it wouldn't be tied to him?... I mean, so it wouldn't necessarily look like one for the other."

Blago says consultants are telling him that he has to "suck it up" for two years and do nothing and give this "motherf----r [the President-elect] his senator. F--- him. For nothing? F--- him."

He adds he will give "Senate Candidate 4" (a deputy Governor) the Seat "before I just give f---ing" Jarrett the "f---ing Senate seat and I don't get anything."

As Governor of Illinois, Blago could have literally picked whoever he wanted to appoint to fill the seat. I am VERY glad that he has been arrested because the Senator from Illinois needs to be someone not beholden to anyone except the people of Illinois. From the comments above it is clear that Blago is a real scumbag dirty pol who is out for himself. Illinois deserves better.

Incidentally, note that the prosecutor is none other than Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is perhaps best well-known for his earlier investigation into the Valerie Plame affair - which he ultimately dropped for lack of evidence. Fitzgerald is a Democrat, but his recent record shows that he puts his duty first and his politics distant second. If Illinois needs someone to run for a recently-vacated public office, maybe they need look no further than Fitz.

Federal land ownership

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:54:00 +0000

This is a fascinating map of Federal land ownership percentages by state. I love how the states are rendered to scale to represent the proportion visually.

I find the comparison between California and Texas quite interesting as well. For one thing I had no idea so much of CA was federally-owned; likewise I had no idea so little of Texas was. This is probably a reflection of the amount of protected land and natural resources between the two states. I think there's a lot more in Texas that should be protected but probably isn't.

George and Barack, BFF

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:44:00 +0000

Obama certainly has hit the ground running, but as he pointed out himself, we only have one President at a time. That's why Obama did not attend the G20 summit last week, for example. Still, it seems that the media is trying to paint a picture of a co-presidency anyway. This story is long on the speculation but short on teh evidence:

America has never seen anything quite like this: The president and president-elect acting like co-presidents, consulting and cooperating on the day's biggest crises.

"It's pretty unusual," said George Edwards , a presidential expert at Texas A&M University, in College Station .

What Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer calls "the split-screen presidency" is the result of several historic forces converging this fall:

— The 24-7 nature of the global economy, which demands timely reaction.

— Incoming and outgoing presidents who have personal and political reasons to show that they can manage a crisis.

— A president-elect, Barack Obama , who "believes in strong government and wants to get things under way immediately," said William Leuchtenburg , a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor who's written extensively about the presidency.

— A lame-duck president, George W. Bush , who's leaving office voluntarily. "Bush was not defeated. That makes for an easier relationship," Leutchtenburg said.

This transition lacks the formality — and the coolness — of the last two transfers of power that occurred during tough economic times, the 1980-81 change from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan and the 1993 end of George H.W. Bush's term as Bill Clinton took office. Both new presidents then had defeated the former ones.

Monday gave a vivid illustration of the comity that's characterized the Bush-Obama minuet.

Bush had a cup of coffee in midmorning with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to discuss the government's decision Sunday to help ailing banking giant Citigroup . Later, on the steps of the Treasury building, next door to the White House , Bush assured the nation that Washington was ready to take similar action to help other financial institutions.

His statement took only two minutes, but it included this paean to his successor: "I talked to Obama about the decision we made. I told the American people, and I told the president-elect when I first met him, that anytime we were to make a big decision during this transition, he will be informed, as will his team."

About an hour and a half later, Obama unveiled his economic team at a Chicago news conference and mentioned that he'd spoken to Bush and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke earlier Monday.

That's it? Obama is briefed on some economic issues and Bush mentioned Obama's name? The photo that goes with the story certainly makes it look like the two are deeply engrossed in Leading The Free World but it's actually from Obama's family visit to the White House, where the Bush twins showed bama's kids how to jump on the White House beds.

Of course Obama's transition team has to be in close contact with Bush, but the same would have been the case had McCain won. Given how much more accelerated everything is than even 8 years ago, a large amount of cooperation between outgoing Administration and incoming transition is mandatory.

There is definitely a romantic impulse at work here, which is fine. But co-presidents? I don't think so. When Obama starts attending Bush Cabinet meetings, or Hillary starts holding press conferences alongside Condi at State, then maybe we are enterig co-president territory.

The Obama New Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Paul Krugman writes about the prospect of Obama doing a grand FDR-style New Deal to stimulate the economy, then does some back of the envelope calculations on his blog, and frets that an Obama stimulus package might be too small (by design), and explains why that's a bad thing. In a nutshell, you don't want to lowball a stimulus - you need to err on the side of caution by being bold. As Krugman notes, you need about $600 billion to close a 7% output gap, but the Obama people seem ot be leaning towards a stimulus package half that size.

Howard Dean for Health and Human Services

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:43:00 +0000

This is a ridiculous argument:

Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean is not a serious contender to be secretary of health and human services in the new Obama administration, sources said.

Dean’s name has appeared on short lists for the Cabinet post circulating throughout Washington, based largely on his party chairmanship and career as a doctor. Dean also passed health care reforms while governor of Vermont. And his allies said the Obama transition team has had some informal discussions with him about the job.

But the chief attributes President-elect Barack Obama is seeking in his HHS secretary will be an ability to work with members of Congress and shepherd reform legislation through the House and Senate.

That job description has turned out to be a particularly ill-suited one for Dean, given his partisan background and lack of congressional experience, sources inside and outside the transition offices say.

Dean never served in Congress and spent his Washington career trying to thin the ranks of congressional Republicans that the Obama White House will need to court during the expected debate on health care reform.

As others have pointed out, the argument is nonsense - after all, Rahm Emmanuel is Obama's Chief of Staff and spent his entire career not just opposing, but utterly reaming the very Republicans he will need to work with to advance Obama's agenda. I think it's likely that Rahm himself is behind this, give his intense animus against Dean for the 50-state strategy. The idea that Dean couldn't be an effective HHS Seretary for partisan reasons is simply ridiculous and transparent.

Dean done at DNC - whither the 50 state strategy?

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:47:00 +0000

While this news has already made its way around the liberal blogsphere, it's worth making a note of it here for posterity's sake, given this blog's origins and history. Howard Dean's tenure at the DNC is drawing to a close, and the future of the 50-state strategy seems to be in doubt. Chris Bowers has been following the story at OpenLeft and summarizes:

People inside the DNC are telling me that the program is not dead. This doesn't surprise me, because it is a popular program and I imagine that many of the remaining staffers at the DNC are committed to the program. At the same time, all of the organizers--who were chosen by local state parties--have been fired. That effectively kills the program, no matter the messaging and commitment of the remaining staffers.

The best bet is that the remaining staff at the DNC will try to push for a continuation of the program once the new administration is in place. In the meantime, many of the large donors who always wanted Dean out and the program terminated seem to have, at least, temporarily received their wish.
[...]
I've seen in the comments that many people think Obama is replacing "Deaniacs" with his own people. That is a failure to understand how the fifty-state strategy works. The DNC organizers were all chosen by the local state parties, not by Dean. Now, the idea that you fire a bunch of locally chosen people, and then send "your own" people back to those local areas, is absurd. The new people will be reviled, and unable to function with the local parties. No one is being replaced. The program is being terminated. 200 community organizers just got fired by Obama's campaign. How ironic.

Bowers suspects that the firing of the local activists has something to do with Rahm Emmanuel's selection as Obama's chief of staff (Emmanuel famously warred with Dean over the expense of the 50SS). This seems unlikely to me, however, as Emmanuel's role as Obama's COS is not really related to the workings of the DNC or political strategy, but rather focused on implementing Obama's governing strategy. He doesn't dictate policy but implements it.

A counter-argument could be made that there isn't much point in paying for these activists right now, since we are just leaving an election cycle. It's not like the people fired can't be recruited anew as 2010 draws near. In addition, Obama's own campaign has a lot of local talent and volunteers of its own and it's entirely possible that he wants to use some of them to staff the new 50SS when it's needed again, for both experience and fresh blood.

Given that Obama's rhetoric and campaign were so wedded to broadening the playing field, and the 50S being so central to his victory, I doubt he'd abandon it. However some fiscal prudence seems reasonable now that the battle, for now, was won.

Related: 50-State Strategy Page at DNC website, Discussion at OpenLeft here and here. Also, a great story on NPR today, with Dean himself talking about the 50-state strategy in detail.

Obama's private election night photos - on Flickr

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:08:00 +0000

Obama's private election night photos - up on Flickr for all to share. Truly, Campaign 2.0.

I love this sequence of photos:

Obama's mandate: center-left nation

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:36:00 +0000

North Carolina makes nine red states flipped to blue. And Texas is on track for 2012. With the axiom that the popular vote is the best metric for gauging the existence of a mandate, I look at the numbers and conclude that Obama has a clearer mandate from the people than any President in recent history.

However something that the far left will need to understand is that the mandate is for Obama, not them. The liberal leftist netroots are self-described as "progressive" - which is unabashedly NOT "center-left". The netroots played a major role in Obama's victory but in another sense, they were also irrelevant, since Obama created his online base virtually from scratch (the netroots are, however, much more directly responsible for the Congressional downballot successes). So, expectations of a "progressive" agenda are probably going to be met with disappointment, as Obama's instincts are soldily centrist. The netroots know it too - look at this by Bowers at OpenLeft where he details all the ways in which Rahm fails to live up to progressive orthodoxy. This rift between Rahm and the progressives is not easy for even sharply intelligent commentators like Larison to discern, let alone the establishment media pundits.

Clinton, in contrast to Obama, was a center-right politician, so Obama will definitely pursue a more liberal agenda, on average, but his general approach will still be coalition-minded and incremental rather than bold and ideological. We have a technocrat in the White House come January.

Texas Blue 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Aziz) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 01:58:00 +0000

Charles Kuffner takes a look at the Bug Urban and Suburban counties in Texas and sees positive trends that bode well for 2012:

The first thing to notice is that what had been an 800,000 vote deficit for John Kerry was this year a 75,000 vote deficit for Barack Obama. McCain lost 80,000 votes from Bush's total, while Obama won 645,000 more votes than Kerry. This 725,000 vote gain by Obama accounts for nearly the entire amount of the pickup from 2004. Maybe you're not ready to call Texas a swing state just yet, but this is a huge step in that direction.

The big urbans led the way on this. What had been a 240,000 vote surplus for Bush (I goofed on the math when I first did this) became a 267,000 vote deficit for McCain, or a total turnaround of over a half million votes. Dallas was a 115,000-vote blowout for Obama, who won with 57.5% there. Both Travis and El Paso were at around 65% for Obama, with Travis' margin for Obama (117,000) the biggest of them all, and both Harris (50.43%) and Bexar (52.42%) went blue. Tarrant, which gave just 37% of the vote to Kerry, gave almost 44% to Obama. The big urbans are Democratic turf, and much of the basis for future growth of the Democratic Party.
...
There's still room for further improvement. None of the Latino counties, which gave Obama his biggest percentages, had turnout levels above 50, except for Nueces, which is more Republican. I expect Harris to get bluer, as should Dallas and Tarrant. The suburbs are ripe for Democratic renewal; both Fort Bend with Richard Morrison and Williamson with Diana Maldonado saw Dems win seats that had been exclusively Republican before. Collin and Denton should be next in line, though that may take a couple more cycles. And this is where a growing share of the vote is; it was 71.3% of the statewide total in 2004, and 72.7% in 2008. Even if the rest of the state doesn't get any more purple - and remember, even outside the top 25, the Republican advantage dropped a little, from about 893,000 votes to 875,000 votes - gains in the biggest counties will eventually swamp it. This is where the action is for the Democrats, and it's the road map for putting Texas in play in 2012, with a stop along the way for the state races in 2010. I'm excited about the future.

By the way, I wrote all this last night, before I saw this Chron story about the statewide trends and the gains the Dems made in urban and suburban areas, though the article is less clear on that point. I think the bottom line can be summed up as follows: Therre were 640,000 more votes cast in the Presidential race this year than there were in 2004. The Democrats had a net gain of 688,000 votes for their Presidential candidate. The Republicans had a net loss of 60,000 for theirs. I know which side of that trend I'd rather be on.

Turning Texas Blue is not only possible, it's probable. Aiming for 2012 is all the more realistic considering Obama flipped 9 Bush states red to blue already, including Indiana and Virginia. Texas needs to be next.