Thank you! I sort of hinted at this long ago, but Adam O'Neill of the Lowest Deep gets at the issue more clearly. Democrats should happily endorse the elimination of the local/state tax deduction on progressivity grounds.

The one fear is that, without the deduction, high-income folks in blue states would start clamoring even harder to lower state taxes—and given that these people tend to have a lot of sway, it could lead to a real shrinkage of blue-state government. On the other hand, the elimination of the state/local deduction would likely come in tandem with a whole bunch of other goodies for wealthy blue-state folks—like the elimination of the AMT—so maybe they wouldn't lash out too strongly. And if they do, well, they can blame the Republicans that raised their taxes. California as a whole may lean blue, but it also raised more money for Bush than any other state but Texas.

Brad DeLong wants to keep Social Security away from Congress' grubby little paws:

...I'm attracted to the Federal Reserve model. Get the cabinet secretaries out as Trustees of Social Security. Replace them with guys appointed for fourteen-year terms. Mandate that they keep the system in actuarial balance--just like the Federal Reserve has a mandate to preserve price stability. And have them raise and lower the retirement age a bit at a time as the fortunes of the system wane and wax.

Fair enough. His commenters also (sort of) bring up a point I've always liked -- differential retirement ages. The standard argument, after all, is that longer life expectancies will enable us to raise the retirement age with some fairness. But only some people will benefit here. I, for instance, sit at my desk all day and either search around on google or talk on the phone. If I retired at the age of 70 or later, assuming I live that long, it wouldn't be a huge deal. A coal miner, meanwhile, probably ought to retire at the age of 55 or so—modern medicine might help him or her deal with arthritis and other disabilities, but eventually the body wears out and you can't heave around a pickaxe all day. Meanwhile, that manual laborer isn't going to get retrained for a desk job at that late age, so where does that leave him?

So some people retire later, some people retire earlier. How does this all shake out? Based on this chart, the overwhelming majority of workers seem to have jobs with relatively low physical stress (management or office). So they would all get raised retirement ages and Social Security would be on even sturdier footing without forcing the coal miners to keep heaving their pickaxes at the age of 70. Hm? On the other hand, this downplays the importance of mental stress, so maybe it would never fly, I don't know.

The other day I mentioned some odd incentives at work in the U.S. criminal justice system. After a little more reading on the subject, I came across another instance that isn't exactly earth-shattering, but interesting nonetheless.

During the 1990s (all data here) in New York City, misdemeanor arrests increased by about 56 percent, thanks in large part to the "broken windows" style of policing. Over that same time, felony arrests only slowly declined by about 17 percent. However, felony indictments declined much, much more quickly, by about 46 percent. In other words, the "overcharges," or felony arrests that did not result in indictment and/or conviction, absolutely exploded.

This held true for all types of cases. The indictment rate for violent felony arrests declined from 35 to 24 percent. The indictment rate for felony drug arrests went from 57 percent to 40 percent. Why? One obvious answer is that actual reported felonies declined by 52 percent during this time, so fewer felonies were actually being committed. Drug dealers also moved underground—so it was a lot harder for police to engage in "buy and bust" sting operations, which result in high indictment rates (since the officer is both complainant and witness.) So while arrests stayed at roughly the same level, the quality of arrests declined quite rapidly.

Now the problem here is that officers had every incentive to maintain the rate of felony arrests. After all, a police station that isn't arresting as many people will quickly get accused of not doing anything. Even though it's not arresting as many people because, well, it did it's job well. Success is deadly. So they continue to make felony arrests, even though there are fewer felons, or the felons are harder to find.

This wouldn't seem like a big deal, but overcharging clogs up and drains resources from the justice system. The detainees in question go in jail for longer periods (and often can't pay the much higher bail). Already overworked prosecutors have to spend time reviewing these cases before reducing or dismissing them. The whole thing leaves everybody worse off. But a rather simple change in the incentive system here could fix the problem pretty quickly, it seems.

Oh great. Here's some more disaster stuff to worry about. Personally, my natural disaster of choice for sleepless nights is the supervolcano. Yes, the supervolcano -- the last known explosion nearly wiped out mankind! More specifically, we ought to worry about the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park, which is long overdue for an eruption. I saw a Discovery Channel documentary on this little bugger recently, and scientists now know for sure that the supervolcano chamber is filling up. Dum dum dum. Ominous! Asteroids and New York-destroying tidal waves, after all, are a matter of "if", not "when." The supervolcano, though, is a matter of "when".

One more thought on the possibility of revolution in Tehran. The key thing to note is that Iran today doesn't at all resemble Iran in 1979. During the last days of the Shah, his army was facing defections of over 1,000 a day, according to Ken Pollack. Khamane'i's security forces today suffer no such thing. Back in December of 1978, meanwhile, the demonstrations had grown to over 9 million people. The 2002-2003 protests in Iran, meanwhile, amounted to no more than a couple thousand students. Most importantly, though, the Shah abdicated in 1979 because he refused to crack down hard on the Iranian protestors. Khamane'i and the hardliners are considerably more ruthless. So while I'd rather not be pessimistic, all signs point that way for now.

While digging around the internet, I came across this interesting paper by Mark Katz on why some democratic revolutions succeed and others fail. Big excerpt:

Certain theorists, including Crane Brinton and Timothy Wickham-Crowley, have argued that the role of the armed forces is the key factor in deciding whether a nondemocratic revolution succeeds or fails. If the armed forces protect the ancien regime, then the revolutionary opposition is unable to seize power. If, however, the armed forces do not protect the ancien regime, then the revolutionaries usually do come to power. I will argue that just as in attempts at nondemocratic revolution, the role played by the military is also a key factor in determining the outcome of democratic revolution. When the military is willing to use force to protect the ancien regime, democratic revolutionaries cannot prevail. It is only the refusal of the armed forces to use force that allows democratic revolutionaries to succeed.

What, then, determines whether the armed forces of an authoritarian regime will use force to suppress a democratic revolutionary movement? Using a comparison of the cases mentioned, I will argue that the decision by the armed forces not to protect an authoritarian regime is not the result of a democratic conversion on the part of the military as a whole, but that it results instead from an overwhelming desire to prevent conflict within the military. Thus, if even a small number of key commanders defect to the democratic opposition, this can neutralize the armed forces as a whole, even though most military leaders may be wary of, or even hostile toward, democratization. But if these key defections to the democratic opposition do not occur and the military remains unified, it is able to crush easily the democratic revolutionaries.

Now since the obvious case of concern here is Iran, let's talk Iran. The Iranian military really has three branches here. There's the Armed Forces proper, for one. By all accounts, it's pretty loyal—though some analysts think that a downturn in the economy could provoke dissent. Next we have Iran's Revolutionary Guard (the Pasdaran), which was created in 1979 to protect the Revolution and enforce Islamic codes. After the army, these folks are perhaps the weakest link. In 1994 the Pasdaran showed a wee bit of disloyalty, when anti-clerical riots broke out in Ghazvin, and a number of Pasdaran and Army Commanders refused to suppress the crowds. Furthermore, I believe a number of Revolutionary Guardsmen voted for Khatami in 1997.

Anyways, after Ghazvin, the hardliners in Tehran began relying mostly on the basiji--volunteer groups of vigilantes to maintain domestic order. This is the third group, funded mostly by religious charities. I'm not sure, but I don't think Ayatollah Khameini has direct control over the basiji. I believe they are mostly controlled by the Combatant Clergy Association, a conservative party which forms the largest bloc in parliament. Nevertheless, these are the folks who cracked down on student protestors in 2002-2003, when Khamene'i feared the army wouldn't comply.

Anyways, the key here, I think, is that there are so many overlapping armed forces that someone is bound to crack down on a revolutionary movement. In Tiananmen back in 1989, as Nick Kristof reported, the 38th Army refused to fight the protestors, but it also refused to defend the protestors. So Beijing just brought in the provincial 27th Army to open fire on the square. Had the 38th Army been more aggressive in its defense, the revolution might have worked. But they weren't.

Something similar seems the likely fate for Iran (albeit for different reasons) at least in the near future: Protests will break out, perhaps one branch of the military (the IRGC) averts its eyes, but the other branches—particularly the basiji brigades—come in and crush the rebellion. This isn't a technical analysis by any means; I'm just pointing out that with fractured and overlapping military forces, Iran doesn't resemble, say, Philippines circa 1986 all that much.

No, really. Osama bin Laden, as most people know, just released his latest string of broadcast tapes, in which he denounced elections in Iraq and Palestine, as well as the itsy-bitsy political reforms in Saudi Arabia. President Bush responded directly, noting that bin Laden's "vision of the world is where people don't participate in democracy." As the New York Times points out, this is the first time Bush has done such a thing, and his staff has agonized over whether he even should:

His aides have said it would be a strategic error to respond to every one of Mr. bin Laden's tape-recorded threats, or to seem to elevate his status by putting him in a long-distance debate with the president.

That's one consideration, certainly, though I don't know how much more elevated bin Laden could get in the eyes of his fans. In the Arab world at least, I wonder if it's Bush who might get a status boost by debating Bin Laden. Maybe.

So what would happen if Bush and bin Laden started debating "publicly"? It depends, I think, on the audience. In Iraq, I don't think this stuff matters much. When Bin Laden denounces democracy, he's speaking for the Sunni Arabs, who have a lot to lose by participating in democracy anyways. Sure, he's pissing off the Shiites, but the Shiites and bin Laden were never going to be best friends anyways. One interesting point, though, as Dan Darling noted, was that bin Laden expressed sympathy for the Kurds who were gassed in Halabja. Seems like bin Laden wants to curry favor with the Kurds just in case democracy doesn't work out and the Kurds feel threatened by Shia hegemony in Iraq. In that case, bin Laden could perhaps try to incite long-standing Kurdish feelings of betrayal towards the U.S. I don't know how probable this is, but it's something to worry about.

Now what about the rest of the world? In his speech today, Bush pitted his vision of democracy against bin Laden's vision of a global caliphate. One hope is that, by publicly taking the side of democracy and defining himself against bin Laden, Bush can push bin Laden towards even more strident anti-democratic rhetoric. Make OBL sound like the raving lunatic he really is, and allow al Qaeda to equate itself with the forces of autocracy, and hence, discredit itself. Especially in Palestine, wherein bin Laden denounced elections (or at least Mahmoud Abbas). That's one happy possibility.

The other possibility, though, is that the reverse will happen. That is, democracy will become associated with Bushism (rather than the converse), and the already rather glowing reputation of bin Laden throughout the world will help discredit democracy as an extension of American imperialism. In other words, in a public debate of this sort, OBL manages to discredit Bush's ideals precisely because they come from Bush. That's not such a happy outcome.S

Did Argentina rebound from its 2001 financial crisis by ignoring IMF advice? The New York Times says yes. Brad Setser says not quite. Indeed, at a very cursory glance, it's hard to blame the IMF here. They thought that if Argentina told all its external creditors to bugger off, bad things would happen. As it turned out, bad things didn't happen, because a whole new batch of creditors lined up to do business and loan out money. But the IMF can't very well give advice based on the premise that there will always be more suckers. Can it? Even if "always more suckers" seems to be the reality for nations that actually do default, that's no way to run an international finance regime.

Over at Brookings, Tamara Cofman Wittes' has a lot to say in her latest, long-ish essay about joint Euro-American efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East. Here are some of the best points:

1) The various Middle East Initiatives now underway do a lot of good, but one thing they don't do is provide security guarantees to various Arab states, like the Helsinki accords did. So Arab leaders are understandably a bit cagey about the whole thing.

2) Western governments need to make economic aid conditional on political reform somehow. They haven't really figured this out yet. Arab leaders, hence, can get away with "controlled liberalization" and not much reform. This will continue on indefinitely until the U.S. and Europe get their shit figured out.

3) "The West" is not all of one mind on Arab reform. Europeans, for instance, worry mostly about poor and uneducated Arabs migrating to Europe and stirring up trouble. The U.S. worries mostly about terrorism. But those two concerns aren't at all the same. Economic development alone can help stem the former, but the latter problem really requires the spread of actual democracy and better human rights.

4) In fact, economic reform alone might actually produce more international terrorism in the short term, by creating "economic dislocation and exaggerated income disparity." That seems about right. I'd add that one of the most striking features of both the 9/11 terrorists and the bulk of Palestinians who joined the two intifadas was that they weren't poor, or uneducated, or backwards in any relevant social sense. Most of them, though, shared a sense of relative poverty—the sense that their talents were under-appreciated or under-deployed. In many ways, it's the white-collar victims of outsourcing who start blowing stuff up. Not a great analogy, but still.

5) Here's a Catch-22. Arab despots tend to restrict all forums for political organization but one: mosques. So naturally, Islamists are the best-developed political groups in the Arab world. Those same Arab despots then use this fact to argue against free elections, lest the Islamists take power. Sneaky bastards.

6) There are really two types of Arab liberals. First, those who protest and clamor for attention and swell the hearts of bloggers everywhere and usually get thrown in prison. These are a minority in the Arab world, though still a potential catalyst for change. Second, there are those pragmatic professionals—doctors, businessmen, lawyers—who try to effect change within civil society itself. Wittes argues that the challenge here is for the West to "support those liberals who are working for change within their existing systems, but in a way that doesn't end up legitimizing the system itself." Conversely, the West will want to support liberal activists, but not to the point where they simply oppose the regime and end up in jail. It's delicate.

7) Both the United States and Europe could use its own assimilated Muslim immigrants as a voice for moderation. But obviously that means not pissing off those constituencies at home.

It's a few days old, but do read Brent Staples New York Times op-ed about the incentives that politicians have to keep the prison population as large as possible. It's also disturbing to note that, while unions and private prison corporations may have their differences, both have obvious reasons for keeping prisons as full as possible. It would be nice to get the free market to put downward pressure on the prison population for a change—what about a market for private parole overseers, with incentives to keep as many parolees as it can out of trouble?

Speaking of natural disasters, Don Boudreaux of Café Hayek has a really interesting post (and follow-up) in defense of price gouging:

Even if you're concerned only with 'the poor,' therefore, the correct question is not "are the poor less able to pay higher prices than lower prices for staple goods?’ The answer to this question is all too obvious: yes.

The relevant question instead is "are the poor less able to pay higher market prices than they are able to pay to take advantage of the other methods of rationing that necessarily replace higher prices?" The answer to this question isn’t at all obvious.

See also this relevant Economist article from a few weeks back. In Iraq, the price of gas is kept artificially low—almost zero, in fact. This doesn't help the poor or needy at all; instead gas gets leaked into the black market for much higher prices, and chronic shortages tend to hurt the poor the most (who are less able to afford to wait in long lines).

As a third alternative, someone could probably set up some sort of disasters futures market to prepare for problems like these, but I have no idea how you would go about doing that.

I'm not really following the debate about whether the U.S. has been too "stingy" in delivering aid to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, etc. As I recall, disaster aid usually comes in waves, and tends to get upped over time as the scope of the tragedy becomes clearer. But hey, if cheap potshots at Bush force the administration to pony up more aid, so much the better. The U.S. can always do more than it actually does, and putting upward pressure on the aid amounts is always a good thing.

Meanwhile, though, I think Juan Cole had it right—the president could have gained a lot of traction in the Muslim world by zipping on over to Aceh, Indonesia, and pledging his support. But McQ at QandO finds this suggestion ridiculous:

Nor does [Cole] mention that the people of the region couldn't care less where Bush is or has stayed, as long as we help them. This is all simply a wonderful opportunity to again engage in a little gratuitous criticism of the man the left loves to hate.

"Couldn't care less"? What? Wasn't the president's entire re-election campaign based on those few moments when Bush stood at Ground Zero and spoke into a megaphone? Of course these symbolic gestures matter. They mattered on 9/11 and they matter now. Letting all of Indonesia know that the president of the richest and most powerful country in the world is personally concerned about the disaster—that seems like a pretty fucking big deal.

Andrew Samwick doesn't favor agricultural subsidies, really, but he says something odd in this post. In response to a statistic noting that "nearly 70 percent of the subsidies go to the top 10 percent of agricultural producers," he asks how much these 10 percent of farms actually produce:

If it is about 70 percent, then we would figure that there is probably nothing perverse about the way the subsidies are being doled out.

But that doesn't seem like a good way to evaluate a distribution at all!

Let's imagine I have 10 farmers in my imaginary country, none of them receiving subsidies. One farmer, Farmer Joe, produces 70 percent of the country's food. But for various reasons, he also turns massive profits while doing so. Now the other nine farmers produce the other 30 percent of the country's food, but they are all in danger of going bankrupt, or are exceedingly poor. Clearly, giving 70 percent of all agricultural subsidies to Farmer Joe is somewhat frivolous here. Not only that, but it ends up being harmful—you get overproduction of food, spur environmental waste, promote poor farm management, and indirectly hurt Third World farmers.

Now my imaginary world sounds very similar to the real world, where farms are expected to pull in a record net cash income of $73.7 billion in 2004—most of that going to the top 10 percent. And yet agricultural subsidies continue to rise. So while I'm not sure exactly how to measure the efficiency of subsidies, doing it like Professor Samwick did above seems to miss something. The rest of his post is quite interesting, though.

I'm confused.

First, context: I clicked on Instapundit this morning only to find a gigantic kerfluffle. Some columnist for some Minnesota paper wrote a column attacking PowerLineBlog. The PowerLine dudes wrote back and got the better of the argument, though it wasn't much more than a silly little schoolyard fight.

So far, so good. But then we're treated to reams of pondering over the meaning of it all. Some Instapundit reader says the whole thing shows "how 'out-of-market msm has become in its methodology of reporting." Another reader marks it as a "milestone for how far the Internet has come." And more, indeed.

What I'm confused about is why this has any special meaning. Seems to me that some guy has a forum for writing stuff, so he wrote stuff, other people had a forum for writing stuff, so they wrote stuff in response, and one argument happened to be better than the other. There's no reason the roles couldn't have been reversed. It's true that the print columnist gets paid for his output, but bloggers are starting to get paid for their output too—it's just a newer and less-developed market.

Meanwhile, there are huge barriers to entry to writing a print column, but barriers to entry are cropping up around blogs, too. It's not entirely true that anyone who's good can rise to the top—the fact that praktike and nadezhda, Joshua Landis and Andrew Samwick get fewer readers than the wholly banal Betsy's Page—and fewer by orders of magnitude—means something less than meritocratic is afoot. Much of this is capricious—Instapundit links to Betsy's Page a lot while none of the big bloggers happen to have the same special fondness for praktike/nadezhda. (Though they should!)

Speaking personally, my blog happens to have more than 10 readers because a big, established blogger (Ezra Klein) was kind enough to link here a few months ago; but if, say, he had happened to find my text formatting hard to read, he might never have linked. Tough luck! But I don't think that would make me more or less interesting or witty or charming or what have you.

Then there's the whole editing business. It's true that mainstream journalism is edited and blogs are not. But that doesn't really mean anything. Some people need a lot of editing—I certainly do—and some people are more or less fine without it. Editing doesn't automatically make someone a better or worse writer. It depends. So this whole spat is very silly, but it's ultimately a spat between writers who happen to work in two different media, not a battle between the media themselves.

Everything Nicholas Kristof says here makes sense:

Liberals traditionally were the bleeding hearts, while conservatives regarded foreign aid, in the words of Jesse Helms, as "money down a rat hole." That's changing. "One cannot understand international relations today without comprehending the new faith-based movement," Allen Hertzke writes in "Freeing God's Children," a book about evangelicals leaping into human rights causes.

Sure enough, looking at the most important national issues - Iraq, terrorism, budget deficits - I can see why liberals feel suicidal. Moreover, the Christian right's ventures abroad strike me as deeply misguided in some areas: "pro-life" policies lead to women dying in botched abortions, and squeamishness about condoms leads to teenagers dying of AIDS. The conservatives' cutoff of money for the U.N. Population Fund has meant less contraception, more abortions and more mothers dying in childbirth.

But the biggest obstacle to American engagement on international issues has been a lack of constituency for them, and that may be changing - if both sides can hold their noses and cooperate. Frankly, Democrats aren't going to accomplish much on their own over the next four years, but by working with the likes of Mr. Brownback they might register real progress on sex trafficking, an African-American history museum, malaria and immigration reform. That would be a much better use of the next four years than sulking.

My only quibble would be that Kristof downplays the large role that secular groups have played in these ventures. But other than that, give this an "indeed" and pass it on.

What are the nightmare scenarios for Iraq? That is, what are some of the worst things we can reasonably expect to happen after the elections? Some kind of full-scale civil war—either between Sunni Arabs and Kurds or between Sunnis and Shiites—would obviously be catastrophic. On the former, Spencer Ackerman notes that towns like Mosul, Hawija, and Kirkuk are quickly turning into flashpoints for ethnic tension between (Sunni) Arabs and Kurds.

I'd add that there have been almost no positive steps towards easing the conflict between the two ethnic groups, which dates back to the 1990s, when Saddam Hussein expulsed the Kurds from Kirkuk and enticed Arabs into emigrating to the province en masse. The Iraqi Property Claims Commission, set up to resolve the disputes here, has only just begun adjudicating a handful of the thousands of outstanding property claims. I have no idea why the Bush administration didn't make this a higher priority sooner, but the results won't be pretty.

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias has another, quite valid concern—that "the elections will cause various 'inside the process' elements to start fighting with one another." This too seems increasingly likely, especially since the elections won't have many international monitors present. The possibility of fraud—and, more likely, possible accusations of fraud—could create chaos very quickly.

Long ago I discussed the possibility that, with some 2 million absentee ballots being tallied in Jordan—whose king favors Ayad Allawi—the possibility of election fraud remains ripe. Even though Allawi may be an honorable man and would never think of tampering with ballots in Jordan (right?), the perception that this could happen will still exist. So if Allawi's Iraqi List does better than expected on the strength of absentee voting, expect a lot of protests and anti-Jordanian rhetoric. (Especially from Ahmed Chalabi, who has his own long-running feud with the Hashemite Kingdom.) Conversely, if Allawi's list fares worse than expected, we could see Allawi, Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, and other secular ex-Baathists pointing fingers at Syria and Iran for meddling in the election. Either event would cause havoc.

Now what about infighting between religious Shiites? Hannah Allam recently filed an excellent report on the bickering within the Iraqi United Alliance, the top Shiite political list, between theocrats, quietists and secularists. I've talked about this before, and I still think that in a perfectly democratic Iraq, the quietists and secularists would carry the day.

But obviously there may not be a "perfectly democratic Iraq". So here's another nightmare scenario. Let's say the Shiites win a 70 percent majority in the January election. The more militant and fundamentalist Sunni Arabs in Iraq remain marginalized from government, represented only by a handful of secular candidates. So the insurgency continues on. At this point, the new Shiite-dominated National Assembly asks the United States to start drawing down its troops—both because of pressure from people like Moqtada al-Sadr, and because the Shiites think that they can defeat the Sunnis on their own.

The problem is that to defeat the Sunnis, the Shiites will need to give militias like the Badr Corps a prominent role. (In any civil war scenario, I assume the Kurds would take Kirkuk and Mosul, declare autonomy, and leave the Arabs in the South to duke it out on their own.) Now Badr Corps is the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which tends to favor Iran-style theocracy. Meanwhile, in any civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, the Shiites will probably appeal to Iran for help, a state of affairs which again favors those Shiites aligned with radical elements in the Iranian Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) and intelligence services.

The point here is that any prolonged conflict between Shiites and Sunnis—even if it never blossoms into full-scale civil war—inevitably strengthens the more radical and pro-Iranian elements within the Shiite-dominated government. So while the probability of an Iraqi theocracy remains low at the moment, it becomes higher so long as the Shiites have to fight their own war against the Sunnis. The converse, I think, is also true. At the moment, Shiite leaders are preaching restraint. But a smart Shiite theocrat might play up civil war against the Sunnis in order to strengthen his or her own radical hand.

Lately I've been poking through Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, and while I enjoy it quite a bit, I'm afraid the whole project seems ridiculous to me. Greenblatt's basic premise is that Shakespeare borrowed heavily from his life experiences to create his plays—which makes for some interesting conjecture (Falstaff = Robert Greene!), but it also downplays Shakespeare's actual inventive abilities.

Greenblatt's premise, by the way, was first put forward by James Joyce, via Stephen Dedalus, in the library chapter of Ulysses (Scylla and Charybdis, I think). "He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandfather is Shakespeare's grandson…" or something like that. The theory, of course, works much better as a gloss on Ulysses—which actually did rely heavily on Joyce's own biography, and in which we can find closer one-to-one correspondences between the novel's characters and real-life persons. But even that sort of analysis (Buck Mulligan = Oliver Gogarty!) always seemed horribly reductive: surely there are at least as many non-autobiographical elements of Ulysses as there are autobiographical elements.

With Shakespeare, perhaps more so. Falstaff from Henry IV might have been based on Robert Greene; but he could have just as easily been based on 5 people, or 100, or no one in particular. The Dark Lady of the Sonnets may not have ever existed as a real person. Why not? That's what imagination is for.

Kriston at Begging to Differ has an interesting post up about how relief efforts in Sri Lanka and Indonesia might actually help quell the ongoing civil wars in those countries. On account of catastrophe bringing countries closer together. Let's hope so. He's also got some good thoughts on how the UN could help countries prepare for tragedies like this one.

On a side note, his post didn't seem "blasé" at all, as he feared. As I wrote below, I used to track these disasters for a living, so I'm a bit unfazed by stuff like this, sadly enough. But even if I wasn't, I don't think I'd see any harm in a bit of detached analysis—outside of giving $50 or whatever to the Red Cross (ahem), there's not a whole lot else to do...

This blog—my blog—isn't a real blog. It's not a real blog because I lack all decency and can't just link to an article without comment, or with only a brief comment. A post doesn't feel like a post unless I've heaped on hundreds of additional words—and all because some misguided English teacher once told me that droning on was the soul of wit.

But as a New Year's Resolution (one of many), that's all going to change! I promise to embrace brevity, starting right here on the ol' blog. So here goes. *Ahem*.

"Do read Judge Alex Kozinski's article in Legal Affairs, touching on the varieties of impropriety in the world of judges. As he says, financial conflicts-of-interest tend to be the least interesting—and often the least important—ethical problems in the judiciary."

How's that?

UPDATE: Okay, fuck, I failed. Just wanted to add that one of the interesting things about analyzing the structure of legal/political institutions—it's called the "political economy", no?—is that you can't really do it with some outcome in mind. You can write a legal opinion, for instance, that aims to achieve some goal of human welfare. But we just don't know if we're increasing the general well-being of the world by writing up stricter ethical guidelines for courts—because we have no idea what kind of legal opinions a more "ethical" court will produce.

At any rate, I wish someone could explain to me—ie., a liberal motivated mostly by welfare principles—why I should even care about the ethical structure of the courts, especially if there's no way of knowing whether, say, forcing judges to write their own opinions would lead to an increase in public well-being. Ah, if only I knew one lick about philosophy, how clear it might all be...

From the annals of counter-intuition, here's the New Republic, circa 1980, comparing Islamic and American ideas of justice:

At least in regard to cruelty, it's not at all clear that the system of punishment that has evolved in the West is less barbaric than the grotesque practices of Islam. Skeptical? Ask yourself: would you rather be subjected to a few minutes of intense pain and considerable public humiliation, or to be locked away for two or three years in a prison cell crowded with ill-tempered sociopaths? Would you rather lose a hand or spend 10 years or more in a typical state prison? I have taken my own survey on this matter. I have found no one who does not find the Islamic system hideous. And I have found no one who, given the choices mentioned above, would not prefer its penalties to our own.

If it was my left hand—I'm right-handed—I'd say chop it off! I'm a fairly skinny fellow, and probably wouldn't last much more than five minutes in a "typical state prison". If we were talking about my right hand, though, I'd think about it.

At any rate, Koranic retribution—public flogging, hand-chopping—seems like a much better way of doing criminal justice than our current system, which consists mainly of horrific jails and little rehabilitation. Koranic justice, in addition to being a better deterrent (less abstract than a prison sentence; loss of hand can prevent further crime) and less conducive to recidivism (doesn't corrupt you like prison does), is also much, much cheaper. And just think of all the money we could then spend on schools and health care...

In a post below I speculated that China, in order to ease the burdens of its aging population, might simply resort to screwing over its senior citizens and cutting them off from all public assistance. Impossible, you say? Too cruel and unusual? Ah, but it appears that Putin's government in Russia—which enjoys Beijing-like ruthlessness—is now doing something similar: dissolving all public benefits to old people, and offering instead a monthly cash payment. The deuce of it is that this cash payment may not get indexed to inflation, so in a few years time it will become meaningless and Russian seniors will have virtually nothing.

I'm greatly enjoying this American Prospect article by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, arguing that despite Bush's victory, the emerging Democratic majority is still, uh, emerging. But one paragraph in particular, on the "centrism" of internet lefties, struck me as a bit fanciful:

Some Republican and hawkish Democratic commentators have branded [groups like MoveOn, etc.] part of the left. New Republic Editor Peter Beinart even compared them to the communist-infiltrated left of the late 1940s that backed Henry Wallace for president. But the outlook of these new, primarily upscale and highly educated activists is Clintonite and center-left rather than left wing. … [L]ike many college-educated liberals, they are also fiscal conservatives. When MoveOn held a poll in January 2004 on what ad the organization should run on the week of Bush’s State of the Union address, its members chose one attacking the Bush administration’s budget deficits.

In this day and age, with yawning budget deficits and a looming current account crisis, sure, anyone with half a brain is a "fiscal conservative," in the sense that they think the insanity must end. But that's a rather narrow definition of fiscal conservative.

Now these definitions are, obviously, always relative to the situation—in another life, with a more liberal Congress at his disposal, Clinton would not have embraced balanced budgets and tight spending restraints. So these labels don't mean much. I suppose we could ask everyone in MoveOn what share of GDP the federal government should take up, and I suspect many of them would position themselves somewhere between the European model (40-60 percent) and the current American model (~18 percent). But again, fiscal conservatism usually manifests itself in individual tradeoffs—"Do you want this program? This program?"—rather than a grand unified vision of how big government should be.

What were left with, I think, is a matter of attitude. Do these new wave of liberals instinctively think that more spending is always the answer, or do they believe that there's merit in keeping tax rates low and investment strong? Or, if the choice comes up, do they believe that balanced budgets provide more economic "oomph" than low marginal tax rates? Right now, opposition to the Bush deficits are a good way to build credibility on attitude (they fooled even Judis and Teixeira!). But a more substantial position on fiscal matters probably won't emerge until the Democrats hoist themselves back in power.

Good Fred Kaplan article on the possible end of American dominance. A friend and I were recently talking about the likelihood that the U.S. would eventually lose its superpower status to either China or Europe. I was somewhat skeptical—for reasons outlined at the end of this post—but my friend was downright bullish on America, arguing that the U.S. had one unbeatable advantage: The Global Baby Bust. U.S. fertility rates are still much more robust than those of China and Europe, she noted, and this disparity will leave our would-be competitors crippled by old people. It's a good argument, but I'm not entirely convinced.

Start with China. It's true that the People's Republic will start aging very quickly, but Beijing also enjoys a rather unique ability to force its citizens to do whatever it wants. If it can coerce each family to have only one baby, as it has done, why not mandate two babies? If it needs more urban workers, why not massive relocation schemes? If pensions and geriatric health care prove too crippling to economic growth, why not just cut the old people off? I don't know how to design policies that force people to make more babies and are harsher on old people, but I'd guess that such schemes would be most likely to succeed in a non-democratic country. Sad but true!

Europe presents a more interesting case. Clearly an aging European society is going to burden their rather extensive welfare state, and Europe is aging faster than America. But they're also better equipped to handle it, thanks to a cheaper and more efficient health care system. To quote Phillip Longman, from the most recent of the Washington Monthly:

[I]n the United States, health-care spending per person 65 and over is more than double what it is in Japan, and more than three times what it is in Great Britain. For all this extra spending, U.S. seniors don't enjoy any advantage in health and well-being. Indeed, at age 60, American women can look forward, on average, to 3.8 fewer years of healthy life than their counterparts in Japan, while American men at the same age share nearly the same disadvantage…

This means that America faces a huge comparative disadvantage when it comes to aging. Only 12 percent of the population of the United States is 65 or older, yet the cost of their health care already amounts to 5 percent of GFP. That's far more than we spend on national defense and equal to about one quarter of all federal spending. By contrast, in Great Britain, where nearly 16 percent of the population is 65 or older, the cost of their health care consumes only 2.8 percent of GDP. Going forward, that means that the United Kingdom can "afford" far more seniors than the United States can…

So the aging global population may actually hurt America the most. Now as I said above, I'm relatively bullish on America, mostly because I believe that the Republican Party will drive the country into the ground over the next decade or so, leading to a progressive revival. In that case, liberals will be able to design a welfare state considerably less intrusive than Europe—after all, we know a lot more now about how to create flexible welfare programs that harness the free market—and the net result will be a social democratic state that still leaves room for dynamic economic growth and innovation. That's the utopian dream, anyway. Now I could be wrong and the GOP could use gerrymandering and the levers of power to stay on top indefinitely. In that case, we better start hording euros and yuan!

Holy, holy fuck.

The Thai Prime Minister isn't kidding when he says, "Nothing like this has ever happened in our country before." During college I worked as a research assistant at the always-nifty Dartmouth Flood Observatory, tracking floods and flooding around the world—whether caused by heavy rains, earthquakes, tidal waves, whatever. Anyways, one of my jobs was to compile and categorize floods in years past by sifting through news reports, Red Cross data, etc. You get a bit inured to it after awhile, but massive disasters like this one still manage to shock and horrify.

I don't have my old spreadsheets in front of me, but as I recall, floods that killed more than a few hundred people were fairly rare and usually considered a big, big deal. So this earthquake/tidal wave/flood combo, leaving 7,000 13,000 dead and drowned, defies words. Absolutely horrible. What's worse, the bulk of deaths often come after the initial onslaught—especially in Southeast Asia, as flooding spreads disease through the rivers and wells. Let's hope that doesn't happen, and that aid organizations can stem the aftermath. (Now would be a great time to donate to the Red Cross...)

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias has some perspective from the other direction, linking to a page that claims 138,000 people died from a tsunami in Bangladesh in 1991. I'm almost positive that number's way too high, but it doesn't matter, it's clearly up there in the realm of the horrific. Bangladesh always gets the disaster that keeps on giving, since most of the houses there wash away easily, and the rising waters spread disease. Christ...

In the midst of a defense of Donald Rumsfeld, Deacon over at Power Line sneers at "the modern liberal view that the state can accomplish anything." In other words, let's blame the inherent chaos in Iraq for Iraq's problems, not Rumsfeld's inability to fix everything, shall we? It's not like he's god or anything. Right?

Well, not exactly.

The first step is to admit we have a straw man problem here. Clearly the state can't accomplish everything, and no one ever suggests it can. But the state can still accomplish a good deal more than what we've seen in Iraq. Unemployment has hovered at or around 50 percent for over a year. 50 percent! (Those numbers, by the way, are skewed by rosy employment in the Kurdish provinces.) Yet for the bulk of the occupation, first the Pentagon and later the CPA mostly concentrated on selling off Iraqi industries and privatizing former Baath holdings—a fire-sale of dubious legality, by the way. It was willful anti-statism at its finest. (In fact, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner was sacked for trying to bring back Baathist job-creation programs.)

In the long run, of course, many economists would endorse this approach—even though Argentina seems to have undercut the neoliberal wisdom on economic growth lately—but in the short term, privatization caused a good deal of unemployment and inflation in Iraq. The chaos that ensued scared away all of the foreign investors that were supposed to be attracted by privatization in the first place. Oops! Now none of this is explicitly Rumsfeld's fault, but he also didn't give these problems much thought before the invasion. The Untidy Theory of Freedom was embraced over the more statist concerns of the Future of Iraq project.

The larger point is that, fine, Rumsfeld can be skeptical about the abilities of the state (or a military trustee) to solve all the problems of the world. But it's not likely that this view will make him very good at undertaking massive nation-building projects. The occupation, after all, was an inherently liberal venture—the whole premise of disarming and transforming Iraq was that you can't just let "stuff happen". So I don't see how the anti-statist outlook of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer, could ever translate into quality nation-building.

As a side note, I seem to recall that one of the big success stories in Iraq involved Lt. Gen. David Petraeus turning Mosul into one big socialist paradise—bags of money being distributed freely on the street, guaranteed wages for workers, etc. Then it all fell apart when Petraeus's 1st Infantry Division rotated out and National Guard units came in to lightly police the town. Freedom thus reigned. And freedom became a wee bit untidy.

By the by, I don't think Rumsfeld should get a pink slip. Why bother? The confirmation hearings would take months, and a new Defense Secretary probably wouldn't improve much on Rumsfeld. (Especially if Bush chooses loyalty or 9/11 affiliation as his major selection criteria, rather than competence or vision.) The military has more or less adjusted to fighting the insurgency, and while they could probably use better intelligence and more manpower, neither will be forthcoming anytime soon, regardless of who takes Rumsfeld's spot. We've long passed the nation-building component of the occupation, and are settling into the watch-and-hope portion.

What better way to cap off the holidays than with this comforting report on A.Q. Khan's still-elusive nuclear network? As it turns out, even though Western intelligence had been tracking Khan for three decades, we overlooked most of his major deals during that time. It would be nice to know why our intelligence failed so badly. Is it that this sort of spy-work is always a mug's game, and that's that? Or are our particular intelligence agencies structurally unsuited for tracking nuclear peddlers? The Times piece cites tension between the U.S. and the IAEA as a stumbling block in all of the ongoing nuclear investigations, but that tension is relatively recent, and it doesn't explain three decades worth of intelligence failures.

Speaking of tension, don't miss senior administration officials (John Bolton, I presume?) offering an interesting reason as to why Americans don't play nice with the IAEA:

Federal officials said they were reluctant to give the I.A.E.A. classified information because the agency is too prone to leaks. The agency has 137 member states, and American officials believe some of them may be using the agency to hunt for nuclear secrets. One senior administration official put it this way: "The cops and the crooks all serve on the agency's board together."

That's plausible—though as we've seen with Iran, the U.S. may also be withholding intelligence in order to maintain a more hawkish stance than the evidence would otherwise warrant. But I'm more than inclined to believe that the IAEA—along with the Non-Proliferation Treaty—is fundamentally flawed: too toothless, too accommodating, too open to leaks and loopholes.

Ideally, the Bush administration would get together with Europe, Japan, and maybe a few other like-minded and wealthy countries, write up a tougher version of the NPT, create a system of sanctions for non-compliance, and then go to town. (Essentially formalizing the sanctions system we already level against rogue nuclear powers.) Meanwhile, we would expand on the Proliferation Security Initiative, get as many European countries in on it as possible, and ignore international law if needed. Nuclear proliferation is too important to be left to the lawyers! Of course, to do all this would involve convincing Europe, Japan, and others that nuclear proliferation actually is their problem too...

Josh Marshall has it right—no Democrat should ever think that supporting Social Security privatization will help him or her build "bipartisan cross-over cred" with conservative voters. Or that they'll lose support among conservatives voters for opposing Bush's elimination plan.

My hunch is that most people simply don't care about the Social Security issue. Insofar as it seems like there's a crisis out there, people want to see it get fixed. But I can't imagine many people getting angry at a Democrat for saying a) there's actually no Social Security crisis so b) we should move on to more important matters. Really! It's an abstract and arcane debate. The majority of Americans wouldn't even choose private accounts for themselves. Opposing Bush's elimination scheme should be an electoral no-brainer.

I'm spending this year's Christmas with my parents in Colorado, as I've done ever since they moved here. It's all becoming familiar by now: The snow falls lightly, the neighbors put up tasteful lighting (within neighborhood guidelines, of course), and lately Santa has mercifully refrained from giving me wool sweaters with reindeer embroidered across the chest. All in all, it's a nice, pleasant affair. So pleasant, in fact, that I had an urge to dig up photos of the wackier, gaudier Christmas of my childhood in Tokyo… here's Xmas in Hachiko Square:



Now that's more like it! And here are the Christmas lights in Shinjuku, circa 2002:



Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Setting legal concerns aside, the proposal to shoehorn Sunnis into the new National Assembly by fiat is a good one, though it still leaves a few practical problems. It matters a great deal, for instance, what kind of Sunnis get seats in the Assembly. Obviously Taliban-wannabes won't be included—and nor should they be—but it might not be wise to have no fundamentalists at the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, whatever Sunni leaders do get plopped down into the Assembly may not have a good deal of popular legitimacy, especially so long as religious groups like the Association of Muslim Scholars continue to boycott the whole process. Interim president and Sunni tribal leader Ghazi al-Yawer may enjoy a lot of popularity in the polls, but no one should pretend that he or any of his urbane and witty cohorts speak for the country's broad band of Sunni fundamentalists.

Jeff Madrick has some fun facts for us:

Indexing to prices may look sensible to Americans, but the reduction in future benefits from the present plan is likely to be severe. By 2075, under the most commonly accepted economic assumptions, indexing benefits to prices rather than wages would mean that benefits would be nearly 50 percent lower than under the current system. Many privatization plans call for such an adjustment.

Will the magic of private investment accounts make up for the reductions? The answer is no. We can compute how retirees fare if they earned the historical average of 4.6 percent a year (after transaction costs) on a portfolio of stocks and bonds. William Dudley, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, has calculated that benefits for a typical retired one-earner family would come to about 93 percent of the projected benefits from the present Social Security system in 2022. In 2075, the benefits would fall to only 77 percent of present-system benefits.

And more:

To determine how sensitive retirement income is to the rate of investment return, Mr. Dudley worked out some calculations under Reform Model 2. The results are stunning.

If a worker earns just the respectable expected bond rate of 3 percent a year, or 2.7 percent after transactions costs, then the typical one-earner family will retire on only about 58 percent of the projected benefits under current law. If the investor earns zero over time, which may well occur for some investors, the projected retirement benefit is only a little more than 38 percent of the current benefit. These are considerably worse than the projected adjustments needed to bring the present system into balance.

I noted this the other day, but didn't have the numbers to back it up. Under Bush's privatization scheme, there is no way for a worker to choose a "safe" retirement option. Investing your private account in low-risk bonds would net you what amounts to about $460 a month today. Given that the vast majority of Americans don't actually want the risk of private accounts for themselves, this seems pretty relevant, no?

(Speaking of which, if the vast majority of Americans don't want private accounts for themselves, how exactly will Bush's little scheme unfold in practice? Will Americans who opt out of private accounts still receive benefit cuts? And if not, then aren't we merely making the current system more expensive?)

Hm, digging even deeper through the IRI poll, it looks like about half of all Iraqis want to see a separation of church and state. Kurdish respondents probably skew these numbers, but it's still pretty impressive. Unfortunately, "impressive" is pretty much it. Without a well-constructed constitution and an independent judiciary, mere sentiments about a secular state won't necessarily translate into an actual secular state. Modest encroachments on the church/state wall can appear pretty quickly, especially since 52 percent of Iraqis would prefer to vote for a "faith-based" party. You start by teaching kids about intelligent design and go from there...

On the other hand, plenty of European countries never separated church from state, and many of those became more secular over time. I guess religions become more radical when out of power, or when marginalized, and become either more moderate or more "corrupted" by politics when in power. Reuel Marc Gerecht cited this fact as a reason for letting Sunni fundamentalists form political parties in Egypt, Algeria, etc.

On a related front, it's interesting to see that Iraqis are mostly hoping for leaders that can improve the economic situation in Iraq. (Security and terrorism rank rather low on Iraqis' list of overall priorities, although when asked specifically about security issues, the overwhelming majority (57 percent) ranked full or partial withdrawal of American troops as their first or second priority.)

At any rate, we know that there will be parties focusing on economic populism. And we know there will be religious parties, supporting various degrees of theocracy. But we don't know how the two categories will intersect. In the United States you have an economic populist party that's largely secular in outlook, and an economic elitist party that's largely religious in outlook. Obviously you can have economic populists who are religious—see the Christian Democrats in Europe [Oops!--too much eggnog for me, Christian Democrats obviously aren't economic populists... any other examples?]. But parties that focus on economic elitism—creating a favorable business climate, say—tend to lean heavily on either religion or nationalism, though. This is either because being religious (or nationalistic) leads you to accept a good deal of privation than you otherwise would, or because leaders use religion (or nationalism) as an "opiate of the masses". Weber or Marx, your pick. Of course, none of this matters much right now, but it's interesting, and relevant for understanding how an Islamic democracy will function.

Well that's odd. The IRI has a new poll on Iraqi public opinion out. In general, Iraqis have more confidence in the interim government and Iyad Allawi now than they did in September, and optimism is unbelievably high in non-Sunni areas (and unbelievably dismal in Sunni areas and Kirkuk). But that's not what's odd. What's odd is that, of those who do not intend to vote in the upcoming elections, over 74 percent gave "no answer" for their reason. (12 percent cited the "security situation", 6 percent "don't trust elections process," 3.2 percent "don't know about parties or candidates", 2 percent cite some higher authority.) But "no answer"?

Perhaps the pollsters framed the question badly. Perhaps Sunnis don't want to appear bigoted by saying nasty things about Shiites. Or perhaps those who don't intend to vote have very vague reasons for it—a general sense of ill-boding, uncertainty about the new government—and haven't actually rallied around concrete, well-expressed grievances. That seems like good news—in theory we'd only see large-scale sectarian conflict or civil war if all of the "dead-enders" had very specific reasons for fighting. (Is that how civil war works?) But I don't really know.

I'm not sure if it got promoted to the main page or not, but this Daily Kos diary discusses the possibility that abortion is not, in fact, as emotionally traumatic an experience for women as commonly thought. That hasn't been my experience—or rather, the experience of those I know—but I'm not going to generalize from such a tiny set of people.

Anyways, as the LA Times recently noted, a debate is supposedly raging on about how big a deal to make of the emotional trauma of abortion—acknowledging that abortion is "icky", as Atrios once rather derisively put it. Obviously there's no sense in simply making abortion A Grave and Serious Thing that needs to be talked about with downcast eyes. In fact, as Kameron over at Alas a Blog explained, stashing the whole issue up in the attic can do a great deal of harm to the pro-choice movement.

But even beyond that, I'm beginning to think that Sarah Blustain may have gotten it wrong, and that taking a "softer tone" on abortion may not be the trump card she thinks. Yes, quite a few women do suffer some emotional trauma after abortion. But that's not a problem with abortion per se. A lot of everyday events can turn out badly—being short in middle school can be traumatic (believe me)—and while no one wants to trivialize that reality, accentuating the negatives never really helps. Ideally, abortion services in the U.S. would provide more consulting and support services—as in Britain, France, Finland, etc. where a woman needs to see two doctors beforehand—but in a health care system like ours, this would only make abortion more unaffordable. (As well, for various cultural reasons, American doctors would probably lean more heavily towards dissuasion than they should, optimally.)

Anyways, I suspect that most of the "nuance" in message here wouldn't be aimed at people who have actual experience with abortion, or know someone who has. It would have to be aimed at people who have no experience at all with abortion.

By and large, these are the people who need reassurance—and unfortunately, it's hard to see how addressing their fears and concerns would lead at all to better abortion policy. (I'm obviously excluding here those who oppose abortion for religious reasons—I just don't see how to arrive at any sort of common ground with these people.) So I'm not sure the Democrats even could go down Blustain's road without ceding actual, substantive ground to pro-life opponents—plumping for overly strict parental notification laws, say, or caviling on senselessly about partial-birth abortion. Or worse.

So Atrios and Blustain really just disagree about audience—are we comforting the experienced or pandering to the ignorant? More focused polling could settle this question pretty quickly.

Perhaps the easiest way for Social Security eliminationists to explain the whole "crisis" concept is to point out that the program use to have 50 workers for every retiree, and soon it will have only two workers per retiree. Max Sawicky gets technical and explains that this fact isn't as dire as it seems. Indeed, this ratio business is an odd way of arguing. We also use to have X farmers for every American that eats food, and now we have Y farmers/eater, where Y <<< X. But we didn't force every American to grow his or her own food, and things turned out fine. As America gets wiser and wealthier, we can do more with less—the pie's big enough for everyone.

In Foreign Affairs next month, John Lewis Gaddis looks at foreign policy in Bush's second term, and concludes that the president needs to "persuade[] the world that it [is] better off with the United States as its dominant power than with anyone else." It's not a bad idea, but it's the sort of crystal ball that seems heavily clouded by the war in Iraq. Over the next four years, in all likelihood, there simply won't be a lot of opportunities for the United States to flex its military strength in a way that could make our allies uncomfortable. As much as the Weekly Standard would like us to elbow our way into Syria, it won't happen—Iraq is going to bog the U.S. down for at least another year, maybe more if elections prove chaotic, and the public appears far more skeptical about U.S. military strength now than they have in a long while.

No, the real challenge over the next four years will be to persuade our allies that they should be concerned about the things we're concerned about. The President will inevitably need to convince Europe and Japan why they should worry about a nuclear Iran, and why the benefits of a real threat of sanctions against Tehran would outweigh any short-term trade benefits they enjoy right now. Ditto for democracy in the Middle East—in order for any real liberalization scheme to move forward, the EU will need to understand why they should value a stronger push towards political reform.

It's a much bigger problem. Notice that, in Europe at least, only France and Germany are really opposed of U.S. power per se. But nearly every country in Europe values a different set of foreign policy goals than the U.S. does.

After a few days of traveling and Christmas-related activities, I've been trying to catch up on all the news. Garance Franke-Ruta's long TAPPED post on Social Security caught my eye especially, and deserves a read. Look, it's all well and good to say that there's no Social Security crisis—and believe me, I'll happily help pitch the tents and watch the towers here—but that message misses one key point. It's within the power of Bush and future presidents to create an imminent crisis by defaulting on the tranche of bonds owed to the Trust Fund. Doing so, assuredly, would amount to a massive transfer of wealth from lower to upper classes, but it's not that impossible to do—if anything, investors would welcome the move, because it would diminish the federal government's long-term deficits, and probably keep interest rates down.

Any Democratic strategy vis-à-vis Social Security, I think, needs to hone in on this possibility. Personally, I think Democrats should start the assault by clamoring to put the Trust Fund completely off-budget (something John McCain proposed in 2000), so as to reveal the full size of the General Fund deficit.

I wrote a piece outlining this strategy for Mother Jones, but my editors wanted to hold off on it until January, which is fine by me, because I think it could use some refining. The point is, playing defense on Social Security is really a four-step process, involving a) noting there is no crisis in Social Security, b) there is a cataclysmic crisis in the General Fund, c) unscrupulous Washington politicians could paper over the General Fund crisis by looting the Social Security Trust Fund, d) the key is to take the Trust Fund out of the grubby hands of those unscrupulous politicians. Political strategists with the skill and inclination can create the proper metaphors for all this. Meanwhile, they can tie in points about tax cuts for the rich, wild-eyed pork spending, and the need to invest into the future into this strategic backbone as they see fit. After that, they can start attacking the whole idea of private accounts in value terms, and then propose something of their own.

CLARIFICATION: Oops. Obviously Bush can't default on the Trust Fund bonds, that was sloppy on my part. But unless he drastically cuts the deficit over the next four years (a General Fund deficit that will reach $800 billion in 2008 less payroll taxes), he's making it increasingly likely that the federal government will either have to default on the Trust Fund in 2016 or risk borrowing over and above a multi-trillion debt and risking a financial crisis. (Assuming we haven't had one already.) Either way, putting the General Fund off-budget assures that no funny business ensures.

Interesting statistic on prisons and prisoners. According to a 2002 Department of Justice study on recidivism, of the 51.8 percent of ex-convicts who returned to prison, more than half (26.4 percent) are sent back not for committing a new crime, but rather for violating one or more conditions of their parole. (Which includes technical violations, like failing to secure a job, or what have you.)

I'd like to look into this more, but it's my understanding that parole agencies tend to be wildly underfunded relative to the rest of the corrections system, no? And not only that, but they tend to come under a lot of pressure from the public—especially after Willie Horton, no one wants to be the parole officer who "let one get away". So it would stand to reason that parole officers and post-release supervisors tend to hit the red button and send their violators back to prison immediately, rather than seek out some alternative form of treatment.

This also seems like a relatively simple problem to fix—or at least improve.

My colleague Jeff Fleischer knows considerably more than I do about politics, but I'm going to have to disagree with his argument that Democrats don't have an abortion problem. (I know, I know, two dudes discussion abortion, what could be more enlightening? See also this male-heavy discussion on Left2Right.) I've had a decent number of discussions with pro-lifers since the election, and even among those who don't hate the Democrats, none of them were reassured by the fact that John Kerry personally opposes abortion. His whole straddle came off as, well, a straddle. Not one could understand how he could be so carefree about something that obviously was important to his faith. He didn't seem that way to me, but there you go.

Pointing to Harry Reid, meanwhile, doesn't strike me as proof that the party is inclusive. It strikes me as mere symbolism—everyone knows we'd prefer Harry Reid to be pro-choice, and everyone knows that the Democrats would never let Reid get too far with his pro-life views. The party may accept Harry Reid, the person, but they will never give his views the time of day, and would actively oppose him if they had to. It doesn't fool me (which is why I'm not at all nervous about Reid as Minority Leader). I don't see why it would fool anyone else.

Anyways, this is just a roundabout way of saying that if the party really wants to reassure more people on the abortion issue, something more solid is needed. Sarah Blustein's deservedly-lauded essay suggests that the party needs to address the fact that a good number of women—pro-choice women—are uncomfortable with the actual act of abortion. For her, there's a personal dimension here that gets lost in the larger "it's my body" vs. "it's murder" frame—and moreover, it's a dimension that can be addressed without sacrificing actual, substantive positions. On the other hand, Kameron over at Alas, a Blog, points out the real danger in over-emphasizing abortion's "ickiness". I don't think it's either/or, but she has a point—it's hard to reach out your hand without getting yanked over to the other side.

During my junior year in high school in a far, far away land (Japan, to be precise!), I remember often leaving lunchtime early to sneak over to the library to use their Internet Device. This being 1997, the Internet Device was spectacularly slow, but I desperately needed to check the day's hockey scores (thanks to the time zone difference, lunch time was the perfect hour for this). Anyways, since no one had told me about ESPN, I used The Sporting News for all my needs, and with the creaky little machine our school fielded, it would take upwards of 10 minutes just to load the scoreboard. Anyways, the NHL is on strike now, but somehow the internets have strangely reverted to their earlier, much slower ways today.

Knight Ridder, 12/20/04:

Harsh interrogation methods of Iraqi prisoners went "beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice," the FBI's top official in Iraq said in a memo released Monday. … A June 25 memo from an FBI agent to Director Robert Mueller, which was also released Monday, said individuals "were engaged in a cover-up of abuses."

The agent included a report from an unnamed witness of "numerous physical abuse incidents of Iraqi civilians" including "strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings and unauthorized interrogations."

Jeff Jacoby, 11/1/02:

In June, the BBC interviewed "Kamal," a former Iraqi torturer now confined in a Kurdish prison in the north. "If someone didn't break, they'd bring in the family," Kamal explained. "They'd bring the son in front of his parents, who were handcuffed or tied and they'd start with simple tortures such as cigarette burns and then if his father didn't confess they'd start using more serious methods."

Who will be the first member of Congress to stand up and say, "We do not let this happen here in the United Fucking States of America"?

I'll have a longer commentary piece coming out today on the one Social Security reform I think Democrats should get behind. (And worry not, it stays true to the "no crisis!" roots.) But for now, I want to go on the attack. Now as I explained on MoJo this morning, the oh-so-unpopular president needs to be tethered—just chained down—to privatization, just like Clinton was to health care. So we need a name for his little plan. Personally, I'd prefer not to put Social Security in the title, since the program has a bad reputation (alas!) and should be resuscitated in other circles, far away from the offensive. So what do we call it? The Bush Retirement Plan? The Bush Pension Fraud? The Bush-Will-Ensure-You'll-Never-Get-Laid-Because-Grandma-Will-Move-In-With-You Scheme? (That one is all praktike.)

Where's the Sloganator when you need it?

Oh dear...

At last! A grand unified theory of the Bush presidency:

When Bush says someone is trying to get him to "negotiate with myself in public," which he says a lot, it has always been my understanding that he means he doesn't have to consider an argument with which he doesn't agree. Now, though, I suspect that, at least in this case, he means something more. He's saying that he doesn't have to consider reality. It isn't his job to do "this hard thing." That's somebody else's job—in this instance, Congress: "I don't get to write the law."

What "I" get to do, as president, is make promises that I know perfectly well can never be kept, and then to make Congress break those promises for me. I don't have to change "the principles I believe in" because I know more responsible people in the government will violate them and take the blame.

I was going to write something about this the other day, but decided it was too obvious. Apparently not. The president cannot be allowed to distance himself from Social Security Abolition. No way, no day. This is Bush's idea, Bush's scheme. Bush wants to drum up a fake crisis. Bush wants to propose a needless and badly designed change. Bush, Bush, Bush. Remember, in 1994, Republicans never stopped calling health care reform by its infamous name: the Clinton Health Plan. And guess what? Voters were overwhelmingly in favor of health care reform. They were much less in favor of the Clinton Health Plan. It's sad to remember, but lesson learned.

Curtis Sittenfeld calls attention to a very real asymmetry:

The thing about groupie stories, and this is especially true of the salacious ones, is that they always seem to feature men in the starring roles. What I've been wondering lately is, has any woman writer -- ever, anywhere -- had a groupie? Does, say, Barbara Kingsolver get phone numbers after the bookstore closes? Do 20-year-old boys throw their boxer shorts at Toni Morrison? And finally, if women do indeed have groupies, might I acquire some for myself?

Based on conversations with editors, booksellers and fellow writers, I've come to believe women can have groupies, or at least there are plenty of female writers who strike the fancy of male readers. The catch is that typically these women fall into one -- or both -- of two categories: either the woman is very attractive or she writes a lot about sex….

Basically, I'm not convinced that female writers can transcend their hotness, that they can elicit lust based on literary prowess alone -- not because they're women, that is, but because they're writers.

Which brings us to the all-important topic of blogosphere lust. I've noticed, from trawling around internet comment boards, that Wonkette gets a fair amount of groupies—mostly based on the (admittedly rather adorable) cartoon picture on her banner. But maybe that doesn't count.

From personal experience, I'll admit I've long, long had a genuine literary crush on Joan Didion, and with all due respect, I just don't think physical lust is the reason. Oh, hell. While I'm at it, I'll add Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Bowen—and I don't even know what they look like! (Though obviously I'm going to go find out now.) So there.

Owing to too much drinking and not enough transcribing this weekend, I'm swamped for work today—trying to dash off a bit on Social Security before the holidays. So there might be nothing to see here this morning! But there's a lot to see over on the MoJo blog. So go read the MoJo blog! Greatest hits this morning include this on why we need to reform disability insurance and this on why Social Security Abolition really is forced gambling, rather than an expansion of choice.

Adam O'Neill's absolutely right -- there are 'good' and 'bad' ways of indexing Social Security benefits to inflation. But the plan put forward by Bush's Social Security Commission -- the so-called Model 2 plan that gets everyone agog -- follows precisely the 'bad' course, so that's the one we should all be complaining about. Robert Greenstein explains -- and he certainly understands the various ways you can switch to price indexing.

Now it's true that under the Model 2 price-indexing, benefits would continue to rise faster than inflation. Nevertheless, for a given worker with a given earnings history, guaranteed benefits would drop from about 42 percent of preretirement wages (today) down to about 20 percent in 2080. And that 20 percent, note, would be entirely gobbled up by Medicare Plan B premiums, in the absence of health care reform. Note also that under price indexing, we would all receive smaller benefits than if we had simply done nothing and suffered the crappy productivity growth predicted by the Trustee's intermediate projections.

Hm, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that many states are facing looming fiscal shortfalls in the coming year. This reminds me of something I've wanted to talk about for awhile: prison policy on the state level. (Whoo!)

You'd never know it from the Bush-Dukakis debates of yore, but prison policy is essentially a state concern: of the 2,000,000 people incarcerated nationwide, less than 160,000 are federal prisoners. The rest manage to swell state budgets. Nosing around in this report, meanwhile, it appears that corrections is the only state function that has consistently grown as a percentage of state budgets since 1987 (excluding Medicaid, whose expenditures are set by the federal government). The good news, however, is that a lot of smart, sensible changes to the system—like adequately funding parole programs to reduce recidivism rates—can be handled entirely by the state executive branch. Did everyone get the unilateralism memo? Good. (Unfortunately, sentencing laws are a lot harder to fix--thanks to both federal guidelines and punitive-minded state legislatures.)

Anyways, I don't know what particular advances have been made state to state thus far, but Democratic governors could quite easily get together and focus on a party-wide effort to decrease prison populations in their blue-governed states, via parole reform, community policing, or whatever else governors can get away with, and academic experts can agree on. (Surprisingly, experts can agree on a lot when it comes to reforming prisons; unfortunately no one listens to them.) It's true that crime control is no longer the national concern it was in, say, 1988 or 1992. But popular opinion has very much shifted away from harsher sentencing, and if the Democrats want to keep the mantle of reform, this is as good a place as any to start reforming things. The party's not going to get much of a chance to do stuff on the national level for at least two years, so the states are a good place to coordinate these sorts of efforts.

Oh, so Bush might be planning a little tax hike on the wealthy, is he?

Two of President Bush's top advisers refused on Sunday to rule out the possibility that wealthy people might have to pay more to help cover the cost of his move to partially privatize Social Security.

Neither Treasury Secretary John Snow nor Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, would say whether Bush's ideas about overhauling the federal retirement program would include raising the limit on incomes subject to Social Security taxes.

Well, I'm not interested in this "compromise"! And Democrats shouldn't be either. Here are two questions for the president:

1) If tax hikes for the wealth are suddenly on the table, why don't we put them to good use—namely, reducing the much more serious General Fund deficit? Hm?

2) Fuck you and your fake "progressivism"! (Okay, that's not a question.) So long as Bush's Social Security Abolition Plan involves welching on the government's debt to the Trust Fund, there is no way this scheme is progressive in any way, shape, or form. I've seen Arnold Kling try to claim that no, no, borrowing money to pay for Social Security is a lot more progressive than using payroll taxes. Ach. Kling's usually an honest fellow, but this is sorely misguided. A default on the tranche of bonds owed to the Trust Fund in 2016, as Dean Baker points out, would amount to a transfer of more than $1 trillion from the bottom four quintiles to the households in the top 5 percent of the income distribution. If this is part of the Bush agenda, it's a fraud, plain and simple.

Bush as Person of the Year puzzles me, and not just because I dislike the guy. I'm not going to deny that Bush has done a lot of "Person of the Year" type things: revolutionizing foreign policy, invading Iraq, expanding Medicare, ballooning deficits, etc. Good or bad, he's a force.

But none of that happened this year. His 2004 accomplishments include: denying reality in Iraq, failing to get any bills passed, failing to get a budget passed on time, signing an intelligence bill he mostly opposed, and nearly scuttling the efforts of his excellent re-election team with a whiney debate performance. By any substantive measure, 2004 was a lost year for Bush.

By the way, I would've picked either 'Ali al-Sistani (most powerful person in world's #1 hotspot, overpowered Washington, possibly the new face of democratic Islam) or Abdul Qadeer Khan (singlehandedly reshaped geostrategic landscape, underscored power of non-state actors).

An interesting take on the Kristol/Rumsfeld flap, courtesy of Justin Logan:

Rumsfeld wants out of Iraq, and the neocons are scared to death that he'll succeed.

Except at this point, it's hard to figure out how much control Rumsfeld has over troop levels in Iraq anymore. If, over the next few months, Shiite politicians campaign on a "USA Must Go" platform—perhaps spurred on by the threat of Moqtada al-Sadr denouncing elections—and then actually ask the U.S. to leave, then the Bush administration won't have much choice but to draw down troops. On the other hand, if the Shiite leaders realize that the entire competent wing of the Iraqi security force is smaller than the entire Sunni insurgency, and don't like their chances in a real knife-fight, they'll ask the U.S. to stay.

Here's where things get tricky. The Shiite leaders probably can't ask the U.S. loudly and openly to stick around—the backlash from Moqtada and others would be fierce. So perhaps they do it quietly; but in that case, they can't put public pressure on the president to stay in Iraq, and Rumsfeld has the upper hand in making this call behind the scenes. Disaster!

So… enter Iyad Allawi. According to wire reports, the Shia are thinking about keeping him around. Swopa—who usually has a fine ear for these little developments—thinks it's just a sop to keep the wily old Ba'athist from causing havoc in the January elections, and Allawi will never get to sniff a leadership role in the new Iraq. But here's the thing: What if the Shiites know they need the Americans to stay, and want Allawi to make the announcement? He already has a reputation for being a sock puppet, so he wouldn't have to worry about the Sadr backlash. In fact, he might be the only politician who could publicly drive the Bush administration into a corner and force the US to stay, even over the wishes of Rumsfeld.

Jeebus. Matt Yglesias is burning down the house on Social Security today. Anyways, this unity theme—Democrats shouldn't give Republicans even a fig leaf of bipartisanship—is important. I wrote a long post about it last week at Mother Jones, but maybe there are a few more points to add. I've never won a legislative battle in my life, so I don't have definitive "advice" here, but it's instructive to note that, in 1994, the Republicans managed to sink health care by turning it into a referendum on Clinton himself. Something similar could very easily be done today: Ruy Teixeira has noted that Bush is personally quite, quite unpopular among independents and moderates. More specifically, the "vital center" is frowning on the president's handling of the economy 58-37. Isn't there an opening here for Democrats to turn Social Security Abolition into a referendum on the president's entire economic worldview?

Meanwhile, Mark Schmitt has a few more lessons from 1994:

It's not that they opposed every initiative or every nominee. Rather, they found the holes and blew them wide open. They didn't oppose the Clinton health plan, for example. They found flaws in the process, or ideas that were not well-developed, and blew them up until they stood for the whole thing. They took control of the agenda by forcing Clinton to defend the weakest points of his -- or other Democrats' -- proposals. They didn't oppose the 1994 crime bill, for example, they just picked at the idea of "midnight basketball" -- a perfectly successful urban crime-prevention strategy that was funded at $1 million a year in the bill -- until most of the rest of the initiative collapsed.

Seems like sound advice. Over the next few months, a lot of dribs and drabs and trial balloons are going to start emerging, long before an actual proposal is settled. Every poorly-developed idea and procedural miscue should, I think, get hammered.

Tyler Cowen asks an important question about the "borrow now, save later!" plan for Social Security:

If we can borrow all that new money "scot-free," will we truly reduce future expenditures on social security benefits? Or will those funds simply be diverted, either explicitly or implicitly, to finance the Medicare shortfall? Which way would you, as a bondholder, bet?

As I've written before, there are a lot of nitty-gritty reasons to tackle Medicare and spiraling health costs long before we ever touch Social Security. For starters, read Jesse Taylor's post, where he worries that Bush's plan will leave seniors with only 1/3 guaranteed benefits. Sadly, that's nonsense—it will be much less than that. So long as Medicare Part B premiums rise the way they do, and take increasingly large bites out of our Social Security checks, the president's plan will effectively leave retirees with zero guaranteed benefits down the road.

Notice what we can expect to happen on this course. The federal government of the future, nervous about giving its retirees zero guaranteed safety net, will either have to cover Medicare premiums on its own, expand guaranteed benefits again to avoid widespread senior poverty, or do something else costly. Either way, we're pretending to "shrink" Social Security now only to expand it (and/or Medicare) down the road. As a bondholder, I don't think I'd be especially confident in the long-term outlook of the federal government.

The movement to legalize prostitution seems to be alive and kicking—and right near my office to boot!:

At the Center for Sex and Culture in the hip South of Market area in San Francisco, prostitutes meet in support groups, hold fund-raisers and plot their next political move after having lost a ballot initiative in November that would have eased police enforcement of prostitution laws in Berkeley, Calif.

In New York, they are readying the first issue of a magazine for people in the sex industry for spring publication. And on the Internet, prostitutes have found a way not only to find customers but to find one another. They have formed online communities and have connected with groups in other countries.

Um, not to be an ass, but the very special subset of prostitutes at work here—those with internet access, for instance, or those with the time and energy to hold fundraisers—don't necessarily speak for all prostitutes. (Sort of like Iraqi bloggers.) Seems trivial, I know, but the "Is legalization of abortion A Good Thing?" debate, sadly, almost always confuses two obviously distinct groups of people:

A) Prostitutes who are fairly well-off, don't find their work all that horrible, and are inconvenienced or far, far worse by whatever prohibitions/lack of oversight/reluctance to report abuse exists.

B) Prostitutes who are where they are by dint of either poverty, trafficking, or other exploitation.

In the Third World, of course, (B) is overwhelmingly the case for most people, and legalization is a profoundly bad idea. Figuring out the relative numbers of group (A) and group (B) in the First World would seem pretty crucial for deciding whether to legalize here.

From the experience of other industrialized countries, group (B) almost always seems to be worse off after legalization. Australia's grand experiment, as I understand it, was derailed by poor regulation—essentially creating large cartels who controlled all the major brothels. So the barriers to entry were very high, helping group (A) but not (B), and women who wanted to strike out on their own had to prowl the industrial/docking areas, increasing the chances of abuse, disease, etc. Trafficking also shot up. Perhaps a better oversight committee could have prevented these problems, I don't know.

In the Netherlands and Germany, meanwhile, it seems the state hasn't offered nearly enough incentives for prostitutes to go ahead and actually register, especially those in group (B), who, among other things, often suffer discrimination at the hands of landlords after being "outed", etc. So illegal brothels continue to thrive. Both countries, meanwhile, removed many of the barriers to exploitation, pimping, and trafficking, an obviously boneheaded move that made group (B) worse off.

Then, there's Sweden, which decided, after 30 years of legalized prostitution, to put laws in place not against the prostitutes themselves, but against the actual buyers of sex services, as well as traffickers and pimps. The record here seems mixed, but it's also a bit hard to analyze any policy in a state with a robust welfare system in place. (Group B prostitutes will of course be better off because they belong to a larger subset of people who are better off under Sweden's social-democratic state.)

Arraying the various bits and pieces of legislation from different countries, we have what seems like the potential to construct a smart decriminalization policy—and maybe even a smart legalization policy—to benefit prostitutes in (A) and (B). But potential and two bucks gets you, &tc. It's hard to find a single successful example that helped both, and easy to find fairly horrific experiences.

I've been waiting my whole frickin' life for this.

Here's something useless I was thinking about this morning. Let's say, by force of magic or advanced technology (maybe via my privatized Pentagon scheme), I was transported back in time to the Dark Ages in Europe. Could I, with my 21st century brain, actually contribute anything super-meaningful to the era? Could I use my knowledge of the future to transform the world?

Sadly, I doubt it.

Let's start with what I know: A lot, it seems, about Galois Theory and algebraic topology. I can explain, step by step, why Hilbert's Tenth Problem is unsolvable. But who would care? On a practical level, I'm not entirely sure I could reinvent calculus from scratch—nor convince my Dark Ages bretheren how to get from their sand-scratching to the new, improved mathematics. Nor explain what they should actually do with their derivatives and integrals. Meanwhile, I have nothing to offer them on the engineering front. Nothing. I know what gravity is, and they wouldn't. But I'm not sure I could figure out how to "produce" electricity, or explain the principles of bridge-building (there's… a keystone… right?). Certainly no amount of fiddling on my part would ever produce a light-bulb, or a telephone, or the steam engine. Perhaps I could beat that Gutenberg fellow to the punch on the printing-press, that doesn't seem so tricky.

Now politics. What on earth could I tell anyone about democracy? These things obviously require broad attitudinal changes, and not a single, not-especially-eloquent, agitator. My crazy ideas about the Catholic Church would just get me the rack, or worse. Maybe with enough observation I could suggest some interesting modifications to their barter system—the value of central banking, for instance. But it would probably take a lot of fiddling and I'd probably botch it up. On the other hand, simply knowing what germs actually are could go a long ways to improving public health. But that's sort of lame.

Maybe I could be a great writer—thanks to plagiarism. I have, for instance, a good deal of MacBeth, King Lear, and some other early works tucked away in memory. So maybe I could write them down and pawn them off as my own. But the parts I didn't have would assuredly suck, and I probably wouldn't know much about marketing these plays, or hobnobbing with other playwrights, or whatever it is you do. And unless these plays were released at just the right time, to just the right audience, they would fall into obscurity. (And then centuries later, poor Shakespeare would have to suffer accusations of plagiarism if he tried to write MacBeth.)

At any rate, the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, if I remember correctly, was a big hit because he had a lot of practical and oddly useful knowledge (like knowing when eclipses occurred, or how to create electricity). Educational standards, I'm afraid, have fallen markedly since his day.

Mark Shields has a rant in the Post today about how we could field a much better army in World War II, even though we were smaller and poorer, than we can today. I'm not too interested in that debate, but the comparison got me thinking about something else.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the baby boomers and our aging society are expected to cause a crisis. Indeed, according to the a 2002 report by the Congressional Budget Office, public pension spending (Social Security and Medicare) will jump from 6.7 percent of GDP in 2002 to around 12.1 percent in 2040. That sounds bad! Except consider this: In 1950 defense spending was a modest 5 percent of GDP. Only three years later, it had ballooned to 14.2 percent of GDP, and didn't drop down below 9 percent until over a decade later (this wasn't just a pig-through-the-python deal). And all the while, the country enjoyed healthy economic growth and endured the scantest of deficits.

Obviously there are some differences, but the basic fact is: in 1950 the U.S. could weather a rapid spike that was greater than the predicted rise caused by our Baby Boomers. The "coming generational storm" is nothing the country hasn't dealt with before, and there's no reason to panic, as the president is doing. Planning calmly and responsibly for the future is the best thing we can do.

So no one really knows whether guns increase crime, decrease crime, increase injury, or what. More research is needed! I've heard this holds true across the board for crime control research—it's always pitiful, the statistical departments are underfunded, and no one can really say with any degree of accuracy what methods work and what doesn't. For comparison, the Pentagon spends about 9 percent of its budget on R&D. The FBI and DoJ, by contrast, spend virtually nothing on data collection, and as a result, can't even get good statistics on crime rates. Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce says, "The reason we were able to bring violence down was our community policing." But I doubt he (or anyone) really knows why violence went down—more funding on statistical research and analysis would go a long ways here.

It's been called to my attention that the Pentagon has over $20 trillion in unfunded liabilities over an infinite time horizon. Believe me, I've done the math and found that Pentagon expenditures exceed tax receipts. More soldiers, in fact, believe in UFOs than believe they'll ever receive their paychecks!

At any rate, I have a plan to put this program back into balance. We'll borrow $4 trillion over the next decade, and allow every soldier to invest some of that the money in his or her own "Patriot Account". In order to get the Pentagon's long-term finances in order, we'll have to "claw back" the guaranteed salaries we promised those soldiers—but whatever, those guaratees were all a mirage anyways, as the chart above shows, and they'll more than make up that money with their private accounts.

Meanwhile, since all Americans should own a piece of our high-tech arsenal, we're going to make drastic cuts in Pentagon spending on procurement and R&D. (Remember, the department is unsustainable on its current course!) Instead, we'll allow each and every American to take some of the remaining $2 trillion we borrowed and invest it in a broad index of defense contractor stocks. The resulting "boom" in savings and investment will spur an era of military innovation like none other—phasers, ray guns, invisible spaceships. All owned by real Americans, like you and me. The return on private investment, meanwhile, will easily make up for the Pentagon's long-term $20 trillion budget hole. Congress, don't be scared. Come. Embrace my plan. Together we can save the Pentagon.

Siobhan Gorman makes a nice point in this long piece about Bush and the Supreme Court—it's foolish to hope that Bush will nominate a "stealth nominee" who might turn out to be liberal or at least not as conservative as expected, ala David Souter or William Brennan Jr. Stealth nominees simply don't exist, it's a great myth—the "surprise" liberalism of Souter or John Paul Stevens or Anthony Kennedy could've been (and was) easily predicted in advance. The only way Bush will elect a non-activist or a moderate is if he thinks his political capital will be better spent elsewhere.

Mickey Kaus, apparently, thinks Muslims are idiots:

Even if you favor making gay marriage a central, non-negotiable Democratic plank, the fact remains that this greatly complicates any Democrat-led struggle against Islamic extremists (because, as my emailer notes, it alienates even Islamic moderates). That's another reality Beinart doesn't seem to want to confront. (Better to talk about 1947!) How exactly would a Dem president who declares gay marriage a "morally momentous" principle convince civilized, non-terrorist, observant Muslims that their religion and culture is compatible with Western-style economics and democracy?

Look, there are a whole slew of things that have been going on in the United States for decades that run counter to even moderate Islam. Pornography. Raunchy sex in big multi-million dollar Hollywood movies. Homosexuals in big multi-million dollar Hollywood movies. Successful and widely-watched TV shows about homosexuals. And yet, somehow, millions of moderate Muslims have admired the West for decades, and continue to do so to this day. Why? Because they're not utter fucking morons. Freedom and the manifestations of freedom are two distinct things, and if liberal Muslims can grasp that distinction now, why would gay marriage change things?

Oh I fully agree. Social Security is healthy and successful. We could go even further. Social Security might be the healthiest program in the entire federal government. No other program has its own dedicated revenue stream. Not education, not defense, not agricultural subsidies. The Social Security checks will never stop coming. By contrast, the tax cuts have not been paid for—in a very real sense, they don't exist, and Bush's tax cut program is in a real crisis.

By the by, let's think like chess players here. I know there's no crisis. You know there's no crisis. There is, alas, no crisis. Social Security is healthy and successful. And Democrats should get on TV and say there's no crisis. But the next move is Karl Rove's, and he's inevitably going to drum up Bill Clinton's statements about Social Security being in a crisis. Oh no! Except here's the thing. Projections about Social Security's imminent demise have always been wrong and too pessimistic. Social Security always makes a comeback. And what's more, the program's long-term outlook is more stable and secure today than at almost any point in it's 69-year history. Clinton had a triple bypass. But Social Security is still going strong.

Meanwhile, John Holbo's racking his brain for ads that denounce Bush's "Lottery for the Elderly". Good stuff, but how about an ad touting the bright side of Social Security? Picture this: A kindly old grandmother—the kindlier the better—from the '40s finding her SS check in the mailbox, going shopping for groceries, buying a gift for her grandkid. Then flash forward to the '90s, yet another kindly old grandmother (perhaps the grandkid all grown up!) finding her check, going shopping, buying a gift for her grandkid. Announcer notes that the program has worked, has helped seniors, etc., for 69 years, and it's on a sturdier financial footing now then at almost any time in those 69 years. Obviously this isn't the only ad the Democrats should run, but the program needs an image makeover. When you're this healthy, you want to look good for the camera!

I see the military's manpower crisis continues apace, with the Army National Guard reporting that hasn't even come close to its recruiting goals. And the problem will no doubt get worse if/when the economy picks up and unemployment falls. (If)

This seems like as good a time as any to revisit the Democratic solution on this front—to expand the active army. While I understand the view that this makes good political sense—let's show voters we liberals have bold, tough ideas about national security!—it's also worth figuring out why this isn't very popular among actual military leaders. So let's ask our generic "General on the street", shall we? (Note: I've actually heard a variation of this explanation from a real-life general.)

General on the Street realizes he's short of troops; he's not thrilled. But what happens if the Democrats get to expand the active-duty army by, say, 40,000? He'll spend the extra money training them, equipping them, housing them, supporting them, and preparing them for war and peacekeeping. That's no problem. His real concern, though, is that sooner or later, when all the conflicts taper off, those goddamn liberals are going to start writing articles in Mother Jones yapping on about a "peace dividend" and wanting to nibble away at the Pentagon's budget. Alas, it's difficult (and expensive) to reduce manpower, so he might have to do some of that, but he'll also have to start reducing funds for training, R&D, procurement. Then lo, our generic general is in a world of hurt and teeth-gnashing. Basically, generals have never trusted liberals, and in their eyes the Democrats can't credibly commit to an expansion of the military.

This might not sound like a big deal—after all, the point of Kerry's proposal was a) to make good policy, and b) convince voters that the Democrats are tough on defense. But I think it's a very big deal that the Democrats aren't taken seriously—and at points, loathed—by members of the military, especially its upper ranks. The party will never, never reach a decent "credibility" threshold on national security in the eyes of the public as long as the media can cite polls every four years claiming that service members support Republicans 3-1 or 4-1. (True, this mostly reflects the officer corps, but they have more visibility so they're the issue.) So I think it's a key issue.

I'm usually unimpressed by arguments that Clinton hurt the Democratic party, but on this issue I have to agree. "Don't ask, don't tell" was the right policy at the wrong time, and Clinton's early feud with Powell, along with his watery Defense Secretary selections, essentially pitted the party squarely against the military.

A few hawkish policy proposals won't regain this trust or credibility. Nor will mushy phrases about "supporting the troops," or pretending that (say) calls to withdraw from Iraq are really about supporting the troops. First, "the troops" do bad shit sometimes, and mindless flag-waving obscures this reality. Second, it won't work. I, for instance, could reasonably claim to be "pro-military" in some generic sense—my brother's in the Navy, I'm not a pacifist, I think American military power can be a force for good, etc. But whatever. Any military personnel who reads Mother Jones or this blog would see that I spend much of my time criticizing the occupation of Iraq (both the administrative and military components), harp on Abu Ghraib, and think missile defense and other big-ticket procurement items are bullshit. I wouldn't expect anyone in the military to think I "support" them—I'd expect a good deal of anger. So let's be honest: Weak cries from my corner about Rumsfeld and body armor will sound just like what they are—cheap opportunities to score political points.

This isn't an unbridgeable gap—but clearly some larger attitude shift is needed. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to go about it. I'm a bit wary of using ex-military personnel—Wesley Clark, or Anthony Zinni, say—as props and poster boys for the Democrats. Waving about a letter signed by thirteen generals in support of John Kerry ("see? he's tough!") strikes me as a bit disingenuous—and I don't see why anyone else wouldn’t find it disingenuous either.

Sorry not much posting lately. I've been glued to the phones, as they say. Interestingly enough, Ken Pollack disagrees with the whole idea (often cited by me and god knows how many others) that the Tehran leadership fears the emergence of the hawza in an-Najaf (because they oppose the whole "rule of clerics" thing). Well, "disagrees" might be putting it lightly. In his words: "bullshit!" Hm... Pollack felt pretty strongly that, if anything, Khamene'i would love (!!) to see an Iraqi alternative to the clergy in Qom, which does nothing but bash the Supreme Leader all the time for his lack of credentials. That seems plausible. Also said he's only heard the "fear of Najaf" theory floated in the United States—never in Iran or Iraq. (Admittedly, though, he doesn't speak Farsi or Arabic, so...)

However, I should add a partial dissenting view—and since we're hiding bravely behind authorities on Iran here, let me just say that I heard this from Ray Takeyh a while back. What Khamene'i and the rest of the Tehran regime might be concerned about is dissident Iranian clerics migrating to Iraq as a means of protest. So the Najaf school might be a threat not in terms of formulating an alternative to the Iranian velayat al-faqih (rule of ayatollahs) doctine, but rather as a symbol of resistance to the Tehran regime. Who knows.

Anyways, interesting interviews. Many thanks to praktike and those who emailed questions. I'll try to get them up as soon as possible.

Thomas Barnett has a damn fine analysis of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hegemon in the East. By denying China access to cheap Middle Eastern oil, they're forced to prowl for resources in the nether regions of the world: namely, Sudan and Iran. As Barnett says, that's a problem on all fronts, though I don't really see an obvious solution—oil's scarce and getting scarcer, and unless we develop a sensible energy policy, we have no real choice but to trade elbow jabs with China on this front.

Still, not everything is a zero-sum game—that's the beauty of capitalism—and the subtly emerging clashes between China and the U.S. can be headed off in other ways. Namely, we could invite Beijing to play a larger role in the IMF and the World Bank, and end our obsession with regional trade agreements. It's a vastly underreported story, but the CAFTA-like mentality of Robert Zoellick and the rest of the Bush USTA is exacerbating competition with Asia, rather than drawing everyone closer together. Above all, Beijing shouldn't distrust the international economic system, or believe it's all to China's disadvantage.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any pro-war novels of "high literary merit", but Walt Whitman's later versions of Leaves of Grass certainly had some serious drumbeat-to-battle verses about the Civil War. "Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice" comes to mind. For someone who spent most of his time in hospitals, treating wounds and watching men die by the handful, Whitman never wavered much in believing the justness of the Union cause, and never treats human death as a something that undermines that cause, in the way that, say, the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay does. (Though the latter seems to worry more about an obsession with war—actually, this warrants a post of its own.)

Hmm… I guess you could add a Farewell to Arms. Yukio Mishima, as well, was a very pro-war writer (not only his attack on the Japanese Defense Forces at the end of his life, but early on he wanted to enlist in the Japanese Army), but I can't think of any specifically pro-war novels he wrote. John Updike's early Rabbit novels are tilted in favor of Vietnam, but they're not exactly pro-war in any meaningful sense. Hugo's Les Miserables strikes me as a bit jingoistic at times (think of his rhapsody on the unnamed soldier at Waterloo).

I only just saw this, but Michael Kinsey's proof about Social Security seems exactly right to me. In fact, I recall putting forth the exact same argument—though less elegantly—about a month ago.

Not surprisingly, Mickey Kaus completely misses Kinsey's point, and argues that privatization will increase national savings, and that will solve all our problems. But that's certainly not true in the short term—not if we're increasing the deficit—which is what Kinsey was driving at. There's also the possibility that households will start saving less if they think their PSAs are a good substitute for other forms of saving. Contrary to CW, households aren't "over-consuming" on frivolities, they're already saving quite a bit (in the form of home equity, etc.), and so the tendency is always to spend more. So a middle-class family with a PSA could decide that they no longer need to put as much in their IRA or 401(k). Then we have a serious reduction in savings, do we not? I ran this theory by Henry Aaron of Brookings the other day, and he seemed to think it plausible, so I don't think I'm completely talking out of my ass.

The only surefire way to increase national savings, to my eye, is to put Social Security completely off-budget, reveal the magnitude of the gaping deficit in the General Fund, and then work to close that off by repealing the Bush tax cuts.

By the by, I'm sitting down for Q&As with both Noah Feldman and Ken Pollack tomorrow. (Separately, that is.) Both will be transcribed and published on MoJo hopefully by next week. If anyone has any clever, thought-provoking or squirm-inducing questions they want me to ask, comment or email me. Seriously. I'm still trying to get the hang of grillling, and I worry that sometimes these things aren't as lively as they could be.

New Mother Jones article, by me, on how Bush's policies to promote homeownership aren't all they're cracked up to be. It's not the most… timely article. (It was written about three weeks ago, but it wasn't timely then, either.) But this stuff is important, I think, and not very well noticed. "Homeownership" is almost universally considered an unalloyed good when, really, it's not.

Side note: I stayed away from current, pressing questions about housing bubbles and whether prices will rise or fall, mainly because it's hard to figure out how this stuff affects low-income homebuyers. What is clear is that housing prices are rising much, much faster than median area income in the lowest income bracket. A steep price decline would be good for affordability, but steep price declines are pretty rare in the absence of sharply concentrated job losses—at which point low-income families have other problems. A steep price decline in a given area also forces a lot of homeowners to sell their homes and flood the market, which pretty much nixes revitalization efforts in urban communities. So I don't know.

Another thing to note, I think, is that the age distribution in America will soon start tilting the markets towards rentals—mainly because the growing legions of immigrants and young adults skew towards renting. That's not good news for the large percent of low-income families who can't buy homes under even the most liberal of underwriting standards. So this means that we really, really should be focusing more and more on strengthening rental-assistance programs (and increasing the supply of affordable homes). But that's not what Bush wants at all.

Anyways, fun topic to unleash the wonk within.

Another good part from Pollack's book—he notes that Khomeini's doctrine of the velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisprudence) actually comes from Plato's Republic, and can't at all be justified by the Quran. Interestingly, back in the 1970s, Iran's seniormost ayatollahs all predicted that the mixing of Islam with politics would turn people off to religion. And so it did.

But was this Khomeini's mistake or was it a flaw in Plato's original theory? I wonder if folks enamored of the whole "philosopher-king" concept have ever thought that mixing politics and philosophy might turn people off from intellectualism. After all, that seems to have happened right here in the United States, where eight years of technocratic rule in the 1990s produced the backlash known as George W. Bush. Damn you, Plato! Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but politicking—ooh does that ever fuck things up.

So I spent the evening finally getting around to reading Ken Pollack's The Persian Puzzle. Most of it anyways. The later chapters aren't so good—I would have liked to see a full plunge into the thorny little world of Tehran politics, but I gather that Pollack's not a Farsi-speaker, so he can't really work off of primary sources here.

However, his history of Iran is very good. I've blundered through this stuff before, but Pollack lines it up in fairly new ways. Most interesting, I think, is his contention that the U.S. really wasn't responsible for Iran's pre-revolution woes. Oh sure, the Kennedy-through-Carter folks all nominally backed the shah, but they also all variously asked him to institute economic and political reforms, and the shah refused. At no point was the U.S. implicated in SAVAK's reign of terror—at worst, Washington's leaders were simply indifferent. Especially in the 1970s, the shah had the upper hand in our little relationship, and his domestic blunders were all his own.

And yet… the U.S. was still blamed for all that ailed Iran. Much of this owed to the bizarre and irrational sentiments on the part of Khomeini, who really hated America and decided to make the 1979 revolution fundamentally about anti-Americanism. But the Iranian people readily hopped aboard, readily blamed America for the shah's screw-ups, regardless of reality. It may defy reason, but it also makes sense: The U.S. is a superpower, so of course it gets blamed, whether it's tugging on the puppet-strings or not.

Anyways, I bring all this up because I've also been reading Reuel Marc Gerecht's The Islamic Paradox, which makes the oft-repeated point—in the grand tradition of Noam Chomsky—that U.S. support for Arab dictators is what creates an Islamist "blowback." Now I don't disagree, but here's a question: how much could the U.S. really distance itself from these dictators? Obviously we send billions to Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt right now, but Iranian history suggests that, were to reduce our support to shah-type levels, we'd still be at the butt-end of fundamentalist rage.

By way of a solution, Gerecht suggests we just let the fundamentalists take charge and let them either reform or discredit themselves. (See here for a dissent.) Fair enough, but I don't see how any of this prevents "blowback", which would seem from a reading of Iranian history to be inevitable, no matter how benignly the U.S. acts. America is there for the blaming—it's not exactly our policies, it's not exactly simply because "they hate us". Time to seek out new explanations.

Kevin Drum picks up a ball I've been kicking around for the past few days—that Medicare, not Social Security, is the real problem that needs fixing. Now let's make this argument a little more sophisticated and add a twist: The two problems are actually related, and fixing Medicare could potentially ease the pressure on Social Security.

Here's what I mean. At the moment, using various benefit formulas, Social Security pays out around 40 percent of workers' pre-retirement wages. However, much of that pension check is eaten up by a premium collected for Part B of Medicare. Thanks to spiraling health care costs, those premiums are going up much faster than prices, and much faster than wages. At the rate we're going, Medicare premiums could soon eat up over half of our Social Security benefits.

Under the Social Security Commissions Model 2—which would cut benefits by indexing them to prices—Social Security benefits would eventually decline to around 20 percent of pre-retirement wages, and retirees could see their entire check gobbled up by Medicare premiums. In other words, they'd be living entirely off of their savings. To repeat: That's no safety net whatsoever. No safety net. Whatsoever.

So if Congress "fixes" Social Security but not Medicare, they will destroy Social Security. End of story. Conversely, if Congress controlled the growth of Medicare but did nothing to Social Security, the Part B premiums would hold steady, and eventually decline as a share of one's retirement benefits. So presto! Congress has automatically increased the size of Social Security benefits, and has a bit more flexibility to cut payouts down the road if it turns out the system can't stay solvent.

Take a look at this op-ed on Iran, by Vali Nasr and Ali Gheissari. The authors suggest we meddle with Iran's regime, mainly by exploiting "growing political divisions" between neoconservatives (mainly the Abadgaran and elements in the Revolutionary Guard) and the pragmatists. Sound familiar?

Maybe not. Notice this is very, very different from the sort of regime change schemes you see cooked up by the likes of Michael Ledeen. Nasr and Gheissari embrace regime subversion as a means to disarming Iran—as a means to integrating Iran into the modern world. But they say nothing about strengthening democratic movements per se, rather, only to the extent that those movements realistically undercut Abadgaran's quest for nuclear dominance. The Ledeen approach, meanwhile, seeks regime change as an end in itself, without much consideration for the main problem at hand, namely, Iranian nukes and Iran's isolation.

Obviously the Ledeen approach is more laudable and idealistic in theory, but when it comes right down to it, no one really embraces regime change as an end in itself. Even the most idealistic neoconservatives among us would object to an Iranian democracy that produced a savagely anti-American parliament. So we might as well be honest with ourselves and embrace our inner realpolitik.

A while back I griped about the paucity of good songs out there about, um, meat-eaters. (No, sad to say, I really did.) Little did I know that a trend was developing: Add Aberfeldy's "Vegetarian Restaurant" to the list of fine theme songs for tofu-munchers. "I like the way that you shell the peas / I only wish you were shelling me." Whatever it means, it's brilliant. And we who enjoy cheeseburgers have nothing comparable from our side, damnit.

Q. Does liberal humor sound as stupid to conservatives as this stuff sounds to me?

Professor Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth wants to design a better health care system. His slick and savvy solution involves scrapping the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health premiums, gather up that $100-200 billion in his arms, and fling it out again in the form of refundable tax credits for individuals to purchase health insurance. In a progressive way. Now Prof. Samwick trends conservative, but he makes a good liberal point: The employer health deduction is horrendously regressive, and any liberal worth his or her salt would happily scrap it in favor of something better.

From an economist's perspective, Samwick's is a clever and elegant solution. No wonder Brad DeLong likes it. But as a health-care journalist—ah, an aspiring health-care journalist—I'd like to look at it from a few other perspectives as well, before I hop aboard.

First, the political perspective. I would never, never in my lifetime, never in anyone else's lifetime, trust the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to implement such a scheme. Sorry, but no. Professor Samwick may intend to design a more efficient and more progressive health care system. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the hack brigade certainly do not.

That settles that. So now let's look at it from a business perspective. Samwick cites research estimating that employers would scuttle their workers to the tune of some 15 million, letting them get health insurance via vouchers. But common sense tells us this number would increase rapidly over time. Ideally, if I'm the Platonic Ideal Businessman, I'd like to get rid of employer-provided coverage completely. For one, I only got into this business of providing health benefits in the wake of the post-WWII wage freeze, so that I could compete for employees. 'Tis your fault, Mr. Politician, for ditzing up the market in the first place. Two, as a business, this emerging idea about a patient's "bill of rights" scares the grits out of me. What, am I gonna get sued or held liable for some medical plan I don't even want to offer in the first place? Oh heeeeeell no. Also, I'd love to boost my stock price by spending those dollars allocated to health more productively elsewhere. So all things considered, I'd rather just hand my employees a bag of gold coins and let them buy their own damned insurance.

Now let's look at it from the worker's perspective. 1) If I have a middle- to low-income and didn't have employer-provided health insurance under the old system, then this is a great idea! 2) If I'm well-to-do, I sort of get screwed. Ha! But whatever.... Um, right. 3) Now what if I have a middling income and my employer already provided insurance? Well, I'm going to be worried that my new insurance policy—which I may have to hunt for on the open market—won't be nearly as good. If I have serious health problems, then I don't like my chances on the open market at all. Maybe my employer will still provide coverage (in which case my healthy co-workers, lucky chaps, get to foot my bills). But maybe not. So what then?

The solution, to make both employers and employees alike happy, is to welcome the end of employer-based coverage. To compensate, let's be good liberals and simply regulate the open insurance market—so that sick people aren't left with higher premiums and the young/healthy don't drop out. I think this could be done without too much pain. First, mandate that everyone gets coverage. This is tough to enforce, but perhaps not catastrophically so. Also, figure out how to convince the poor to take advantage of health care. Somehow. Third, change the underwriting process so that insurers can only take into account, say, age and gender to come up with their premiums. Or hell, force them to offer everyone the exact same price. That way insurers would have to compete based on value, rather than the time-honored practice of offering insurance to everyone except Fatty. And since premiums would be static, companies would have incentive to increase their copayment rates, which presumably will lower health care costs.

The downside is that the insurance companies who happened, unluckily, to take on a bunch of diseased blokes run the risk of going bankrupt. We don't want that, so we set up some sort of reinsurance system for catastrophic costs. John Kerry proposed a very expensive one, which I think was a good one, but maybe we could do it through some sort of "Healthy Mae"-type private system, I don't know. But this is just a turn of the monkey wrench.

We're almost there! La-Dee-La...

Now the final problem. What sorts of benefits are these folks on the open market going to get with their subsidies? What sorts of contracts are they going to sign? We don't want a government-mandated benefit package that's very specific—otherwise you stifle innovation. (Or you get utter weirdness ala Medicare.) We don't want a package that covers everything, or costs will shoot through the roof. But we also don't want a package that covers only some things, or insurance companies will find a way to weasel out of their obligations to the very sick.

The solution, I think, comes from Tyler Cowen, who proposes—brace for it—a cost-monitoring bureaucracy to patch up this problem. Namely, third-party arbitrators—who can decide whether "whether an insurance company covers reasonable expenses or instead screws over its customers". When even libertarians back this sort of scheme, we know our work is done. So with a few tweaks, yes, Andrew Samwick has a very good idea for fixing the health insurance system.

This chart doesn't lie. By the way, here's my main concern about the whole Social Security debate, inspired by Greg Ip's Wall Street Journal piece today. Here we are, babbling on about the coming Social Security shortfall, when there's a massive and very catastrophic Medicare crisis also looming. Very catastrophic.

Ip estimates that the Social Security deficit could reach around 2 percent of GDP in 2080. Odds are it will be much, much less, given decent labor force and productivity growth. But Ip also estimates the Medicare deficit to be 10 percent of GDP in 2080. 10 percent! (The sum total of all federal taxes is ~20 percent of GDP right now.) And odds are the Medicare shortfall will be much, much more—medical costs have a way of catapulting out of control. Oh, and we haven't even discussed Medicaid yet...

Now as Atrios says, if our backs get pushed against the wall sometime in the future, we can always slash Social Security benefits. It's no big deal. But we cannot just hack Medicare benefits. What do you do, tell seniors to reduce their prescription by 75 percent? Only get 75 percent of a hip transplant?

So screw Social Security. It will get fixed if and when it needs to be fixed. Medicare is the only problem worth talking about. And yet the president wants to borrow lots of money, completely hamstring the federal government for a decade or more, and not do a damn thing about Medicare. Why? If I'm being chased by a bear, and I have a gun, I'm not going to run around bagging pheasants. Yet the Republicans are running around obsessed with bagging pheasants. But crikey. It's a bear, people...

Via Ezra Klein, Digby has a brilliant little essay on what liberals need to do to combat the Republicans. (Namely, combat the damn Republicans!) Good stuff. But here's the thing: I've seen plenty of these sorts of essays in the weeks following the election. Hundreds of them. And I imagine I'll be reading even more of them—and nodding at their collective brilliance—for years to come. But what I haven't seen, and what I don't expect to see anytime soon, is anyone actually taking these scraps of wisdom to heart, tucking them under their arm, and going out and putting them to good use.

Here's what I mean. The liberal side of the commentariat—let's include blogs, think tanks, op-ed writers, television pundits, and flagship political magazines—is enamored of meta-commentary. We all just love to analyze the State of American Politics Today, come up with our grand theories, and dish out clever advice. Indeed, the mark of distinction these days falls on whoever dishes out the most clever advice, rather than on whoever uses the clever advice most effectively for political ends.

So we have lots of brilliant bloggers suggesting: "Pit American liberalism against Islamic Fundamentalism." Or: "Let's get in the habit of calling Republican moral elitists." But no blogger's thinking to themselves, "Hell yeah, I'm going to put that into practice every single day, even if I think it's kind of silly, because it's going to work!"

Or take a more substantial issue—take Social Security. I may have missed it, but I never saw a protracted period of conservative wrangling over how best to "frame" the Social Security debate. All I saw was the Heritage Foundation and Sean Hannity and David Brooks out there, unfurling their canvas paeans to private accounts, talking about how liberals are afraid of the market. It's as if they sat down in private, figured out how they wanted to present the issue, hammered out the details, and then came out in public with their strategies coordinated and battle-axes sharpened. Meanwhile, on the liberal side of things, I've seen Josh Marshall, Atrios, Marshall Wittman, The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The New Republic, and even the Democrats themselves publicly hemming and hawing over ingenious schemes to win the rhetorical battle. (Let's leave Mother Jones out of this because, um, that's my fault.) Paul Krugman is an important recent exception—but only, I think, because he's had a lot of practice on this. His earlier columns on Social Security had just as much "Here's how we should all think about this debate" as actually wading into the debate and duking it out. Too much "Let's do it this way." Too little: "Yeeeeaaaargh."

What I'm getting at is that the liberal side of the commentariat is very analytical, even philosophical, about politics. There's of course nothing wrong with being analytical. It's the spice of life. The problem is that it's the main mode of liberal discourse. Liberals send out their strategists to fight these public battles when they should be sending out the 1st Infantry Division. At least.

And yet, at least among the liberal side of the blog-world, this isn't likely to change. Liberals seem to like musing and analyzing. Even Atrios, who surely ranks as the top warhorse around these parts, does a lot of meta-analysis about liberal strategy and the like. Yet we almost never see this thing on the Corner, or on PowerLineBlog, or on Hugh Hewitt's site. They seem to keep their meta-musings to themselves, using blogging not as a form of exploration, but as a form of combat. They seem to grasp better the various perlocutionary effects of Thinking Aloud to Oneself—namely, that it's a form of weakness, in some ways.

So how to fight this off? Or, to reply to Mark Schmitt's post about trial balloons, who do we really expect will fight these battles?

Unfortunately, success here would probably involve turning a lot of liberal thinkers and commentators and bloggers into hacks. The change, I'm afraid, would be drastic. Consider, for a moment, Peter Beinart's "A Fighting Faith". As brash and ill-considered as some might think it, was still essentially a meta-commentary. He called on Democrats to consider purging the MoveOn wing of the party; he did not directly say "you're outta here" to MoveOn. There's a difference, morally—but also strategically. No one really wants to see the New Republic or the American Prospect become hack party organs. We want them to telegraph liberal weaknesses, and hem and haw over strategy, because we're interested in that sort of thing. I know I am.

Still, it's a problem that this hemming and hawing is very much done out in the open—splashed across op-ed pages, criss-crossing the internet, barked out in various forums and conferences. Ideally, liberals would have some central planning committee, do all its framing and meta-analysis and pondering there, and then palm off the finished product on a few foot-soldiers.

Obviously I'm exaggerating somewhat, but this is the advantage, I think, that the Republicans have. They really have those central planning committees, or something approximating that sinister ideal. The Tuesday morning meetings with Rick Santorum and K Street lobbyists provides one such instance. The cozy overlap between D.C.'s conservative think-tanks provides another. (From what I've heard, Heritage is particularly good at the two-step maneuver: crafting its messages in private and proliferating them in public.) Media is yet another: Reporters in the media may be liberal Democrats, but the news chiefs and producers are quite often Republican. More to the point, the conservative media outlets coordinate their messages better. Look at the Fox News memos—this sort of centralized command is vastly more effective than a hundred liberal reporters all "spreading their liberal agenda" separately, each to his or her own drummer.

Now, I promised a talk about open-source politics in my post title, so here it is. The future of the Democratic party, we're told, lies with the internet and bloggers and all the wonderful and brilliant commentators on Daily Kos. In one sense, this future is bright as can be—barring groupthink effects and the like, a swarm of internet denizens will be very good at analyzing What Ails the Left and producing apt solutions. Less clear, however, is their ability to use those solutions on the battlefield. In other words, if you want to produce good ideas, unleashing the wisdom of the crowds is the way to go. If you want to fight a war, however, you want a more rigid command structure.

Now maybe the solution is simply to employ these sorts of hacks—covert "man on the street" types who go on TV and shamelessly hawk partisan positions. Maybe what seems like a deep structural dilemma—as I've tried to portray it—is nothing more than a need for better organizational tactics. I don't know. Maybe after a good night's sleep I'll be able to crank out 1000 more ponderous words on this. Because frankly, I'm just a meta-commentator without much aptitude for actually doing something.

UPDATE: As Oliver Willis points out via e-mail, I forgot to mention one obvious (and, I think, quite brilliant) exception.

Matthew Yglesias points out a paradox: If schools in one region start to improve, then all the rich families will move in, property prices will shoot up, and all the poor families will have to leave. Thanks a lot, eduwonks. On a related note, I'd add that the "bidding war" for houses in neighborhoods with good schools gets brutal on the middle-class pocketbook. But bid parents must, since the main consideration for any family buying a house will be the local school system.

But the solution here is fairly obvious: Sever the link between where a family lives and where a family sends its kids to school. Institute some sort of public school voucher system that allows families to send their kids anywhere they want within a district or reasonable geographic location. Families can then live in crappy neighborhoods and still send their kids to good schools elsewhere. And, conversely, if a school in some crappy neighborhood suddenly becomes excellent, the only thing that will happen is that some high-achieving suburban kids will get sent to the school—which would only improve the school without the gentrification effects Matt's talking about.

Ideally, by the way, public school choice would operate within certain boundary conditions—for instance, each school has to set aside no fewer than 10 percent and no more than 30 percent of seats for kids who qualify for subsidized-lunch programs. Or whatever works. Unfortunately, there are also real commuting issues here, and how to ensure that, say, property tax revenues get to where they need to go. But this is why we have think tanks, hoho...

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki notices an intriguing little development: The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has found that states do not have the right to offer tax credits and other such subsidies in order to woo businesses (because, according to the Constitution, only Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce). Surowiecki thinks this is a good thing, since these state subsidies a) distort the market, b) divert funds away from more productive uses, c) often don't succeed in luring business anyways, and d) provide "fertile ground for cronyism and political favoritism."

Okay. Now set aside the legal merits of this case—I haven't a clue what the issues are. But assuming that the Supreme Court declares such subsidies illegal, then the question of whether this will be a good thing or not depends entirely on Congress. If senators and members of the House decide that no, we really did need those subsidies, then they'll take matters into their own hands and usher in a new age of pork like nothing we've seen before. If "location-based incentives" were inefficient when doled out on by state governments, consider how disastrous they'll be in the hands of Congress. On the other hand, if Congress decides that it needs to improve the general economic climate of the country, rather than rely so heavily on subsidies to do the job, then the Sixth Circuit's decision will be a very good thing indeed.

Lawrence Kaplan applauds the White House's decision to purge the State Department of all dissenters and troublemakers:

Rice, after all, would be well within her rights to "clean out" the State Department. ... There's no reason it shouldn't function more like the military establishment, whose professional ethos depends on the principle of strict subordination to political control--disagreements may exist, but once the president arrives at a decision, the matter has been settled. Needless to say, no such ethos animates the ranks of the diplomatic corps...

In 1966, then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk asked Yale Professor Chris Argyris to conduct a study explaining what ailed the Foreign Service. His report described an "inbred club" whose members resist outside direction and "focu[s] more on protecting [their] department than on making effective decisions." In 2001, the bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security portrayed the State Department as a "dysfunctional" institution whose Foreign Service officers could use a "needed reminder that this group of people does not serve the interest of foreign states, but is a pillar of U.S. national security."

We hear the same complaints about the CIA—it's too hidebound, too wrapped up in its own interests, too rebellious. But the thing is, these all sound like structural problems -- in need of a structural solution, rather than simply firing all personnel every four years. Consider this: If you're in charge of an NBA team, and nobody's scoring, you purge your roster and get new players. But if you're in charge of an NBA league and nobody's scoring, you change up the rules.

Not one, not two, but three government officials decide to leak to the Post the fact that the Bush administration has been wiretapping Mohamed ElBaradei's phone calls. Evidently more than a few people are standing in ElBaradei's corner—but who and why? And more importantly, what does this have to do with the White House's forthcoming Iran policy?

As ArmsControlWonk pointed out a few weeks ago, "anonymous intelligence sources" have been trying for some time now to leak reports that Iran is cheating on its agreement with the IAEA by purchasing beryllium in bulk, and has accused the IAEA of not following up on the matter. (Note, the intelligence here comes from the MEK.) They floated this allegation first in September, and then in December, after the IAEA reached an agreement with Iran. They're coming up again today, as Iran is expected to resume nuclear talks with the EU.

For now, leave aside the (very relevant) question of whether beryllium is actually the crucial bomb-making ingredient the U.S. claims it is. What's important for the politics of all this is that ElBaradei has dismissed the charge as a technical detail, as "gutter allegations", and is even now suggesting that the beryllium experiments are part of a civilian program. There are two ways to read this refusal: One, that ElBaradei's reticence here "smacks of an effort to conceal something" (The Washington Times theory); or two, that ElBaradei no longer trusts U.S. intelligence to "keep looking" for damning evidence—not unlikely, considering the debacle on Iraq's WMDs, wherein ElBaradei was jerked around in late 2002 to hunt down a program he and his team had destroyed a decade ago—and he wants to avoid any needless confrontations.

So let's bring this back to the Post story above. Three "government officials" are leaking information to put the White House in an unfavorable light in this whole dispute—especially since "the intercepted calls have not produced any evidence of nefarious conduct by ElBaradei." That would seem to drive a stake through the Washington Times theory—that ElBaradei is downplaying the beryllium charges to protect or collude with Iran. Now does that also mean that these officials think that the beryllium allegations, along with other U.S. intelligence that Iran is covertly pursuing a weapons program, merely amount to so much bullshit driving the country towards yet another war? Maybe. As I said before, much of this depends on how crucial beryllium really is

What's crucial, however, is that the IAEA and the White House apparently don't trust each other, and have been slow to get on the same page intelligence-wise. John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, along with the Washington Times, seem to think the problem lies with ElBaradei. Others—ElBaradei included—seem to think the problem lies with Iran hawks in the White House. Seems like an important dispute to try to resolve, no?

There's so much Social Security commentary out there, I can't keep up. (And silly me, I took a whole day off from the internet yesterday to go watch sea lions flop all over each other. Really!) But I'm going to stick with my preferred frame for this debate: Namely, there are two separate issues here. Issue A is that Social Security will likely run a deficit at some point in the future, either because benefits will exceed payroll tax receipts (maybe), or because the federal government is running a whopping Bush-created deficit and can't pay back money it's borrowed from the trust fund. Issue B is that some people want private savings accounts. Notice that creating private accounts obviously addresses Issue B, but it's completely unrelated to Issue A, and in fact makes the problem worse.

Now if you asked me what I wanted to do about Social Security, here's what I'd say.

First, take a look at Brad DeLong's graph, comparing the yearly balances of the Social Security trust fund with the yearly balances of the general fund. Straighten that out—take every Social Security dollar off-budget. Now notice we have a federal budget deficit approaching $1 trillion by 2012. Treat that as a (breathtaking) problem with the general fund, which it is, and act accordingly. If the federal government wanted to borrow money, invest it in the stock market, and use the returns to pay off its General Fund debt, fine, see what the voters think about that, but at least do it in an honest and straightforward way.

Okay, now second, notice that the Social Security program itself is now solvent for another 40 years, maybe more if we have modest labor force growth and productivity over that time. So leave it mostly alone. On the off-chance that we don't get the labor force growth and productivity we need, Dean Baker has the right approach:

If productivity growth falls back to the 1973-95 rates predicted by the trustees, I would propose a tax increase at the rate of 0.025 percentage points annually (on both employee and employer) for the twenty years from 2025 to 2044. A total increase of 0.5 percentage points on each side by 2044.

Or we could start looking seriously at Andrew Samwick's sensible proposal to raise the retirement age. As Baker has insisted time and time again, this is a problem that should be left to future generations, and the best thing to do is to "maintain decent educational standards," so those future generations can figure out for themselves what to do.

Third, there are some minor, very wonky adjustments that I think ought to be made to Social Security right now. Workers with low lifetime earnings, for instance, get very paltry benefits at the moment. To maintain the "safety net" aspect of the program, we could say that minimum-wage workers who meet some reasonable criteria could receive SS benefits at least equal to the poverty line at some point in the future and above it thereafter. (Details here aren't that important.) Meanwhile, the benefits for elderly widows should be increased, perhaps paid for by reducing benefits for high-income couples while both are alive. I'd also like to see some sort of payroll taxation formula that raised the maximum taxable earnings base to around its average level (ie: somewhere between where it is now in real terms and where it was in 1983). Finally, about 4 million state and local government workers do not take part in the program—they should be brought in.

So after dealing with Social Security's insolvency, then we could start talking about the Issue B—namely, private accounts. Personally, I'm not convinced there's any good way to do private accounts that could a) take advantage of the equity premium, b) avoid hefty administrative costs, c) insure against risk, and d) eliminate the need for a safety net. But I am convinced that this issue should be dealt with separately from the question of Social Security's supposed shortfall.

Afterthought: Just to clarify, what I would recommend on Social Secuirity obviously won't be the same thing as what I think The Democrats should recommend. In fact, I think that private accounts may have to come in to play in order to make any Democratic proposal viable (since private accounts are very popular).

In response to the accusation that the Republican party has a strain of anti-intellectualism coursing through its veins, Stephen Bainbridge replies:

In other words, conservatives are stupid. Wrong again. As I also pointed out in my TCS column, Data from the widely used General Social Survey (GSS) consistently show that Republicans are better educated than Democrats (on average, they have more than half a year more education and hold a higher final degree). In addition, Republicans score better than Democrats on two tests included in the GSS. As for Chait's argument that conservatives are anti-intellectual, how about all those fine public intellectuals who write for opinion journals like Policy Review, Commentary, or First Things, to name a few? Or how about all those policy wonks working at places like AEI or Heritage?

As Henry Farrell points out, quite the non-sequitur—no one's saying that conservatives are stupid, merely anti-intellectual. But Bainbridge then clarifies, insisting that his data in fact proves that: "There are a lot smart conservatives out there interested in intellectual matters and the life of the mind." But his data shows nothing of the sort.

Having a college degree, in itself, does not necessarily indicate any interest in the "life of the mind". It could just as easily mean that Republicans value the instrumental aspect of education -- that it helps one earn money or influence people or whatever -- quite apart from any "interest[] in intellectual matters". The fact that a lot of conservatives work at AEI or Heritage (moreso Heritage) proves that a lot conservatives are very smart and want to use their brains in pursuit of some political end. It does not mean these folks value knowledge for its own sake, or that they would be happy to engage in a little disinterested reflection about the world and its funny ways. But the latter, it seems, is what academics ought to enjoy—a dose of irrelevant intellection from time to time. Even in a perfect world, without liberal bias or any other hiring discriminations, I imagine that the vast majority of people working at Heritage now would still work at Heritage. They're different worlds—and not different like soccer and football are different; it's the difference between playing in an orchestra and writing ad jingles. Each attracts widely different types. Any argument otherwise would have to summon up considerably more relevant data than anything Professor Bainbridge has given us.

Today's Post retrospective on Tom Daschle's Senate career deserves a look. Reading through it, I sometimes wonder if the Democrats—nay, add the whole country here—might have been better off if they had never ousted Trent Lott in late 2002. After all, the fact that the GOP's new figurehead, Bill Frist, owed his job to the Karl Rove ushered in an era in which the Senate GOP became a faceless extension of the president's will and command. Lott, for all his warts, would have never let that happen, at least not to the degree we're seeing now.

Frist's incompetence as a leader, meanwhile, and his party's subsequent inability to get much of its agenda passed, drove the Senate GOP into such a fury that it lashed out by becoming, in essence, a pure campaigning machine. Frist couldn't get an energy bill passed, so the GOP decided that the solution was to use gay marriage and flag-burning to try to trap the Democrats. Frist couldn't get leaders to agree on a budget, so votes were manipulated to play "gotcha" games with Kerry and Edwards. On a substantive level, I can't imagine either party prefers this state of affairs—though Republicans might enjoy the election-day victories that came with it.

On a related note, I'm not entirely convinced that the Shiite unified list that will dominate the new Iraqi government will be so influenced by pro-Iranian fundamentalists. Look at who the likely new Shiite leaders are going to be. There's Hussein Shahrastani, a former nuclear scientist and a moderate close to Sistani. There's Ahmed Chalabi, who could be an Iranian stooge, but mostly seems to pledge allegiance only to himself. Adel Abdul Mahdi, the current Finance Minister, is going to have a prominent role -- he's another moderate, and a shrewd capitalist to boot. Same with Ibrahim al-Jaaferi, a pro-Western technocrat who hails from al-Da'wa party -- which officially opposes the Iranian concept of vilyat al-faqih or rule by clerics. I'm not sure if Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, the current national security adviser, is on the list; I bet he is -- if so, he's a very pragmatic leader who's committed to pluralism and has a lot of links to the exile community, along with his personal friendship to Sistani.

The wild card here is Abdul al-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and the first name on the slate. SCIRI's pro-Iranian leanings are subject to some debate, I think. The party originally broke away from Da'wa precisely because its followers believed in Iranian-style clerical rule. Aziz al-Hakim has publicly praised the vilyat al-faqih before, but one of SCIRI's prominent scholars, Hamid al-Bayati, has said that clerical rule would be "inappropriate for Iraq." Meanwhile, SCIRI defied Tehran hardliners in early 2003 by backing the American invasion.

So I don't know. I'll have to see the full list (where can I find one anyways?) but I don't see the dark grip of Tehran here. Reports have also indicated that Sistani put a lot of independent candidates on the list, unaffiliated with anyone party, which would make it hard for Iran to exercise a good deal of influence. I'm sticking with my theory that Iran's hawkish mullahs will generally aim to destabilize Iraq (hence the support for Ansar al-Islam and other Sunni terrorist groups) and won't be overly psyched for this bunch.

(I also think Allawi's going to throw a serious judo flip on the whole process pretty soon. They are, after all, counting the absentee ballots in Amman, where the Hashemite monarchy has to be aching for Allawi to stay in power.)

Matt Yglesias thumps Charles Krauthammer with a sandbag full of hindsight. Funny stuff. But he's a bit too quick to mock Krauthammer's assertion that "Shiism is not a hierarchical religion." Shi'ism isn't a hierarchical religion, and this distinction matters quite a bit.

When Krauthammer was writing, in May 2003, it looked like Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim -- the older brother of the current SCIRI leader -- would be top dog in Najaf, over even the more distinguished Ali al-Sistani, if only because Bakr al-Hakim had broader popular support. (Remember the cheering crowds that greeted his return?) It may seem like a foregone conclusion now, but Sistani only really became the undisputed alpha cleric when a) Bakr al-Hakim was blown to bits by Zaraqawi & Friends and b) Sistani smacked down the Americans over our wacky little caucus scheme, endearing himself to millions. But Sistani's authority is not absolute, nor is it universal. It could wane if he loses the respect of his followers—there was real danger of that during the August showdown in Najaf, though Sistani happened to handle it brilliantly. (It helped that the U.S. military shredded through the Imam al-Mahdi Army and forced Sadr's hand.)

It's best, I guess, to think of Shiite religious authority in terms of overlapping spheres of influence. Sistani happens to have a Godzilla-sized sphere at the moment, so when he speaks, all ears perk up.

Meanwhile, if Sistani were to die, then yikes, who knows what would happen? None of the five remaining Grand Ayatollahs (Muhammad Said al-Hakim, Muhammad Fayed, Bashir Najafi, Muhammad Taqi al-Mondarresi—or maybe even al-Haeri in Qum) have much political support, so we would see a lot of jockeying, back-room dealing, backstabbing. Even Sadr, pitiful as his "ranking" may be, could come out on top in this struggle, with the right mix of gunmanship, maneuvering, and popular support. (Though I think his army has dwindled significantly.)

This holds in Iran too -- Khamenei, as far as I know, hasn't attained Grand Ayatollah status, and never will. (He's a laughable scholar, from what I've heard.) If the Shiism was as rigid as, say, the Catholic hierachy, Hussain Montazeri would have ascended to "Supreme Leader" status post-Khomeini, and Iran would probably be our ally by now. But all Montazeri's authority got him was a fuck you and house arrest. Same goes for some of the other Grand Ayatollahs in Iran. The "hierarchy" depends entirely on who stabs who in the back. In part, this is because Iran's a theocracy, and in theocracies religion tends to get subsumed into politics. But Shiism also lends itself to these sort of intricacies.

Anyways, way too much information here, but Krauthammer was kind of correct at the time. Sistani outmaneuvered everyone in a way that would have been hard to predict back then.

Some time ago -- and no doubt everyone was chattering about it then -- Joseph Siegle, Michael Weinstein, and Morton Halperin butted heads (to form an acronym: SWH) and wrote an essay called "Why Democracies Excel", in which they set forth to refute the "wrong-headed" notion that economic development needs to precede democracy. No, no, say SWH: The festering countries of the world do much better when they democratize first and ask for cash later. Therefore, SWH go on, the IMF and World Bank should bias their aid towards democracies, and the U.S. and others should promote democracy before development. That's the rule.

Now it just so happens that instinctively I agree with this premise. As I wrote yesterday, the data in the Middle East, at least, suggests that by eradicating corruption and bolstering the rule of law, countries can set themselves down onto the fast track towards sheer globalized bliss. Forget those free trade fixes! Political reform is where it's at. That sounds good to me. It makes my neocon heart flutter.

But... I'm also not at all convinced by SWH's argument. And since SWH are apparently influential hotshots, I guess it's worth taking the time to rap them the knuckles. So... indulge me.

To make their case, SWH stack poor autocracies with poor democracies side by side, finding that the latter do at least as well economically, and much better socially (people live longer, send their kids to class, grow better fruit, etc. etc.) But this whole exercise tells us nothing about what individual countries can actually bear. Egypt, to be sure, could use a the political equivalent of a kick in the autocratic ass, and good might well come of it. But would this ass-kick work on, say, Angola? Oh wait, they tried that in 1992; it went to shit. Why? Perchance because Angola suffers from "the resource curse". So okay. In these cases, "resource curse" cases, mightn't the country be better off developing economically -- through World Bank, etc. programs that spread the wealth about more equitably --before easing into democracy?

The crux is this: Does the resource curse hinder democracy or can democracy ease the resource curse? Joseph Stiglitz says yes to the latter. But these economists think otherwise. The truly important thing, though, is that I don't know and SWH's cross-country comparisons certainly aren't helping me out.

Then we sometimes catch SWH mixing up cause and effect. They argue, for instance, that democracy doesn't actually enable factionalism and armed conflict, as per CW, by noting: "poor democratizers fight less frequently than do poor authoritarian nations." Eh? But couldn't you reverse the causal arrow here, and say that regions prone to conflict are in turn less likely to democratize? Aren't there century old reasons why Yemenis get ornery? Why should we believe that democracy will cure that?

Oh yes, then we're treated to a long sermon on why being a democracy encourages growth. Honestly, it's okay, I don't need the banner-on-the-blimp to figure this out: free media, transparency, all that good stuff spurs innovation. I get it. But that's not what we're talking about. No one's wondering whether autocracies are better than democracies. They're not. We're wondering which path is better and easier: democratization via economic growth, or economic growth via democratization. Or better yet: We of course know that autocracies bog down economic growth, but is this bogginess better or worse then whatever pitfalls come from foisting democracy on an unready country? To this, SWH give no love -- nor answers.

Listen, if anyone has figured out how to wave a magic wand and promote democratic reform without all the pitfalls -- like, y'know, civil war, or "one man-one vote-once" -- then sell us the damn wand and be done with it. But otherwise, we'll assume those pitfalls are real; so this debate needs to be conducted at a far more specific level, figuring out course works for each particular country. Or sorts of countries. Questions for discussion include: How do you solve the resource curse? How do you know if a country needs more democracy or more development? Yes, it's not always either/or, but maybe sometimes you need to put a grubby finger on the scales. How do we know if a country is in danger of becoming an illiberal democracy, and can a gust of economic development -- or liberalized trade -- nudge that country on the right course? And on and on.

Josh Marshall:

I don’t think we can deal with the issue of Democrats, national security policy and the war on terror, without addressing Iraq front and center and recognizing just what a disaster our enterprise there has become. This isn’t a secondary issue.

Now that's right. But there are ways in which that's right and ways in which it's wrong. I tried to get at some of the differences in this longish post over at Mojo.

Simply splitting up the camps into "hawks" and "doves" and reviving the old feuds of 2002 and 2003 doesn't do much good. Not just from a "political" standpoint, but from any standpoint. It's much, much easier to wipe the slate clean, come to a consensus on the actual lessons learned on Iraq, figure out what we now know and what problems now exist, and move forward. This mushy approach isn't very morally satisfying -- the Peter Beinarts of the world still want forcefully install a backbone into those weak-kneed lefties, and the Atrios's of the world still want to gut the liberal hawks for cravenly giving in to the neoconservatives -- but obviously this doesn't get anyone very far.

Moreover, we're simply not going to invade and occupy another country with the aim of imposing democracy anytime soon, so this isn't a debate we absolutely need to have. Especially insofar as it obscures current national security concerns -- so in this sense, Iraq is a "secondary issue," pace Marshall.

The Muslim prison population in Europe is swelling in size. Prisoners are treated unfairly. Proselytization is frequent. Clearly indicative of some larger trend or event. But what?

Apropos the below post, and especially apropos Ian Buruma's essay on the prospects for Islamic democracy, a few questions. First, what exactly do we mean by "democracy"? Obviously an Athenian-style demokratia differs from a U.S.-style representative republic. Philosophers will find these questions painfully basic, but hair-splitting like this really doesn't come up all that much in politics when we're talking about "spreading democracy" 'round the world. The White House, for instance, didn't seem to give all that much thought to the structure of the Iraqi legislature, and in part that was because Ali Sistani blindsided the CPA, but in part it was because no one seems to have parsed the concept of democracy very well.

This sort of semantic cloud, I think, makes a fetish out of "democracy" and especially "freedom", without asking what these things are actually good for. Are they ends in themselves? In Iraq, obviously not—from our view "freedom", et al, is meant only to create stability and temper radical Islam. That's our yardstick for whether it's working. For a good many Iraqis, though, the success of democracy may depend on whether it furthers or strengthens certain Islamic values. That's quite another yardstick. The dangerous temptation is for a person to split the difference and use "freedom" or "legitimacy" itself as a yardstick—which Bush tends to do, and pundits like Krauthammer sometimes do—but that degenerates into incoherence pretty quickly.

Robert Looney, of the Naval War College, has to be one of my favorite analysts around, but I've never seen anyone contradict themselves as thoroughly as he does in the latest issue of Strategic Insights. Let me explain. The paper in question asks why globalization has eluded the Middle East, and it's worth following Looney's argument closely.

Like any good globalization analyst, he starts by determining what, exactly, we need to mean by "globalization", and follows the KFPGI index by hacking it up into four parts: technology (esp. internet); political engagement abroad; facilitating personal contact with foreign countries; and economic integration. After a bit of technical fiddling with the various indices, he suggests that Middle Eastern countries that decrease their corruption by improving the rule of law tend to pave the way for a general increase in globalization. (Note that he's not just talking about correlation; there's strong reason to think causation holds here.)

Meanwhile, when Middle Eastern countries merely liberalize their trade policies, they do see an increase in technological globalization, but too many of them do "not possess[] the domestic institutions" necessary to take advantage of the new opportunity. Without the proper rule of law, etc., open trade policies tend to cause a lot of domestic turmoil in the Middle East, which in turn gives globalization a bad name. (And it has a horrible name over there…)

So far, so good. But then Looney concludes by saying that, while improvements in governance "have the greatest pay-off at the present time," these are probably too difficult to foist on Arab regimes—even those "liberal" regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco—so the U.S. should just stick with trying to promote an open trade policy, which maybe, possibly, might improve political globalization. The End.

What?

No, really. What?

Okay. Keep that rather odd about-face in mind, and let's hop over to politics. The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Bush administration is officially backing away from pushing political change on Arab countries. Instead, it will opt for the low-key "European" approach—small business initiatives, some support for legal aid and civic education, blah blah blah. But oh! Nothing drastic, you see, because that will only make us more unpopular than we already are.

This, I think, is a mistake. The problem with Bush's Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI) was never that it pushed for political reform. No, the problem was the way it was done. The GMEI basically amounted to a series of high-sounding principles that imposed themselves on Arab countries from up above. But the last thing the region needs are more principles. They've got charters and constitutions and principles from here to eternity. Principles mean sweet fuck all, quite frankly. What's needed is a mutually-agreed-upon framework for dealing with the problems of the region: namely, the hordes of angry young Arabs disillusioned by the present state of affairs and ready to blow stuff up.

No, what the United States should have done—and what it should do now—is to identify concrete political issues—legalizing political parties, holding national elections, expanding the power of legislature—and work out with Arab nations what specific steps they can take to improve on these fronts. But this needs to be a two-way dialogue—which means the U.S. will have to start discussing security issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. I know the Bush administration's collective skin would crawl to hear this, but America needs to listen to the concerns of Arab nations—even the short, brutish, and nasty ones—and put some concessions on the table.

Looney had it right at first—changing the rule of law and forms of governance in the Middle East will go a long, long way towards "globalizing" the region. It's hard work, sure. But "hard work" was what we elected the man to do, wasn't it?

Oy. Computer's experiencing a massive slowdown. Mozilla. Word. Email. They've all rebelled. Anyone have any idea why that might be? Me neither. Anyways, since this means my productivity's getting a major kick in the junk, I'll probably limit all blogging to the Mother Jones site today. Maybe more posts in the afternoon or somethin'.

Dean Baker offers a reason for Christian conservatives to oppose Social Security privatization -- namely, that they would be forced to invest in immoral companies (especially if the private accounts were invested in some index fund.)

To be sure, that's clever, but I don't think you can "trap" Christian conservatives like this. I'm going to generalize a bit, but Christians in the United States -- especially evangelicals -- have very much become entrepreneurs in their own way. Evangelical megachurches don't money so that they can give to charity; they raise money in order to invest in themselves, to grow and expand and satisfy its congregation, like a corporation maximizing shareholder value. From my experience, individual Christians approach wealth much the same way -- you make money not so you can go out and make the world a better place, but so you can make yourself a better person, and a better Christian. Put simply, it's an investment in yourself as a Christian.

There's a long history of this sort of doctrine -- from the Pentacostalists (see, for example, A.A. Allen's popular books on the scriptural guide to financial success) all the way to Rev. Ike's "Thinkonomics" today. To outsiders, these "prosperity preachers" and "prosperity Christians" look like hypocrites, but they follow a logic of their own, and there's no way to convince them that Jesus Christ really wanted us to give up all our earthly belongings and live sparely. This seems like the trend -- I used to think that you could, at least in theory, drive a wedge in the Republican party between the libertine Wall Streeters who celebrate individualism and the more community-based religious right. But the two camps are slowly fusing their beliefs into one coherent ideology.

The NYT tells me that Donald Rumsfeld is "the oldest defense secretary in the nation's history." Boy Howdy! And that John McCain could be older than Reagan if he ran for president. Wee! Zip! Bang! Honestly, though, why are they including this bit of information? To imply that these folks are all decrepit old freaks, unfit for command? Hmmm? People are living longer these days, growing older, medicine is awesome. We're bound to start seeing presidents older than Reagan, and defense secretaries older than Rumsfeld. It's really no big deal.

(Okay, yes, Donald Rumsfeld is unfit for command. But it has nothing to do with his age...)

As Noam Scheiber notes, it's tough for people to explain why they respect Antonin Scalia ("even if he's conservative, he's still brilliant") but not Clarence Thomas ("he's... uh... I think...") without sounding a wee bit racist. But the easy answer here is that Scalia believes in stare decisis (the notion that one ought to respect precedent), and Thomas does not. That makes Thomas a wild card, a radical, and one scary dude.

(According to David Garrow, though, some of Thomas' decisions betray a more muted tone. See United States v. Lopez, where Thomas says he'd be willing to interpret the Commerce Clause in a manner that reflected recent history: "Although I might be willing to return to the original understanding [of the Commerce Clause], I recognize that many believe it is too late in the day to undertake a fundamental reexamination of the past sixty years." Of course, many believe is not quite the same thing as I believe, yeah? And mightn't he feel more emboldened if a few more judges felt the way he did? Hence the worry at nominating another Clarence Thomas-type judge!)

Steven Malanga points out what seems like a pretty fatal flaw in Tom Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?—namely, that Kansas isn't doing all that poorly in economic terms. Some of his stats could be red herrings (employment rates don't necessarily tell you all that much about how a state's doing [what if the jobs all suck, say?])—but if you look at the 2004 Census data, Kansas' median income is above the national average, it has more people insured than average, and fewer people in poverty. So it seems wrong to say, as Frank does, that Kansans are ignoring their own economic misery and voting purely on cultural issues when there isn't, in fact, much economic misery.

On the other hand, a lot of red states are sucking wind economically. Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia. Maybe Frank had the right idea, then, but just applied it to the wrong state. (As an added bonus, those other states have been known to actually respond to economic populism -- way back in the New Deal era -- whereas Kansas toed the conservative line through all the big realignments of last century.)

Of course, the correct way to look at this isn't always at the state level. The crucial question for politics is whether a key bloc of swing voters is a) doing rather poorly on economic issues, and b) voting Republican on cultural issues. Kansas voted for Bush by quite a bit, but it ultimately wasn't that many people who actualy swung the election, and the stories of those people could easily be "hidden" in the state-level data. Improbable? Aye. Not impossible, though.

Kevin Drum has some more terrorism stuff for liberals to think about. It's late, and I'm tired, so I won't go into this too much right now, but here's yet another foreign policy question to ponder: What is our military actually for?

All through the 1990s, it seems, the Pentagon couldn't come up with a good answer to this question, and it led to a lot of problems. Top strategists -- and a lot of neoconservatives, note -- believed that we needed to have a robust, high-tech military to face off against a robust, high-tech adversary (China, perhaps?), and also that we needed to fight a two-front war. So the Pentagon viewed the little forays into Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and elsewhere as a distraction -- something that bogged the military down and left it unprepared to fight its two-front war against high-tech adversaries.

Nowadays, though, it seems clear that we're not going to go up against a high-tech adversary anytime soon. China? No. Russia? No. It's not even clear that we need the two-front war doctrine, given that the high-tech wars we actually could fight -- against Iran, or North Korea, probably won't actually be fought. Iraq looks an exceptional case in all respects. In hindsight, it seems like the minor interventions into Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and elsewhere in the '90s were exactly the thing the military should have been trying to do all along. Especially since that sort of peacekeeping and nation-building is the biggest challenge today, as seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we don't have the right kind of military to do it.

Anyways, a lot of liberals these days have been fretting that our army is "bogged down" in Iraq, or its "overstretched." But too overstretched to do what? What should the military be doing instead? It seems silly to say that we should be preparing for (or discouraging) a colossal war against China, as neoconservatives did in the 90s. It also seems silly to say that we should only use our armies for "self-defense." Face it, we'll never have to use our armies for self-defense, in the classical sense of the word. We have nukes for that. The United States will only ever use its army proactively. What, then, should it do?

The question matters because it obviously determines what kind of military we have. But, by extension, it also determines what kind of foreign policy we pursue. As the saying goes: When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like nails. Well, right now we have a military geared towards conventional warfare against nation-states, so rogue nation-states like Iran and Iraq are, naturally enough, our main problems, and deposing regimes with our "shock and awe" weaponry is the preferred solution. On the other hand, if we had a military geared towards intrastate warfare and peacekeeping, then it's likely that we'd see the genocide and civil war-type states in Africa as bigger problems than we do now. And so on.

Good news! "Private Firms To Chase Delinquent Taxpayers". Not because this is good policy; oh heavens, no. But I did a wee bit of reporting on this subject a long while back, and I've been, um, secretly waiting for the issue to resurface so that I can finally write the story. Ah, journalists and their perverse incentives...

Matt Yglesias has a fun post on red states and blues states, bringing up a statistic I don't think I've ever heard before -- that red states tend to give more to charity than blue states. Fair enough, though since "states" make for an extremely coarse topology on the set of all Americans, this tells us little, of course, about liberals and conservatives as people. It could be the case that a bunch of lavish Democrats are responsible for the vast bulk of charity in the red states; there are after all millions and millions of liberals residing in those states. Odds are this isn't the case, but you never know.

More fun with coarseness: As the LA Times reminds us today, Bush might try to end the tax deductions for state and local taxes. Republicans are sniggering about the fact that this will put the hurt on "blue states," since those states tend to pay the most in state and local taxes. The problem is that a lot of wealthy conservatives also live in those blue states, and they're all going to get hurt by this. Even though it's obviously a Gore/Kerry state, California was still Bush's biggest donor in 2000, and probably came close this year. Bad, bad news for Jeb's campaign coffers in '08.

Here's a liberated version of Geoffrey Garrett's excellent globalization article in the current Foreign Affairs. Garrett argues that both very wealthy and very poor countries have made out well by embracing free trade; but middle class countries, such as Latin America or Eastern Europe, have not. These countries are stuck in limbo -- they're not advanced enough to compete in high-tech markets, but they have too high wages to compete with China et al in the low-tech manufacturing markets. So they just suffer, and free trade alone won't cure what ails them.

Anyways, Garrett suggests the solution for these limbo-dwellers lies with education and training, allowing them to "tech up" for the changing world. (Also, they ought to developing sophisticated banking systems, property rights, and better regulations.) Maybe that would work. But dude, what if it doesn't? Garrett never asks whether some sort of selective protectionism or strategic trade or (heavens!) central planning might actually do these countries some good. As I recall, it seemed to do wonders for the East Asia tigers in the 1950s-60s; so why couldn't a bit of protectionism work for these countries?

Now here's my card: I'm definitely a free trader by temperament -- which merely means, as it does for any non-economist, that I'm more "sympathetic" to flashy promises of dynamic growth than I am to images of workers toiling in sweatshops. That's all. Still, this sort of vague emotional position won't always match the facts on the ground, and if Garrett's right, it seems that middle-class countries simply can't find a niche in the world market. If they were businesses, we'd let them go bankrupt, die, and celebrate the creative destruction. But you can't just do that to entire countries. So we have ourselves a bona fide market failure; the question is whether it can be fixed through better education and local regulations, or whether more drastic intervention is needed.

This New York Times article seems to imply that Hillary Clinton could never get elected president -- too many people hate her, you see. But perhaps Hillary's smarter than we think:

Mrs. Clinton offered a revealing answer when asked recently whether Republicans might be hoping that she becomes the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, since it would give the G.O.P. a divisive figure to run against.

Mrs. Clinton - who studiously avoids answering questions about her presidential ambitions - quickly responded. "We have a president who is quite polarizing - and very successful, I might add," Mrs. Clinton said during an appearance on NBC's "Today."

She might be onto something. No really! See, there are a lot of theories on why Bush won in 2004, but one plausible theory holds that liberals whipped themselves up into such an anti-Bush frenzy that they couldn't actually put forward a positive progressive agenda. As Andrew Sullivan likes to say, Bush-hatred only helped Bush. In an evenly divided political landscape -- and in an age where, as Jon Chait says, personality matters more than policy -- running as a polarizing figure may well be an advantage insofar as it turns your opponents into raving lunatics. Clinton herself saw that in the 1998 midterms, when Republican anti-Clintonism turned so frothy that the GOP lost a good deal of credibility -- and a good deal of seats.

Hillary Clinton would also attract a great deal of negative attacks, and contra much conventional wisdom, I think negative attacks actually tend to backfire on the attacker. The "flip flopper" stuff certainly hurt Kerry over the summer, but it also allowed him to set the bar so low that he exceeded expectations during the debates and pulled even in the polls. Meanwhile, the "dumbass" attacks hurt Bush in 2000, but he likewise benefited from the low expectations they created. Clinton would probably garner a bunch of "cold, calculating, woman" attacks, but I think in person she's very good at shattering that caricature.

So there's your secret weapon -- divisiveness. I should note, though, that divisive politicians don't tend to be good leaders. Visit your friendly neighborhood House Republicans to see what I mean.

Praktike observes a new theory making the rounds:

I noticed a new argument being formulated by [AEI neoconservative] Reuel Marc Gerecht... that in order for democracy to work in the Middle East, the fundamentalists have to take control, obviating the need for radicals to use violence, and allowing Islamism to discredit itself just like it did in Afghanistan and, increasingly, Iran.

This isn't a bad theory, though it needs some tweaking. The first step, I think, is to view Islamic fundamentalism as a radical response to the secular dictatorships of the Middle East—in Egypt, in Iraq, in pre-1979 Iran, in Saudi Arabia—rather than as an outgrowth of Islam proper. That is, Islamic fundamentalism took such a reactionary form precisely because it has been thrust into a reactionary position, especially under the Nassers and Mubaraks and Assads of the world who have marginalized or even persecuted religion. In order for Islam to stop taking such reactionary forms, then, it needs to find a public outlet—and the "moderate" Islam espoused by the an-Najaf hawza in Iraq could provide just that.

If I understand praktike, though, Gerecht is proposing something slightly different, saying that radical Islam should be allowed to govern, so that it will discredit itself and hence give way to secular reformists like the "third wave" movement in Iran. Strangely enough, they aren't advocating any such thing in Palestine. But no matter! The real problem here is that when this new, non-Islamist movement comes to power, it could in turn marginalize Islam, which could then once again take radical forms in the sidelines. And we're back to square one. We've seen a very attenuated form of this "cyclical effect" in the United States, with the radicalized Christian Right coming back with a vengeance in the 1980s after a long period of (relative) secular dominance.

Note: This also explains why I'm against funding secular education in the Middle East, at least on the order that John Kerry proposed. Some secular funding is of course fine. But I think there are real dangers in driving a fresh wedge between modernity (in the form of secularism) and the Islam preached in the madrassahs. We've been down that route before, with Nasser or Shah Palavi. Better to try a Hegelian synthesis.

Many scholars will cite Turkey as a triumph of secularism over Islam; I don't know enough about Turkey's history to draw historical parallels. Still, the key conditions that seemed to lead to the secular revolution in Turkey in the 1920s—a brilliant leader in Ataturk, an interventionist military—seem to exist only in Pakistan, and nowhere else. (And Musharraf is a good deal less brilliant than Ataturk was.) I doubt that sort of thing will work anywhere in the Arab world. Turkey also has had the carrot of EU membership to help blunt the rise of Islam in recent years. Algeria is another example, though Algerian-style civil war may not appeal to everyone.

For a symposium on how Islam can converge with democracy, rather than give way to it, see Khaled Abou El Fadl's brilliant essay in Boston Review (my previous employer!).

One of these things is worse than the other:

a)An economic slowdown that would result from raising taxes enough to close the deficit and preventing the dollar from declining even further.

b)An economic slowdown that would result from the interest-rate hikes made necessary by the rapidly declining dollar.

At what point does it become clear that the U.S. may have to pick from the least bad of these options? Pretty soon, it seems.

Digby has some commentary on the right-wing crusade against "liberal professors". The real problem, though, is that the professor in question was a bad professor who also happened to be liberal. When David Horowitz or whoever trots out these examples, he is of course trying to conflate the two categories to score political points, but he's also obscuring the more important issue, which is poor-quality teaching. That sleight-of-hand is the only reason Horowitz and co. are getting any traction on this.

A defense of substance abuse, please note, should not be the first thing one writes in the morning. But I've been reading the commentary on Barry Bonds' steroid use, and it seems that every pundit out there wants to take his records away, or put an asterix by then, or simply consign them to oblivion. Not only do they want to do this, but they see it as the obvious thing to do.

Huh?

Not one sports pundit has offered any sort of reason why steroid use, in itself, would taint someone's records. One objection might be that it's "unnatural". But players these days do all sorts of unnatural things to their bodies. Had Bonds really been rubbing arthritic cream on his skin, and not steroids, he would have still enjoyed an "unnatural" advantage far beyond what Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron ever had.

Another objection is that steroids are illegal. But they're illegal for the same reason crack cocaine is illegal: the state is trying to prevent harm to the user and others. Not because they bestow "unfair" advantages in breaking records. No one put an asterix by Daryl Strawberry's numbers for skitzing on crack. What's the difference, morally? So Bonds is willing to accept bodily harm later in life for sportsly glory now. Isn't this what every single professional athlete in known existence does? Isn't that the point?

The only compelling objection is that Bonds broke the rules, and baseball exists only insofar as it's a bunch of rules strung together for some fan-pleasing purpose. Fair enough, though according to this story the league didn't even start testing for steroids until last season. At most, then, Bonds should get an asterix for that one season, and then be forced to retire -- for the awful example he's set for future generations of young children. (I mean, asterix or no, what will we tell the children?)

I realize that smirking at Adam Yoshida is so 2003, but merciful heavens, read the latest post, the one that opens with: "Frankly, I sometimes fear that our society is too 'civilized'." It goes on to admonish the world for (I think) not expressing enough moral outrage over a Tom Clancy novel. Yada yada yada, some bits about brown people taking over Europe, yada yada yada. Ooh, then it ends on a creepy note! "I have developed a program for ensuring long-term American dominance." Why, I thought, you little devil. You haven't. But no, he has.

On second thought, don't read his latest post; take a peek at this instead. You read that right: clingfilm. Somehow it all fits.

Bizarre essay by Chip Ward on carnivores. Apropos of nothing really, the best vegetarian anthem I've ever heard is Dear Leader's "Billions Served". (Well, more of an anti-fast food song than anything else, but whatever.) Nothing comparable in favor of carnivores though, that I know of.

Q. So if you indexed Social Security benefits to inflation rather than to wage growth, wouldn't that mean that the income drop-off from work to retirement becomes steeper and steeper over time?

Why isn't that a problem again?

(Er... devoted readers will recall that I've advocated something similar in the past. Even provided some historical context. Yes, true. But the rule is: once all the cool kids get on board, the contrarian pen flashes from its scabbard, and I'm obliged to ask naive-sounding questions.)

To the battle stations! Michael Powell's defense of FCC censorship has suffered a good deal of ridicule around the internets. Much as I'd like to pile on, this isn't my area of expertise. (My morality take, though, is that a little boob from time to time is good for parental discipline—a stern lecture with the kid every time Janet Jackson flashes the screen would create a powerful positive reinforcement against sex. Unless, of course, you don't watch TV with your kid. But then geez, spend some time with the fella!) However. However—this paragraph caught my eye:

When the commission makes the determination that a program is indecent, we typically fine the licensee that broadcast it. Although the commission has the authority to fine an artist personally, we have never done so nor do I support doing so. Over the years, fines had become trivial. A routine violation generally received a paltry $7,000 fine, with the maximum fine being $27,500.

But why not fine the artists instead of the licensee? If an artists feels that his or her indecency is worth a $7,000 fine, he or she can should be able to go through with that indecency anyways. Or raise the ante: Any indecency worth $27,500 is bound to be some high-quality indecency! Under the Powell Doctrine, meanwhile, artists don't put much thought at all into the quality (measured in economic terms) of their indecencies, and fines levied on licensees merely leads to unfortunate chilling effects.

Meanwhile, for those worried about artists not being able to afford their fines, never fear, we can always create a large, private-funded charity for the support of obscenities. Remember, originality counts. "Fuck you" won't cut it. "No-talent ass clown" is pretty good though. I'm also open to some sort of cap 'n' trade system.

Lee Feinstein on the proposed reforms to the United Nations. Again, all of these reforms -- expanding the Security Council, defining terrorism, figuring out some way to let peacekeeping missions do their work -- are good and noble solutions to current problems. But there's not much talk about what the UN is actually for.

After World War II, the UN was set up to prevent strong states from invading weaker states and protect sovereignty. Today, that's not a problem, insofar as strong states don't tend to invade weaker states (Iraq did it, but that's a single data point, and the UN only prevented it because the United States decided rather radically that we should start getting involved in the Middle East.) The exception, of course, is the United States, which does invade weaker states. But as long as there's only one superpower, the UN is never going to thwart the United States. Some of its lesser goals -- promoting human rights, development, health care -- are good, but if the UN is going to be nothing but a global charity, then it really ought to set itself up as a global charity and not waste time doing other stuff. Maybe the UN should do more than charity; fine, but let's be clear about defining those goals.

Praktike has a few much-welcome criticisms of the liberal foreign policy sketched below:

In general, I think he's missing one key dimension: Democrats need to regain the moral high ground, which can't simply be done by embracing a fairly wonkish and boring set of ideas. The other problem is that these are things that Democrats already sort of support. It wouldn't be news.

On the first issue, I'm not sure we disagree, honestly, although the wonky and boring ideas are of course important (Neoconservatism, after all, started as a set of wonky and boring ideas). The second criticism is that "these are things Democrats already support." But that's the whole jig, isn't it? A liberal foreign policy should embrace pre-existing liberal ideas, putting them together into one-all encompassing, competent vision. It wouldn't be "news" in the sense of shocking the beltway (as a denunciation of the UN would), but it would be news to the vast majority of people who have no idea what the Democrats actually stand for on foreign policy. Getting all of the disparate liberal groups together, working on one common foreign policy vision, is, I think, more crucial right now than doing something shocking to wow swing voters.

Also, praktike's not arguing this, but let me say again: The Democrats are never going to appear more "hawkish" than the Republicans on foreign policy so long as they're pursuing the exact same goals. There are a few relatively painless ways the Dems can earn a bit of hawkish street cred—calling for reform at the UN is one of them—but there's limited room to manuever that way.

Great post here about America's system of public diplomacy, it's history, it's constraints, and what could be done to change it. So wonky it's ludicrous.

Since I hate just linking to things without comment, let me also note, unrelatedly, that the truth of the allegations against Galloway is important insofar as the "evidence" against him came from the Ahmed Chalabi-linked Iraqi Oil Ministry. The same Oil Ministry that's producing many of the accusations in the Oil-For-Food scandal...

Right then. Let's talk Islamic terrorism. Adding the usual caveat about nuclear terrorism -- and that's a boulder-sized caveat -- Kevin Drum's surely right about one thing: No Islamic insurgent group poses an existential threat to the United States. Granted, much of this debate depends on how strong groups like al Qaeda actually are. Kevin linked to some evidence the other day that al Qaeda doesn't pose the threat we thought it did. But then there's sundry counter-evidence that al Qaeda has become decentralized. I'm not an expert on terrorist groups, so I can't really say. Anyways: the strength of al Qaeda isn't necessarily the point.

What is clear, however, is that when considered in the aggregate, the larger combination of rogue states, failed states, and insurgent groups do pose something of an existential threat to the United States.

Now I don't mean this in the sense that Rogue State A will give a nasty weapon to Terrorist Group B that hails from Failed State C so as to nuke the United States. That's possible, of course, but I'm thinking more about the thousand cuts that can come from the unintegrated, largely chaotic region of the world that Thomas Barnett calls "The Gap". The cuts could come from an influx of radicalized immigrants into Europe; or constant conflicts in Africa and the Middle East that demand American intervention and end up badly draining our resources; or the constraint on First World economic growth that inevitably comes with a recalcitrant and recidivist Third World; or regional problems that can create tensions between the U.S. and its superpower neighbors (China, the EU) that eventually lead to confrontation. Any and all of these would be existential threats.

In essence, I'm echoing Robert Kaplan (in The Coming Anarchy) and Thomas Barnett (in The Pentagon's New Map) in seeing the entire un-integrated "Gap" or "Third World" as one giant foreign policy threat that needs to be dealt with comprehensively. The Islamic world is obviously a big part of this, but focusing thusly is much too narrow. The unit of focus here ought to be that entire half of the globe where the international order is either broken or non-existent. Islamic insurgents are a threat to this order, but so are lots of other things -- militias in Africa, poverty, fascist movements in India, dwindling natural resources. A liberal foreign policy, I think, ought to shuffle two steps back and take all of this in.

Pause for a second: This may be right on the merits, but would the Democrats be doing the smart political thing to try to take on this broader challenge? I think so. The thing is, it's not enough for the Dems to simply agree with Bush's goals (spreading democracy in the Middle East, defeating Islamic insurgents, disarming rogue states) and then quibble over the methods. The party will never distinguish itself in that way; the "easily-duped median voter" theorem inevitably kicks in, and voters will not discern a clear alternative here. To present that clear alternative, the Democrats need an entirely different set of goals. Bigger goals. Better goals.

With all that in mind, a Democratic foreign policy should have, in my opinion, these basic (and briefly-sketched) aspects:

1) A new conception of multilateralism. The international institutions we have now need a serious upgrade. This will entail creating new security arrangements that deal more effectively with rogue states such as Iran, proliferation networks such as AQ Khan's shop, and peacekeeping operations as in the Sudan. Maybe it means creating a new "league of democracies". It also entails, crucially, using international institutions to promote convergence among "Core" states, to prevent problems like we've seen in the Ukraine.

2) Integrating the "Gap" into the "Core". This is Thomas Barnett's territory, but it's the right way to think big. Notice that this involves not only democracy promotion, but also weaving rogue or failed nations into the sort of global institutions (such as the WTO) that promote liberalization. Trade policy goes here. Rather than using trade as a "carrot" for our allies or as a means of creating "regional blocs", as Zoellick has done, it should be used for assimilation purposes. Borg-style.

3) Not letting America fall behind. For this, see Adam Segall's recent essay on how America may be losing its technological dominance. Here Democrats really have an advantage—they can harp on not only GOP-created deficits, but the need for education, health care, and other investments to make sure we have the growth and stability necessary to undertake this sort of massive foreign policy endeavor. You can file an expansion of the military under this prong if you want.

4) Proportional intervention. This is going to be the most controversial aspect for liberals. What I have in mind is something proposed by Robert Kaplan, where the U.S. should make a policy of intervening in "trouble spots" where it thinks conflict or anarchy is likely to develop -- heading it off before it happens. The criteria to consider here are ease of intervention, strategic value, and the psychological leverage gained by intervening. (Iraq would fail on the first.) Again, if the U.S. conceives of troubled spots like the Sudan as part of the global security threat, then intervention will be a de facto intervention in the "interest of national security."

5) Strengthening "global governance" Here I'm deferring to Ann-Marie Slaughter's book A New World Order. I can't possibly summarize it in one post (read the intro here), but needless to say, integrating the "Gap" into the "Core" will require the sort of inter-government networks she describes. Law-enforcement vis-à-vis terrorism also goes here. So does preventing nuclear proliferation. So does promoting an international labor movement in non-integrated states, a nice idea Beinart touches on.

6) A focus on development. Liberals have always been big on international development. But it's never been part of a comprehensive foreign policy. (Although liberal hawks like Biden and Holbrooke have begun to think along these lines, in re: support for secular education in the Middle East. I disagree strongly with this specific policy recommendation, but it's the right idea.) A development-oriented foreign policy should entail not only aid for democracy-promotion, but also aid for things like population control, women's literacy, and resource-renewal projects that prevent phenomena like militant Islam (or Hindu fascists, or Angolan pirates) from arising in the first place.

Needless to say, there's nothing overly radical or new about all of this. But I truly think it all ought to fit together into a vision that's larger than Islamic terrorism. (Without, of course, trivializing the immediate threat from Islamic terrorism, whatever it may be.) The good news is that much of this jibes nicely with much of what Democrats already do and believe. And point #3 above plays nicely into the hands of a liberal domestic agenda. True, it's the ultimate starry-eyed "Make the World A Better Place" vision, but I don't think it's unrealistic.

But maybe I'm wrong—maybe it's too broad, or won't fly with American voters. This is merely a start; I'm open to suggestions.

So Peter Beinart's kicked off a discussion on how Democrats should think straight on national security. There's a lot to be said on this, but first, it's worth asking to what extent the specific events of the last four years should drive a Democratic vision for foreign policy. After all, much of this debate over unilateralism vs. multilateralism has worked within the conceptual bounds of the Iraq war -- in which a multilateral institution found itself unable to enforce its own resolutions, and unable either to stop or to legitimate an American invasion. But surely that was a very unique situation, made even more unique by the current disaster in Iraq. Barring a nuclear attack, we're simply not going to invade another country anytime soon, nor use our military in any large-scale pre-emptive capacity.

The point here is that those arguing that the United States needs to find itself some better sources of legitimacy, for instance, aren't really forward-looking in any meaningful way. Surveying the scene, there are no "rogue states" that could a) plausibly pose a threat to the United States and b) be invaded. This type of situation is no longer a big foreign policy issue. "Legitimacy" is no longer a concern in the same way. (Multilateralism is, but it too needs to be reconceived.)

Unfortunately, the Iraq war dominated the 2004 campaign, and John Kerry was forced to talk about what he would have done in that situation. So he did, and his answer was incoherent, but any answer would have been a bad one insofar as it would have focused almost exclusively on a special, one-time-only situation.

More to come... obviously there's a "terrorism" aspect to foreign policy that hasn't been addressed.

At long, long last I've figured out how to… um… purchase music over this fantastic World Wide Web device. Whole CDs in fact! (He means "pirate".) Ye-e-es, I mean "pirate". Not since my glory days in a small, very wired, college town have I had this sort of capability! So here we go; some albums downloaded over the past few hours:

The Get-Up Kids -- "On a Wire"
The Arcade Fire -- "Funeral"
The Faint -- "Wet From Birth"
The Shins -- "Chutes Too Narrow"
The Fatales -- "Pretty in Pixels" (These fine Interpol-esque blokes actually have a website from which you can download a few mp3s.)

Strange to say, but the definite article figures pretty heavily into all this. Suggestions, of course, are always welcome. One exception: Classical and/or jazz of any stripe (not because I dislike it, far from it, but I'm badly surplussed in this department.)

Wading through The Century Foundation's Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action, I stumbled upon this bit in Chapter 6: "The 9/11 Commission's recommendation of an outside, civil liberties board should be adopted."

You see this sort of thing everywhere, but it reminds me of a point I've been meaning to make. The significance of the PATRIOT Act, I think, should not be understood in terms of its actual policy content. For the most part, the act reiterated a lot of intelligence-sharing and warrant stuff that already existed prior to 9/11, but simply wasn't being taken advantage of. A lot of the new provisions, meanwhile, that really raise the hackles of civil liberties groups—allowing federal officers to seize medical, business, library, and educational records, for instance—don't do a whole lot of good.

The real significance is all in the politics. After 9/11, remember, it would have been possible to make some significant tweaks in law enforcement and surveillance policies in order to make the FBI and others far more effective at home. Even the liberal consensus at the time was trending towards a policy that curtailed some civil liberties in the interest of security. But George W. Bush apparently wanted a politicized act that would drive liberals into a Bush-hating frenzy and hence "weak on terror", regardless of how inappropriate the actual policy was. It worked, and as Peter Beinart has pointed out, the result has been bad for liberals. But it's also been bad for national security, since we no longer have anything like a consensus on how to balance counterterrorism and civil liberties. A "civil liberties board" as proposed above shouldn't be necessary—these things tend to hamper and intimidate domestic intelligence over time—but that's the price you pay for divisive policy.

Pursuant to thinking about multilateralism, I recommend reading this essay (PDF) by Steven Simon and Jeff Martini of RAND, on whether international norms against terrorism can be used to help cut off popular support for an insurgent group like Al Qaeda. They say yes, and the argument's a decent one. Spreading these sorts international norms, however, is a trickier matter, and I'm not sure it gets done simply by getting the UN to agree on a definition of terrorism. Top-down stuff matters, but so does the furthering of international standards along "horizontal" lines—which requires some other form of multilateralim entirely. What, though?

Why the president misunderestimates "multilateralism". Hopefully the first of many posts on the topic. I should add that inevitably there are going to be times when the U.S. "goes it alone", and it may even be the right thing to do. But in those cases, the exceptions should prove the rule, rather than shatter it.

More crucially, whatever the path foreign policy takes over the next few years, the U.S. would do well to encourage dissent from the UN. If France and Germany are opposed to this or that action, it may well be because they genuinely believe it's a bad idea. That's important: Even if France and Germany also happen to have darker, ulterior motives for opposition, that certainly doesn't mean they're wrong about it being a bad idea. World leaders know a lot about the world, and their judgments are worth sounding out, especially since, in the case of Iraq, it doesn't seem like France and Germany were entirely wrong about the "bad idea" bit. This, I think, is where the ballyhooed "global test" matters: Even if you don't think you have pancreatic cancer, it's worth asking around and getting a second opinion. (Or whatever... the analogy's obviously not the point here.)

James Joyner also believes that Iraq is not truly in a civil war, as I argued below. Much of this debate may seem rather pedantic, clutching at definitions, but it matters for U.S. policy. If you think the worst-case civil war scenario is what we're already seeing, then it may make sense for the U.S. to withdraw. But if you think—as I do—that the real worst case scenario is a civil war in which the worst elements of the Sunni insurgency could actually take over the country, then you sort of have to think twice about the whole thing.

Just what I need... Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do). For the record, I violate all of these -- I'm not proud of it, but then none of us are. Also, at times I've resolved to stop using the hyphen altogether; it's superfluous and moderately barbaric (akin to hurling a spear from one clause to the next). But it's such a good option when one can't figure out whether a semicolon or comma is the best option. Ho hum...

UPDATE: Oh yes, I meant the "emdash", not the hyphen. Meanwhile, Ezra quotes from a rousing defense of the little bugger: "By its very shape the dash pushes the sentence ahead and explains why they decided to keep going." That's correct, I guess, but it's also plainly wrong. Using the dash to "keep going" is like running the 3k, faltering halfway through, and then digging deep for a burst of energy that lurches you onwards, stumbling towards the finish. You get there, sure, but it's painful to watch. Far better to train ahead of time and run the whole race smoothly, using, um, only commas... and semicolons... Oh whatever.

Our new Commerce Secretary, Carlos Gutierrez, claims he's experienced the fruits of a Bush-style "ownership society". But look at his bio:

Gutierrez said he left Cuba as a political refugee in 1960, joined Kellogg Co. of Battle Creek, Mich., by selling cereal out of a van in Mexico City, and became Kellogg's president and chief executive in 1999. He said his experience shows him that Bush's vision of an "ownership society" is "real, and I know it's tangible."

Let's see. Got a leg up during the early days of the Great Society, toiled around in middle management all through the Reagan era, and then finally got a chance to be CEO in 1999, when Clinton's high marginal tax rates were supposedly "stifling" corporate America. Another welfare state success story!

In more important news, the Post reports that top economists like James Poterba and John Cogan are all declining jobs with the Bush administration. Noam Scheiber suspects they're put off by the lack of influence they'd inevitably have. Or maybe they just want to get through life with their reputations intact...

Some new angles on Ukraine. (By the by, "Ukraine," and not "The Ukraine." Hmph.) Fistful of Euros complicates the situation as only a Euro-watcher can, noting that: 1) Ukraine's economy has been so integrated with Russia's that some splash of Russian influence will persist for some time. 2) Insofar as it needs tangible goods like money and security, Russia wants to be part of the West. Insofar as it needs intangible goods like "National Pride," Russia wants to distance itself from the West. 3) Ukraine will not join the EU anytime soon. Oh no. But, the EU could learn to accept "privileged partners" that build bridges to peripheral states like the Ukraine. However, Slate pops in to add 4) Apparently Leonid Kuchma tried for years to cozy up to the West, and was rebuffed. 5) Even if Yuschenko does get elected, he'll spend so much time compromising with nationalist elements, that he won't get very much in the way of reform done.

Now add them all up. "Democracy," vaguely defined, isn't any sort of solution for Ukraine, since any democratic leader would get dragged into this rather taut tug-of-war. What's clearly needed is some way to slacken the tug-of-war, to harmonize (somewhat) the interests of Russia and the West, so neither feels the need to meddle. All this is rather banal and obvious -- Tom Friedman banal and obvious -- but it's part of the whole "democracy abroad" deal. And, as I keep promising to spell out, UN-type international institutions are a better way of reaching that harmony, as opposed to relying on cordial understandings between leaders (in this case Bush and Putin).