JustOneMinute

Obama Won't Question My Patriotism

We are reassured to learn that

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Monday he will never question others' patriotism during the race...

Right - his advisers were no doubt chomping at the bit to besmirch McCain's patriotism, confident that the American public would see past McCain's tired war hero gambit, but Obama stood on principle.

Let's note (hmm, with Karl at Team Protein) that this new non-questioning is a flip-flop for Obama, who felt comfortable passing judgment on the patriotism of others not so long ago:

“Somebody noticed I wasn’t wearing a flag lapel pin and I told folks, well you know what? I haven’t probably worn that pin in a very long time. I wore it right after 9/11. But after a while, you start noticing people wearing a lapel pin, but not acting very patriotic. Not voting to provide veterans with resources that they need. Not voting to make sure that disability payments were coming out on time.

“My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart. And you show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who served. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and our ideals and that’s what we have to lead with is our values and our ideals.”

Whatever.  We have no idea who this guy is - let's elect him President so we can get to know him better.  (This idea for bringing us closer to Obama and vice versa never caught fire).

Swift Boats Are Back And Lipscomb's Got 'Em

Kate Zernike of the Times gets a front-pager deploring the use of the term "swiftboating" to mean "the nastiest of campaign smears".  Thomas Lipscomb, who covered the Swift controversies in depth back in 2004, trounces her.

To which I will add my one original contribution to this stew:  The latest response by Kerry's defenders mentions Kerry's controversial first Purple Heart on p. 12 (of 15):

The attempt to denigrate the circumstances of Kerry’s first Purple Heart, for example, is disproved by the two enlisted men, Pat Runyon and Bill Zaladonis, together with Kerry, who state categorically your so-called eyewitness, William Schachte, was not on the skimmer in the action that night. (Responding to this lie,
Zaladonis has quipped: “me and Pat aren’t the smartest, but we can count to three.”8) Should William Schachte ever consent to sit in a room with them, which he has thus far refused to do, or to be interviewed publicly with them present, which he has also avoided, they will offer further proof of his lie.

I would be curious to see what proof they could produce.  What has struck me is that Zaladonis was interviewed repeatedly by Douglas Brinkley prior to 2004 for Brinkley's "Tour of Duty" hagiography, and was also interviewed by the Boston Globe for their 2003 Kerry profiles.  Yet neither the Globe nor Brinkley elicited from Zaladonis that he first met Kerry during this incident that resulted in Kerry's first combat, Kerry's first medal, and was later described by Zaladonis as "one of the scariest nights I've had in my life".  Instead, Zaladonis meets Kerry a few days later as a crew member on Kerry's first PCF.

Deficient interview technique, twice over?  Or did Zaladonis only later decide that his story was even more impressive if he put himself in the boat with Kerry?  Zaladonis first appears with Kerry on the skimmer when the Purple Heart story was being criticized in early 2004. 

Neither Brinkley nor the Globe will be following up on this, and Kerry's War Notes (aka his journal) have not been made available so that we could see his contemporaneous account of his first combat and first medal incident.  And a Bonus Note - although it was his first medal incident, the medal was actually awarded later than some of the others (IIRC); the presumption is that Kerry pushed through the paperwork after some other officers had gone Stateside.

Thomas Lipscomb had more on Kerry's first Purple Heart (and my thoughts).

No, I Meant "Obamafuscation", Thank You

Google needs to get with the times.

And those times will shortly include the most glorious Obamafuscation yet, when Obama's February 2007 position on Iraq collides with the emerging reality of the summer of 2008.  Here is George Packer, author of The Assassin's Gate, writing in The New Yorker:

In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize. With the general election four months away, Obama’s rhetoric on the topic now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far.

The New Republic sees an opportunity for Obama to visit Iraq, pronounce himself to be well-pleased, and "reposition himself without appearing too shamelessly political".  Well, they would say that - I see an opportunity for McCainiacs to ask "If we are going to be fighting a war anyway, who do you want leading it?"  One hopes that will be widely viewed as a rhetorical question, but this has been an odd year.

MORE:  Our incredible, too-good-to-be-believed supersleuths have found a rough draft of Team Obama's statement on the success of the surge and Obama's new hope and change for Iraq:

My fellow Americans...  I have toured Iraq, I have talked with the generals who have worked tirelessly to stabilize this situation, I have talked with the fine American troops who daily make heroic sacrifices for freedom, I have talked with the Iraqi leaders and the Iraqi citizens who have suffered so much under Saddam Hussein and during this war of liberation, and it is time for me to report to you my latest and evolving thoughts.

In the winter of 2007 I denounced the Bush surge, opining that the additional troops could not quell the violence raging there.  However, I misunderestimated the energy and commitment of our fine soldiers.  I also endorsed the conventional view that the Bush Administration had committed so many errors that their venture to create a stable and democratic Iraq had failed.  It now appears that I also misunderestimated the incompetence of the Bush Administration, which has now been able to screw up an all-but-inevitable defeat and turn it into something that has the potential to result in - well, I can't say "victory", so let's call it 'non-defeat'.

This is grim news, I know, and I share the disappointment of many of my supporters.  But it appears that, despite Bush's many blunders and lies, we actually have a chance to win this ridiculous war, and I am not willing to be tarred for the next fifty years as the President who lost Iraq.  So, despite what so many may have interpreted at the time as my assurances to the contrary, I will not be setting a firm timetable for withdrawal of our troops.  I am now convinced that the situation in Iraqis fluid and our continued presence may provide the Iraqi government the vital breathing space it needs to build on its recent successes.

That or something like it.

Once Upon A Time You Wrote So Fine

How can I be expected to take Chief Justice Roberts seriously after this:

The last chief justice liked light opera. The new one cites Bob Dylan.

Four pages into his dissent on Monday in an achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long distance carriers, John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, put a song lyric where the citation to precedent usually goes.

“The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “ ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).”

When you got nothing?  C'mon!

...The Roberts citation is more problematic.

On the one hand, he showed excellent taste. “Like a Rolling Stone,” as Greil Marcus has written, is “the greatest record ever made, perhaps, or the greatest record that ever would be made.”

On the other hand, Chief Justice Roberts gets the citation wrong, proving that he is neither an originalist nor a strict constructionist. What Mr. Dylan actually sings, of course, is, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

It’s true that many Web sites, including Mr. Dylan’s official one, reproduce the lyric as Chief Justice Roberts does [So it does, at the Dylan site here]. But a more careful Dylanist might have consulted his iPod. “It was almost certainly the clerks who provided the citation,” Professor Long said. “I suppose their use of the Internet to check the lyrics violates one of the first rules they learned when they were all on law review: when quoting, always check the quote with the original source, not someone else’s characterization of what the source said.”

Nobody who has ever sung this song in the shower has gone with "When you got nothing you got nothing to lose".  However, I will not attempt to vouch for every live and cover version.

Ask A Silly Question

The pollsters at Gallup present a result that baffles me based on a question that perplexes me:

Americans Oppose Income Redistribution to Fix Economy

by Dennis Jacobe, Chief Economist

PRINCETON, NJ -- When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today's consumer, Americans overwhelmingly -- by 84% to 13% -- prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Well, geez - was "Both of the above" an alternative?  I can't be sure it was the specific question asked, but as best I can tell, this poll tells us that a vast majority think that improving general economic conditions will do more to "fix the economy" (quoting their question as presented in the graphic) than will be achieved by a government attempt to redistribute income.  Personally, I would love to believe that this means that a vast majority "oppose" attempts to redistribute income, as per the Gallup headline, and that may be the case.  But I don't see how the Gallup analysts can get there from here - surely there are respondents that think that redistributing income is a meritorious venture, but that improving economic conditions is a more direct way to "fix the economy" (whatever the heck that means).

In the time-honored tradition of leaving no dead horse unbeaten let me suggest this hypothetical poll, if time hangs heavy for the Gallup pollsters: ask Yankee fans whether they would prefer to (a) see the Yankees beat the Mets at Shea on this final Sunday in June, or (b) see the Yankees win the World Series this October.

My guesses - an overwhelming majority of Yankee fans will hold out for the World Series win, but Gallup will not headline an article with "Yankee fans oppose victory over Mets".

Oh, well.  Don Surber whacks Obama; Will Wilkinson connects this to support for education reform:

This is consistent with other polling data I have seen that shows that even as the percentage of Americans who claim to be concerned about income inequality has risen (as income inequality has risen), support for redistributive programs has been more or less constant. What you see instead is increased support for educational reform, suggesting a widespread belief that the problem worth worrying about is the ability of people toward the bottom to gain the skills they need to be successful, not the fact that some small percentage of people are becoming really fantastically rich.

Oh, I do want to see Obama dragged into a chat about his long history with education reform, with Bill Ayers at his side, with whom Obama first teamed up in 1987. As if.

The Great Equalizer

Gun rights equals gay rights - who knew?  From the Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Using the new judicial muscle provided by the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the right to bear arms, the National Rifle Association and another pro-gun group sued San Francisco and its housing authority on Friday to invalidate a ban on handguns in public housing.

...In an interesting turn in a city known for its embrace of gay rights, the chief plaintiff in the suit against the city is a gay man living in a public housing development, owned by the federal government, who wants to have a gun to protect himself from potential hate crimes.

...

A city of about 725,000, San Francisco has 12,000 residents living in public housing, all of whom are required to sign a lease that forbids a broad variety of weapons, including pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, automatic rifles, BB guns, as well as nunchucks, brass knuckles and stun guns. This blanket ban was begun in 2006, and the penalty for violation of the lease is eviction.

In the case filed on Friday, an anonymous gay man said that stipulation had deprived him of “any effective means of self-defense.”

A very clever choice of plantiff.

Megan McArdle explained yesterday that gun rights equals women's rights.

BONUS CHEAP SHOT:  The same folks who can read the Constitution and Bill of Rights and find an unassailable right to abortion and gay marriage can't find a right to possession of a firearm.

Catch That Tiger!

I concur.

MORE:  Now catch this Tiger.

Props To Megan McArdle Et Al

David Brooks writes on young conservatives:

Among the many dark tidings for American conservatism, there is one genuine bright spot. Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene.

These writers came of age as official conservatism slipped into decrepitude. Most of them were dismayed by what the Republican Party had become under Tom DeLay and seemed put off by the shock-jock rhetorical style of Ann Coulter. As a result, most have the conviction — which was rare in earlier generations — that something is fundamentally wrong with the right, and it needs to be fixed.

Moreover, most of these writers did not rise through the official channels of the conservative or libertarian establishments. By and large, they didn’t do the internships or take part in the young leader programs that were designed to replenish “the movement.” Instead, they found their voices while blogging. The new technology allowed them to create a new sort of career path and test out opinions without much adult supervision.

As a consequence, they are heterodox and hard to label. These writers grew up reading conservative classics — Burke, Hayek, Smith, C.S. Lewis — but have now splayed off in all sorts of quirky ideological directions.

There are dozens of writers I could put in this group, but I’d certainly mention Yuval Levin, Daniel Larison, Will Wilkinson, Julian Sanchez, James Poulos, Megan McArdle, Matt Continetti and, though he’s a tad older, Ramesh Ponnuru.

Ross Douthat and my former assistant, Reihan Salam, are two of the most promising. This pair has just come out with a book called “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

Go, Megan!  And I hope this picks her up a bit - I infer from this that she might be having a bad day:

There are many other near-surefire ways of killing yourself, like jumping off a high bridge, gassing yourself with carbon monoxide, driving your car at high speed into a piling, hanging yourself, etc. Think of it this way: most people who choose to wear high heels are women. That doesn't mean that if I threw out my Manolos, I would turn into a man.

Well, uhh, have a nice weekend.  If you survive it.

"Yeah, I Don't Do Cowering"

"Yeah, I Don't Do Cowering" - thus sayeth the President and Leader for Life of the Barack Obama Fan Club, as reported by the Times Caucus blog.

So let's see - Obama's FISA flip-flop was not cowering it was, uhh, tacking to the bipartisan center!

And shades of Ray Rector, let's check out the bloodthirsty Obama on the recent Supreme Court ruling barring the application of the death penalty in a child rape case:

Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said, “I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, that the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution.” He added that the Supreme Court should have set conditions for imposing the death penalty for the crime, “but it basically had a blanket prohibition, and I disagree with the decision.”

Is there a "Libs For Death" chapter in Hyde Park, or anywhere?  My goodness, his position seems awfully... expedient.  Does anyone think this ruling will prompt Obama to call for more judges like Alito and Roberts?  As if.  [And see MORE for Obama on judges.]

And what about the latest Supreme Court ruling striking down the Washington DC gun ban?  More Obamafuscation:

With the Supreme Court poised to rule on Washington, D.C.'s, gun ban, the Obama campaign is disavowing what it calls an "inartful" statement to the Chicago Tribune last year in which an unnamed aide characterized Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as believing that the DC ban was constitutional.

"That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator's consistent position," Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News.

The statement which Burton describes as an inaccurate representation of the senator's views was made to the Chicago Tribune on Nov. 20, 2007.

In a story entitled, "Court to Hear Gun Case," the Chicago Tribune's James Oliphant and Michael J. Higgins wrote ". . . the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he '...believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.'"

...

When Obama has been asked on multiple occasions to weigh in on the D.C. gun case he has regularly maintained that the Second Amendment provides an individual right while at the same time saying that right is not absolute and that the Constitution does not prevent local governments from enacting what Obama calls "common sense laws."

Although he has been willing to describe his general views on this topic, Obama has sidestepped the question of whether the ban in the nation's capital runs afoul of the Second Amendment.

Asked by ABC News' Charlie Gibson if he considers the D.C. law to be consistent with an individual's right to bear arms at ABC's April 16, 2008, debate in Philadelphia, Obama said, "Well, Charlie, I confess I obviously haven't listened to the briefs and looked at all the evidence."

That's leadership!  My goodness, is Obama running for President or imagining that he is being queried at a Senate confirmation hearing weighing his appointment to the bench?  Well, since he hasn't looked at the case it is hardly reasonable to ask whether he agrees or disagrees with the ruling.  Here is more "wait and see" waffling from Obama in the WaPo.

But he does not cower.

Jim Geraghty brings it together:

I expect a lot of discussion about judicial nominations on the trail in coming days, considering that four of the justices ruled that a state cannot sentence a child rapist to the death penalty, but that state can deny almost all of its citizens the right to own a gun. And when asked for his model justices, Obama listed three of those four...

MORE:  The LA Times and the NY Times assessed McCain and Obama on judges.  From the LA Times:

Obama has also praised current Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter. "I want people on the bench who have enough empathy, enough feeling, for what ordinary people are going through," Obama said.

...Whoever is elected in November will probably have the chance to appoint at least one justice in the next presidential term. The court's two most liberal justices are its oldest: John Paul Stevens turned 88 last month, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75.

McCain promised that, if elected, he would follow President Bush's model in choosing Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

In the normal course of events Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts wouldn't be expected to step down during an Obama administration.  However, Obama is committed to appointing more judges like Breyer, Ginsburg and Souter, presumably so that the Court can deliver more rulings with which he can disagree.

 

Score One For David Brooks

In the course of finding something good to say about George Bush, David Brooks said this about opponents of the surge in Iraq:

And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

Well, intellectual denial includes denial;as if on cue, here is Ezra Klein:

"the argument over the surge was never an argument positing that more troops couldn't lead to less violence."

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard finds Barack Obama making exactly this argument.  Ooops.

How does that go?  Those who control the past control the present, and the future is now!  Or some such.  But with Web 2.0 control of the past ain't what it used to be.

POKING AROUND:  Barack Obama was speaking with Olbermann and Matthews (transcript).  Here is Dick Durbin:

Twenty thousand American soldiers are too few to end this civil war in Iraq and too many American lives to risk on top of those we‘ve already lost.

From which a casual listener might infer that Durbin thinks that 20,000 additional troops won't reduce the violence.  Here is Obama, from the top:

OLBERMANN:  Were you convinced at all by that speech?  And if not, what are you going to do about it? 

OBAMA: Well, the one thing I share with the president‘s assessment is the belief that the American people and American troops have done everything imaginable that has been asked of them.  And they‘ve done a great job in difficult circumstances. 

I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there.  In fact, I think it will do the reverse:  I think it takes pressure off the Iraqis to arrive at the sort of political accommodation that every observer believes is the ultimate solution to the problems we face there. 

So I am going to actively oppose the president‘s proposal.  I don‘t doubt his sincerity when he says that he thinks this is the best approach, but I think he is wrong.  And I think the American people believe he‘s wrong.

And we are looking at a variety of options here in Congress to place some sort of conditions, some sort of meaningful consequences to the failure of the Iraqi government to meet the benchmarks that the president mentioned in his own speech.

Well, that analysis did not work out.  Just for starters, some Sunnis were already unhappy with Al Qaeda in Iraq and were happy to work with the US to subdue them.  It's harder to imagine that turnaround gaining momentum if US troops had been headed towards the exits.

The RNC provided a second example of Obama's prescience on the surge from Jan 23, 2007:

Obama Said “I Don’t Think The President’s Strategy Is Going To Work.”

Obama: “But right now what we have is, I think by all accounts, a disaster unfolding in Iraq. We all have a responsibility, Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the White House, to make sure that we can come up with the  best strategy. I don’t think the president’s strategy is going to work. We went through two weeks of hearings on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; experts from across the spectrum -- military and civilian, conservative and liberal -- expressed great skepticism about it.” (MSNBC’s “Reaction To The State Of The Union Address,” 1/23/07)

That is not a specific comment about US troops reducing violence, so today, Obama's apologists will want to claim that he was focusing on political reconciliation, which has occurred slowly but not up to Bush's benchmarks.

Do NOT Mock Obama!

Joseph Palermo of the Huffington Post gets so incensed that Jon Stewart mocked Obama's decision to opt out of public financing that he denounces Jon Stewart as having led us into war:

Sometime during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq I remember watching a comedy bit on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that drove home what a big joke the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq were. The segment featured the UN inspectors, who were at the time charged with unearthing Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, as a bunch of Keystone Kops running around Iraq tripping over their own equipment and being led around by their noses by the Iraqis who were obviously hiding banned munitions. The thrust of the satirical news story was to give viewers a laugh while they nodded in agreement that anyone who trusted these UN clowns to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq must be a fool.

Slamming the UN weapons inspectors as ineffectual twits dominated right-wing talk radio at the time and The Daily Show was in effect regurgitating the talking points of those who wanted to bring the country to war. Dissing the UN's efforts on Comedy Central inadvertently helped in make the case for war.

And that's why proper libs shouldn't mock Obama now, since it inadvertently makes the Republican case for McCain. 

Groan.  Does this mean the next four (or eight?!?) years will be humor free, at least from the left?  Not as long as Huffers step into the gap with quips like this:

Second, absent from the discussion about Obama's "betrayal" of his principles because he's not foolish enough to tie his hands in the general election is the fact that he has broken all records in American politics for the amount of money raised BY SMALL DONATIONS. The vast majority of his campaign cash, about 93 percent, has come from donations of $200 or less.

I urge Mr. Palermo to leave the math to others.  Obama has a lot of small donors, but they are giving small amounts (Coincidence? I think not!).  Consequently, the fraction of cash raised from small donors is (and must be) lower than the fraction of small donors in the donor base.  Per the Times:

The Obama campaign highlighted Thursday the fact that 93 percent of the more than three million contributions it had received were for $200 or less.

And what does that mean for his total fundraising?  The Times again:

But by showing that he could raise large sums from small donors — 47 percent of the $263 million Mr. Obama received has come in amounts of $200 or less — Mr. Obama has made the argument that he has achieved online what the public finance system has been unable to do.

Still very impressive relative to what other candidates have accomplished in the past, but not quite as impressive as presented by Mr. Palermo.  Oh, well - math is easy; comedy is hard (OK, dying is hard, too).  The Jammie Wearing Fool has more on the Obama campaign as a humor-free zone and the Huffington Post as its content-free counterpart.

Intangibles, Or Why Some Flip-Flops Matter More Than Others

Richard Cohen of the WaPo articulates the obvious about the flips-flops of McCain and Obama and the relative seriousness thereof:

But here is the difference between McCain and Obama -- and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It's not just that he's been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It's also -- and more important -- that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This -- not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express -- is what commends him to so many journalists.

Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don't know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain's decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailors a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically. That's why his reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.

Well, sure.  It's also part of the reason that Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright was of much greater consequence than McCain's endorsement by Hagee (the length and depth of the Obama-Wright association was also important).  It's why Obama's long-time association with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers, which dates back to at least to 1987 when Ayers and Obama first joined forces on Chicago public school reform, is important - we are still getting to know Obama, who is now strolling back to the political center.  And as I noted recently, we can't judge him by his speeches since he has back-pedaled from so many.  And we can't judge him by his anorexic resume.

Oh, well - let's elect him and let historians sort it out.  There's a plan!

GAO On Iraq - Violence Down, Other Benchmarks Mixed

The General Accounting Office issued a report (summary, 94 page .pdf) on the New Way Forward in Iraq, popularly known as the surge.  There is coverage in the Times and WaPo, and David Brooks lauds Bush's vision and resolution in pushing the surge.

From the summary (my paragraph breaks):

The New Way Forward responded to failures in prior strategies that prematurely transferred security responsibilities to Iraqi forces or belatedly responded to growing sectarian violence. Overall violence, as measured by enemy-initiated attacks, fell about 70 percent in Iraq, from about 180 attacks per day in June 2007 to about 50 attacks per day in February 2008. Security gains have largely resulted from (1) the increase in U.S. combat forces, (2) the creation of nongovernmental security forces such as Sons of Iraq, and (3) the Mahdi Army's declaration of a cease fire.  Average daily attacks were at higher levels in March and April before declining in May 2008. The security environment remains volatile and dangerous.

The number of trained Iraqi forces has increased from 323,000 in January 2007 to 478,000 in May 2008; many units are leading counterinsurgency operations. However, the Department of Defense reported in March 2008 that the number of Iraqi units capable of performing operations without U.S. assistance has remained at about 10 percent....

The Iraqi government has enacted key legislation to return some Ba'athists to government, give amnesty to detained Iraqis, and define provincial powers. However, it has not yet enacted other important legislation for sharing oil resources or holding provincial elections. Efforts to complete the constitutional review have also stalled. A goal of The New Way Forward was to facilitate the Iraqis' efforts to enact all key legislation by the end of 2007.

Between 2005 and 2007, Iraq spent only 24 percent of the $27 billion it budgeted for its own reconstruction efforts. More specifically, Iraq's central ministries, responsible for security and essential services, spent only 11 percent of their capital investment budgets in 2007--down from similarly low rates of 14 and 13 percent in the 2 prior years. Violence and sectarian strife, shortage of skilled labor, and weak procurement and budgeting systems have hampered Iraq's efforts to spend its capital budgets.

Although oil production has improved for short periods, the May 2008 production level of about 2.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) was below the U.S. goal of 3 mbpd. The daily supply of electricity met only about half of demand in early May 2008. Conversely, State reports that U.S. goals for Iraq's water sector are close to being reached. The unstable security environment, corruption, and lack of technical capacity have contributed to the shortfalls.

The Departments disagreed with our recommendation, stating that The New Way Forward strategy remains valid but the strategy shall be reviewed and refined as necessary. We reaffirm the need for an updated strategy given the important changes that have occurred in Iraq since January 2007. An updated strategy should build on recent gains, address unmet goals and objectives and articulate the U.S. strategy beyond July 2008.

Times coverage is here, and the WaPo.  The WaPo leads with the absence of a longer-term strategic plan to build on our initial success (shades of 2003!):

The administration lacks an updated and comprehensive Iraq strategy to move beyond the "surge" of combat troops President Bush launched in January 2007 as an 18-month effort to curtail violence and build Iraqi democracy, government investigators said yesterday.

While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the "New Way Forward" strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.

And the Times:

Beyond the declines in overall violence in Iraq, several crucial measures the Bush administration uses to demonstrate economic, political and security progress are either incorrect or far more mixed than the administration has acknowledged, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.   

Over all, the report says, the American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration’s goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines.

The Times solicits an outside expert (one more than the WaPo, for those scoring at home):

“Clearly there are substantial changes in the security situation on the ground,” said Nathan Freier, a retired Army officer who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2007 and is now a senior fellow in the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The administration prefers to focus on those improvements, Mr. Freier said. But the accountability office report, which Mr. Freier read on Monday, and his own observations in Iraq contain a different message, he said.

“Iraq remains a mixed bag and will continue to do so in perpetuity, to be quite honest,” he added.

Although the Times won the battle of expert quotes the WaPo scores points for citing a newly released Pentagon report (news release) which was dated June 13 but made public yesterday, possibly in response to the GAO study.  Here is the summary paragraph of the Pentagon Executive Summary:

In summary, the security, political and economic trends in Iraq continue to be positive; however, they remain fragile, reversible and uneven. Recent events in Basrah, Sadr City and elsewhere have generated new challenges and opportunities for the future. As in the past, continued progress will require Iraqi leaders to take additional selfless and nationally-oriented actions in the spirit of reconciliation and compromise if Iraq is to achieve its potential as a stable, secure, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian democracy under the rule of law.

I don't see how any of this supports the notion that a prompt US withdrawal will improve the security situation there or push the government towards quicker and more meaningful reconciliation, but I am not a Dem military or political strategist.

 

Grid Parity

Andrew Leonard of Salon tells us that solar powered photvoltaic cells are very nearly competitive with conventional power sources in some venues.  That's mission critical.

How Green Was My Candidate?

The Times front-pages (below the fold) and near Obama-basher describing how his is beholden to the domestic ethanol agribusiness interests.  Surprised?  Illinios is the second-largest corn producer and neighboring Iowa hosts the first prominent Presidential caucus, so what might one expect?  The bottom-line, which the Times nearly articulates - McCain makes more sense on ethanol.

So, why didn't this article score as a full basher? Well, the Times downplays the absurdity of domestic corn-based ethanol, despite their previous reporting on the subject.  The current consensus is that US corn-based ethanol raises total emissions of greenhouse gases and is contributing to global food scarcity by diverting food corn and cropland from other uses.  Yet here is how the Times tackles that today:

Mr. Obama, in contrast [with John McCain], favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. In the name of helping the United States build “energy independence,” he also supports the tariff, which some economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade Organization’s rules but which his advisers say is not.

Many economists, consumer advocates, environmental experts and tax groups have been critical of corn ethanol programs as a boondoggle that benefits agribusiness conglomerates more than small farmers. Those complaints have intensified recently as corn prices have risen sharply in tandem with oil prices and corn normally used for food stock has been diverted to ethanol production.

“If you want to take some of the pressure off this market, the obvious thing to do is lower that tariff and let some Brazilian ethanol come in,” said C. Ford Runge, an economist specializing in commodities and trade policy at the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But one of the fundamental reasons biofuels policy is so out of whack with markets and reality is that interest group politics have been so dominant in the construction of the subsidies that support it.”

Corn ethanol generates less than two units of energy for every unit of energy used to produce it, while the energy ratio for sugar cane is more than 8 to 1. With lower production costs and cheaper land prices in the tropical countries where it is grown, sugar cane is a more efficient source.

Well, yes - it is apparently true true that "Corn ethanol generates less than two units of energy for every unit of energy used to produce it" - per this bullish Dept of Energy pamphlet, ethanol is a net positive, taking .78 BTU of fossil fuels to deliver 1 BTU of ethanol.  The pamphlet also notes that other studies show corn ethanol to be a net neutral or even negative energy source.

Andrew Stuttaford notes Obama's odd notion that the US has a vital interest in securing its energy independence from Brazil; Karl at Team Protein has more on Obama's lobbyist ties.

Succeeding Tim Russert

Joe Gandelman appraises possible successors to Tim Russert but overlooks an obvious candidate.  I'm thinking of someone who is young, charismatic, telegenic, works well with a teleprompter, and has lately been briefed on the issues of the day.  And since Russert and Stepanopolous crossed over from Democratic politics, his past won't be a problem.

He is also looking for a new job and increased responsibility.  It's a win-win, and the high price of piano lessons will never be a problem again.

When Will Reality Bite? (Or At Least Nip? Or Nip And Tuck?)

Are the Iraqis engaged in a civil war?  They are at Obama '08!

When the topic is Iraq the Obama website opens with a self-congratulatory statement from Barack hailing his vision and courage in opposing the war in 2002, then delivers this:

The Problem

The Surge: The goal of the surge was to create space for Iraq's political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq's civil war. At great cost, our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006. Moreover, Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war.

Let's see - per yesterday's Times:

Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004.

And what about the "civil war" in Iraq?  Both the White House and Fox News had some fun at the expense of NBC News, which declared Iraq to be in a civil war back in November 2006 but has apparently dropped that label without similar fanfare.  Does Team Obama still feel comfortable with the "civil war" label, or is the website due for a cosmetic change?

Maureen Dowd "Over The Top" On Hillary

Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt absolves most of the Times of sexism in their coverage of Hillarity's Presidential campaign but has special words for Maureen Dowd:

SOME supporters of Hillary Clinton believe that sexism colored news coverage of her presidential campaign. The Times reported in a front-page article on June 13 that many are proposing boycotts of cable news networks and that a “Media Hall of Shame” has been created by the National Organization for Women (link).

The Times itself, however, was barely mentioned, even though two of its Op-Ed columnists, Maureen Dowd and William Kristol, were named in the Hall of Shame.

Peggy Aulisio of South Dartmouth, Mass., said, “A real review of your own stories and columns is warranted.” I think so too. And I think a fair reading suggests that The Times did a reasonably good job in its news articles. But Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.

Folks reading this over their morning coffee might want to pause and reflect on the awkwardness of that last bit - "paid not to be objective" does not mean the same as "not paid to be objective", nor the same as "paid to be not objective".  Ah, well - enough reflecting on a Sunday morn... After a Big Skip, we come to Mr. Hoyt's conclusion:

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Aulisio, the reader who wanted a review of Times coverage, asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”

Of course, there is no such man, and I do not think another one could have used Dowd’s language. Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

News So Good It Had To Wait 'Til Saturday

The Times front-pages this:

Big Gains for Iraq Security, but Questions Linger
By STEPHEN FARRELL and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD — What’s going right? And can it last?

Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004. The two largest cities, Baghdad and Basra, are calmer than they have been for years. The third largest, Mosul, is in the midst of a major security operation. On Thursday, Iraqi forces swept unopposed through the southern city of Amara, which has been controlled by Shiite militias. There is a sense that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government has more political traction than any of its predecessors.

Consider the latest caricatures of Mr. Maliki put up on posters by the followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the fiery cleric who commands deep loyalty among poor Shiites. They show the prime minister’s face split in two — half his own, half Saddam Hussein’s. The comparison is, of course, intended as a searing criticism. But only three months ago the same Sadr City pamphleteers were lampooning Mr. Maliki as half-man, half-parrot, merely echoing the words of his more powerful Shiite and American backers. It is a notable swing from mocking an opponent perceived to be weak to denouncing one feared to be strong.

For Hatem al-Bachary, a Basra businessman, the turnabout has been “a miracle,” the first tentative signs of a normal life.

“I don’t think the militias have disappeared, and maybe there are sleeper cells which will try to revive themselves again,” he said. “But the first time they try to come back they will have to show themselves, and the government, army and police are doing very well.”

While the increase in American troops and their support behind the scenes in the recent operations has helped tamp down the violence, there are signs that both the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government are making strides. There are simply more Iraqi troops for the government to deploy, partly because fewer are needed to fight the Sunni insurgents, who have defected to the Sunni Awakening movement. They are paid to keep the peace.

Mr. Maliki’s moves against Shiite militias have built some trust with wary Sunnis, offering the potential for political reconciliation. High oil prices are filling Iraqi government coffers. But even these successes contain the seeds of vulnerability. The government victories in Basra, Sadr City and Amara were essentially negotiated, so the militias are lying low but undefeated and seething with resentment. Mr. Maliki may be raising expectations among Sunnis that he cannot fulfill, and the Sunni Awakening forces in many cases are loyal to their American paymasters, not the Shiite government. Restive Iraqis want to see the government spend money to improve services. Attacks like the bombing that killed 63 people in Baghdad’s Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday showed that opponents can continue to inflict carnage.

Reporter Stephen Farrell has a related story here.

MORE:  Obama re-emphasized his commitment to defeat at the Philadelphia debate in April (transcript).  Here is US News & World Report:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama locked themselves into rigid positions on Iraq during a debate in Philadelphia Wednesday night.

Both said they would begin withdrawals of U.S. troops soon after taking office and would move quickly to end the war. They didn't leave themselves much room to change their minds even if the military situation were altered or U.S. commanders gave a different recommendation. This could make it more difficult for each of them to be flexible during the general-election campaign and, more important, as commander in chief.

SUNDAY UPDATE:  In an odd mix of defensiveness and triumphalism Frank Rich defends Obama's positioning on Iraq:

Now That We’ve ‘Won,’ Let’s Come Home

By FRANK RICH

THE Iraq war’s defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they’ll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn’t rate anymore. When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market on Tuesday, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC’s) even bothered to mention it.

The only problem is that no news from Iraq isn’t good news — it’s no news. The night of the Baghdad bombing the CBS war correspondent Lara Logan appeared as Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” to lament the vanishing television coverage and the even steeper falloff in viewer interest. “Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier,” she said. After pointing out that more soldiers died in Afghanistan than Iraq last month, she asked, “Who’s paying attention to that?”

Her question was rhetorical, but there is an answer: Virtually no one. If you follow the nation’s op-ed pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy vs. Michelle, not Shiites vs. Sunnis, is the hotter battle. This isn’t the press’s fault, and it isn’t the public’s fault. It’s merely the way things are.

In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details. They’ve moved on without waiting for the results of Election Day 2008 or sampling the latest hectoring ad from moveon.org.

Hmm.  I first read this in the Dead Tree edition - in the on-line version, Mr. Rich provides a link to the PollingReport.com and draws the same conclusion I came to when I went fishing there for evidence to refute and confound him - opinions aren't changing on the outlook in Iraq, even as the facts on the ground are changing.

As I said, Mr. Rich seems to have mixed feelings about having the support of the American people regardless of whether he has the support of the facts.  After all, plenty of libs talk about public opinion polls showing Americans believed that Saddam was behind the 9/11 plot; those polls are not normally cited as evidence of the good judgment of the great unwashed, but rather as evidence of their susceptibility to media manipulation and comfortable narratives.

Mr. Rich presses on with his defense of Obama:

The G.O.P.’s badgering of Mr. Obama about the war is also backfiring. In sync with Mr. McCain, the Republican National Committee unveiled an online clock  — “Track How Long Since Obama Was in Iraq!”  — only to have Mr. Obama call the bluff by announcing that he will go to both Afghanistan and Iraq before the election. Unless he takes along his own Lieberman-like Jiminy Cricket to whisper factual corrections into his ear, this trip is likely to enhance his stature as a potential commander in chief.

It might indeed increase his stature.  It might present Obama with an opportunity to back-flip away from his commitment to withdraw.  It might do a lot of things.  Time (He boldly predicted) will tell.

The other whiny line of G.O.P.-McCain attack is to demand incessantly that Mr. Obama stop refusing to recognize the decline in violence in Iraq, stop calling for a hasty troop withdrawal and stop ignoring commanders on the ground in assessing his exit strategy. Here, too, Mr. Obama is calling their bluff, though not nearly as loudly as he will, I suspect, in the debates.

The fact is that Mr. Obama frequently recognizes “the reduction of violence in Iraq” (his words) and has said he is “encouraged” by it. He has never said that he would refuse to consult with commanders on the ground, and he has never called for a precipitous withdrawal. His mantra on Iraq, to the point of tedium, has always been that “we must be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” His roughly 16-month timetable isn’t hasty and isn’t “retreat.” As The Economist, a supporter of the war, recently put it, a safer Iraq does not necessarily validate Mr. McCain’s “insistence on America staying indefinitely” and might make Mr. Obama’s 16-month framework “more feasible.”

As to the assertion that "He has never said that he would refuse to consult with commanders on the ground", the quotes from the Philadelphia debate make clear that Obama has claimed that he will set the mission and will not be consulting with his generals as to whether a prompt withdrawal is appropriate.  Where he is open to consultation is in achieving those withdrawals safely, but that is hardly the same thing (although Obama may try to respin it to appear to be).

Here is what the Obama website says about the Surge:

The Surge: The goal of the surge was to create space for Iraq's political leaders to reach an agreement to end Iraq's civil war. At great cost, our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006. Moreover, Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war.

Time to update that a bit?  Let's revisit the Times lead:

Violence in all of Iraq is the lowest since March 2004.

And a bit further down:

Mr. Maliki’s moves against Shiite militias have built some trust with wary Sunnis, offering the potential for political reconciliation.

And the Obama website is still calling it a civil war.  Sooo 2006.  But where are we now?

OK, back to Frank Rich:

After all, the point of the surge, as laid out by Mr. Bush, was to buy time for political reconciliation among the Iraqis. The results have been at best spotty, and even the crucial de-Baathification law celebrated by Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in January remains inoperative. Mr. Obama’s timetable is at least an effort to use any remaining American leverage to concentrate the Iraqi leaders’ thinking. Mr. McCain offers only the status quo: a blank check holding America hostage to fate and ceding the president’s civilian authority over war policy to Gen. David Petraeus and his successors.

As the original Times article noted, one aspect of the surge was that it bought time for the training of Iraqi security forces.  It may be that a few more years of a "blank check" will be the critical time that the Iraqis need for that training to be expanded and/or completed, and it certainly may be that our generals think so.  What woukd Barack do then?

Should voters tune in, they’ll also discover that the McCain policy is nonsensical on its face. If “we are winning” and the surge is a “success,” then what is the rationale for keeping American forces bogged down there while the Taliban regroups ominously in Afghanistan? Why, if this is victory, does Mr. McCain keep threatening that “chaos and genocide” will follow our departure? And why should we take the word of a prophet who failed to anticipate the chaos and ethnic cleansing that would greet our occupation?

"Nonsensical"?  Now Mr. Rich is just raving.  Crime has dropped in New York City - should we disband the NYPD, or reduce it by two thirds?  "We are winning" in Iraq doesn't mean we have won; my goodness, would General Rich have advised General Eisenhower that, having liberated Paris from the Nazis it was time to bring the troops home?

Mr. Rich appears comfortable having won the battle of the narratives, but I hope he is concerned that the battle of reality is not over.

Obama To Opt Out Of Public Financing

Obama announced that he will be the first Presidential candidate since the Watergate era reforms to forego Federal funds for the Presidential general election.

Patterico provides background on Obama's previous pledges to operate within the public system, as does The Politico.  I like this from Obama's response to the Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire:

I have been a long-time advocate for public financing of campaigns combined with free television and radio time as a way to reduce the influence of moneyed special interests.

Apparently Obama has discovered that his vast network of donors is special, but not an interest.  My guess is that none of Obama's supporters will care, and that the various media outlets that are bemoaning this today, such as the Times and the WaPo, will endorse him in October, even though John McCain has been the champion of McCain-Feingold.  And after they do so, I presume they will continue to agitate for campaign finance reform, from a position of even more diminished credibility (Hmm, less than zero?).

The 2012 race will be interesting, unless Obama and a Dem congress can quickly re-write the rulebook to their own advantage.  With the Times cheering them on, of course.

And Now I Play Ditto-Head To John Cole

From John Cole:

The best part of this election is about to start, though- we are going to be treated to months of folks on the right learning Obama really is not as liberal as they think he is and becoming upset that they can not simply attack him as a radical left-winger (although some morons will still continue with the Marxist nonsense because it is all they know), all the while having to watch left-wingers kvetch and moan as they learn he really is not as liberal as they thought he was and that he will move to the center to and compromise. Put together, it has the potential to be really damned amusing.

Well, I hope its amusing.  An early marker will be Obama's vote next week on the FISA compromise, which includes a provision on telecom immunity which has libs in a tizzy and is described in the Times as "a clear victory for the White House and the phone companies".  The obvious guess is that Obama will simply skip town and skip the vote.  [UPDATE:  Obama announces that he supports the bill but opposes the immunity provision and will work (almost surely unsuccessfully) to have it removed from the Senate version.  Good gnashing and kvetching by Krugman and Greg Sargent, with links to more.]

Obama might also provide some laughs at some point as he grapples with nuclear power, as noted below.  Less of a laughing matter will be his re-positioning on Iraq - his commitment to defeat now seems absurdly dated and the gnashing and wailing from the left if/when he changes course and admits that maybe he can work his magic and bring hope and change to Iraq will be momentous.

And John overlooks another source of possible amusement - as an antidote to his inevitable repositioning on various pet lefty causes Obama will have to toss out some red meat rhetoric and embrace some other symbolically fraught but practically inconsequential lefty vision.  What will it be?  I will guess he won't break-dance on an American flag or start singing "The Volga Boatman", but beyond that, I have no idea.  Something analogous to Bush's gay-marriage message is what I would watch for.  Or maybe Obama will make some utterly staggering Cabinet or judicial picks to placate his base - John Edwards to the Supreme Court could cause enough aneurysms on the right that it would compensate for a victory in Iraq.

However, two caveats furrow my brow.  First, it is a bit unnerving that we really don't know just how liberal or moderate the probable next President of the United States actually is.  Secondly, the idea that he admits he has been blowing smoke on some topics (such as NAFTA) and has backed away from his own "overheated" rhetoric on other topics, ("undivided" Jerusalem, "unconditional" pledge to meet with foreign leaders) does not inspire confidence that we can discern the "true" Obama by listening to his words.  And of course, we can't discern the "true" Obama by studying his resume and track record because if you blink once you miss it.

Well, we are probably going to elect the guy and learn by doing.  Could be fun - after all, people seem to enjoy Space Mountain.

My Stint As A Paul Krugman Ditto-Head

Paul Krugman thumps John McCain's conversion to support of off-shore drilling; I completely agree with this:

As many reports have noted, the McCain/Bush policy on offshore drilling doesn’t make sense as a response to $4-a-gallon gas: the White House’s own Energy Information Administration says that exploiting the outer shelf wouldn’t yield noticeable amounts of oil until the 2020s, and even at peak production its impact on oil prices would be “insignificant.”

But what I haven’t seen emphasized is the broader picture: Mr. McCain has now aligned himself with an administration that, even aside from its blame-the-environmental-movement tendencies, has established an extensive track record as the gang that couldn’t think straight about energy policy.

Remember, they didn’t just insist that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators; on the eve of the Iraq war, administration officials were also adamant that regime change in Iraq would add millions of barrels a day to the world oil supply, driving oil prices way down. (In fact, Iraq’s oil output took five years just to recover to preinvasion levels.)

So why would Mr. McCain associate himself with these characters? The answer, presumably, is that it’s a cynical political calculation.

I’m reasonably sure that Mr. McCain’s advisers realize that offshore drilling would do nothing for current gas prices. But they may believe that the public can be conned. A Rasmussen poll taken before Mr. McCain’s announcement suggests that the public favors expanded offshore drilling, and believes (wrongly) that this would lower gasoline prices.

And Mr. McCain may also hope to shore up his still fragile relations with the Republican base. As anyone who has read what’s in his inbox after publishing an article on oil prices can testify, there are many people on the right who believe that all our energy problems have been caused by sanctimonious tree-huggers. Mr. McCain has just thrown that constituency some red meat.

But I very much doubt that Mr. McCain’s gambit will work. In fact, it’s almost certainly self-destructive.

To have a chance in November, Mr. McCain has to convince voters that he isn’t just Bush, continued. Energy policy is one of the areas where he could best have made that case.

Instead, he has ceded the high ground on energy to Mr. Obama, and linked himself firmly to the most unpopular president on record.

It's a matter of guesswork and opinion but this switch helps McCain with some people and hurts him with others.  My guess is on net, it hurts.  McCain has been nicely distinguished from Bush by his environmental stands, and this muddies those waters.

What McCain should have done is gone nuclear on Obama - McCain is calling for 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030; Obama has had a hard time getting off the dime on this topic, since a notable slice of the Dem base is utterly and irrevocably opposed to all nukes (and critics Yucca it up every time Obama addresses this).

If McCain pushed a "Yes to nukes, no to offshore" platform he could distinguish himself from both Bush and Obama in a way that actually made sense.

In Which I Wave My Hand During Prof. Althouse's Class On The Constitution

Prof. Althouse is trying to make sense of Barack Obama's rhetoric on Guantanamo and civil rights for terrorists, and good luck to her.  Let me flag this:

So he's talking about what he isn't saying I'd like him to be clear about what he is saying. He won't give them "full privileges," but what portion of privileges does he favor? (And why is he saying "privileges" and not "rights"?)

I won't try to guess what he is saying but he said it at length in 2006 in his Senate floor statement objecting to the Military Commissions Act (excerpted in this recent post).

Whether his 2006 statement is still operative and consistent with is 2008 rhetoric is a question for others.

My guess as to the most relevant part of the 2006 statement is excerpted after the break.

Finally Piled Too High

Apparently Team Obama is no longer making foreign policy by gaffe.  A while back Matt Yglesias delivered a classic appraisal of Obama's foreign policy process as it related to the Obama's unconditional pledge to meet with foreign leaders such as Chavez and Ahmadjeinad.  The short version is that Obama just delivers some darn gaffe or other and then his fo-po team struggles to rationalize it.

But now it appears that his team is exhausted and can't figure out any way to push his endorsement (before AIPAC) of an undivided Jersualem uphill.  So it's on to Plan B - admit that Obama mis-spoke, but blame the rest of us for lacking vision:

EW YORK (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama misused a "code word" in Middle East politics when he said Jerusalem should be Israel's "undivided" capital but that does not mean he is naive on foreign policy, a top adviser said on Tuesday.

Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. "He has closed all doors to peace," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.

Obama later said Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the status of the city, in line with long-held U.S. presidential policy.

Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama's comment stemmed from "a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones."

"So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East," Kurtzer said.

So "undivided" means "living together in peace and harmony", not necessarily "undivided".  Sort of like the way New Jersey and New York are undivided.  Sort of.  Kinda.  Or maybe like the US-Canada border with some security checkpoints.  But anyway, peaceful, harmonious, and undivided.  Except for the checkpoints.

It's not clear how this clarification will affect the Hamas 'un-endorsement' of Obama.

                   

Deceptive Ad From MoveOn, AFSCME

The NYTimes fact-checks a new MoveOn/AFSCME ad:

ON THE SCREEN A young, blonde mother speaks directly to the camera as she sits on a living room couch, holding on her lap a baby boy dressed in overalls.

THE SCRIPT The woman says, “Hi, John McCain; this is Alex. He’s my first. So far, his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog — that, and making my heart pound every time I look at him. So, John McCain, when you said you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because, if you were, you can’t have him.”

The Times duly notes that McCain was contemplating a peace-time occupation similar to the extended presence of USA troops in Germany or South Korea and adds this:

Because advertisement fact-checking reports like this one are never viewed as widely as the spots themselves, a good many people may take from this advertisement that Mr. McCain is supporting 100 years of an overwhelmingly unpopular war.

That's the hope, anyway.

Michelle Obama - They Hope She's Changed

Barack Obama couldn't disown his wife the way he disowned his former minister, so he had her remade.  Here she is paraded before the Obama press office formerly known as the NY Times:

Michelle Obama’s eyes flicker tentatively even as she offers a trained smile. As her campaign plane arcs over the Flathead Range in Montana, she is asked to consider her complicated public image.

Conservative columnists accuse her of being unpatriotic and say she simmers with undigested racial anger. A blogger who supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton circulates unfounded claims that Mrs. Obama gave an accusatory speech in her church about the sins of “whitey.” Mrs. Obama shakes her head.

“You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be,” she says in an interview. Referring to a character in a 1970s sitcom, she adds: “I mean, ‘whitey’? That’s something that George Jefferson would say. Anyone who says that doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived. They don’t know anything about me.”

Now her husband’s presidential campaign is giving her image a subtle makeover, with a new speech in the works to emphasize her humble roots and a tough new chief of staff. On Wednesday, Mrs. Obama will do a guest turn on “The View,” the daytime talk show on ABC, with an eye toward softening her reputation.

"View" coverage from Prof. Althouse and the NY Times Caucus.  Bonus pathos from Lynn Sweet.

Now, check this next bit, ludicrously presented as a sympathetic and positive story of her professional efforts:

In the mostly black neighborhoods around the hospital, Mrs. Obama became the voice of a historically white institution. Behind closed doors, she tried to assuage their frustrations about a place that could seem forbidding.

Like many urban hospitals, the medical center’s emergency room becomes clogged with people who need primary care. So Mrs. Obama trained counselors, mostly local blacks, to hand out referrals to health clinics lest black patients felt they were being shooed away.

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

“She’ll talk about the elephant in the room,” said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

What elephant?  That at some point the black community needs to stop invoking Tuskegee as an excuse for ignoring the medical community?  Jeremiah Wright cited Tuskegee as his basis for believing that the US government might have been responsible for the AIDS virus - per RAND, that paranoid fantasy costs lives.

In a different and better world the community affairs director for a hospital would use her college education and neighborhood roots to educate and reassure the community that her hospital was not actually interested in recreating ghastly medical misadventures from the past.  In this world, it looks like the Sister Grim is less interested in resolving these grievances and more interested in nursing them.

Not The Look They're Looking For

They told Glenn Reynolds that if George Bush were elected Muslims would face discrimination at political rallies... and they were right!

MEMORY LANE:  The Muslim dis, the Asian dis - if only the Democrats could find a candidate who believed in equality.

OOOPS:  OK, I am sooo like, three hours ago here.  But it seemed original when I thought of it!

To Which I Would Add...

Karl of Protein Wisdom studies the vapor trail of the Obama resume but he overlooks Obama's involvement and non-achievement in public school reform, a topic which includes a bonus link to unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers.

A bit from Karl on Obama's early years in Chi-town:

From June 1985 to May 1988, Obama was a community organizer with the Developing Communities Project in Chicago, working primarily to organize a housing project called Altgeld Gardens.  According to the Boston Globe:

For all its impact on Obama, Altgeld Gardens today seems far from the kind of success story politicians like to tout.

Dozens of buildings are boarded up, with fences surrounding much of the property. The roads are a potholed mess. Blinking lights illuminate a series of towers where police have mounted cameras.

That’s change you can believe in.  Moreover, Hazel Johnson, who has lived at Altgeld Gardens since 1962 – and was an organizer long before Obama appeared on the scene – claims Obama has exaggerated his role in getting asbestos removed from the projects.  Otherwise, Obama did not get much done — and even had difficulty explaining what a “community organizer” did.

Ahh, well - let us not give short shrift to Obama's involvement in public education reform.

There was a city-wide push for public school reform in 1987-88 after Secretary of Education Bill Bennett called Chicago's schools the "worst in America".  A number of different civic-minded coalitions emerged to promote their reform agendas.  Barack Obama's Developing Communities project allied with the ABCs Coalition, a group apparently coordinated by (your patience is about to be rewarded) former Weatherman Bill Ayers [No Quarter link].  Other groups in the ABCs coalition were Chicago United and the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, both of which are linked to businessman and philanthropist Thomas Ayers, Bill Ayers father.  This report describes the 1988 reform effort; this photo from the back of the report links Obama and the Ayer's family.

Obama was off at Harvard from 1988 to 1991, but flashing forward a bit, he re-partnered with Bill Ayers for another school reform effort in 1995, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.  With much fanfare at the White House philanthropist Walter Annenberg announced a $500 million challenge grant program to spur school reform efforts across America.  Bill Ayers led the effort to bring some of that money to Chicago, which resulted in the creation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in 1995.  Barack Obama was selected as the group's first chairman and Bill Ayers worked closely with the group through his newly-formed Chicago School Reform Collaborative.

The press has not exactly picked up on this Obama-Ayers connection, and Obama's Fact Check team seems to have amnesia in describing this long involvement between the two men.

As to why Obama is not touting his long experience with school reform - well, not much was actually accomplished in the 1988 round, and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was viewed more as an opportunity to learn from failure than as an actual success.  And just maybe the campaign team feels a bit of awkwardness with the Ayers connection.

However, public school reform, unlike asbestos mitigation, is a topic most Americans are interested in discussing.  We will see whether Obama can hide his embarrassing history beyond November (It was Mission Accomplished as far as hiding it from David Brooks last week).

Keep Hope alive!  And Change, too.

MORE:  JM Hanes has more in the comments.

Gitmo Rights

Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard opines on the Supreme Court decision embraced by the party of Civil Rights for Terrorists:

As it happens, some of the most effective arguments against Boumediene come from the decision itself. For example, Justice Kennedy wrote that in cases involving terrorist detention, "proper deference must be accorded to the political branches." Then he overrode them.

Kennedy further noted that "unlike the President and some designated Members of Congress, neither the Members of this Court nor most federal judges begin the day with briefings that may describe new and serious threats to our Nation and its people." They had better start, because the courts are about to be flooded with petitions to release terrorists sworn to America's destruction.

He also wrote that now the "political branches can engage in a genuine debate about how best to preserve constitutional values while protecting the Nation from terrorism." But that is precisely what Congress and the president were doing when they passed legislation laying out a process for detainee review, one that in fact addressed concerns previously raised by the Court. The Court now says this process is inadequate. What would be adequate? Kennedy's answer: I'll get back to you on that.

Jake Tapper of ABC News interviewed Barack Obama, who waxed on the wisdom of treating terrorism as a law enforcement, rather than military problem.

OBAMA: Well, but the fact that they disagree does not mean that they're right on this. What it means is, is that they have been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution, that our founders put in place.

And it is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. And there has been no evidence on their part that we can't.

And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks -- for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, "Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims."

So that, I think, is an example of something that was unnecessary. We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws.

One obvious objection to all this is that the Bush people do not think they are operating outside the constraints of the Constitution - they simply have a different view of the limits of those constraints on a wartime President.

And the McCain camp provided the obvious rejoinder, as reported by Mr. Tapper - the post 1993 law enforcement approach was not a resounding success.

Drink Up

Make mine a double.  Espresso, that is:

"No higher death risk in long-term coffee drinking".

Nice to know something I can't live without isn't going to kill me.

Thinking Outside The (Six Foot Pine) Box

Can't fault this for lack of imagination.

UTTERLY UNRELATED:  Who's on Basra?

The Chicago Way

Barack Obama channels his inner Sean Connery as he describes his approach to the upcoming campaign:

Barack Obama is warning supporters that the general election fight between him and John McCain may get ugly, but the Illinois senator is vowing not to back down.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

Uh huh.  I hope he also brings a gun permit, a trigger lock, and a good lawyer.  And a health care plan.  In his next fantasy I suppose Obama will want to channel his inner Clint Eastwood, who once explained that "I've got a firm policy on gun control. If there's a gun around, I want to be the one controlling it."

Meanwhile, let me applaud any of the attendees who managed to keep a straight face while listening to Gunslinger Obama bragging on his quickness with a nine.  Here's a guy who never heard a gun control proposal he didn't like promising to brandish a handgun as if he were Annie Oakley hunting ducks.  As if.  But he certainly is a bold orator!

And since Obama said it we may not hear the typical Dem denunciations, but let me get a start on filling in the blanks:

1.  I deplore this exhortation to random gunplay - what sort of a message does this send to America's youth, too many of whom have grown up in a culture glorifying violence?  Is Obama a serious Presidential candidate or yet another rapper with yet another beef?

2.  I deplore the imagery of a black man waving a gun to settle a dispute - surely if Team Hillary's mention of Obama's teenage drug use was a despicable play on regrettable ethnic stereotypes, this is too.

That's a start - over to you.

BEING A ROLE MODEL - A SOMETIME THING WITH BARACK:

Obama explains why he wore a goofy-looking bicycle helmet last weekend:

Obama couldn't resist a little boasting. He explained that he faced a tossup: Risking ridicule or sending children the right message about bike gear. "I had an internal debate," Obama admitted when a supporter thanked him for wearing a helmet. "Because I knew that the AP was going to take a picture, and they were trying to portray it like Dukakis wearing that tank helmet.

"But I wanted to make sure that the children who saw that picture knew that even the Democratic nominee for president wears a helmet when he goes biking," he said to applause.

Sure.  And if the AP mocks you, cap 'em with a nine.

Just Say "No" Carries The Day

The Irish vote down the latest European Union treaty.

So Thursday saw epic collapses by the Mets, the Lakers, and the Euros.  And I'm sitting on the express bus to Schadenfreude City.

Tim Russert Dead

Tim Russert has died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 58.  NY Post, NY Times Caucus, MSNBC, Kurtz of WaPo.

I was a fan and admirer of Mr. Russert, although I was fairly tough on him for his role in the Plame leak and the ensuing Libby trial.

Very briefly on the trial - David Gregory of NBC News was alleged to have been informed of Ms. Plame's CIA affiliation by then-press secretary Ari Fleischer; Special Counsel Fitzgerald did not push for Gregory's testimony and Gregory has never resolved this, to the best of my knowledge.

Andrea Mitchell, also of NBC News, was covering every other aspect of the Wilson-Niger trip and claimed to have received a leak about Ms. Plame, but later back-tracked.  Special Counsel Fitzgerald never got her testimony, either.

Tim Russert, in his role as Washington Bureau chief, claims he would have been passed the tip if either Gregory or Mitchell had received a Plame leak.  He also insisted in court that he had not received a leak or relayed such a leak back to I. Lewis Libby, but I speculated as to the circumstances which may have led him to lie under oath.

Unsolved mysteries.

Point - Counterpoint On Habeas Corpus

John McCain bashes the Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus rights for Gitmo prisoners; this is the McCain statement by way of Michael Scherer of TIME:

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn't torture any prisoners, that we didn't mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won't go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.

Barack Obama addressed the question of habeas corpus suits related to prisoner accommodation in his Senate statement opposing the Military Commissions Act of 2006:

Let me respond to a couple of points that have been made on the other side...

You are also going to hear a lot about how lawyers are going to file all kinds of frivolous lawsuits on behalf of detainees if habeas corpus is in place. This is a cynical argument because I think we could get overwhelming support in this Chamber right now for a measure that would restrict habeas to a one-shot appeal that would be limited solely to whether someone was legally detained or not. I am not interested in allowing folks at Guantanamo to complain about whether their cell is too small or whether the food they get is sufficiently edible or to their tastes. That is not what this is about. We can craft a habeas bill that says the only question before the court is whether there is sufficient evidence to find that this person is truly an unlawful enemy combatant and belongs in this detention center. We can restrict it to that. And although I have seen some of those amendments floating around, those were not amendments that were admitted during this debate. It is a problem that is easily addressed. It is not a reason for us to wholesale eliminate habeas corpus.

Obama is a lawyer, so one would hope he is accurate on this point; I am not a lawyer and don't know whether Congress could have restricted the habeas right to the one topic of reasonable detainment, but I am pretty sure that Senators Lieberman and Graham have extensive legal training.  Well, as president Obama will have a chance to reach across the aisle and settle this.  As if.

The Day The Music Died

But which music?

Support The Troops - By Issuing Them Laminated Miranda Cards

In a big win for the party of Civil Rights for Terrorists, the Supreme Court (134 page .pdf) opined that foreigners captured and held abroad are entitled to the protection of the US courts.  Times coverage:

WASHINGTON — Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

In extraordinary times, and in all places, evidently.

And Chief Justice Roberts said the majority had struck down “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants,” and in doing so had left itself open to accusations of “judicial activism.”

The chief justice said the majority had gutted the Detainee Treatment Act without really giving it a chance. “And to what effect?” he wrote. “The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date.”

Indeed, the immediate effects of the ruling are not clear. For instance, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, told The Associated Press he had no information on whether a hearing at Guantánamo for Omar Khadr, a Canadian charged with killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, would go forward next week, as planned. Nor was it initially clear what effects the ruling would have beyond Guantánamo.

The 2006 Military Commission Act stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed by detainees challenging the bases for their confinement. That law was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in February 2007.

FWIW, here is the Senate vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006.  It passed by 64-35, a resoundingly bipartisan margin in other contexts but not bipartisan enough to have attracted Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden, Dodd, or Kerry.

The SCOTUS blog offers this summary of the decision:

The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights.  If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.

The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that “we do not address whether the President has authority to detain” individuals during the war on terrorism, and hold them at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered first by the District judges.

The Baseball Crank appraises the reactions from McCain and Obama.  McCain first:

You can tell that [McCain press rep] Goldfarb would like to go harder after the Court's decision, but the campaign and the candidate are constrained by McCain's own Gitmo-bashing, and so while McCain's response sides with Roberts and the statutes McCain voted for, it has to be somewhat muted on the pragmatic consequences of the decision because McCain isn't really clear on what he himself would do with those detainees.

And Obama:

It's not clear what Obama means here. First, if the DTA's procedures are themselves "a legal black hole," and if he agrees with the Court that they are inadequate to satisfy due process, why on earth did Obama vote for them? Second, he's ripping McCain for "support" of Bush's Guantanamo policy, completely ignoring the fact that McCain has been calling for some time for shuttering the place. Third, if Obama means that McCain "supported" Bush's policy by voting for the DTA and the MCA, what about Obama's own vote for the DTA?

That is not the DTA Obama knew.

Just Say "No". Or "Yes". Or "Wait For It"

Irish voters hold the fate of the latest Euro treaty in their hands, but what have they chosen?

The European Union's Lisbon treaty appears to be in peril, with weak turnout in Ireland's referendum on Thursday leaving the outcome in doubt.

Irish voters were the only citizens in the 27-member bloc to be given the chance to vote in a referendum on the treaty, which replaces a rejected European Union constitution.

"It's knife-edge stuff," a governing party source said, acknowledging that authorities had counted on a higher turnout.

"We're just not sure if we've done enough or not."

When will we get a result?

But the Irish media conducted no exit polling to gauge the  actual result. This information vacuum set the stage for a  suspenseful wait Friday in the national count center,  Dublin Castle, where the outcome will be announced.

Suspenseful for some, but not all.

FINALLY:  Just say "No" carries the day.

Live Long And Prosper

Life expectancy in the United States lengthens to a new record:

White women continue to have the longest life expectancy, followed by African-American women, white men, and African-American men. Those patterns have held since 1976, though all groups have seen their life expectancy improve during that time.

Here are the 2006 life expectancy figures for each of those groups:

• White women: 81 years
• African-American women: 76.9 years
• White men: 76 years
• African-American men: 70 years

Here is the CDC press release and a link to the 52 page report.

In April we had linked to a study showing that women's life expectancy had declined in some US counties; that study had 1999 as an end-date, so one wonders how it would be updated.

More On Derivatives Regulation

Last week we derided David Corn's argument that deregulation of derivatives championed by McCain adviser Phil Gramm had led to all the problems of the current financial system.  One of the many problematic passages was this:

But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It's like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

No.  The Federal Reserve regulates the money-center banks; if those banks are entering into credit derivative swaps, then the Fed will oversee their activities in that area.  However, it is fair to say that no one was empowered to watch hedge funds, and it was the SEC that regulated investment banks.

NY Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner spoke in these topics yesterday.  This is from the WaPo:

Geithner, echoing an elaborate proposal by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., said the nation's fragmented system for regulating banks and other financial institutions needs to be consolidated -- and in Geithner's vision, the Fed would take on new power. Currently the Fed can order commercial banks to adjust their exposures to a given type of asset or to improve their systems for measuring risk -- but has no such formal power for investment banks and a range of other financial institutions.

"At present the Federal Reserve has broad responsibility for financial stability not matched by direct authority," Geithner said, "and the consequences of the actions we have taken in this crisis make it more important that we close that gap."

He stopped short of proposing new regulation of hedge funds or private-equity firms.

The WSJ has more and better coverage:

"The conventional risk-management framework today focuses too much on the threat to a firm from its own mistakes and too little on the potential for mistakes to be correlated across firms," Mr. Geithner said in prepared remarks to the Economic Club of New York.

Mr. Geithner called the existing regulatory structure "an enormously complex web of rules that create perverse incentives and leave huge opportunities for arbitrage and evasion, and creates the risk of large gaps in our knowledge and authority."

A recent Treasury Department blueprint for regulatory overhaul, designed to address those problems, shifts some of the Fed's power to other agencies while giving the central bank overall responsibility for the financial system. Mr. Geithner appeared to take issues with that design, saying that major "globally active" banks and investment banks need to operate under a single framework with stronger consolidated supervision.

Geithner spoke about hedge funds and derivatives two years ago.

MORE:  Megan McArdle notes the absence of omniscient, prescient regulators and wonders what Barack has in mind on the regulatory front.

Get This Reporter A Breathalyzer

Times reporter John Broder is funny but not surprising in his reporting of an Obama gaffe:

[Obama] said he would preserve Social Security by requiring higher payments from the wealthy. He vowed to resist all efforts to privatize the program or raise the retirement age. He also vowed to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens and noted that Mr. McCain had originally opposed the Bush tax breaks because, as Mr. Obama put it in a rare verbal slip, they were “too skewered” to the rich.

A "rare verbal slip"?  Kidding?  Well, as the Obama's Gaffes blog noted, this is from ABC News:

5. Obama's gaffes won't matter at all until they do (at which point they will all matter all at once).

Right now the Times is still shielding their readers from the reality that, absent a teleprompter, their guy is no more coherent than (dare we say it?) George Bush.  McCain gaffes merit a story.

READ HIS LIPS: Obama on taxes:

In his most pointed and sustained attack on Mr. McCain’s economic agenda, Mr. Obama said that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of President Bush’s faltering economic policies. And he highlighted his own proposals to aid economically beleaguered Americans: tax cuts for middle-income families and retirees, a $50 billion economic stimulus package, expansion of unemployment benefits, and relief for homeowners facing foreclosure.

Bill Clinton got good play with his promise of middle-class tax relief during the 1992 campaign, but of course that promise foundered on the hard rocks of fiscal reality once the many promises of the Clinton programs were put on the table.  Let's flash back to 1993:

CLINTON'S ECONOMIC PLAN: The Campaign; Gambling That a Tax-Cut Promise Was Not Taken Seriously

In selling his economic plan, President Clinton is gambling that voters never took seriously his campaign promise to lower the tax burden of the middle class and will respond favorably to an aggressive pitch based on equal measures of hope, fear and class revenge.

After months of polling and research, Mr. Clinton's top political advisers say they are convinced that middle-class voters will support higher taxes. The advisers say the voters will see the new taxes as the price of great improvements in Government service and as inflicting a just punishment on the rich who profited during the Reagan and Bush Administrations.

Can we amplify the class warfare angle?  This is Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's pollster in chief:

"It is critical," Mr. Greenberg said, that the rich be seen as punished most by Mr. Clinton's tax increases.

"This says to voters that this is a President who is not a captive of the wealthiest people but who is instead responsive to the middle class," Mr. Greenberg said. "That is a critical issue. Since they are not going to see the results of economic growth for a long time, it is critical that you send them a very big signal about whose interests are being advanced."

2009 will be deja vu all over again under President Obama.

HOW DO YOU FLIP-FLOP IN THE FOG?

Think Progress claims McCain has flip-flopped on estate taxes, but that would require that he held coherent and contradictory positions.

The Think Progress link to the pro-estate tax McCain has him voting for cloture on a 2005 bill backed by the anti-estate tax Republicans; back then, as now, McCain expressed support for a lower estate tax rate triggered at $5 million, not $1 million.  McCain's rhetoric didn't match his record even then.  However, it is fair to say that McCain has been all over the map on taxes.

Test Case

Frederick Kagan argues that The Surge provided a good test case of the relative martial  judgment of McCain and Obama.

Fred Hiatt argues that Bush exaggerated but didn't lie.

McCain has good traction today among "Fred" voters.

Deja Vu All Over Again, Again

The Mets lose by 2-1 to the Padres for the third straight day.

Kids today!  When I was a young man in the pre-Sports Center days and the Yankees took a western road trip, the NY Times coverage was an enduring source of confusion.   Due to the late starts and early print deadlines, the Times would often have coverage of the Thursday game in the Saturday paper.  Folks not concentrating carefully would glance at the sports section and think, how odd, that score looks just like the one from the game a couple of days ago.

But now the Mets confusion is real.

Blogging Through The Ages

Via Glenn we come across a James Joyner discussion of the evolution of political blogs:

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with the political blogosphere, a tiny fraction of the whole enterprise, and that my observations mostly apply in that realm.

Well, since I started JustOneMinute back in April 2002 I hope to be madly insightful on this topic.  Eventually.  Maybe even later today.

PRE-GLACIAL:  What earnest young scribbler wrote this?

Back to Basics

Perhaps in response to the pounding administered in the blogosphere last week by Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, Jane Galt, and the folks at Best of the Web, Paul Krugman has retreated to the safety of the Economics 101 classroom. Professor Krugman presents a clear column on a subject of general interest that is within his area of expertise - how refreshing. And "Stick to what you know" is good advice for all of us, although I'm damned if I'm going to limit this blog to "Winning Tactics for Hearts - Windows 98".

And as a bit of a cautionary tale - only the link to the original Krugman column still works.

All About The Absence Of Benjamins

Hillary lost because she didn't have enough money?  So says campaign adviser Mark Penn:

While everyone loves to talk about the message, campaigns are equally about money and organization. Having raised more than $100 million in 2007, the Clinton campaign found itself without adequate money at the beginning of 2008, and without organizations in a lot of states as a result. Given her successes in high-turnout primary elections and defeats in low-turnout caucuses, that simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines.

Well, credible candidates with a compelling message and high name recognition can generally raise money, especially with an ex-President in their corner.  The WaPo thought so in Feb 2007, anyway; OpenSecrets shows the Clinton fund-raising tailing off in the second half of 2007 as the campaign unfolded, as did Obama's.

Cogitamus reviews the players for those lacking a scorecard.

Still Flat-Lining

This Washington Monthly post by guest blogger Hilzoy pinning all the perils of derivative deregulation on Phil Gramm was dumb when it was written and hasn't gotten any smarter.

And no, I don't consider this post - happy black people make Maguire angry, but that doesn't mean I think he is a racist - an adequate response.  Dishonest?  Sure.  Gutless?  Absolutely.  But responsive?  No.

Open Thread Saturday

I remember the 1978 Affirmed-Alydar showdown at the Belmont as if it were yesterday.

Some Big Brown coverage here.

The Latest Senate Intel Report

The Times has a front-pager and an editorial on the new Senate Intelligence Committee report on pre-war Iraq intelligence.  Here is the 57 page .pdf on the CIA role and a 172 page .pdf on public statements of various Administration officials.  Page 165 of the .pdf is the section of the Minority Views that recites some public statements of Hilary Clinton, Jay Rockefeller, and Dick Durbin.

My To-Do list is lengthening, but dig in.

More Praise Than Links

Megan McArdle is cogent on cap and trade versus carbon taxes, we are told by no less an eminence than Prof. DeLong (with a follow-up, and something from Marginal Revolution).

Let me add that Barack Obama picked up both candor and wonkery points at one of the many, many debates by noting that cap and trade does not represent a free lunch relative to carbon taxes.  C'mon, doesn't anyone in the blogosphere support this guy?

I will also toss in my two cents in response to this from DeLong:

...there are two third-order differences:

• It's easier to get not-too-bright Republicans to vote against something that is actually in their long-run interest if you can demagogue it by calling it a tax.
• It's easier to get not-too-bright Democrats to vote for something that actually is not in their long-run interest if you can demagogue it by claiming that it's just a restriction on the behavior of corporations and not something that directly impacts people.

Ain't it the truth.  However, cap and trade does have an historic and intellectual pedigree that separates it from some other conventional taxes.

First, cap and trade meshes neatly with the notion of pollution as a failure of property rights; if I owned the air, and the right to pollute it, I would auction to Exxon and Barbra Streisand the right to emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants (or not).  If you owned the air, you would do the same.  However, since no one owns it, the level of pollution is well above any sort of social optimum, and there is not direct market mechanism to bring it down.  Google on "the tragedy of the commons", which is often repeated as "the comedy of the commons"  (Yes, I sit around all day thinking these thoughts...). 

Secondly, early cap and trade schemes in the environmental arena were not put forward as an alternative to taxes; they were put forward as an alternative to the command and control rules of the EPA, with the idea that compliance with a mandated target could be acieved more efficiently if the industry swapped pollution allowances and cleaned up the easy-to-clean pollution emitters first.  I am thinking of the 1990 reform to the Clean Air Act and the cap/trade system for sulfur dioxide when I say this.

A long extract from the Times of May 17, 1989:

The Evolution And Education Of A Candidate

ABC News notes the shift in Obama's position on Iraq.  Get Matt!

BACK WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND SNIDE:  For the impatient among you I summarized the Matt Yglesias article on Obama's foreign policy process this way:

AND SPEAKING OF JUST MAKING STUFF UP:  Shorter Matt Yglesias: Obama's foreign policy is really just an ongoing attempt to rationalize whatever extemporaneous toad hopped out of Barack's mouth this week.  And that's a good thing!