Obama's Secret Plan

(via Syd O) This guy thinks the only explanation for Obama's coddling of Wall Street is that he has a secret plan to give the bankers everything they want so they'll fail - and then he'll have an excuse (w/ public's backing) to really put the screws to Wall Street.

I'm not sure any pol is that smart. A full scale "head fake"?? Problem is - the flip side is that Obama's getting took.

Questions For Obama

... on his First 100 Days in office, from the Conservatives over at Shadow Gov't. Many are "set-ups", but I think Obama could handle them.

UPDATE: The NRSC has youtube attack ad out against Obama. And to be honest - about the first minute is pretty fair (if you ignore the fact that the bottom dropped out of the economy between when Obama made the campaign promises and his acts).

Foreign Policy Film Series

Steven Walt posts his Top 10:

- Meeting Venus
- Independence Day
- Syriana
- Judment at Nuremberg
- Wag the Dog
- Fail Safe
- Gandhi; and A Passage to India (tie)
- The Great Dictator
- Dr. Strangelove
- Casablanca

UPDATE: Slate slams this list and comprises its' own.

Torture

This Ezra Klein post describes the tension between being outraged over torture and wanting to prosecute - and being pragmatic and moving forward:

I don't want to agree with Tyler Cowen on the politics of torture prosecutions, but I think I actually do:

I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors. That's why we can't proceed and Obama probably understands that. If another attack happened this would be all the more true.

Tyler notes that he agrees with the moral stance of those criticizing Obama's attitude towards prosecution. So do I. But insofar as Obama's opposition to torture prosecutions goes, I think it might be as much the calculation of an anti-torture pragmatist as the cowardice of a politician who'd prefer to move on. Right now, he's essentially assumed to have "won" the issue, and the American consensus is anti-torture. Opening up prosecutions -- which will inevitably see tough talking CIA agents swearing that sleep deprivation saved American lives -- could change that.

There are two counterarguments to this. One is the legal point eloquently offered by Glenn Greenwald, who simply says, "the notion that the law can and should be ignored whenever we think doing so would produce good results or would constitute good policy was the engine that drove Bush lawlessness."

Then there's the more instrumental counterargument. Prosecutions impact individual incentives rather than simply political incentives. Obama has won the argument only so long as he remains in office. A win at the polls is not a durable victory. It can be obviated by someone else winning at the polls. But there might be more rank-and-file resistance to torture, however, if future CIA agents looked back and realized that they could be vulnerable to prosecution once the politics changed. Safety in the moment would not imply safety across time periods. And you'd really only need one high-profile, successful prosecution to show that.

"State Secrets" Doctrine Narrowed

The 9th Circuit issued a ruling on in a CIA Rendition case that puts it squarely at odds with the 4th Circuit and therefore, probably, bound for the Supreme Court:

The Fourth Circuit said a lawsuit by one claiming to have been a “rendition” victim can’t go forward if secrets form “the very subject matter” of the program. The Ninth Circuit, however, said that a lawsuit cannot be stopped at the outset even if secret information abounds in the case, so long as there is evidence that could be brought out that is not secret.

The “state secrets privilege,” the Ninth Circuit ruled, applies only to evidence — one item at a time. If an item of evidence is a secret, it will be kept out of the case. But if the information about government action is not secret, it can be offered and tested in court, it said. “The state secrets doctrine,” it said, “applies to evidence, not information.”

Thus, it went on, even if the government claims that information about the “rendition” program is classified, that is no bar to a court exploring specific evidence that is not itself a secret. “The question is which evidence is secret and may not be disclosed in the course of a public trial,” the Circuit Court said.

Douthat's First NYT Column

Appeared today.

Marriage

A good little post:

I never stop being amazed at the paradox that the more marriage is cheapened, contractualized, made commitment-lite, covenant-lite (sorry, the financial and biblical pun is irresistible), the more we are told to be careful and risk-averse when it comes to entering into it. After all, do you really need seven years of shared rent, a golden retriever, a boy and a girl to know whether your mid-life crisis divorce will succeed? It’s Sex and the City as life ethic.

The Next Financial Crisis

(via Syd O) I was just talking to a friend the other day who does some private equity investing and he was saying how we haven't even seen the worst of the recession - the commercial real estate bust. Many commercial loans are over leveraged by the banks and just as troublesome as the mortgage-backed securities that sank the housing market. Plus we're shedding, what, 600K jobs a month or so? When those people start closing up shop in the commercial parks and the banks are left with the notes, we're going to be in huge trouble.

Slate has a good article on all of this.

Section 5 of the VRA

(via Carmi) SCOTUS is set to hear arguments tomorrow on one of the biggest cases this session. The question presented in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility Dist. No. 1 v. Holder is whether "Congress overstep[ed] its constitutional power in 2006 by reauthorizing Section 5 of the[Voting Rights Act], which requires states and localities with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before making changes to their voting procedures?"

Section 5 is central to the VRA, and a legacy of the civil rights movement ... but it was enacted to combat voting restrictions during Jim Crow - so the looming question is whether it's still needed in the age of Obama!

Draw the Line

(via Magic Shell) I can definitely relate - an ASU law student left his window open last week and a guy broke in to rob his apartment.

ASU student Alex Botsios said he had no problem giving a nighttime intruder his wallet and guitars. When the man asked for Botsios' laptop, however, the first-year law student drew the line. "I was like. 'Dude, no -- please, no!" Botsios said. "I have all my case notes ... that's four months of work."\

When the intruder persisted, Alex wrestled away his baseball bat and beat the guy up and then called police ... they had to take the intruder for stitches before booking him for burglary.

Orszag

Ryan Lizza profiles Peter Orszag, the President's Budget Director, in this week's New Yorker.

Shep Smith is Against Torture

(via Yglesias) ... but Fox only airs it online. In an online Fox show, Shep Smith drops the F-bomb in arguing that the Torture Memos advocated, well, torture.

Tab Dump

(Courtesy of Syd O) Some Quality Stuff:

- Trailer for the new movie Food, Inc., about Agribusiness featuring Michael Pollen, the Fast Food Nation guy, et. al.
- Trailer for the upcoming movie, Facing Ali, about the champ's fights as told by those who fought him
- The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is going green! Wow.
- The Scientific American looks at the possibility of food shortages "bringing down civilization."
- An article in Slate on how the NFL draft is illegal, except for the fact that the player's union sanctions it.

Obama's Internal Debate re: Releasing Torture Memos

(via Armando) Some veteran reporters over at the Post report on how there was a divide in the Cabinet (mostly the CIA vs. everyone else) over whether to release the torture memos. Obama, true to form, gathered both sides and aired it out. This is pretty cool:

Seated in Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's West Wing office with about a dozen of his political, legal and security appointees, Obama requested a mini-debate in which one official was chosen to argue for releasing the memos and another was assigned to argue against doing so. When it ended, Obama dictated on the spot a draft of his announcement that the documents would be released, while most of the officials watched, according to an official who was present. The disclosure happened the next day.

Going Mainstream

First, one of my favorite bloggers, Ross Douthat gets picked up by the NYT, now Ezra Klein - another favorite - moves over to the Washington Post. Congrats, and good for him. But Matt makes a good point:

...to be perfectly honest I do have some concerns about this. After all, one thing all decent progressive blogs do is point out semi-regularly that the Washington Post opinion section is a pretty rotten operation. You have liars like Charles Krauthammer and George Will penning regular columns, alongside less-egregious but still pretty pernicious stuff like David Ignatius’ apologia for war crimes and so forth. There are also good people working there, of course, like E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson. But while both of those guys write a lot of great stuff on a lot of important topics, you don’t see them ever writing great stuff on the important topic of how grossly irresponsible it is for an influential entity that wants to be taken seriously as a purveyor of information to be publishing the likes of Krauthammer and Will. That, of course, is the world we live in. People don’t go after their bosses with hatchets. So while hiring Ezra makes the Post less hatchet-worthy, it also means that we’re down a hatchet-wielder. That’s the dark lining in my silver cloud.

On top of that - I'll do my best to find some new, underground, bloggers to keep it hip :)

Hoop Abroad

(via Stilt) Jeremy Tyler, a 6-11 and 260lb junior is skipping his senior year - of High School - to turn pro and play in Europe. Here's a good article on how ground-breaking, establishment shaking, and savvy the move is.

Developing 2nd Amendment Law

SCOTUSblog informs me that a big question left after Heller - whether the Constitution's guarantee of a personal right to have guns - allows the states to regulate personal weapons. The funny thing is, the first case to come before the Supreme Court on this issue may have to do with New York's right to regulate "chuckas!" Yes - like nunchucks.

How to Argue About Waterboarding

Megan McArdle makes an interesting point on how arguing that waterboarding is wrong because "it doesn't work" leaves open the possibility that waterboarding would be Ok if it did work. Better to leave it a strictly moral question than a pragmatic one.

Stimulus Package Break Down

(via Gortyn) This chart from latest issue of the Atlantic is a fantastic breakdown of where and how all the stimulus dollars are being spent; and the chronology of the Federal Reserve intervention. I know it's small - so download and zoom in on it, it's good.

Jane Harman Spy Games

This broke yesterday, and it's been tossed around a bunch - and it's pretty BIG. Stephen Walt explains it in case you haven't heard:

For those of you coming in late: Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly has a bombshell story that the NSA monitored a 2005 conversation between Rep. Jane Harman and a suspected "Israeli agent," in which Harmon allegedly said she would "waddle in" to the ongoing AIPAC espionage case to get the charges reduced in exchange for AIPAC's help in helping her retain her influential position on the Intel Commmittee. Stein also reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez later quashed a DOJ investigation into this incident in order to secure Harman's support for the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

We're Way Behind in Renewable Energy

(via Yglesias)There's a new CAP report out on how the US is pretty far behind other developing countries in producing renewable energy. Also, Matt points out that this is pretty piss poor, especially when you look at solar power - Florida, the West and Southwest should be killing countries like Germany in solar power.

Also, this is disheartening - about how China is passing us up too (even as the popular political argument has been "well, we aren't making China meet CO2 caps, why should we put ourselves at a disadvantage" ... well, now they're jumping out to an advantage while we're sitting flat footed!)

A February analysis by HSBC Global Research in Hong Kong projects that nearly 40 percent of China’s proposed $586 billion stimulus plan—$221 billion over two years—is going toward public investment in renewable energy, low-carbon vehicles, high-speed rail, an advanced electric grid, efficiency improvements, and other water-treatment and pollution controls. This stimulus is on top of historic levels of government spending and private investment in renewable technology, energy efficiency, and low-carbon growth all across China. The upshot: China, according to a recent analysis, is “the largest alternative energy producer in the world in terms of installed generating capacity.”

This massive stimulus plan will spend over 3 percent of China’s 2008 gross domestic product annually in 2009 and 2010 on green investments—more than six times America’s green stimulus spending as a percentage of our respective economies. This is about $12.6 million every hour over the next two years. In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests $112 billion in comparable green priorities over the next two years, about half as much as China, according to HSBC. This represents less than half of one percent of our 2008 gross domestic product.

Tortured Position

Yglesias points me to Philip Zelikow's (ex-Condi staffer) post on how the Obama administration is conflicted in its dealing w/ the OLC torture memos. There seem to be 4 options:

1. No unlawful conduct occurred. That judgment should, at least initially, be made by the Attorney General, free from political influence.

2. Unlawful conduct occurred, but the suspects have a credible defense — that before undertaking their unlawful conduct, they relied in good faith on authoritative (though in retrospect, mistaken) legal opinions that the planned conduct would be lawful, and these opinions were also issued in good faith. Again, that judgment should be made, at least initially, by the attorney general, free from political influence.

3. Unlawful conduct occurred, and the legal opinions are not an adequate defense. Federal prosecutors, regular or specially appointed, then go to work. Again, the prosecutorial judgments should be free from inappropriate political influence.

4. Unlawful conduct occurred, and the legal opinions might not be an adequate defense. But President Obama decides to issue a blanket pardon for any possible criminal activity.

But, Instead, we’ve chosen wacky option number five: “in which the president does not exercise his pardon power but instead, in effect, tells his attorney general what conclusions he should reach about whether federal officials broke the law.”

Marquee Fail

(via Syd O)

21 Dead Horses

21 Horses collapsed and died today prior to a polo match in Florida. Foul play is suspected.

Debunking Tax Myths

(via VH1) Following up on the tax post below, Robert Reich has a great post debunking all the tax myths - most of which we heard at all the "Tea Parties".

The Daily Dish

(via Ezra) The Economist has a good profile of Andrew Sullivan.

Toons

Eat/Tax the Rich

(via Ezra) David Leonhardt has a good, short, piece in the NYT Magazine on Obama's tax structure. Here's the meat of it:

His agenda is a bold one in many ways. Yet his tax code would still look more kindly on wealth than Nixon’s, Kennedy’s, Eisenhower’s or that of any other president from F.D.R. to Carter. And only part of the reason for this is widely understood.

It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton.

What’s much less known is that those old confiscatory rates were not as sweeping as they sound. They applied to only the richest of the rich, because yesterday’s tax code, unlike today’s, had separate marginal tax rates for the truly wealthy and the merely affluent. For a married couple in 1960, for example, the 38 percent tax bracket started at $20,000, which is about $145,000 in today’s terms. The top bracket of 91 percent began at $400,000, which is the equivalent of nearly $3 million now. Some of the old brackets are truly stunning: in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate to 79 percent, from 63 percent, and raised the income level that qualified for that rate to $5 million (about $75 million today) from $1 million. As the economist Bruce Bartlett has noted, that 79 percent rate apparently applied to only one person in the entire country, John D. Rockefeller.

Today, by contrast, the very well off and the superwealthy are lumped together. The top bracket last year started at $357,700. Any income above that — whether it was the 400,000th dollar earned by a surgeon or the 40 millionth earned by a Wall Street titan — was taxed the same, at 35 percent. This change is especially striking, because there is so much more income at the top of the distribution now than there was in the past. Today a tax rate for the very top earners would apply to a far larger portion of the nation’s income than it would have years ago.

No one in the Obama administration or Congress has suggested taking rates back to their sky-high pre-Reagan levels. But a tax code that drew a sharper distinction between the upper middle class and the extremely wealthy, while keeping its top rate below, say, 50 percent, seems more conceivable.

Easter

One of my favorite pieces, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, from one of my favorite artists, Caravaggio.

And 7 Stanzas at Easter, by John Updike:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

Peep Show III

Check out the 3rd installment of the Washington Posts' "Peep Show" - witty and funny panoramas made with an Easter favorite.

New 4th Amendment School Search Case

SCOTUS is set to hear Safford United School District v. Redding on April 21 - a case that involves a 13 year old girl getting strip searched for prescription drugs (ibuprofen nonetheless) at her Middle School!.

More on Rawls

(via Ezra's post) Hilzoy has a follow-up post defending Rawls.

Thus, there is nothing particularly odd about a political philosopher being concerned with the question: how can we construct a community within which all persons can flourish? That's (one way to take) one of the central questions of political philosophy. However, defining Christianity as centrally concerned with the construction of community is not, to my mind, an obvious move. (Love, yes; the nature of community, no.) What's striking about the thesis, besides the cast of Rawls' mind and the glimpses of his twenty-odd year old self, is not how Christian his later work was (it isn't), but how very Rawlsian his take on Christianity is.

Brooks' Philosophy Backlash

I read David Brooks' column yesterday - and was intrigued by it, not because he was attacking philosophy, but because he seemed happy to allow intuitions - not reason - to take a central role in ethics. This seems like a smack to philosphers, but it also seems like a smack to conservatives like Brooks! I didn't have time to think about much else in the column (and he did make a lot of very broad assumptions), but Yglesias has, and he's right that emotions have been considered by philosophers (and sub-sets of philosphy) for quite some time.

And Hilzoy (an actual philosopher) has an excellent post showing how Brooks was really conflating two, very separate, philosophical questions.

Roger Ebert v. O'Reilly

(via Andrew Sullivan) Read this Ebert Sun-Times op-ed. O'Reilly's column got dropped and he ranted about it on his show and asked for a boycott. And Roger shoots back. This is a great ending:

Bill, I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?

That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

15 Men on a Dead Man's Chest

...yo ho ho and a whole shipload of relief headed for Africa ... was hijacked by Pirates! But this is an American Flagship - with 20 American crew! You think Obama thought he'd have to deal with a Wall Street implosion AND Pirates on the high seas?

The PUMA

(via Syd O) Cool car - GM and Segway teaming up - probably the way we should go (i.e. use something like this for city - only use cars when really needed). But, of course it's hard to break our habit of loving cars:

Though being unveiled in New York, the Pumas might appeal most in densely packed cities in places such as India and China, Borroni-Bird says. There they would seem a big step up from bicycles. Americans, who are used to cars, might not take them as seriously.

Ballad of a Thin Man With a Funny Name

(via Politico) Dylan gets interviewed by the Times of London:

Q: What struck you about him?

DYLAN: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage — cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Q: In what way?

DYLAN: First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii. Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise — so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise.

Also:

Q: What else did you find compelling about him?

DYLAN: Well, mainly his take on things. His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.

Stimulate the Economy - And Then Eat Some Doritos

(via Ezra Klein) I've heard some talk that legalizing marijuana is becoming less taboo, politically. Eric Holder said (I've been told) the DOJ wasn't going to actively prosecute minor drug violations ... and then there's the whole drug wars on the Mexican border. So now drug-reform is bouncing around the chattering class. Here's Joe Klein.

But there are big issues here, issues of economy and simple justice, especially on the sentencing side. As Webb pointed out in a cover story in Parade magazine, the U.S. is, by far, the most "criminal" country in the world, with 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public. (See the top 10 ballot measures.)

At the same time, there is an enormous potential windfall in the taxation of marijuana. It is estimated that pot is the largest cash crop in California, with annual revenues approaching $14 billion. A 10% pot tax would yield $1.4 billion in California alone. And that's probably a fraction of the revenues that would be available — and of the economic impact, with thousands of new jobs in agriculture, packaging, marketing and advertising. A veritable marijuana economic-stimulus package! (Read: "Is Pot Good For You?")

Will Wilkinson smokes weed and he likes it:

Have you heard of Santiago Meza Lopez? They call him “The Soupmaker.” In January he confessed to Mexican authorities that he had dissolved over 300 dead human bodies in acid. There’s a lot of money to be made in America’s black market for drugs and Mexican suppliers are willing to kill a lot of people to control those markets and capture the gains. Conservative estimates put the death toll of the war between rival Mexican gangs at over 5,000 in the last year alone. When you kill so many people it’s hard to know what to do with all of the rotting bodies. One way to handle the problem is to call in the Soupmaker. Six hundred American dollars per corpse.

Did you know that the United States of America, the Land of the Free, puts a larger portion of its population behind bars than any country on earth? Thanks in large part to the War on Drugs, Americans lock more of their own in cages than do the thuggish Russians or those “Islamofascist” Saudis. As it happens, American drug prohibition and sentencing policies hit poor black men the hardest, devastating already disadvantaged black families and communities—a tragic, mocking contrast to the achievement of Obama’s election. Militarized police departments across the nation month after month kick down the wrong doors, terrify innocent families, shoot lawful citizens, and often kill the family dog.

Toons

Cap and Trade Will Require 60 Votes

Looks like the Cap and Trade GHG bill isn't going to go through budget reconcilliation in the Senate (which needs only 50 votes) - but will instead need to overcome a filibuster with 60 votes. So that means that the bill (which to my knowledge is STILL MISSING a permit auction - which is unforgivable) will have to be watered-down more to meet awful GOP concerns. Oh, and here are the Dems that agreed:

Max Baucus (Mont.), Evan Bayh (Ind.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Bob Casey Jr. (Pa.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Russ Feingold (Wis.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Carl Levin (Mich.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Mark Warner (Va.) and Jim Webb (Va.).

Not that I'm surprised. Budget reconciliation is sort of seen as cheating, so I'm not surprised that Dems wanted to win on the merits under regular rules. The problem is that the regular rules (60 votes) makes bills suck.

The Way We Were

(via Syd O) Check out this NYT piece on life during the depression. Really interesting/touching stuff. I post this because, with the prospects of peak oil/economic depression/climate change/etc., it's worth remembering that humans have been living on local, organic food; recycling everything they can; depending on neighbors and local trade; and simply surviving self-sufficiently from the beginning of time up until about the 1950's. So, I don't want to romanticize the Depression, but just acknowledge that we are survivors and can get along without credit default swaps, iPods, eBay, and cable TV.

In the winter the chickens would come up under the house and sit in the basement, so if we wanted a chicken we’d raise a plank up and reach down and get the chicken. (It was warm in the wintertime. The base of that chimney would be nice and warm; I don’t blame them for going down there.)

Also, I'm pretty sure that organics can feed the world too.

Last year, mandatory spending on farm subsidies was $7.5 billion, compared with $15 million for programs for organic and local foods, according to the House Appropriations Committee.

Global Warming Is Good

The NYT Magazine has a profile on renown Princeton physics professor Freeman Dyson - a hard core liberal who's broken ranks and believes that Global Warming isn't a big problem.

This guy thinks it's irresponsible for the NYT to fuel the confusion.

Rep. Shimkus (R-IL), channeling Dyson, thinks that CO2 is good for plants and he'd like to go back to Cambrian levels (where plants and animals didn't exist)

I think Ezra Klein's response is correct:

I liked NASA climatologist James Hanson's response -- in the form of an explanation of an unclear quote -- to this weekend's New York Times Magazine article on heterodox scientist Freeman Dyson:

You might guess (correctly) that I was referring to the fact that contrarians are not the real problem – it is the vested interests who take advantage of the existence of contrarians.

There is nothing wrong with having contrarian views, even from those who have little relevant expertise – indeed, good science continually questions assumptions and conclusions. But the government needs to get its advice from the most authoritative sources, not from magazine articles. In the United States the most authoritative source of information would be the National Academy of Sciences.

There are two climate change discussions that occur basically simultaneously. The first asks how to get the information we want. The second asks what to do with the information we have. The first is a scientific discussion while the second is a policy discussion. Contrarians like Dyson have a more obvious role in the first discussion. The scientific consensus should probably dominate the second discussion. But, in practice, the two have gotten mixed up. The media gives a disproportionate amount of coverage to the intellectual dissenters in the policy process, and that has, in turn, spurred the climate change community to spent a lot of time emphasizing and defending the degree of consensus in the scientific process. It's bad for everyone.

PBGC May be Close to Broke?

(via Ezra) Bad News: Last year the Pension Benefit Guaranty Coorporation transferred $64 BILLION of its assets from bonds to stocks ... and then the market crashed. If you'll remember, the PBGC is the gov't entity that takes over all the benefit packages that get dumped on the feds by companies like GM and United when they go into bankruptcy and can't pay their workers the benefit that they promised.

Nationalize the Banks

MUST READS: Two in-depth articles are worth reading. The first, by Simon Johnson (ex-IMF) in the upcoming issue of the Atlantic discusses the financial crisis from the IMF's p.o.v. and points out how much our situation looks like the problems the IMF encounters in emerging nations: a financial oligarchy with entrenched political power strangling the governments ability to resolve a crisis. The solution, too, is straight out of the IMF's playbook: nationalize the banks and then break the oligarchical influence of Wall Street on D.C.

I liked his quote that said: "anything too big to fail is too big to exist".

This segues into the second article by Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel Prize winning economics professor at Columbia) in the Nation outlining just how a bank nationalization plan would look like.

Sen. Stevens' Conviction is Dropped

Sen. Stevens (R-AK)- ex-President Pro Tempore of the Senate - who lost re-election bid a week after being found guilty for corruption charges had his conviction dropped by AG Eric Holder today. Basically, the prosecutorial misconduct was so bad that Holder had to send a message. Stevens definitely doesn't have clean hands, but the DOJ overstepped. Holder actually started his career at the public integrity department, and knows the AK judge who reprimanded the prosecutors - so he has incentive to keep the department clean, and had reason to trust the judge's reprimands. Here's how the Congress Daily reports it:

NEVER MIND. The government today dropped corruption charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, because prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from his lawyers. The decision by Attorney General Holder was announced early this morning. Stevens, who was convicted in late October on charges of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts and favors on Senate financial disclosure forms, had not yet been sentenced. "I always knew that there would be a day when the cloud that surrounded me would be removed," Stevens said today. "That day has finally come." Defense lawyer Brendan Sullivan said the case provided "a warning to everyone. Any citizen can be convicted if prosecutors are hell bent on ignoring the Constitution and willing to present false evidence." But he called Holder a hero for asking the judge to dismiss the verdict and not seek further charges.