The best course is to return to the original Summers parameters — temporary, targeted and timely — thus making the stimulus cleaner and faster.
Strip out the permanent government programs. Many of them are worthy, but we can have that debate another day. Make the short-term stimulus bigger. Many liberal economists have been complaining it is too small, so replace the permanent programs with something like a big payroll tax cut, which would help the working class.
Meantime, the residents of my home state have paid a terrible price for Blagojevich's dereliction of duty. While neighboring Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin all have enjoyed the benefits of innovative, effective and upright governors during the past six years, Illinois has seen its finances, its school systems and its competitive position undermined by a governor known for his absenteeism and greed.
That's a joke to some people, but not to a state I love
Under Mr. Bush, punctuality was a virtue. Meetings started early — the former president once locked Secretary of State Colin Powell out of the Cabinet Room when Mr. Powell showed up a few minutes late — and ended on time. In the Obama White House, meetings start on time and often finish late.
...So [Obama] issued an informal edict for “business casual” on weekends — and set his own example.
He had that nice phrase about "the winter of our hardship." And then there was this wonderful passage: "Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights." Why not end the speech right there? What a great walk-off line. Keep it short, simple, shattering. Leave 'em weeping.
So if we're going to do stimulus, judging from our not-very-good best example, what we want to do is pack a massive wallop as quickly as possible, to shock those "animal spirits" back into a more normal economic rhythm. I am skeptical that this will work even if tried, for reasons I have outlined elsewhere. But if we are going to try it, we should be focusing less on the Democratic wish list and more on figuring out where money can be most quickly and effectively spent....or course, I don't mind some Democratic wish list items being on the list (Especially energy - since we need to get that going. But there are also a lot of Dem wish-list items that require a lot of central planning and shouldn't be hurried)
The suit contends that Yoo’s legal opinions authorized Bush to order Padilla’s detention in a Navy brig in South Carolina and encouraged military officials to subject Padilla to aggressive interrogation techniques, including death threats and long-term sensory deprivation.
That’s not all. On Thursday, Justice Department lawyers are slated to be in Charleston, S.C., to ask a federal magistrate there to dismiss another lawsuit charging about a dozen current and former government officials with violating Padilla’s rights in connection with his unusual detention on U.S. soil, without charges or a trial.
The defendants in that case are like a who’s who of Bush administration boogeymen to Obama’s liberal followers — former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. ...
...Obama [] seems to be no fan of Yoo’s work. One of the new president’s first acts upon taking office last week was to nullify every detainee-related legal opinion issued during the Bush administration by the unit Yoo worked in, the Office of Legal Counsel. ...
...To an extent, the lawsuits against Yoo and Rumsfeld are symbolic. Padilla was transferred from military to civilian custody in 2006. A jury later convicted him on conspiracy charges unrelated to the alleged “dirty bomb” plot. A judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison, though an appeal is pending. While Padilla does want an order barring another involuntary trip to the brig, each suit seeks only $1 in damages, plus legal fees.
Berkeley's public library will face a showdown with the city's Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city's nuclear-free ordinance.The dispute centers on a five-year, $63,000 contract the library wants to sign with 3M, an international technology company based in Minnesota, to service five scanner machines library patrons use to check out books.
But 3M, a company with operations in 60 countries, refused to sign Berkeley's nuclear-free disclosure form as required by the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act passed by voters in 1986.
As a result, the library's self-checkout machines have not been serviced in about six months. Library officials say 3M is the only company authorized by the manufacturer to fix the machines, which were purchased in 2004.
The lesson I would hope the administration learns here is this: He needs to spend less time seeking political cover to mitigate the downside to possible policy failure, and more time trying to implement the best policies he can.
"Can I make a comment that is unrelated to the economy very quickly?" the new president told reporters at a gathering with business leaders. "And it has to do with Washington. My children's school was canceled today. Because of, what? Some ice?"
The president said he wasn't the only one who was incredulous.
"As my children pointed out, in Chicago, school is never canceled," Obama said to laughter. "In fact, my 7-year-old pointed out that you'd go outside for recess. You wouldn't even stay indoors. So, I don't know. We're going to have to try to apply some flinty Chicago toughness."
Asked if he meant the people of the national's capital are wimps, Obama said: "I'm saying, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."
In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt was able to put 4 million people back to work within a period of two months through the Civil Works Administration, precursor to the WPA. Obama proposes to put the same number of people to work "over the next few years."
But what really has sustainable agriculture advocates in a tizzy are the rumors that Vilsack might pick Chuck Hassebrook, currently the director of the Center for Rural Affairs, as the number two guy at the USDA. Aside from the fact that he would be the highest ranking progressive food figure in government since, well, ever, the significance lies in the importance of the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture (his potential new gig). Deputy Secretaries are the operational folks - the people who actually run the departments (a COO to the Secretary's CEO). So Hassebrook, if appointed, would represent far more than a bone tossed to the sustainable ag community. He'd be more like the camel's nose. Their excitement is therefore understandable.
Vilsack has already whet the appetite of food reformers in the choice for his own chief of staff. Via Obamafoodorama, we learn that Vilsack's pick, John Norris, is a former farm activist (and former chair of Iowa's Utilities Board) and beloved by the Iowa sustainable ag community. And, get this, Norris' wife is chief of staff to the First Lady. Pillow talk, indeed. Feel free, by the way, to raise eyebrows at the growing influence of Iowa in our national affairs. But, then, that caucus happened which did kinda sorta help Obama win the nomination. So I guess we'll just have to live with it.
In his conversation with the estimable Hisham Milhem (a good choice for an interlocutor), Obama reached out directly to the Arab public via the Saudi TV station al-Arabiya (which shrewdly posted the transcript immediately). It signals the importance of the Middle East to the new President, his commitment to engaging on Arab-Israeli peace, his genuinely fresh thinking and new start with the Muslim world, and his recognition of the importance of genuine public diplomacy.
Not very progressive! Add in state and local taxes and it would look flatter still. And just to remind everyone of exactly what that "Top 400 Taxpayers" segment at the far right looks like, here are the pinkos over at the Wall Street Journal to explain it to you:The top 400 taxpayers have greatly increased their share of individuals' income since the mid-1990s. The group accounted for 1.15% of total income in 2005....more than twice as large as its 0.49% share a decade earlier.
....The average federal income-tax rate for the group was 18.23%....well below the average income-tax rate of nearly 30% back in 1995, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.
So there you have it. The top 400 taxpayers, a group so rich and elite that I'd need scientific notation to properly represent their proportion of the population, have doubled their share of income in the past decade or two but have decreased their tax burden by nearly half. Nice work! As you can see, Warren Buffett wasn't exaggerating when he said his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he does. If she pays more than 18% — not exactly a tough hurdle when you figure that payroll taxes already account for about 8% of that — she probably does.
A British newspaper is reporting that some al Qaeda goofballs killed themselves playing with the bubonic plague in the hills of eastern Algeria. File this under "interesting if true." In general I have a pretty low opinion of British newspapers, which seem to me much more willing than American ones to run with rumors.
The Kings of War, whose contributors are going to give academic Web sites a good name, has some helpful commentary that includes a translation of the original article in the Algerian newspaper Echorouk that seems to have started the buzz.
Also, there is an interesting echo of Algerian-born Albert Camus in all this.
(via Gortyn) The Rocky points out:
Beer drinkers around the globe can hoist their beer cans in a celebratory toast to a milestone that began in Golden half a century ago. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the old Adolph Coors Co. unveiling the U.S. beer industry's first seamless, recyclable aluminum beer can.
That can ultimately spelled the demise of the tin beverage can developed in the mid-1800s. Industry officials say the development of the Coors aluminum can forever changed the way people drink beer and other beverages.
President Obama intends to use conservative values for progressive ends. He will cast extreme individualism as an infantile approach to politics that must be supplanted by a more adult sense of personal and collective responsibility. He will honor government's role in our democracy and not degrade it. He wants America to lead the world, but as much by example as by force.And in trying to do all these things, he will confuse a lot of people.
One of the wondrous aspects of Obama's inaugural address is the extent to which those on the left and those on the right both claimed our new president as their own.
The specific incidents include the report that a decision was made to cut off access to Purple and Blue standing areas, which meant that a large number of ticketholders could not reach their designated areas.
I also aware of the incident involving the 3 rd Street Tunnel, where thousands of people were stuck for several hours and apparently without any law enforcement presence.
If you were told an animal was "naturally raised," what would you imagine that meant? Is it evidence that they wandered a field? Felt the touch of sunlight? Ate their normal diet? Well, no. At least, that's not what it means if you see "naturally raised" on a package of meat. The USDA released their guidelines for the marketing term this week. Grass, sunlight, and open space don't enter into it. Rather, animals are "naturally raised" if they "have been raised entirely without growth promotants, antibiotics (except for ionophores used as coccidiostats for parasite control), and have never been fed animal by-products."
Clinton spent his first two-and-a-half months in law school more or less out of law school, working as an operative for a liberal U.S. Senate candidate. When the campaign ended, he threw himself at the mercy of the first sympathetic classmate he could find, a woman named Nancy Bekavac. Maraniss recounts the exchange:
"Hi, I'm Bill Clinton. Can I borrow your notes?"
"For what?"
"For everything."
"Are you in our class?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, where the hell've you been? We've been here since September!"
President Obama stepped into the Oval Office at 8:30 a.m. today, starting his first full day in office by focusing on two of the biggest promises he made during the campaigning -- winding down the war in Iraq and righting a battered economy. Obama's schedule included meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. David Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq, and, this afternoon, a session with his economic advisers. Obama has set a 16-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops but will need to deal with the economy on a much shorter timetable. "Fortunately, we've seen Congress immediately start working on the economic recovery package, getting that passed and putting people back to work," Obama said in an interview with ABC News. "That's going to be the thing we'll be most focused on."
You can say, of course, that I am treating his speech as a political argument, and not as a piece of oratory, but the problem is that it existed in the netherworld between inspiring oratory and political argument. It had intimations of both, but lived up to the promise of neither. I suspect Obama chose this ambiguous course partly because of the difficulty of the occasion. Argument requires pros and cons, truth and falsity, truth-tellers and misleaders, but an inaugural speech is an instrument of national, and even international, unification. Thus, some who might have actually qualified as misleaders and villains (e.g. the greedy) make only a fleeting appearance, while scorn is heaped upon others (the "cynics... who question the scale of our ambition") who are inventions of the moment rather than real adversaries. That's certainly understandable, but it didn't make for good oratory or argument.
A reported two million people watched Barack Obama's inauguration today. I, unfortunately, wasn't one of them. If you don't care why, and just want foreign policy blogging, skip the rest of this post and come back tomorrow.
See, I went to the show with a few friends who received excellent Purple tickets as a reward for untold hours volunteering as foreign policy advisers for the Obama campaign. We got down to the security checkpoint for the Purple section bright and early (I left home at 4 AM), and were guided into a long tunnel which had been closed to traffic. We waited in line for nearly four hours, in a claustrophobic tunnel with no porta-potties, no food or drink, and not a single official or volunteer in sight. Finally, we got within sight of the Purple Gate -- only to find that it had been closed. Thousands of people in front of us hadn't gotten in (not that anyone bothered to tell the people languishing in the tunnel that the gate had been closed, mind you). Thousands of purple ticket holders were behind us. It's remarkable that there wasn't a riot. I rode the metro home with a lot of people who had been turned away, including an elderly African-American woman muttering over and over to herself that it had been one of the worst experiences of her life.
The Capitol was a scene today. People everywhere. Hordes of vendors. (If Barack Obama really is a secret Marxist, he's got to be appalled by the quantity of commerce taking place in his name.) Families of all colors. Everybody cold. Kids holding fast to their father's hands, pointing at the big white buildings, demanding commemorative flags, asking to go to the bathroom, standing unhappily in line to tour the halls of Congress. Their parents whispering to each other, pulling them back from the street, exasperated by the burden of entertaining kids in the DC winter but glad they could be there. Not because it was pleasant, or fun, or because you received a free juicer for attending. But because it was important. Because they wanted to be part of wat was happening in Washington this week.
People are proud of their politics again. They can sense that their country has done something that future generations will be proud of. They can sense that they have done something that future generations can be proud of. They were the generation that elected an African-American to the presidency! You can roll that sentence around on the tongue, imagine how it will read in tomorrow's textbooks. Obama's election feels like history. Reads like history. Is history.
For that reason, though, tomorrow will be a strange day. It marks the end of Obama's transition from candidate to president. And president will be a very different role. Obama's campaign was as much about the idea of Obama as the presidency of Obama. There were dry policy plans that sought to reform our tax code and soaring speeches that traced the moral arc of our politics. And the latter, frankly, proved more important than the former. The latter is the only reasons anyone even cared that a first-term senator from Illinois had a tax plan.
What Obama represented mattered. Hope is not a plan and it is not a policy, but people hunger for it. A politics that has room for hope is a politics wherein people can imagine coming together to make tomorrow better than today. That belief is, arguably, the highest purpose of politics. And there was no better evidence for the enduring power of hope than the almost ludicrous idea that a black man could contest the presidency.
And then it was true.
The night Obama became president-elect, he was almost pure idea: The celebrations that took hold on America's streets were not a joyous affirmation of his statements on entitlement reform. They were an explosion of pride at what America had just done, the barriers it had just broken, the boundaries it had just obliterated. For a few weeks, Obama was hardly even a partisan figure, much less a tawdry politician. He was living history.
The past two months have marked his slow transition from idea into president. What Obama meant is increasingly submerged beneath what Obama does. The fact that we elected a black man says little about how we spend the TARP dollars, or mediate the conflict in Gaza, or stimulate the economy. Tomorrow, our politics will be at its highest point in memory. We will have elected an African-American. We will be inaugurating a president with higher approval ratings than any other incoming executive since the advent of polling. But then politics will quiet, for a little while at least, and governance will take over. Obama will stop representing things and start doing things.
Obama's next task, then, is harder. To recast governance much as he recast politics. Success would look different, to be sure. Good governance is often more technical than inspiring. It need not feel like history. But nor should governance deject Americans, or disgust them, or appear impervious to their input. The power of Obama's election is that it felt like the country's accomplishment. That is easier in an election: The country votes. Such a direct connection may not be possible in governance. But if governance can feel again like it works on behalf of the public, like it takes seriously their concerns and works daily to meet their expectations, then that would be something better than hope. That would be change.
Peter Beinart today bravely repeats the emerging would-be conventional wisdom. Rather than simply denounce everything Republican, he argues, Democrats should admit that the "surge" worked and -- uniquely echoing a thousand recent op-eds -- was President Bush's finest moment. I have a hard time imagining anything as tedious as rehashing those tired debates from the campaign about the "surge" -- perhaps we could have another round of arguments as to whether the surge brigades arriving in the spring of 2007 caused the Sunni turn against al-Qaeda in the fall of 2006? But in the interests of post-partisanship, I am willing to offer an alternative as Bush's finest hour in Iraq: the Status of Forces Agreement.
Signing a Status of Forces Agreement requiring the full withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq on a fixed three year timeline demonstrated a real flexibility on Bush's part. It demonstrated a pragmatism and willingness to put the national interest ahead of partisanship that few of us believed he possessed. It is largely thanks to Bush's acceptance of his own bargaining failure that Barack Obama will inherit a plausible route to successful disengagement from Iraq.
Read the whole post.
Ex: the new AG, Holder, said that waterboarding was torture - Cheney admitted to authorizing it - and torture is a felony carrying a 20yr sentence.Unfortunately this won't happen - although it probably should. Tom Ricks thinks we should have a "truth and reconciliation"commission like South Africa - which is more feasible - but probably just as unlikely to happen.
Watching Bush's farewell address last night, what struck me above all was how long it's been since he felt like the President. Bush never had the gift of persuasion, the ability to give a State of the Union address or a press conference that left his enemies disarmed, but there was a time when he at least seemed like a leader - like someone consequential, active, and important, whatever one thought of his actions and their consequences. But that air of authority and leadership dissipated somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 midterms, and for the last two years Bush has projected the air of a bystander to history, as though events, and his presidency, were largely out of his hands.
But scratch the surface of the manufacturing process and the green sheen disappears. Vast amounts of fossil fuels are used to produce and transport panels. Solar cells contain toxic materials. Some components can't be easily recycled.
That has some environmentalists worried about a new tidal wave of hazardous waste headed for the nation's landfills when panels eventually wear out. A report to be released today by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition warns that the industry and lawmakers need to set policies now to ensure that a clean technology doesn't leave a dirty legacy.
What a phantasmagorically strange conflict the Arab-Israeli war had become! Here was a Saudi-educated, anti-Shiite (but nevertheless Iranian-backed) Hamas theologian accusing a one-time Israeli Army prison official-turned-reporter of spying for Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, an organization that had once been the foremost innovator of anti-Israeli terrorism but was now, in Mr. Rayyan’s view, indefensibly, unforgivably moderate. [...]
Mr. Rayyan answered the question as I thought he would, saying that a long-term cease-fire would be unnecessary, because it will not take long for the forces of Islam to eradicate Israel.There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief.
The reverse is also true: Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation. Neither position credits Hamas with sincerity, or seriousness.
The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.
1. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004
2. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000
3. "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000
4. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004
5. "Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001
6. "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001
7. "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2006
8. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005
9. "I've heard he's been called Bush's poodle. He's bigger than that."—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun newspaper, June 27, 2007
10. "And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq."—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008
11. "We ought to make the pie higher."—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb. 15, 2000
12. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
13. "And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007
14. "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers."—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000
15. "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000
16. "One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures."—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000
17. "People say, 'How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?' You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002
18. "Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000
19. "I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend."—on the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005
20. "I think it's really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006
21. "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000
22. "You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one."—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006
23. "There's a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.' "—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000
24. "They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000
25. "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008
The passive-solar house is positioned to absorb winter sunlight, warming the interior walkways and walls. Underground water, which remains a constant 55 degrees year-round, is piped through a heat exchange system that keeps the interior warm in winter and cool in summer. A graywater reclamation system treats and reuses waste water. Rain gutters feed a cistern hooked to a sprinkler system for watering the fruit orchard and grass. Clearly, Bush goes home from the White House to a green house.
McMaster demolishes the view that the U.S. military had a great plan for invading Iraq but that bad old L. Paul Bremer III and other civilians subsequently blew it. In particular, McMaster spanks former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his partner in the invasion planning, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks...
...the way the United States went to war influenced everything that followed. A fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the otherThis passage Ricks thinks is especially insightful:
Decisions against deploying coalition forces in numbers sufficient to secure populations left many commanders with no other option than to adopt a raiding approach to counterinsurgency operations -- an approach that tended to reinforce the perception of coalition forces as aggressors and conflated tactical successes with actual measures of strategic effectiveness. Inadequate troop strength and the approach it impelled created opportunities for the enemy.
There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.
On the other hand, if I were Obama's political advisor, I'd probably argue for a bill that could pass by wide margins, too. The political system just isn't set up to handle anything as radical as I'm proposing. Worse, Obama faces a lose-lose proposition. If he were somehow able to get twice as much money as he's asking for and avoid the crisis a lot of us fear, then his critics would say it wasn't necessary. And if he doesn't spend enough and we do go off a cliff, he also gets blamed. I'd probably want a big majority in my corner under those circumstances, too.
Tom Philpott delivers a nice reality check on the Obama campaign's almost wholly disappointing approach to food policy. Despite the momentary flash of promise when Obama mentioned Michael Pollan's work in an interview, his subsequent appointments and statements haven't demonstrated an evident commitment to understanding farm policy as a question of food rather than a question of food producer interests. Indeed, Obama's agricultural adviser, Marshall Matz, is a partner at a law and lobbying firm that represents agricultural interests against federal regulators. And he also served as co-chair of Obama's rural outreach committee, which neatly places him on the wrong side of another problem in farm policy: The tendency to understand it as an issue that's mainly of interest to rural Americans who produce food rather than urban or suburban residents who eat food. That's two for two.ALSO: I guess there's a new Blog - Obama Foodorama - that follows all things Obama and Food Policy.
History of Plymouth Plantation, Wm. Bradford
The Federalist Papers
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
Walden
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
The Promised Land, Mary Antin
How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock
On the Road, Keruac
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
WASHINGTON—With his departure from office only weeks away, President George W. Bush told reporters Monday that he is "fed up" with the way his mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, keeps pestering him about his post–Oval Office plans.
"Every time I see her it's 'have you thought about your future' this, and 'do you know where you're gonna put your presidential library' that," said Bush, who will be moving out of the White House on Jan. 20. "It's like, I'll just get a job as a CEO or board chairman or something. My God, quit worrying about it. I'm 62 years old, for Christ's sake!"
The spending versus taxes distinction is the wrong way to think about it. The question is at the margin. So one dollar of infrastructure is better than one dollar of tax cuts. But if you already have a hundred dollars of infrastructure then adding one dollar of infrastructure is a lot less effective than adding one dollar of tax cuts.And then Noam Scheiber claims that Obama's really making a brilliant political move:
By agreeing to channel up to 40 percent of the stimulus through tax cuts, Obama is essentially calling the GOP's bluff. He's saying, "You guys are making a principled argument that tax cuts can be a more efficient way to stimulate the economy. I'm accepting that argument in large part. So rather than spend a lot of money helping low- and middle-income people, I'm going to get that money to them via tax cuts."
At which point he's kind of backed them into a corner. If the GOP accepts, then great. If they turn around and say, "Well, when we said tax cuts, we actually meant tax cuts for wealthy people, not for low- and middle-income people," then it becomes blindingly obvious that they weren't making a principled argument at all. They were trying to shake Obama down on behalf of their rich cronies.
Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?
Such examples are the biggest reason why many experts are now fast-forwarding their estimates of how quickly we must shift away from fossil fuel. Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore on behalf of the IPCC, said recently that we must begin to make fundamental reforms by 2012 or watch the climate system spin out of control; NASA scientist James Hansen, who was the first to blow the whistle on climate change in the late 1980s, has said that we must stop burning coal by 2030. Period.
The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
Lynn Sweet reports, Senate Majority Whip (and Illinois senior Senator) Dick Durbin has left at least two telephone messages for Burris, but neither of those calls has been returned. (Burris says he hasn't figured out how to work his cellphone, which suggests that perhaps he is indeed suited for the Senate.) So the assumption now is that Burris will be showing up Tuesday to get sworn in on the first day of the new congressional session.
Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?
Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
