Centerfield

Academic Parasites

I'm ashamed at having ever considered entering academia after this story in the NY Times about the University of Colorado professor that compared the 9/11 victims to Eichmann.

Hamilton College, where he is a sophomore, is embroiled in a controversy. An invited speaker - Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder - has compared American policy in Iraq to that of Nazi Germany. He also referred to Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis' plan to exterminate the Jews, when he called the trade center victims "little Eichmanns."

Of course, that wasn't enough for this genius.

Later, Professor Rabinowitz began receiving e-mail messages from colleagues who had learned that Professor Churchill had written in a published essay that those killed in the trade center had ignored their role in American foreign policy. "They were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cellphones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants," he wrote.

The idiocy of this really boggles my mind; apparently, everyone that worked in the Twin Towers was some apostle of American imperialism, including, presumably, the janitors and secretaries. How else can you justify something this stupid?

"They were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cellphones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants," he wrote.

And, then, not even having the balls (pardon my language) to stand up for what he said, this

For his part, Professor Churchill said in an interview, "My reaction is astonishment. This is a three-year-old piece that has been spun mercilessly and distorted. The comparison was of technocrats. Eichmann is someone who, after all, killed no one. He made the trains run on time."

I have several reactions to this. First, while I'm sure he believes this, I suspect that this also reflects how academia works, especially in the social sciences. A little controversy and you go from being some obscure professor to a renowned speaker famed for defending the First Amendment. (And, oh yeah, more money.)

Second, the utter lack of concern or compassion for people affected by 9/11. Later in the article, he says he does have sympathy for the victims of 9/11 as well as victims in Iraq and Palestine. But I suspect that people are just an abstraction to him. He doesn't give a damn about the 9/11 victims or the Iraqis or Palestineans either. They are simply symbols. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he sort of liked seeing civilians killed to prove his point. Like many academics, he is so divorced and alienated from the real world that mere human sentiments and concerns from low-life ordinary Americans mean nothing to him.

Third, as I noted above, his disingenuousness and unwillingness to face up to the consequences of what he said. Right after he compared the victims to Eichman and talked about their "braying" he justified their murder as the only effective means of retribution; later, of course, he said he had sympathy for them.

Finally, what bothers me the most is the absolute hypocrisy of the academic Left. Having him speak and having academics defend him wouldn't bother me nearly as much if they were equally willing to defend people whose views they don't like. For example, what if someone like Daniel Pipes, or Charles Murray or Ward Connerly were to speak? Do you think the academics would be rushing to defend their right to speak? And then, of course, they blame the "political climate" for all sorts of ills. What would the "political climate" be if someone invited an opponent of affirmative action to speak on campus?

It is simply disingenuous and exhibits an utterly bizaare self-absorption when these people constantly make inflammatory statements that they know are offensive and hurtful and then express shock and dismay at any criticism. As if the First Amendment gives them the absolute right to offend anyone they want without any consequences whatsoever. Yet, when someone like Larry Summers makes, IMO, a much less inflammatory statement, that is considered beyond the pale. Of course, when you are an academic you become used to having people hand on your every word and express admiration for your brilliance. Ass kissing is the preferred method of advancement in academia. In the real world, if you made statements like this, you would get a punch in the mouth.

And what is even worse is that, for the most part, these statements aren't even designed to start a so-called "dialogue." They are intended simply to shock and appall. They have no interest in actually discussing ideas; it is simply agitprop. Apparently, the college will have a forum with this guy where people will supposedly be able to engage. Does anyone really think that this guy will do anything but sling mud at anyone who dares challenge him?

I apologize for my anger, but things like this sicken me. I used to hold the academy in such high regard; I thought there would be nothing better than to teach and discuss ideas. It is simply appalling what has happened on campus. I think tenure has outlived its usefulness; let these people get a taste of real life instead of having a sinecure for life. (My sister-in-law won't approve of these statements since her husband just got tenure at Penn.) Let Ward Churchill address the families of the 9/11 victims and tell them how their loved ones were braying little Eichmans. Of course, he wouldn't have the courage to look them in the face; he has to retreat back to his rock at the University of Colorado. Fortunately, he has at least resigned the chairmanship of his department although he remains on the faculty. (The fact that he was chairman of the department says something about what the social sciences have come to.)epartment is it that would have someone like this

How to "Fix" the Republican Party, Part 1

A while back I asked Rick why we seemed to perseverate on “How the Democratic party should change". He challenged me to suggest another topic. Since “turnabout is fair play” I’ve decided to look at how the Republican Party might change. Since success is fleeting; what are the issues that could potentially divide the Republican Party, hurt it in future elections AND is that important to centrists.

First, I’d like to examine an issue near and dear to Arizona: Immigration reform. This past election the Arizona voters easily passed Proposition 200 . While on the surface the proposition simply required that all Arizonans show proof of citizenship to vote and to receive public benefits, unofficially it was seen as a backlash to the illegal immigration problem that Arizona, as border state, wrestles with. The Federation for American Immigration Reform,Fair, was the major outside group behind Prop 200.

Most major Republican officer holders opposed the proposition as an unnecessary and ineffective initiative. A major voice for opposition in AZ was John McCain. McCain, as a counter-proposal, has worked with fellow senators (including Teddy Kennedy) to propose a guest worker program. President Bush has endorsed the concept. Groups such as FAIR suggest that only tighter enforcement of border restrictions and no amnesty or guest worker programs. Several prominent AZ Republicans support the FAIR agenda.

As an interesting sidelight, 44 % of Arizona Hispanics supported Prop 200 leading some pundits to suggest that such “anti-immigrant” referenda aren’t a “slam dunk” with Hispanic voters.

So what direction should the Republican Party go? What is the “conservative” position (i.e. free market versus greater government regulation)? What is the centrist position on immigration reform? And ultimately which party benefits from addressing this issue?

Centrists Gaining Visibility

BOPnews blogger paperwight isn't too happy with Marshall Wittman, the former Republican who is now blogging for the Democratic Leadership Council.
But what pleases me about this post is the comment by John:

i think this guy is what is lately called a centrist. i've noticed alot of new political blogs under this label lately. truthfully i don't really understand what a centrist is. they seem to be coming from the far right of the domestic political agenda with a corporate agebda at their core. i'd bet most of their funding is corporate.

Here is my response to John:

I'm delighted you've noticed an increased in centrist blogs. Most centrists I know are pro-business and socially tolerant. In fact, at the Centrist Coalition, we're supportive of gay marriage, and have had arguments with conservatives who say we can't really be centrists, because the median American voter is against gay marriage. In theory, a centrist could be anti-business and socially intolerant--kind of like William Jennings Bryan. I don't know anyone like that, however.

Except for the DLC blogs, I don't know of any centrists who are getting paid to blog. The Centrist Coalition is all-volunteer at this point.

As far as why someone might be a centrist, it's often because they have had life experiences that allow them to relate to both sides of the cultural divide. I for instance was raised in a highly traditional religious household, but also went to college in Cambridge, Mass.

The Welfare State Revisited

The problem presented by the millions of Americans that are unemployed and dependent on welfare is a troubling one. Democrats must put forth a solid strategy directed at solving this problem if we are going to get back to our roots and take back the areas of America that are now Republican.

Republicans rail against a "welfare state" while at the same time making it harder for welfare recipients to get low-level employment and shake that burden. Those who honestly want to get off of welfare do not like being on it. They do not wear it as a badge of pride. It is the bottom line, though, that rules the day for the Republicans: keeping the wages down and the profits coming in.

Unlike what anti-welfare proponents would like people to believe, there are more methods to solving this problem than hiking wages and making it difficult for the rest of us. The rhetoric doesn't measure up to analysis. Job turnover rates - the rate at which workers quit and employers have to replace them - has always been a problem with welfare workers. They just don't seem to stay at work. Wages play only a small part in this equation. When simple humanity is injected into the workplace, turnover rates dramatically decrease.

According to studies done in collaboration with the publication of David Shipler's brilliant account of welfare workers, The Working Poor, simply having an employee or supervisor talk to and eat lunch with a new employee regularly can reduce turnover rates by half. Yes, something so simple as making a welfare worker feel as if they are more than just one cog in the machine will help bridge that gap and cut turnover rates drastically.

Families that have used welfare through generations - the groups Republicans like to harangue - are often those who would be helped the most by this process. They normally show an increased difficulty attaching to a regular work schedule beyond a 60-day period of high motivation. These "60-day workers" are normally bound down by family issues and are not used to holding a fixed schedule. As an employer interviewed by Shipler put it, "Work is not the first job." With someone there to spot them, per se, they now feel needed. That fundamental motivation of feeling important in the workplace solves the most basic problem of turnover.

Looking for a college degree for a secretarial job, or in nursing or car repair, cuts out many applicants who have trained in these very skills through welfare job training programs. It sounds bad, but lowering the requirements for those jobs from a college degree to a G.E.D. would open doors for hundreds of thousands of otherwise capable but undereducated workers. Let me briefly explain why this is not such a negative thing:

The long-term solution to the swollen ranks of welfare recipients lies not in wages - which are also an important part of the workplace, but actually ranked lower than "Feeling Appreciated" in Shipler's studies - but in taking low-cost risks and focusing on the worker. It takes extra time, but a partnership between corporations and the government to allow for rebates if workers stay beyond a set time limit would help ease the burden employers may feel. A motivated welfare worker is much more likely to stay employed and work his or her way into self reliance and out of the welfare pit. This challenge is far more difficult than Republicans - or Democrats, for that matter - give credit for.

Time, not money, will solve this problem. Time, care and adaptation will serve as three tonics that will do what money cannot do. Democrats and Republicans could both take some points away from Shipler's book: if we want to make welfare reform real, why not start by making jobs available to those who have the skills for the labor but not degree? Why not let them work their way out, like everyone seems to want? It's time to answer.

Brought to you by The New Democrat

Centrist National Voice Chat

Because we're scattered round the USA, it will be difficult for us to ever meet in person. That's why we've come up with the idea of a national voice chat. Centrist Coalition members have already been using the voice chat feature of Yahoo Groups to handle our business meetings. We've decided to set up a voice chat to talk about politics and anything else that interests us--the equivalent of our Friday open thread. We may also invite a blogger from our blogroll to be our featured guest.

To participate in the voice chat, you will need to install Yahoo's free Instant Messenger on your computer. That's all you need if you just want to listen; if you want to speak, you will either need a built-in microphone on your computer, or you will need to spend $15 to buy an external mike.

We plan on setting up a new Yahoo Group just for the voice chat. Users could select the "No mail" option to ensure they're not adding to their email traffic. We're taking nominations for a name for the group. The ones suggested so far are: Centrist Voice Chat, Centrist Townhall, and Moderate Mooseheads. Please leave your suggestions in the comments to this post.

Also, please suggest a day and time for what could become a weekly chat. I'm thinking 10PM Eastern Standard Time, which would be 7PM on the West Coast. I'm often committed in the evenings Monday-Thursday, so my favorites would be Friday or Sunday night--especially since I'd be stoked up by talk shows like the McLaughlin Group.

I hope we can get this rolling within a couple weeks. Stay tuned.

Good news from Iraq, Part 20

The regular Chrenkoff report on what you don't normally see on the 6 o'clock news.

Good news from Iraq, Part 20

Naturally, much on the elections, including the surprising show of voters in Falluja and Mosul. Also a few things on the election that I haven't found at all elsewhere, like the Turkish press report from the election observers.

Those Uber-Civilized Germans

'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Euro-socialism, anyone?

Are Americans from Mars and Europeans from Venus

Isiah Berlin is generally considered one of the great political philosophers of the 20th Century and a doyen of political pluralism. In recent years, some conservatives have questioned his legacy due to the aspect of cultural relativism in his work. Berlin spend most of his career at Oxford (he was born in Russia), but spent the war years in the United States. He reflected a very European view of the world (even in the 40s) and was generally uncomfortable with (although not hostile to) the United States.

Simon Schama reviewed a book of Berlin's letters in The New Republic recently and one part of the article really struck me as being relevant to the current transatlantic divide. It discusses Berlin's somewhat negative view of American optimism.

Early in his stay in the United States, where he arrived first in 1940, hoping to move on to Moscow (via Japan), Berlin realized that his skeptical and finally tragic view of history made him a cultural misfit. In New York, where Berlin was employed at the British Press Service in Manhattan, and in Washington, where he became head of the political survey section at the British Embassy, he blinked at the sunlit intensity of American optimism. Though he genuinely admired American energy and forthrightness, the mistaken conviction that exhaustive iteration was the same thing as comprehension depressed him. Ultimately he thought that the national passion for the unequivocal could only be sustained through an exercise of eye-shutting make-believe akin to a children's party game: the conversion of the world from what it was to what America wished it would be. This optimization of the world, he thought, was a willed self-deception about the reality of human behavior; namely, that there were no conflicts that, with the application of enough goodwill, money, and robust determination, could not be resolved.

Clearly, this reflects a still existing divide between European and American thought and, IMO, explains a lot of the policy differences. Largely because of history, the Europeans have a much more tragic view of history than we do and are much more skeptical in the ability of humans to shape their environment. Americans, on the other hand, believe in finding a clear cut solution. Contrary to what people might like to think, these different perspectives predate Bush and really have existed since the United States broke away from England. People on both sides of the ocean are often frustratrated by the inability of the other to see things their way, without realizing that the differences reflect, not just disagreements on particular policies, but completely different world views.

Obviously, for example, this explains a lot of the difference on Iraq. Where Americans want to get to the root and apply our resources and energy to solving the problems in the Middle East, Europeans are much more skeptical about the human ability to deal with complex issues and are much more comfortable with an incremental, cautious approach.

Thus,

Those exasperated by the reluctance of Sunni Iraqis to be reasonable and take their coming electorally rendered punishment on the chin could do worse than read Berlin on the tenacity of social magic in the allure of tribal nationalism.

Conservatives were traditionally skeptical of man's ability to solve problems and against efforts to change the status quo. Liberals were usually more receptive to change. Now, to some extent, this has reversed and many conservatives seem willing to embrace action for the sake of action with the idea that, at least with respect to the Middle East, the world is susceptible to change and improvement.

I think there is a lot to be said for both viewpoints, but I have to say I have a lot of sympathy for the Berlin perspective. I know there is not a lot of sympathy for Europe here, but the world is complicated and sometimes the best you can do is to muddle through. Expecting to bend the world (or a region) to your will can be counterproductive. I think the European view is often the more realistic. On the other hand, the fatalism inherent in the European attitude can lead to complacency (as I think it has) and a willingness to compromise with evil (as I think it has at times). Both perspectives have some validity and Europeans and Americans are making mistakes by ignoring (or dismissing) each other.

Voices of Islam

The January Issue of Current History (which is, unfortunately, subscription only), has writings from Muslim scholars (translated from the original) on issues relating to the the state and religion, tolerance, and freedom of thought. The writings are interesting because they take Islam away from the militants and theocrats and present a religion that is not what we have been presented in recent years. They also, I think, are startlingly candid in some respects about Islam.

I can't excerpt the articles, but I want to give some of the flavor. Gamal Al-Banna, an Egyptian, notes that the hardline interpretation of Islam (at least in Egypt) resulted in part from the repression practiced by the Nasser regime in the 50s and 60s. He argues that many of the militants had been tortured in Nasser's prisons and came out hard and impervious to what he calls "appeasement." Thus, he argues that terrorism arose originally from autocratic governments. Muhammad Shahrur says much the same thing, arguing that Islamic militancy arose largely because the modernist Arab governments failed to deliver and created a need for an alternative. He argues that the "central concern for the Arab Muslim world is the need to appreciate the urgent necessity of a second contemporary reading of the Koran and Sunna, guided by the imperatives of the world today." He advocates readings the focus on doctrines of constitutional jurisprudence, checking power and ensuring accountability to the people, "but these concepts were not found in the inherited traditional culture."

Mohsen Kadivar talks about Freedom of Throught and Religion. He notes that the Koran states that "Duress is not permissible in religion." He says this means that "God has prohibited us from imposing faith on anyone, since forced faith and tyranny are not valid." And, "if non-Muslims or skeptical Muslims do not accept our reasoning, we do not have an obligation to impose our version of truth on them."

Finally, Mohammad Boujnourdi, who is described as a "pragmatic" Iranian cleric, argues that "throughout history Muslims have been very tolerant people. We must emphasize this virtue among Muslims and in the world today."

Moreover, toldrance means more than just allowing something. He says it "means respect, acceptance, and appreciation of the rich diversity of world's cultures, forms of expression and ways of being human." Thus, "with non-Muslims we should have dialogue and good relations, but we cannot accept things that are contrary to our religion."

I think these are fascinating articles. I don't know whether these people reflect the consensus in Islam or not, but clearly, they believe that Islam has been hijacked by people with a radically different understanding of Islam. I would like to think that these writings are reasons for hope, in the sense that more people in the Muslim world will look askance at how their religion is being falsely portrayed to the rest of the world.

On the other hand, it's probably naive to think that the other interpretation of Islam is not also supported by a lot of people and that, in many cases, it serves the ends of the powerful in these countries. To truly encourage political reform, I believe, will require that we engage the religion and encourage the empowerment of people like these scholars on their terms--ie, not as geopolitical pawns serving US interests, but as people working within the Islamic world to further its interests.

Zarquawi Misjudges Iraqis

It looks like our friend Zarqawi has overreached; first, by setting the bar for disrupting the election so high that any decent turnout would be a victory for the good guys; second, by adopting a view of Islam that seems to have less and less appeal to the population. An article in today's Washington Post gives an interesting perspective on the reaction to Zarqawi's statements about democracy being incompatible with Islam.

In a widely disseminated Internet audiotape, Zarqawi didn't merely say that he opposed the mechanics or timing of the U.S.-run elections being held today in Iraq to choose a 275-member assembly and transitional government. And he didn't say he thought Iraqis should wait and vote after U.S. occupation forces depart. No, Zarqawi said that he opposes any elections under any circumstances.

In doing so, he sets up a clash with more at stake than the outcome of today's voting. In the audiotape, which surfaced last Sunday, Zarqawi, the most feared and wanted militant in Iraq, declared a "fierce war" against all those "apostates" who take part in the elections. He called candidates running in the elections "demi-idols" and the people who plan to vote for them "infidels." And he railed against democracy because he said it supplants the rule of God with that of a popular majority. This wicked system, he said disapprovingly, is based on "freedom of religion and belief" and "freedom of speech" and on "separation of religion and politics." Democracy, he added, is "heresy itself."

A small but influential group of Islamic intellectuals is saying that Muslims should see democracy as compatible with Islam. Islamic political parties and movements across North Africa and the Middle East are deciding with greater frequency to take part in elections whenever possible. In the Palestinian Authority balloting, the radical Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, has entered candidates in races for local offices. In Egypt, Islamic political activists are urging President Hosni Mubarak to retire and permit free elections. And in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the revered Shiite cleric, issued an edict saying participation in the balloting today was a "religious duty."

There was also an article, which I can't seem to find now, to the effect that other citizens in the Middle East are looking at the elections with interest. This and the results so far of the election are obviously good news. I still remain skeptical about the benefits of bringing democracy at the point of a gun, but it is clear that the autocratic Arab regimes may be under some pressure now. But the question remains how willing will the Bush Administration to pressure the Saudis to open up their system if the possibility exists that it may threaten our oil supply? It seems to me that, if you are really serious about political reform in the Middle East (which I think is a better term than democratizing), it's going to require some difficult choices and working for incremental change. Fawaz Gerges, who wrote the article on Zarqawi makes a good point

Terminology matters. You cannot sell Western liberal democracy to Muslims worldwide because Muslims associate it with Western colonialism and power. But some Muslims are trying to give democracy an Islamic dress while embracing essentials such as elections, human rights and the rule of law.

The point is, as long as opponents (including Arab governments) can identify political reform with American "imperialism" it is going to be a hard sell. But I have to say that I have been moved by the efforts and sacrifices a lot of the Iraqis are making to vote. I think its safe to say that many Americans (probably including me) would not do so. As I said in a comment the other day, while I still have deep problems with the Bush policy, people that behead others and kill their own people are not worthy of romanticizing as some sort of Bolivarian nationalists.

I think (hopefully) that we are beginning to see a roiling in the Middle East against radical Islam, although we are far from seeing its demise. In another post, I am going to discuss some writings from Islamic scholars recently published in Current History that highlight a much more positive view of Islam than we have been seeing in the West.

More Election Thoughts

72%.

The terrorists have failed. Freedom has prevailed.

Regardless of TalkLeft's whining that there's too much security, the fact that Matt Yglesias seems to be grudgingly and sarcastically conceding rather than celebrating freedom, and Daily Kos seems upset that America can't pull out as soon as the last ballot is cast.

I don't care. I'm ashamed to be a former Democrat.

Excuse my language, but can't these negative windbags shut the hell up for 24 hours and realize what is taking place here?! No, it isn't the end-all, be-all of Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

But it sure is something.

On another interesting note, as Rick mentioned earlier, Iraqis are getting their fingers dyed purple to celebrate their voting today. I really like this; it's a slap in the face to the terrorists.

We're not afraid of you.
You can't stop this.

Inheritability Of Private Accounts

What's the deal with inheritability of the private accounts being proposed by the Administration?

The GOP polling found that a majority of voters oppose reducing the starting benefit for all future retirees, or borrowing money or increasing the national debt.

On the other hand, there is support for applying the payroll tax to all income rather than maintaining an existing cap, and for reducing starting benefits for those who retire early.

As is often the case with political polls, the survey tested a variety of claims for and against the issue so Republicans would know which ones are most persuasive with the public.

On the positive side, "voters are most impacted by messages regarding inheritability, the voluntary nature of the program and the fact that workers would own and control, their account," the memo said.

Does anybody have more details on how the payouts of the private accounts would be scheduled, and whether they could be transformed into a life annuity?

Inheritability suggests to me that the payouts would simply be the interest on the accumulated balance, and the principal would never be touched. Upon death of the retiree, the principal would be inherited (tax-free of course) by heirs. Would the principal be transferred to the heirs private accounts, or would they be able to use the money immediately?

If this is the proposal and if there is no option to transform the payout into an annuity that would pay out the principal in payments actuarily adjusted for life expectancy, it seems dumb to me.

It means that the retiree will underspend their accumulated savings, and that the next generation will receive a windfall. Living purely off interest is the equivalent of an infinite life expectancy. The beauty of an annuity is that one doesn't need to know how long one will live. The insurer makes a calculation of life expectancy, and in return for a lump sum, which is never returned or passed on to heirs, a stream of payments are made which have an expected value equal to the lump sum. Without insurance, one either has to assume one will live indefinitely, and never touch the principal, leaving it to one's heirs, or dip into the principal, at risk of living too long and becoming indigent.

If there is an option to convert private account payments into an annuity, or an option to payout only the interest on the principal, I suppose that would be fair.

Does anyone know the details?

Politics Not Reason Enough for "No" Vote on Gonzalez

A few days back on his blog, the "real" New Democrat made a spirited argument, urging Democrats to stand against the Gonzalez nomination. I like Max, if the Democratic Party listened to him they would be in a lot better shape then they are now. However, on this one, he is wrong. In his post, he states:

The United States of America has, since its very creation, been a nation governed by law. No matter how heinous the crime, our laws still stand firm in their demand that every accused criminal be afforded his or her rights. When those men - terrorists or not - came under American control, by law they inherited those most basic protections of their life and liberty. The argument is often made that these are the men who would spare no expense to kill those we love. Perhaps this is true. However, could the same not be said for Timothy McVeigh? For John Wayne Gacy? We did not torture them. We provided them with cable television.

The criminal protections provided to those who stand accused of a crime are there not for those crimes we see as petty, but for those so gruesome and gut-wrenching that it takes the strength of our supreme law to keep their rights and liberties intact. If an American were detained somewhere far away, would we not demand he receive these same rights we deny the detainees at Guantanamo Bay? Would we deny him the right to plead his case? Would we stand for his torture and simply say that government was just trying to get some information? No. Alberto Gonzales does not represent these values...

Now how we can look under our own noses at those we deny the freedom to plead their case in a court of law and say, "There is nothing we can do for you...

Now is the time, my fellow Democrats, to stand for our principles in front of every American. Let the Republicans say what they will: if Alberto Gonzales is confirmed, if every able Democrat has not stood against him, we have let down not only the constituents of the Democrats, but all people who believe in upholding the American system.

I am one to argue that there are better alternatives to physical torture, but my question to Max would be, who are the Democrats to say what my values are? I know it is not this black and white, but if the choice is between torture or my family, I say use torture.

Furthermore, if Democrats followed Max's logic on this one, they would not vote for any of the President's cabinet picks because they simply could take any issue and say that the nominee is standing against their values, and therefore American values. After all, don't politicians from both parties claim to speak on behalf of what America stands for?

The fact of the matter is, this issue is a lot more complicated than looking at images on the internet and expressing a negative emotion. There are complexities to consider when we ask about the policy of torture other than, would we want that for ourselves or our troops? Yes, there is an argument for taking extreme measures when we are talking about the safety of the American people.

Max may be on one side of this issue and has made a fairly strong legal argument. I appreciate his willingness to share his opinion and am not so sure that we are that far apart, but I will say about Gonzalez what I said about Secretary Rice... It is improper for the Senate to vote down a nominee because they disagree with that person's viewpoint on certain issues. The President has a Constitutional right to appoint people to his cabinet who agree with him, or not. He did, after all, win an election.

As long as the nominee is not grossly unqualified, has been involved in unethical activity that is an obvious violation of the public trust, or has broken the law, the Senate should vote to confirm. I personally believe that there where better picks than Gonzalez because the Attorney General should have independence from the administration. I am not sure, because of his professional connection with the President, that Gonzalez can be effective. None the less, the man was a well respected and decorated attorney, state judge, and White House Counsel. I am glad that the discussion about his position on torture has occurred, but he is qualified to do the job.

Although some may disagree with the legality of the Gonzalez torture memo, no Court of law has charged him with a crime, or even said what he proposed was criminal activity. If they had, it wouldn't matter, because policy makers have a right to propose ideas that are reviewed by courts and determined to be unconstitutional if that is the case... It is the very reason for the idea of checks and balances.

If there is any question about the Gonzalez nomination, it should be about whether or not Carla is right about his alleged illegal cover up of that DWI, while he was a judge and the President was a Governor.

Cross-posted at the Dan Evans Republican.

Iraqi Polls Closed

Looks like a success. Iraqi officials report a turnout of 72%, reaching up to 90% in Shiite areas. It looks like the silent majority came out to choose their next leaders. The exception is in Sunni strongholds like Tikrit, where polling stations were empty. That's their loss.

Voters braved the threat of violence, and some actual execution of voters

But the landmark vote for a nation that has survived decades of brutal oppression and nearly two years of war and insurgency was marred by eight suicide bomb attacks in Baghdad that killed at least 11 people and injured 47 more.

Identifying them by their ink-stained fingers, insurgents also rounded up four voters after they left a polling station and killed them by throwing grenades at them, Iraqi police from Baghdad headquarters said.

Hopefully, this will inspire Iraqis to defend their new government, and allow American troops to withdraw without in any sense abandoning them.

Update: The Moderate Voice has an excellent roundup on the election, including a doctored photo which sends a message.

Undermining The Democrats

The Washington Posts Thomas Edsall reports on the potential political benefits of the Bush agenda to the Republican Party

Legislation putting caps on civil damage awards, for instance, would choke income to trial lawyers, among the most generous contributors to the Democratic Party.

GOP strategists, likewise, hope that the proposed changes to Social Security can transform a program that has long been identified with the Democrats, creating a generation of new investors who see their interests allied with the Republicans.

Less visible policies also have sharp political overtones. The administration's transformation of civil service rules at federal agencies, for instance, would limit the power and membership of public employee unions -- an important Democratic financial artery.

Mere interest group politics?

Republicans note that limiting the growth of lawsuits and damage awards, as well as proposed investment accounts in Social Security, are ideas Bush and other conservatives have championed for years. The Bush agenda lies "at the wonderful intersection where good policy is good politics for Republicans and conservatives," said Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund, which is lobbying for the Social Security changes.

Polarization in the UK

I have no intuition about why this is happening, but the center is reportedly in decline in British politics

Intriguingly, the poll also suggests the Tory vote is hardening to the right, with only six per cent identifying with the 'One-Nation Tory' label and a rise in those identifying themselves as Thatcherite. A similar shift on the left has seen a switch from those identifying as 'new Labour' to 'old Labour', suggesting the party may be losing floating voters.

Britain has a vigorous third party, the Liberal Democrats. I gather that on economic issues, they're to the right of Labour, but on foreign policy, particularly Iraq, they are to Labour's left.

The National Debt: How Bad Is It?

I keep meaning to write a lengthy post on this, but someone else has beat me to the essentials and done it with much more brevity than I can usually manage. Check it out!

National Debt burden: Full history

Swift Vet to Challenge Kerry

Fresh off the Political Wire:

Jerome Corsi, co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, announced he will move to Massachusetts later this year and to run against Kerry in 2008, the Washington Post reports.

This lying, carpet-bagging, "war crimes don't need to be reported" idiot will be crushed in his tracks by Kerry.

Your fifteen minutes were up before you stepped to the mic, Jerome.

Health Care: The 800-lb Gorilla

While the Democrats work overtime to shoot down a Social Security reform plan that hasn't even been proposed or detailed yet, there's another crisis waiting in the wings to explode. And for this one, there's no cushion of lead time.

Tax-Exempt Hospitals' Practices Challenged
46 Lawsuits Allege That Uninsured Pay the Most

As the cost of medical care continues to increase faster than economic growth, even the institutions that are supposed to help are taking a very hard line indeed on collecting bills from the uninsured--and charging them more to boot. While insurors negotiate steep price breaks on services, the uninsured are dunned for full "list" price, sometimes as much as six times what an insured patient's bill would be. In times past, the poor's charges would be written off as charity. Now even the non-profits are sending the bill collectors to dun minimum-wage workers for bills they can't possibly pay.

Malpractice suits, insurance companies, high drug costs, boutique clinics, corporate medicine--the list of things and people to blame is endless. But the bottom line is that the system is out of control, and rapidly becoming unaffordable to even those in the middle rungs of the ladder. Health insurance for a family of four has already passed the $10,000 a year mark, and that's NOT including deductibles and co-pays. By far the #1 cause of bankruptcy in America today is medical bills.

Social Security reform, while not cheap, is not complicated. The choices are fairly clear, the finances not all that ambiguous. If we act soon, it can be brought under control without the system imploding. But Medicare isn't running out of tax revenue in 2018. It's running out of revenue NOW, and the overall cost of the program in constant-dollar terms is expected to more than quadruple in the coming years. And that may be an optimistic estimate. One conclusion is inescapable--Medicare can not be reformed without reforming the overall health care system.

In the meantime, fewer and fewer employers are picking up the full tab for medical insurance. And even fewer pay anything at all for the employee's dependents--that's extra. The cost of insurance is severely retarding wage growth, and is the #1 factor cited in "outsourcing" decisions by employers.

Many defenders of the American health care system like to say that we have the finest health-care system in the world. And it's true that American health-care innovation is unrivaled, in drug and technology and treatment development. But outcomes are lagging, as large portions of the populace simply can't afford to access these innovations. We do indeed have the finest for-profit health care system in the world. It's the absolute finest at producing profits. But it's rapidly becoming second-rate at producing outcomes.

I have no easy answers. But I'd love to hear suggestions. How do we cage the 800-lb gorilla? And how can we afford to feed it?

Is the nuclear option defused?

Recent counts have as many as seven Republican senators indicating that they may buck a party line vote that attempts to sustain a parliamentary ruling that Rule XXII (a/k/a cloture a/k/a the filibuster) does not apply to debate on judicial nominees.

Assuming that the Democrats are able to hold their line (some have suggested that red-state Democrats would buckle under pressure), the loss of seven Republicans would kill the nuclear option Senator Frist (R-Tenn.) continues to dangle like the sword of Damocles.

The Magnificent Seven (or Seven Samurai, depending on how much you like remakes) reportedly are Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.), Susan Collins (R-Me.), Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Olympia Snow (R-Me.), Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), and John Warner (R-Va.).

Historic day: January 30, 2005

Usually, interested Americans watch a foreign election wondering only "who will win?" and/or "will it be fair?" That is not at all the case in Iraq. We don't even really know who the candidates are, but we do know that -- regardless of the inevitable irregularities and likely attempts at fraud -- the Shiites are going to "win" in the sense that their representatives will get a majority of the votes. The story in this election will be how many Iraqis are willing to defy the Sunni thugs for the sake of their own futures as well as future generations, and how many of those people are killed as a result. In that sense, I don't think that there has been an election remotely like this one in my lifetime.

I intend to bifurcate my evaluation of the news from Sunday into two categories: (1) what happened in the Sunni Triangle?; and (2) what happened in the rest of the country? The establishment of democracy anywhere requires time, and this election is only the first step for Iraq. After decades of repression in any country, a qualified success in the first democratic elections thereafter is probably the most that can be reasonably hoped for under the best of circumstances and, obviously, the best of circumstances do not exist in Iraq right now.

Please use this thread to express any thoughts you have regarding the good, the bad and/or the ugly in connection with this weekend's elections in Iraq.

Vandal-ized

Only a week after the controversy broke over Ricky Vandal's take-off of "The New Democrat," everything has quieted. 'Ricky Vandal' the person has been shamed away from his crown jewel weblog. 'Ricky Vandal' the Republican operative has been defeated. In a way, it is as if we come to the end of a great war for the security of Democratic discourse. It is a war, I am glad to say, we all won.

'Ricky Vandal' symbolized the kind of person, the kind of operative, that has been so successful in the past in confusing and spoiling the kind of frank discussion the Democratic Party needs in order to survive and thrive. His voice, disguised behind the banner of the Donkey, attempted to throw a monkey wrench into the new and expanding tool of the internet in guiding the course of our political parties.

Had it not been for a few angry, determined Democrats who demanded decency, it may well have continued. Those who pushed me on to do more than sit idly by while a Republican-in-disguise took links and traffic that rightfully belonged to Democrats deserve my highest praise and gratitude. Ricky is just one of many like this, and it should be the job of every Democrat - especially those who took time and effort in blunting Ricky's attacks and mistruths - to keep aware and do all we can to keep our discourse pure.

We are the party of the Big Tent, the party that has accepted blacks when they were shunned, that gave women the right to vote when others scoffed, and now defends the rights of homosexuals when others find them indefensible. This new vigor that has been brought into the Democratic Party from our defeat in November 2004 will serve us well if we can only keep it up, and keep men like Ricky from confusing and turning off those newcomers who expected frank discussion and got right-wing confusion tactics.

So my thanks goes out to you, Rick Heller, for informing me of all of this, and making The Centrist Coalition the headquarters of our Democratic offensive against the mistruths and misdeeds of Ricky Vandal. I thank in the highest Mr. Ron Brynaert, who worked more than any man ever should to bring to light the arrogance and ignorance of Ricky Vandal's past, a fact that helped bring him to account. Also, to all of those who tracked back to this -- The Moderate Voice, The New Industry, The Kentucky Democrat, Kudzu Files, The Blogging of the President, Watcher of Weasels, and Ron's blog.

This may not seem like much to those who were not involved in what happened, but it stands as one of the major victories Web Democrats have had - taking down a website a full 10 times larger than the one it is copying, through the effort of a group determined to make the smear- and confusion-machine account for what it did. We challenged Ricky Vandal to put up or shut up, and shut up he did.

Ricky Vandal's "New Democrat" is gone, and we are better for it.

Brought to you by The (REAL) New Democrat

The Anti-Rice Crowd

A lot of praise/insults (depending on your choice of Daily Kos or Power Line) are being hurled at John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Robert Byrd and the other Democrats who protested against the appointment of Dr. Condoleeza Rice for SecState.

I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the matter - are these men and women obstructionists, or are they simply exercising their right to discourse? Nobody's arguing whether they had the right to hold up the nomination, but whether they should have done so.

I, personally, see no point in it. I'm by no means a hard rightist, but I have to work hard to steer clear of the term "obstructionist" - Rice was clearly going to get nominated. If not for this "boy who cried wolf" approach to the SecState position, perhaps the Democrats' criticisms of Alberto Gonzalez would be taken seriously.

And oh, yes... I'm new here!

Open Thread

What's on your mind? Nothing is off topic.

(Beat you to it, Rick!)

Another Positive Sign for Abortion

I must make it clear, I am not a fan of President Bush’s. However, I was genuinely surprised and happy to hear his comments on abortion today in a New York Times interview.

"I think the goal ought to be to convince people to value life," Mr. Bush said. "But I fully understand our society is divided on the issue and that there will be abortions. That's reality. It seems like to me my job is to convince people to make right choices in life, to understand there're alternatives to abortion, like adoption, and I will continue to do so."

I think this positioning on the issue of abortion by Bush, as well as Hillary Clinton’s recent acknowledgement of the validity of discouraging abortions, is very promising. I hesitate to say it signifies the beginning of the end for the issue, but both Bush and Clinton represent their respective wings rather prominently, so their comments could lead to new, acceptable common ground.

Third Pundit On Government Payroll

Salon's Eric Boehlert reports that a third columnist, Michael McManus, got a government contract, in addition to Maggie Gallagher and Armstrong Williams. At first, I thought the problem might be restricted to the Education Department, but clearly this is a much bigger problem, as the other two had contracts from Health & Human Services.

The only defense I can imagine for this sort of abuse is, "Clinton did it too!" Did any liberal columnists get contracts from the previous administration? None that I know of. I'd like to see a thorough investigation of these public relations practices, going as far back as necessary.

Female Soldiers 'Broke' Gitmo Detainees With Sex

I'll be brief, because I can't stomach thinking about this for very long.

In what is rapidy becoming one of the most disturbing revelations out of Camp X-Ray, it appears that female soldiers have been playing sexual games with detainees in order to break them down for questioning.

I'll tell you, this really drops the bar on what I thought of our military. I know, the vast majority of our troops are honorable and are doing what they think is best. But this just crosses the line.

A similar situation went on in Abu Ghraib, and Cageprisoners.com has a comprehensive article on the horrifying and disgusting subject. Is this what the Army has become? Are we now so much like our enemies that we are resorting to attacks on their religious and culutural decency?

"Fake menstrual blood" was used in one case, the Yahoo! News story notes, smeared on the face of a detainee to humiliate him. Now to some of us the idea of female soliders in thongs and miniskirts may be the exact opposite of torture, but the military knew fully well that those sorts of things were frowned upon by Muslims. This is pyschological battering of the worst kind.

This is just another reason why Alberto Gonzales - the man who advocated all of this in the first place - must not be confirmed. Democrats need to stand up as a party and oppose this man's confirmation as strenuously as they can. Thanks, Alberto -- we're no better than the people we're fighting now.

Brought to you by The New Democrat

Kevin Drum on the Class-Based Social Security Bargain

In an earlier post, I pointed out that there were only four ways of closing the gap between Social Security income and payouts, if such a gap emerges in the currently projected year of 2018, or in any other year.

The four ways are:

1. Raising the payroll tax

2. Raising general taxes

3. Cutting benefits

4. Borrowing the money

Turns out Kevin Drum is indeed suggesting (in a post today and a Christian Science Monitor article) that option #2 is the way to go -- raise taxes that go to the general fund (i.e., income taxes) and transfer the money to Social Security.

I expressed skepticism about that option in my earlier post because I've never seen it discussed. All the Social Security fixes I hear about involve a combination of #1 and #3 above -- e.g., fixing it from within by adjusting Social Security taxes and benefits.

I propose a challenge. Who can be the first person to find a proposal by any elected representative that accomplishes what Kevin suggests? Maybe such things are being considered at some level of seriousness. It's quite possible that I just don't know about it.

I'd also like you to think about the class-based bargain that Kevin suggests occurred with the 1983 Social Security reform. He says that lower income people agreed to a higher payroll tax in 1983 (a type of tax that costs them more) in exchange for a payback from the general fund several decades later when the baby boom retirement begins.

Basically, by his theory, lower income people agreed to pay more for a roughly 35 year period beginning in 1983, in exchange for the wealthy paying higher income taxes beginning around 2018 or so.

Why, exactly, would lower income folks make that bargain? If fairness in these taxes is a key issue, why not just make it fair all the way through? Just tap into general fund revenues as part of the 1983 reform and have everybody pay their fair share. People live and die during the 35 year period involved in this class bargain. Why charge a janitor more in 1985 ... only to have him retire in 2005 and die in 2015, before the first dime of "payback" is charged to the rich?

Maybe we didn't tap into general revenues in 1983 because we just don't think that way regarding Social Security. There's an ingrained sense of it working internally, rather than being funded from outside. You can prove me wrong by finding all the proposals to pay the Trust Fund off with increased income taxes.

Massachusetts Meetup Canceled

I hate to wimp out, but due to sub-zero temperatures forecast tonight plus the fact that there's snow everywhere, I've canceled the centrist/independents meetup that was scheduled in Cambridge tonight.

Bush's press conference

With only 45 minutes notice, Bush announced his intention to give a press conference today. Perhaps his intention was to partially preempt a news-cycle that included reports of the deadliest day in Iraq for Americans since the war started. Personally, I don't think that this White House is that spontaneous and, instead, I think that this press conference was planned with the singular intent to address the building push-back from Congress (including Republicans) on the Social Security issue.

I was home this afternoon with a sick child and, being the geek that I am, I watched a CSPAN repeat of Bush's press conference. It struck me that he kept saying that he was "looking forward to" working with Democrats. I have now found the transcript from the press conference (here), and confirmed that he used the "looking forward to" phrase 15 times. (Gee--I wonder if it was a talking point that was discussed ahead of time?)

I think that Bush understands that his Social Security "reform" agenda is already in deep trouble.

Iraqi election coverage

Michael Totten has a new (albeit temporary) gig, editing reports filed directly by Iraqi correspondents during the week before and the week after the January 30 election in Iraq.

Enduring Hatred

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by the Soviet Red Army, Tom Carter has a moving post on remembering the Holocaust. At the same time, The Moderate Voice covers a remarkably anti-semitic document endorsed by 500 prominent Russians from opposition groups such as the still-extant Communist Party containing language describing Jews as "PROVOCATEURS AND HATERS OF HUMANKIND" and "JUDAIC AGGRESSIVENESS AS A FORM OF SATANISM"

I am a Jewish-American (and a Unitarian Universalist). It is chilling to know that people hate you and want you dead, even though you've never met them and have done nothing to harm them. I'm glad no one wants to exterminate Italians or Finns. There are some other ethnic groups besides Jews at risk, such as African Tutsis.

I have no solution to propose. Any suggestions?

Is Hillary a Centrist?

An interesting article in the New York Times about what seems to be Hillary Clinton's attempt to move to the center on the abortion issue. Senator Clinton spoke about finding "common ground" with pro-life people in terms of actions to discourage unwanted pregnancies. She even talked about how

We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women,"

and that

"The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place."

What is really interesting to me is the forum she chose to make this speech--the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State. This is obviously a pro-choice group and, while Senator Clinton made clear that she supports abortion rights, her speech seemed to cause some consternation in the group.

This sounds like Senator Clinton was trying to reprise a "Sister Souljah" moment-ie, telling the liberal pro-choicers that they have to compromise. Of course, how much of a compromise her speech entails is really open to question. All she is really advocating here is education to prevent unwanted pregnancies, which shouldn't be too startling. Nevertheless, it's an interesting and, I think, admirable attempt to find some middle ground. Obviously, she is not going to win over hardcore pro-lifers and she is not going to convince the extremes of pro-choice that abortion is a problem at all. But that's not what she is aiming at. She is looking at the broad middle that is often troubled by abortion but doesn't want it banned outright. These people (and I guess I am one) might appreciate an approach that recognizes the complexity of the issue even if it doesn't offer any real solution. After all, saying we need to end unwanted pregnancies is like saying we need to end war--nice sentiments, but not terribly likely.

The thing about both Clintons is that, regardless of their actual sympathies, they are political pragmatists-some might say unprincipled. Is this enough to overcome Senator Clinton's disadvantages? I doubt it but it suggests that the fulcrum of the Democratic Party is unlikely to move significantly to the left.

Along this same line, The New Republic has an article on the governor of my childhood state of Tennessee, Phil Breseden. He is a native New Yorker educated at Harvard. He seems to be in the trend of Democrats that have been successful in the South--i.e., businessmen. If there is one thing that Southerners respect more than the military, it's businessmen. This is a guy, along with Mark Warner and some others, that I suspect are more viable presidential candidates than Hillary Clinton.

Benefit Bomb: Daniels Wants Medicaid Slash

Living in Indiana these days is a lot like following Alice's white rabbit down an endless tunnel. Surprises - bad ones - wait around every corner. Governor Mitch Daniels' plan to hack apart Medicaid is just the latest in a string of bad surprises he's dropped on Hoosiers across Indiana.

Right before he added $1 billion in new spending to Indiana's bloated, sinking budget, Gov. Daniels complained about how he would need to cut whatever it took to decrease the deficit. Yeah, you do the math - $1 billion in new spending and rhetoric about having to make essential trims in government services. We're in a crisis situation, Daniels seemed to be saying, and Medicaid landed square in his sights.

Daniels has been ambiguous about his top secret plans for the Medicaid program - the "open door governor" doesn't want to talk about this one. Daniels has made senseless statements about Medicaid recipients, among the poorest Hoosiers in the state. He has claimed that they go to their doctor in limousines, a not-so-subtle hint of his that people can't be trusted with government money and that the program is corrupt enough to merit slicing away at. He has chastised recipients for what is in his mind "splurging." He has done everything but justify his plan.

Nearly 70% of Medicaid recipients in Indiana are children, children who deserve to have someone in the government watching out for them if their families do not have the means. This doesn't seem to bother Governor Daniels, who so blatantly made "the children" his campaign centerpiece not three months ago. Why, then, does he stand willing to cut their benefits in an area where they need it most? By 2007, The Indianapolis Star reports, nearly one million people - 700,000 of them children - will be on Medicaid. What do we say to them?

Are these families, these splurging families, wasting their Medicaid money? Are they wasting it on essential speech and occupational therapy so that their children can operate in an educational environment? Are they wasting it on special transportation so that their wheelchair-bound children can get in and out of the van? Maybe they're spending that money on diapers to keep their mentally disabled daughter or son sanitary.

They certainly aren't taking the family limousine to pick up expensive anti-seizure medicine, pills that, as the CEO of Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals, Governor Daniels lobbied to keep high.

Governor Daniels does not understand the burden of being poor and counting on that extra help Indiana's Medicaid program provides. Medicaid is not some luxury handout for the poor - it is a necessity that allows families struggling with intense medical bills to ask the government for a little help making ends meet. It allows families to get the treatment they need should something happen that is not covered in their insurance. Medicaid makes life livable for many who would not have much without it.

Perhaps if Governor Daniels focused more on creating meaningful and well-paying jobs, as he promised to do, Medicaid's burden would ease itself. The white rabbit is tunneling along in the wrong direction again, and Hoosiers are getting claustrophobic.

Brought to you by The New Democrat

Josh Marshall's "Phase-Out"

Josh Marshall has two new posts this morning about the "phase-out plans" for Social Security -- his term for partial privatization plans that involve personal accounts.

A search of his site reveals that he's used the term "phase-out" in 70 separate posts on the topic over the last seven weeks. You could say he's intent on that phraseology.

Let's take a closer look at how these plans "phase out" Social Security.

The payroll tax that funds Social Security takes 6.2% out of each of our paychecks, and our employers match that amount, for a total 12.4% tax on earnings.

Of that 12.4%, the Kolbe-Stenholm plan would take 2% to 2.5% and put it in personal accounts. The Graham plan would take 4%. I haven't seen a plan that goes beyond the 4% in the Graham plan.

So, realistically speaking, these reform plans take between one-fifth and one-third of the payroll tax and put it in a personal account. None of them involve increases in this figure over time -- they take the same 2% or 4% of the payroll tax in projections 70 years out as they do in year one.

In other words, they don't phase out the program, and they never take more than a third of the program's funds.

Now let's look at the all-imprtant benefits side of the equation. How do these new private accounts impact benefits?

First, we should note that the plans typically include provisions aimed at controlling spending -- the kind of slight adjustments we might do anyway to make the program balance out in the coming decades. The Kolbe-Stenholm plan has an adjustment in the growth of benefits that would lower it by about .2 percentage points. This is a reduction in the growth rate of the program. Benefits don't go down -- they grow slightly less fast.

Second, we have the main mechanism these plans use to control costs -- something called an "offset". The private accounts are really small in the early years, so there is virtually no offset. But as the accounts grow, the new system reduces your traditional benefit by an amount equal to the growth in your private account.

It doesn't reduce your benefit according to the amount of money deposited in the account -- but rather according to a growth rate applied to that money.

The Kolbe-Stenholm plan uses a formula that reduces the traditional benefit mostly for individuals with above-average earnings in their private accounts.

The Graham plan uses a flat 2.7% offset. It assumes you will earn 2.7% on your private account funds, and reduces the traditional benefit by an equivalent amount. The 2.7% figure was chosen because it is the average gain on long-term government bonds.

That introduces a few wrinkles. On the one hand, it does make it possible to lose part of your Social Security benefit. If your private account doesn't grow by 2.7%, you won't make up all the difference between your new benefit and what the traditional benefit would have been.

However, since the Graham plan uses the Thrift Savings Plan as a model for private accounts, and since the Thrift Savings Plan has an option for investing in long-term bonds, each person has the option of basically matching the current non-privatized system. Just select the bond option, and watch as your private account grows at the same rate as the offset.

That's a weird kind of "phase-out" plan. It allows you to stay in the current system.

There's more. Both of these plans, it turns out, have built-in protections for those who's personal accounts perform poorly. The Graham plan sets a "floor" benefit of 120% of poverty. The floor does not include the personal account, so any amounts in the account would accrue on top of the base benefit.

The Kolbe-Stenholm plan adjusts this benefit according to years in the workforce. Those with 20 years of service have an 80% of poverty floor, while those with 30 years get 100%, and 40 years get 120%.

This is, again, a strange kind of "phase-out" -- one that guarantees a base benefit drawn from the traditional side of the program.

Why do the thoughtful proponents of partial privatization include these provisions? Because they don't want to eliminate the fundamental social protection function of the program. On the most fundamental level, they want to retain Social Security.

Josh can call this a "phase-out" fifty times a day, if he likes. He seems almost giddy with the term -- like it's his chance to frame the debate conceptually in a way that Republicans have done so successfully with other issues.

In this case, though, his terminology is almost totally divorced from the facts. It is, quite simply, a false charge, and one used by Josh to mislead his readers every day.

The Centrist"Coalition" or the Center-right Choir?

>I'm getting a lot of flak for adding you to our list
>of authors. People want me to dump you. I don't want
>to do that. However, I must admit that the tone which
>you are using is not working out. I agree with you
>about Boxer and Kerry, but your style isn't making any
>converts.
>

>I really do welcome your contribution, as we have a
>number of participants on the center-right, and I
>desire an equal measure from the center-left. I hope
>you don't drop out of Centerfield, but rather, adapt
>your style to our audience.
>

Thanks but no thanks Rick. No hard feelings, but the truth be known you guys aren't really centrists over here or a coalition either for that matter. As you note, overall the bloggers here are pretty much a doctrinal center-right block of apparent moderate republicans, Zell Miller Dems, maybe a smattering of libertarians etc.. And as far as I can tell all guys (white guys?). (I'm sure I'll be corrected on that one if not; if so, apologies up front). That's fine, it is in fact a free country. But it's also a diverse one. Given the apparently rather narrow focus and tolerance of this "audience", you'll likely fail to attract the support you need in order to govern it. Angry white guys are necessary but no longer sufficient to win.

I am who I am: centrist on average, while holding some views that come down to the left and right politically, given the issue. I may not agree with all positions, but I won't be afraid to hear and consider them because that's what authentic centrism's all about: opening up to all views across the spectrum and building solid consensus from that process. If you're not open to divergent positions, then there can be no consensus. Rather, just self congratulatory back-slapping between political clones.

For the record, I did reference my from the hip style as a potential issue when I offered to join. Anyone who has read my stuff would have known what they were in for. Could it in fact be that the real problem folks have with me over here is that I'm as hard on the Right as the Left? Hmm..

Yes, a Bigger Tent is in fact about broadening the Democratic voter base. We have several bloggers over there now that come down left to center-right in keeping with the mission. And we respect all those views because that's what real coalitions do. The Center Ring, on the other hand, is my personal op-ed blog and thus my personal take. And, yes, my style is provocative. Change that and it's no longer my style but instead yours. There it is.

I will leave you with this, though. If the centerfield mission is to reach out both right AND left from the "center", but the practice is to eschew those that don't fit the apparent CF PC code of center-right sensibility, then is this not just another case of "Mission Accomplished" unrealized?

Anyhoo, thanks for the opportunity to opine over here, if only temporarily. I'll proudly keep you folks on the blog roll precisely because A Bigger Tent is about reaching out. I'll also, I'm sure, continue to piss off a lot of folks - left, right and center - with The Center Ring by just telling the truth as I see it. I imagine it will at times seem like hell. But as everybody learns in grade school, the truth does indeed sometimes hurt. Some get over it and keep looking for the common ground. Others don't.

I sincerely hope that we all can and will succeed in building a true centrist coalition and meet in the winner's circle in 08. Not to will only serve to further the divisive cause of radicals and reactionaries.

Cheers, good luck and ciao.

The Ringmaster
The Center Ring
http://centerring.biggertent.com

Blog Name Theft

Is it okay for a blog to take the name of an already existing blog. Can I go into blogspot and create a new blog and call it Instapundit? As far as I know, there is no law against it. But a blog that would do that should get no incoming links from the blogosphere.

A new blog started up in January, taking the name of the already established blog, The New Democrat, which is written by Max Burns, who also contributes to Centerfield. I send an email to the author of the new blog, Ricky, alerting him to the issue, adding

I'm not aware of any legal issues involved, but I believe that the blogger code of ethics requires you to honor the prior claim to the name The New Democrat, and to select another name for your blog.

Ricky responded

Thank you for your e-mail. When I created this blog I didn't know there was another blog with the same title. I can't change the title now, because too many people linked to it under this title and especially this URL. Readers will understand the difference when they visit the blog. Mine is hosted on Blogspot.

I send Ricky an email in response, agreeing that it was understandable that he could not change the URL, but that he could easily change the name of the blog to something close to "The New Democrat" that was not an exact duplicate of the name of Max's blog. Ricky has not responded to my second email, or changed the name of his blog. He has, however, kept on blogging.

Even more troubling, the imposter New Democrat blog, in its first two weeks of operation has scored links from Wizbang, Instapundit, and Andrew Sullivan. If nothing is done, people will soon think the upstart is the real New Democrat, and Max is an imposter. It's quite an achievement for a newbie to score 10,000 visitors in its first two weeks of operation. It turns out that Ricky is not a newbie, and his previous blog, John Kerry's The New Soldier was part of the network of right-wing blogs which supported the Swift Boat Vets attacks on John Kerry. Ricky even skirts copyright law--he calls it fair use--by linking to the entire scanned text of an out-of-print book by John Kerry. Ricky wrote (in a post he has now deleted, which itself shows bad faith. I saved a copy before he deleted it.)

"I know I had something to do with Kerry's defeat. For a long time my blog was the only blog with a link so you could read John Kerry's anti-war book "The New Soldier". I was the one, who marketed it all over the blogosphere. The book was unavailable. John Kerry took it off the market. Copies on Amazon and E-bay cost more than 2000 dollars. I was the first one making the book available for mass readership. "

While Ricky did not directly sell John Kerry's book, he earned money from the traffic

I sent many visitors to the SwiftVets website. I encouraged many to donate to them. I sold hundreds, more than 400 "Unfit for Command" books through my Amazon link. I also sold many Zell Miller and Tommy Franks books. I received a check for hundreds of dollars from Amazon. I haven't cashed it in yet.

Ricky's respect for intellectual property is demonstrated by this promotion of the pirated copy of Kerry's book, and his theft of Max's blog name. Now, the charge is going around that a blog called The New Democrat is a fraud and quite possibly a Republican operative. This too is damaging to Max, who as far as I can ascertain (I have not met him in person, but we've exchanged friendly emails) is a real and thoughtful centrist Democrat.

Ricky calls himself a Zell Miller Democrat. I have strong doubts whether he is any more a Democrat than David Duke is a Republican. But it's a free country. He can call his blog The New Democrat or The Daily Dish or Wizbang. But at least until he chooses a name that no other blog is already using, no one should link to new-democrat.blogspot.com

Update: Ron has done a number of posts alleging that Ricky has operated under other pseudonyms, and casting further doubt that Ricky is in any meaningful sense a Democrat. Not having access to IP logs, I cannot verify Ron's allegations. I can however, verify that Ricky's copycat New Democrat blog had a post claiming ownership of johnkerrythenewsoldier.blogspot.com. Sometimes later, Ricky deleted that post. This morning, it's back. He seems like a slippery character.

Clarification: In case I've caused any confusion, Ron is the originator of the charge that Ricky is a fraud. The post on tas's blog referenced in my entry above makes that point and contains a link to Ron's blog. I am not making that allegation myself, just reporting what Ron and Tas have charged. Before Ron added a link to his blog in a comment on my first post, I assumed that Ricky was a neophyte who had made an innocent mistake in taking the name of a blog that was already in use. My knowledge of Ricky's previous blog, John Kerry's The New Soldier, came from Ricky's own Full Disclosure post.

Personally, I don't care what else Ricky has been up to. I would just like him to change the name of his blog to something unique. He has no legal obligation to do so, as far as I know, but it would be the right thing to do.

Of Boxer, Kerry and Rice and Doing the Business of The People

Thank you Barbara Boxer. Thank you John Kerry. Thank you for reminding us that we have a system of checks and balances in this nation and for good reason. Check. Your move George.

Yes its time once again for the ringmaster to poke a stick in the eye of many (perhaps most?) of my more conciliatory comrades. This time the unfortunate targets of my jab glare forth from those centrists lambasting what is being cast as cheap partisan stonewalling on the Rice nomination for Secretary of State. Pardon me, just plucking the beam from your gaze that surely must be obscuring your view. It must be so else the thoroughly justified tactics exercised by Boxer and Kerry would be as obvious to other political realists as to myself. I'm sure of it.

How could it be otherwise when a woman who largely ignored, even dismissed the threat of al-Qaeda pre 9/11, even though clear warnings were communicated to her, is about to be confirmed for such a critical foreign policy position? What could those Senate Democrats so eager to confirm be but blind when they intend to deliver the crucial foreign affairs of the sole world superpower into the grasping hands of one who has thus far served as unswerving, unexamined and unrepentant cheerleader while her boss willfully mislead this nation and the world into his disastrous Iraq adventure? Where's the outrage? And given the dogmatic unilateral nature of the Bush Administration foreign policy approach thus far, where indeed is the moderation?

Thus are our heroes, B and K quite rightly, if cynically, doing the business of the people and the constitution. As dubya oh so cynically railed against tyranny on his inaugural, two lonely Senators were conspiring to actually check tyrannical power in it's jack-booted tracks.

Good and good I say. Another arrogant bully frustrated, if only temporarily. We will have our debate. The festering wound of the Bush cabal's secretive and manipulative process will be exposed if only a little to the cleansing light of democratic scrutiny.

This is no "Whitewater" under the bridge affair. This is not just politics (not just). This is about an ongoing tragedy engineered by that inner circle Rice inhabits. People are dying. Lives and places are being destroyed in real time. This is LIVE at 5. This debate needs to happen. This is democracy.

Got democracy?

PEACE

Playoffs thread

Get yer football comments in here!

I'm starting with a grumble on the "Verizon National Anthem?"

I didn't mind the stadium name selloff, but that seems pretty tacky....

Upon further review

A second round of debate on Bush's inaugural speech seems worthwhile, particularly given the push-back from otherwise reliable Republicans (e.g., Peggy Noonan).

Personally (and not a reliable Republican), I think that the odds are remote, absent a new attack in the U.S., that there will be any new wars initiated by the U.S. in the next four years. Rather, I think that Bush wanted to communicate an idea -- i.e., that increased U.S. national security is dependent upon decreased tyranny around the world -- that he wants to be his historical legacy. I do not think that he was telegraphing foreign policy tactics for the next 4 years as much as attempting to shift foreign policy strategy for the next generation.

Which Is The Real New Democrat?

You will have noticed some new bloggers here, including Max, a 17 year old prodigy who has a blog called The New Democrat. Imagine my confusion then, when Andrew Sullivan linked to a blog called The New Democrat. As far as I can tell, this new blog was created in 2005, while Max was blogging in 2004. I believe that Max has priority, and this new blog should modify its name. Blog names are not trademarked, so I suppose another blog could come along and call itself Centerfield or Instapundit, but I would hope peer pressure from other bloggers would ensure that names cannot be duplicated willy-nilly.

On the merits, the new blogger seems to be a Zell Miller Democrat, who likes George Bush better than John Kerry. Not my cup of tea, but within the parameters of centrism, and I would be willing to add the blog to the centrist blogroll, but not under the same name as an already existing blog.

Update: I've done a new post, explaining my exchange of emails with the duplicate New Democrat blog. He has refused to change names. Ricky has also deleted a post, and comments on the blog. Based on this and additional information I've received, I conclude that he is an unethical individual, perhaps the most unethical blogger I'm come across in my three years in the blogosphere. Centerfield will not link to his blog again, even if he does change its name.

Clarification: In case I've caused any confusion, Ron is the originator of the charge that Ricky is a fraud. The post on tas's blog referenced in my second post makes that point and contains a link to Ron's blog. I am not making that allegation myself, just reporting what Ron and Tas have charged. Before Ron added a link to his blog in a comment here, I assumed that Ricky was a neophyte who had made an innocent mistake in taking the name of a blog that was already in use. My knowledge of Ricky's previous blog, John Kerry's The New Soldier, came from Ricky's own Full Disclosure post.

Personally, I don't care what else Ricky has been up to. I would just like him to change the name of his blog to something unique. He has no legal obligation to do so, as far as I know, but it would be the right thing to do.

The Social Security Trust Fund

Josh Marshall has posted multiple times every day for weeks now on the Social Security issue. Kevin Drum has covered the issue pretty thoroughly, too, though not quite with the frenzy at Marshall's site.

Part of this energy on the left, I think, is the sense that they've found a winner of an issue. There's a growing expectation -- and I think and accurate one -- that Bush is headed for a major political failure on this issue.

On substance, there is a remarkably vast gap here. Opponents of partial privatization have a very different set of facts and concepts than supporters. Perhaps the single clearest gap relates to the Social Security Trust Fund -- the nature of the fund and how it is likely to work in the future.

The Trust Fund accumulated significant assets between 1983 (after the Reagan Social Security reform) and the present -- a total of 1.5 trillion dollars by 2003.

Those "assets" represent the difference between payroll tax receipts and expenditures since 1983. The money has been borrowed by the general treasury and spent on various government programs. So the Trust Fund holds U.S. Treasury securities in amounts equal to the accumulated Social Security surplus over these past 20 years.

It's on the basis of this fund that Marshall and Drum claim the problem date for Social Security should be 2042, the year currently projected by the Trustees as the moment the Trust Fund is fully exhausted.

They don't consider 2018 to be the important milestone. That's the year the Trustees estimate payroll tax receipts will no longer cover benefits. It's the year we spend more than we receive.

According to the Trustees, borrowing the money to cover the Social Security deficit between 2018 and 2042 will add $7 trillion to the publicly held debt.

Kevin Drum says the 2042 date means the system is "in good shape for at least 40 years and maybe more like 60 or 70 years."

Nate at Common Sense says:

They argue that there is no Trust Fund and that Social Security is insolvent after 2018 when we officially reach deficit territory. They argue this even though they know that the Treasury bonds in the Trust Fund will have to be paid (it's in the Constitution) from the General Fund, i.e. income taxes.

There's another wrinkle to this debate in a recent New York Times Magazine article by Roger Lowenstein that resonated nicely in threads on Drum's and Marshall's sites.

Lowenstein points out that the Trust Fund has gone into negative spending in 11 years since 1970, and that it "redeemed bonds from the Trust Fund without a fuss."

I thought that was an interesting point, so I took a peek at the Social Security Administration's site. They show only 7 years since 1970 when Social Security was in deficit. I'm not sure where the discrepancy arises between these figures and Lowenstein's.

The 7 years of deficit are all consecutive, from 1975 to 1981. The deficit ranged between 1.5 billion and 5 billion a year. The Trust Fund paid out a combined $20 billion during that 7 year period -- a drop in the bucket in terms of the federal budget.

At the time, these consecutive years of deficit were viewed as a crisis, which resulted in the reforms signed into law in 1983, which in turn resulted in an accumulated 1.5 trillion in surplus over 20 years. All of it was then used for government spending, instead of the more responsible choice of paying down the debt (which would preseve our ability to borrow in the future).

Some of the other points Drum and Marshall make may very well be true. The estimates of 2018 and 2042 may be overly pessimistic, and could very well get pushed back.

If the dates turn out to be true, however, then I would say their understanding of the role played by the Trust Fund is deeply flawed.

If 2018 comes and we start running deficits, we will have four choices:

1. Raise the payroll tax

2. Raise general taxes

3. Cut benefits

4. Borrow the money, and add roughly $7 trillion to the debt.

Options #1 and #3 are essentially an acknowledgement that we can't spend down the Trust Fund. They represent efforts to match current revenues with current expenditures so that we don't have to dip into Trust Fund assets.

Option #2 is unlikely. I haven't seen a Social Security reform plan that raises general fund taxes and transfers the excess into the Trust Fund. The Social Security Trustees estimate taxes would have to be increased by 34% to cover the gap.

Option #4 is deeply irresponsible and not really a solution at all in terms of providing more funds to the system. It simply transfers the burden to the next generation.

This concept of a spend-down of the Trust Fund between 2018 and 2042 seems pretty fanciful to me. It's hard to view the Trust Fund, in it's current form, as something that takes Social Security away from its pay-as-you-go basis.

The fiscal hawks are right on this particular aspect of the issue. Read the pieces about the Trust Fund at Centrist.org and the Concord Coalition. Decide for yourself whether their understanding of the Trust Fund is more or less sound than those offered in daily posts by Drum and Marshall.

Texas Blowback

The Bush plan to partially privatize Social Security is running into resistance from House Republicans, and the New Republic's Peter Beinart, in a subscription-only article, posits that one of the causes is the DeLay gerrymander that defeated several Texas Democrats. Here is an excerpt

But there is one more reason that, as The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes recently noted, "conventional wisdom in Washington" suggests that "Bush's plan to reform Social Security is dead before it's been unveiled." And it's more than a little ironic. It may be that the GOP's victories in last November's elections, the very victories that Bush says give him the "political capital" to push through partial privatization, are actually making the effort harder. By killing off the Democrats most susceptible to his influence, Bush may have created a political dynamic that works for his opponents, and against him.

The most obvious example, as Carolyn Lochhead recently pointed out in an excellent article in The San Francisco Chronicle, is Charlie Stenholm. Stenholm, a 13-term representative from West Texas, was probably the congressional Democrat most enamored of partial privatization. He had already co-sponsored a partial-privatization bill and would likely have done so again. Having Stenholm's name attached to private accounts would have given Bush's effort a bipartisan veneer--and an ally able to lobby red-state Democrats more effectively than the White House ever could.

This is rather Byzantine, but it makes sense. Moderate Republicans are lerry of being swept up in a party line vote and then having to pay for it if public opinion turns against the changes.

A Fresh Look at Welfare

I was recently speaking to some teens like myself about community service and assisting the poor over the holiday season. I never agreed with the policy of only helping the homeless when those with money feel guilty and want to give back – they get cold in October and last through March. Perhaps helping them over Halloween is a better option.

It was suggested that we reach out to those homeless who are in shelters due to lack of education or job loss, and offer food and money to help their suffering. It was at this point that I fully awakened to the difference between the position I advocate and include in my New Democratic Plan, and those of Terry McAuliffe’s version of the Democratic Party.

“The homeless do not need a one-time contribution of stiletto heels or pity money,” I said, bringing the discussion back to a joke I had made about a homeless man being given a pair of red heels. “The homeless need help getting back on their feet. They do not need a system of endless welfare and handouts. What they need more than anything is training for a job, a GED, a chance to succeed.”

President George W. Bush has cut job training and education programs for the homeless, unemployed and underemployed in a crude form social Darwinism. He also claims, with some justification, that welfare is not an unending charity for the un- or underemployed in America. The first point I see as being morally backwards. The second point, however, is a valid idea.

Welfare ought to be looked upon, it seems, in the lens that Franklin Roosevelt saw it – a government recovery benefit to be used until that person is able to find work on his or her own. Welfare should not become a way of life. Families should not have to learn how to play the system so as to live from check to check. Keeping welfare in place would be ideal, while placing a time limit on its use, and offering better access to educational and job-training programs. A responsible security net should be the keystone of any social-minded Democracy.

Emphasis must be put on helping those who are homeless or jobless, and who are able to work, find jobs that match their skills. If they do not have skills, it should be the moral duty of the government to provide facilities where they can gain an education. This means we must have a more comprehensive GED program, and better communication between homeless shelters, halfway homes, and the state and federal governments.

States should be given economic bonuses and incentives for increasing their educational and employment opportunities for homeless, unemployed or underemployed Americans. This idea, while active in some areas, is both seriously out of date and not hitting the areas in which states would be driven to educate and employ the population.

This requires that Republicans and Democrats work together in this divided nation, drop the partisan talking points, and admit several things: limited welfare is good, social programs do not all lead to Communism, there must be limits placed on welfare, and that people must, in the end, not rely wholly on the United States to tide them by. This will be made much harder than it has to be by both sides of the aisle.

The teenagers – the very liberal, most of them – shirked the idea and claimed that their Democratic friend had been indoctrinated by the GOP. The method I proposed would take too much work. Money is faster. It is too intrusive on the lives of the homeless. It would mean effort from both sides.

What was infinitely more inspiring was the group of teens – moderates, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians – that nodded in silent agreement and walked away contemplating it. I even saw a Republican and Democrat, both of them well-known for their views, sharing mutual interest in the idea.

Partisanship can wait. Let us help the people now. Together.

The New Democrat

Open Thread

What's on your mind? Nothing is off-topic

What about Saudi Arabia?

I loved attending the swearing-in yesterday, and listening to the President's speech in person. I thought it was very well written and delivered, and he was making the argument that IMO he should have been making about Iraq since the start, instead of relying on a WMD message that clearly turned out to be false.

I admit I did wonder about the cost of a human rights crusade throughout the world and then there is the issue that Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler pointed out today in the Washington Post:

"President Bush's soaring rhetoric yesterday that the United States will promote the growth of democratic movements and institutions worldwide is at odds with the administration's increasingly close relations with repressive governments in every corner of the world.

Some of the administration's allies in the war against terrorism -- including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan -- are ranked by the State Department as among the worst human rights abusers. The president has proudly proclaimed his friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin while remaining largely silent about Putin's dismantling of democratic institutions in the past four years. The administration, eager to enlist China as an ally in the effort to restrain North Korea's nuclear ambitions, has played down human rights concerns there, as well."

I don't think it is an appropriate policy to call for an end to tyranny in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, without addressing the same issue with those nations that call themselves our friend. If there is anything 9/11 taught us, IMO, it is that we need to know who our friends are. After all, wasn't it a human rights violator that we empowered in the cold war, who in the end harbored the very terrorists that flew airplanes into our buildings?

Is Bush A Conservative?

Bush's second inaugural address outlined a utopian crusade for democracy throughout the world. It's antecedents are in Woodrow Wilson's idealism, and in John F. Kennedy's "bear any burden." Wilson's crusade seeded democracies in Europe, like that of Weimar Germany, all of which subsequently failed with disastrous consequences. Is this policy conservative in any meaningful sense? I think not.

Is Bush a conservative on economics? He's a big spender who piles on the debt. Yes, he cuts taxes. Tax cutting is identified with conservatives, but that really an accurate categorization? If one thinks of economic conservativism in terms of the old puritan value of thrift, then Bush is a spendthrift, and not a conservative.

Is Bush a conservative on social issues? Yes. Decidedly yes.

Bush is 1/3 conservative, and 2/3 I don't know.

Update: Fred Barnes says that Bush has smashed the wall between idealism and realism.

In effect, Bush said the policy of idealists will lead to the goal of realists. "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," he said. Boom! The wall between the two schools is gone, at least in the president's formulation.

Um, don't many idealists think their policies is realistic? This is starting to remind me of the rhetoric of the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party.

Cataloguing Intolerance

I just took a little journey from Charles Johnson's blog Little Green Footballs through some articles about tolerance and intolerance in the Muslim world.

Charles adopts a contemptuous tone toward a new article in the New York Times describing the city of Mecca as an unusually tolerant and cosmopolitan outpost in an otherwise repressive region.

Charles posts repeatedly every day about the unpleasant aspects of Arab and Muslim societies. That makes his perspective biased, but that doesn't mean he's factually wrong in any specific case.

I wondered, in this case, if he was right. So I did some reading about Mecca, about the yearly Haj, and more broadly about Saudi society.

First, it's hard to make any blanket sort of case that the intellectual and social environment of Mecca is broadly tolerant. Leading Imams sometimes call for "the destruction of the Jews" from the pulpit of the Grand Mosque. The cosmopolitan flavor of Mecca doesn't extend to tolerance for the Jews, or Christians either in some cases.

It's also pretty clear that Saudi society is intolerant toward religious dissent.

There is, however, a diversity of opinion both in Mecca and in the larger Muslim world. The really brave ones are often being oppressed by their governments.

One such gentleman mentioned in the New York Times piece is Seyed Mohammad al-Maliki, a leading scholar of an alternative Muslim tradition called Hejazi. He wrote over 100 volumes on Islam, and was removed from his professorship at a Mecca university for opposing the Wahhabi tradition that dominates Saudi Arabia. He was also one of the earliest to issue warnings about the rise of Islamic extremism.

A couple months ago, al-Maliki passed away from complications of diabetes. His followers were permitted to organize a service for him in the Grand Mosque, presided over by a leading Hejazi Imam. In attendance were Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Sultan. They made statements praising him.

This is a regime that had arrested al-Maliki for his beliefs, and who took away his teaching privileges. It's also a place where he has thousands of followers, as indicated by the crowds at his funeral, and where his stature was significant enough to warrant the presence of the Crown Prince.

It seems fair to say that something's missing from both Johnson's blog and the overly cheerful New York Times piece. The Times forgot to include virulent (even genocidal) anti-Semitism in the "tolerant, cosmopolitan" culture of Mecca. Johnson has very little to say about the flip-side of the coin -- the real moderates of the Arab world who have stature and a significant following.

Johnson might have said something about the panel discussion in Mecca recounted in the opening part of the Times article. The reporter recounts a freewheeling discussion that involved difficult questions, many of them posed by female participants. That's the kind of thing we want to see in Saudi society, and accross the Muslim world.

If we want to see it -- and if we see a little of it -- it's worth a few hopeful words, especially in the midst of LGF's catalogue of Muslim evils.

Governor Mitch Daniels and his Tax Hike

When Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels - once a moderate Republican - campaigned for Indiana to be run “like a business,” no Hoosiers expected it to be Enron he emulated. A week into Daniels’ first term as governor, he has managed to stumble again. This time, Daniels isn’t taking apart unions, but shooting his own party in the foot.

In his January 19th State of the State address, Gov. Daniels – the former Budget Director for President Bush – proposed a “temporary” tax hike of 1% on every household that has a combined income of $100,000 or over. This comes from the man who adamantly swore that a tax increase would be a “last resort” for Hoosiers already strapped with property taxes and falling incomes.

What’s more, Daniels has coupled this tax hike with over $1 billion in new spending – exactly the opposite of the “trimming down of government” that “My Man Mitch” promised on the campaign trail. Somehow, amid $1 billion in spending and a 1% tax hike, Daniels found time to freeze education spending and only provide for about 50% of what state Medicaid requires. That’s quite a balancing act.

According to a flurry of stories on Page A1 of The Indianapolis Star, Daniels stands alone in his view that a tax hike is the best way to get out of the hole Indiana has put itself in. House Republican leader Jeff Espich – the man in charge of deciding whether Daniels’ budget goes before the General Assembly – has flatly declared that there is no reason to hike the tax rate. Maybe reducing spending would help a little.

Both sides of the aisle backed away from this marriage penalty of a tax hike, and for good reason: in many cases, a family that files jointly is just above the $100,000 mark, and thus gets the pleasure of paying the “temporary” tax. Another “temporary” tax, started by Republican Mayor of Indianapolis William Hudnut over a decade and a half ago, still sits on the books. Given the history of state taxes, Daniels’ idea will be all but “temporary” if it is implemented into the final budget.

What Daniels is proposing would place a penalty on those Hoosiers who choose to file tax returns with their spouse instead of individually. It would harm families where both parents are teachers – a profession Daniels has promised to help – and the combined salaries edges up against the $100,000 limit. It would harm the expanding small business society of Indiana, which Daniels also promised to assist in its growth. Dropping a tax on those companies doesn’t seem like a very smart plan.

With his brash and surprising actions against the Unions, $1 billion in extra spending instead of the streamlining Hoosiers were promised, and this marriage penalty of a “temporary” tax hike, Daniels has shown Hoosiers that his views worked out perfectly on the campaign trail, but are falling apart in the Statehouse. Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee have abandoned the Daniels budget, and risk leaving Indiana without a budget and with the General Assembly on a $20,000-a-day special session binge like in 2002.

Daniels’ State of the State came off as a State of Confusion; a grim, stumbling attempt to address the problems of a state he did not come to know before jetting away from Washington D.C. to campaign in and govern. Defying his campaign promises, spending instead of streamlining, and violating his “last resort” have become ‘Problem One’ in the Daniels encyclopedia.

Thinking Hoosiers would be too stupid to notice is now ‘Problem Two.’

Namesakes

If you've been watching 24 this season, you will have noticed the character Richard Heller, the son of the Secretary of Defense who is being tortured by the Counter-Terrorism Unit because he may have inadvertently contributed to the kidnapping of his father by Islamic radicals. Richard is an anti-war lefty and a wimp, but he's holding up well under torture because he may not know anything.

It happens that my legal name is Richard Heller, and I'm tickled to hear my name on TV. Do any of you have namesakes, and how have you reacted? By the way, today is the last day to enter a contest to have a character on 24 named after you!

More nuance from Sen. Kerry

Senator Kerry has sent clear signals that he intends to run again in 2008, so it is fair to assume that everything he does in the near future is intended to advance that effort. This election year, he obviously had a problem explaining his shifting positions on the war in Iraq. So now, consider this.

Condoleezza Rice was overwhelmingly endorsed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today to be the next secretary of state, but only after some spirited exchanges signaled that Iraq will be a divisive issue in President Bush's second term.

The 16-to-2 vote by the panel cleared the way for Ms. Rice to be confirmed by the full Senate . .

The "no" votes by Senators Boxer and Kerry were no surprise, given their sharp questioning of Ms. Rice on the reasons for going to war against Iraq, the prosecution of the war, and the peacekeeping operations that have caused more American deaths than the war itself.

In August, Kerry was saying that he would have voted to authorize the war even knowing what we know now (i.e, that Saddam did not have WMD). Now he is aligning himself with Sen. Boxer.

What is going on and how could this possibly help him in 2008? There is no way, at this point, that he can run as the anti-Iraq war Democrat in 2008, is there?

The New Democratic Plan

Before I begin, I'd like to take a brief moment to introduce myself. The name's Max, webmaster of The New Democrat. I'm glad to be here on Centerfield, and hope you all voice your opinions on what I have to say.
---

THE New Democrat is not a tangible thing. It does not have an office, a shape, or a voice on its own. It is an idea, a simple idea that is given voice and power by Democrats nationwide, from the moderates to the liberals, from the rich to the poor. With a unified Democratic Party, with a core of people devoted to the ideals of The New Democrat, we can take back our government once more.

Moderates will lead our charge back to the White House in 2008; men like Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, Governor Mark Warner of Virginia, and women like Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona. The Democratic Party has long been the party of the people, and we are losing elections now because we have lost that important connection we once had to the people. It's not surprising that states like Ohio and Iowa abandoned us for the Republican Party in 2004 - it was a simple matter of who they related to more.

We must look to the Heartland of America for the men and women to lead the Democratic Party into 2006 and 2008, and find amongst them a leader that can bring Ohioans and Iowans, Hoosiers and Missourians, the base of the Democratic Party back into the fold. We will not win another national election until we have returned moderate areas like Missouri and Ohio to the Democratic Party, as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and 1996. We lost those states because of one major problem: communication. The Republican Party, Karl Rove's machine, the machine that pummeled Congressional Democrats in 2002, is still in fine form. To win, we must speak through the noise.

Senator John Kerry was doomed in Ohio and Missouri from the start. As hard as he tried, Kerry never had Missouri's heart, nor did he ever have its eleven electoral votes. To the people of Missouri, filtered through President Bush's ingenious ad campaigns and door-to-door volunteers, John Kerry came off as an east-coast liberal, a Massachusetts Yale-ite, a man confused with his religion and willing to contradict himself on key social issues in order to get votes. Some of this may be true, but the problem lies in what was John Kerry's stunning inability to connect with Midwestern voters enough to convince them it was a lie.

Kerry spoke in complex terms, using political jargon that was easily turned around into that well-worn "elite liberal" title by Bush's plain-speaking and brilliance at playing the role of the 'common man'. His abortion stance flew in the face of the Catholicism he later praised; his anti-gun voting record made all of the duck hunting photo ops seem as cheesy as Dukakis riding his tank. John Kerry's inability to communicate clearly and in plain terms with the people, to reassure them as Bill Clinton did, proved to be his ultimate downfall. In the end, Kerry just seemed out of the mainstream.

A plain-spoken Democrat from the heartland, a man like Evan Bayh or Mark Warner, is what this party needs to win. We need a man who shares the values of the people he asks to vote for him. A man who will spend more than one afternoon in an Ohio town before jetting off to go sailing in Nantucket. It's time to look for that common man candidate to represent the people once more.

Wave of the Future!

I’m a new blogger here at CC, so I’ll just introduce myself.

My name is Art Allen, I grew up in Minnesota and I’m now in school at Northeastern University in Boston. I am 20 years old.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m here to mix up the system. About a month ago I came across a great article calling for the formation of a third major national party with its base in the center. A centrist third party, if you will.

I’m a new blogger here at CC, so I’ll just introduce myself.

My name is Art Allen, I grew up in Minnesota and I’m now in school at Northeastern University in Boston. I am 20 years old.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m here to mix up the system. About a month ago I came across a great article calling for the formation of a third major national party with its base in the center. A centrist third party, if you will.

As anyone who has even been in the same room as a newspaper in the past five years can tell you, there are massive internal strains in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. These strains are varied in nature, but can most plainly be traced to a pull from each party’s traditional base versus a pull from the center, America’s base.

This presents two obvious conclusions: either both parties move more to the center, or a third party forms in the middle.

The easier solution would be for both parties to move to the center. However, that was tried in 2000. The fringes felt left behind, and therefore “third” party candidates drew large percentages of the votes. It was a four-party election, with the two major parties courting the middle. The math was just awful.

The harder solution, which is invariably the better solution, is the formation of a third party in the center. And I’m not talking about a Libertarian-style third party, I mean a real, centrist, viable, exciting third party.

One of my colleagues brought up the idea that in order for a centrist party to be viable, it has to have a serious candidate. That is to say, a candidate who is politically established and can be take seriously. This is needed to avoid the (as Bill so accurately put it) “quirky candidate syndrome that plagues third parties.”

But let’s not put the cart before the horse. We need a party before we get a candidate.

The Independence Party of Minnesota is the most obvious place to start. Then we contact more and more centrist groups, such as Centrists.org, the DLC, the RMSPand a lot of the centrist bloggers. We get all these groups together and say "Yes! Cooperation is what we need!" and we all sign on to a document calling for (and perhaps outlining) a party platform and mission statement.

We then send copies of our signed document to various moderate politicians at all levels of government (including newly unemployed statesman Colon Powell). We implore them to join the cause for cooperation in American politics and the side that is ruled by reason rather than partisanship.

I believe the time for a real third party in America is now. I believe it has to be now, America needs it now more than ever.

Who’s with me?

To George, on his Inaugural

Dear Mr. President,

In reference to your recent statement alleging an electoral mandate to conduct the war in Iraq, I have but one word in response: Bunk!

I am centrist registered Democrat. As such I speak only for myself. I cannot nor would I presume to speak for any other political centrists, moderates, swing voters, Reagan Dems... you get the picture.

That out of the way, let me state in unambiguous terms my opinion that the Iraq invasion and occupation, foisted upon this nation via a Bush administration campaign of willful ignorance and outright deception, is nothing less than an unmitigated disaster. And a disaster it will remain irregardless the outcome of US orchestrated elections, troop withdrawals, support from puppet Arab regimes.. you name it.

I supported the action in Afghanistan. Though I could quibble with some of the tactics and regional strategy implemented in that ongoing struggle, it was and remains on the whole a just campaign in the just cause of combating global terrorism. The Afghan conflict is not, nor should it be, anti-Islamic. But it is justly and justifiably anti-fanatic.

Not so the Iraq debacle. It is instead the ill conceived, ideologically driven bastard of an unholy alliance between our own brand of home grown religious fanatics and the equally delusional Straussian neo-cons. It is the worst kind of foreign policy imaginable. One where the realization of arcane socio-political theory combined with twisted theology displaces the balanced rational evaluation so critical to a sound geo-political decision process. It's policy more familiar to mid 20th century Fascism or Bolshevism than 21st century liberal democracy.

In such a scenario as this there can be no middle ground. The zealous, self-righteous nature of the process puts it out of the reach of any real consensus. Centrism is by nature a pragmatic approach. But there has been nothing practical or reasoned about Bush's reckless Iraq adventure. In hindsight it's now clear that the invasion was largely a foregone conclusion, even before 9/11. All pretense at continuing the containment of Saddam in coordination with our allies and the UN was just that. Once 9/11 provided needed cover, the American people and the world were railroaded into accepting this initial gambit in a grand strategy to ostensibly stabilize the volatile Middle East, bolster the security of Israel, and help ensure a ongoing ready supply of oil.

Now in the midst what has spiraled into a full blown middle eastern quagmire, this despite the dismissive pre-conflict assurances from the neo-cons and their allies that it would be a veritable walk-over, we have mounting indications that a further misguided adventure into neighboring Iran is in the offing, it's advocates apparently emboldened by Bush's razor thin margin of victory. This in spite of the fact that our military is currently stretched to the functional limit and public support for the Iraq war, never solid to begin with, is now sagging. Astounding.

The Iraqi elections will, apparently, be held this month; though at what level of participation and by whom remains to be seen. What is sure is the resultant vindication that will be trumpeted by Bush and his lackeys. Baloney. Even if the poll were to be judged fair and broadly representative - a huge if, to flaunt it as justification for this snafu is tantamount to leaping blindly but willingly off a cliff and then touting the wisdom of such reckless stupidity as evidenced by the fact you survived with only a broken back and a skull fracture. Hurray for our side!

And the list goes on.

Saddam was brutalizing his people:

Given the at least tens of thousands of civilians killed and many more horribly maimed both mentally and physically thus far, Saddam would've been challenged indeed to match the brutality of Bush's meat grinder over the same period.

We're fighting them over there so we don't have to here:

It's almost embarrassing to even consider the validity of this one. To hear apparently sane people (though, admittedly, they all likely voted for Bush; so..) parrot this fallacy speaks to the level of ignorance and outright denial among far too many Americans. But it's now a case of justification become mantra among war supporters, so here goes.

Put down that comic book, sit up straight and listen closely. There was NO significant cooperation or collaboration between Saddam and Islamic terrorist groups before the invasion. The invasion and occupation has instead inflamed anti-American feeling in the Islamic world, as well as elsewhere, and served as a recruiting boon to these terror groups, our true enemies. At the same time we have weakened many of our most valuable foreign alliances by ramming this fiasco though unilaterally. The coalition of the willing is a joke. A very bad joke. Yes, we are in fact less safe as a direct result of Bush's bull-headed ill-informed foolishness.

John Kerry, though late in coming around was absolutely correct. This war is a distraction from, not part of, the war on terror. End of story.

WMDs:

Never mind.

This war is not about oil:

Oh really.

George Bush has largely been a miserable failure and an unrepentant fool as President. He does deserve some credit for leadership immediately post 9/11 in combating terror groups and uniting the country. But he gambled this all away with the Iraq adventure. His domestic policies, well to the right politically of most Americans, have on the whole matched the war. Reckless and mostly feckless. Now as his second term begins all signs are that the myopic, simplistic incompetence as well as the appointments and policy initiatives motivated by dogmatic, impractical ideology will remain the norm. And this is a tragic shame.

Where, at this crossroads in human history, a unifying leader of all America and the world could be the agent of real and lasting positive change, George Bush instead has been a divider and a reactionary and he has steered us all off the solid path of global progress laid by his predecessor. He has done so willfully, gleefully and with the misguided and frightening belief that he is doing the work of his god. Perhaps he indeed sees himself as sewing seeds for the second coming. But by this lunacy he in fact only serves to sew the dark seeds of another more ancient mythological being, Chaos.

Therefore, on George's inaugural, this centrist will join with millions of Americans left, right and center in protesting the worst Presidency in at least my middle-aged lifetime. I will do so because, though I believe Bush did win the election, even democracies can make mistakes. Indeed, no one or no thing is perfect. Fifty two percent of the electorate just made a grave mistake. It was their right to do so and I'll fight for that right. But I'll also exercise mine in peacefully protesting the disaster they chose to revisit upon us all.

I hope to see you there.

PEACE

Let's Talk About Sex

Some folks think we've been talking too much about the Democrats. Okay. Let's change the subject, to one specific Democrat.

Harvard President Larry Summers made some controversial statements about gender differences, and liberals like Matt Yglesias have been mocking him. Summers is, of course, Clinton's former Treasury Secretary. So he's not right of center, except on campus, where Republicans faculty are neither seen nor heard.

I don't dismiss the underrepresentation of women in science as due solely to biology-based gender differences. Once there are a lot of men in a field, you can have a fraternity-like atmosphere which makes it difficult for qualified women. But Summers is right about research which shows cognitive differences between men and women. Generally, men are better at spatial reasoning (e.g. maps) while women have superior verbal skills.

We're talking averages here, not iron rules. It was wrong in the past to say that "no woman can do x" and its also wrong to say that "any difference between the average man's and woman's ability to do y is the result of socialization or discrimination."

Update:
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas suggested that Social Security benefits take gender into account

Thomas said lawmakers should debate whether Social Security benefits should differ for men and women, because women live longer. "We never have debated gender-adjusting Social Security," he said. A House leadership official said that not even Republicans on Thomas's committee would vote for that idea.

I'd be reluctant to support such a change. There are differences between men and women, but the law should treat them equally except where there really is no overlap between the sexes, such as in the ability to get pregnant.

Framed

Kenneth Baer takes on George Lakoff, who in addition to Thomas Frank, has become the Democrats new guru.

Indeed, Lakoff has stumbled upon the central problem facing Democrats since Bill Clinton left office, but his explanation of how he got there is unconvincing, and his advice on how to go forward is misguided. By reducing American politics to language, Lakoff ignores the context that gives meaning to those words. Language only motivates people if the ideas and policies it's connected to resonate with a majority of Americans. It has to be consistent with the realities of American history and the American national character. Throughout his book, Lakoff ignores this context, using his theories to push for an agenda that resonates with him (and possibly his friends at the fringes of left-wing politics), but reflects neither what most Democrats—nor most Americans—believe.

Read the article for the specifics.

I will say that Lakoff's advice is deeper than mere labeling (pro-choice vs. pro-abortion). It's about selling the policies you believe in. Find out what people want, and show how the policy you advocate gives them what they want. The problem with Lakoff seems to be what policies he thinks can be sold, like opposition to the US invastion of Afghanistan.

As I've mentioned previously in comments, I do think framing could be used in the gay marriage debate. The problem with liberal language is not just the "marriage" word, but that the issue is perceived through a civil rights frame. Believe it or not, a lot of people are tired of new groups demanding their rights, and government benefits to go with it. In fact, equating the struggles of gays with civil rights even offended some African-Americans, who did not see them as equivalent.

A better frame would be the conservative one of contracts and obligations. Marriages, mortages, and family makes people more conservative--gays too. Committment in sickness and in health means that private resources are available for people who would otherwise become wards of the state. Some advocates of gay marriage, like Andrew Sullivan, do use this argument, but not enough. It runs against the grain of liberals to sell the conservatizing effects of marriage, which is why they are reluctant to use that frame.

Blogging Break

I'm going to take a blogging break, both to catch up on some push programming, and to regain some lost perspective.

For the last few months, I feel that my blogging has been increasingly angry and partisan. In the last couple of months, I've started and never finished several posts because they were too angry. In fact, in a certain sense, this is just ratification of a reality, since that has caused my posting levels to go way down. In comments, I've shouted rather than argued, and I hope you don't take my yellings personally.

There are all too many bloggers who have lost their cool and become ranters. I don't want to follow in their footsteps.

So I'm going to stop even trying to post for a month or so, to regain perspective and rethink my blogging approach. I'll keep reading the blog, of course, and I'll keep in touch via the comments. Hope y'all had a fine weekend!

Centrists Skeptical of Social Security Changes

The Hill reports that in addition to centrist Democrats, moderate Republicans are holding back on the President's initiative.

But so far there are signs that Republicans will have trouble holding their own ranks together in both chambers. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a Finance Committee member who played a key role in tax-cut negotiations in the last Congress, has steered clear of statements that would put her in the forefront of the Social Security debate. Snowe is up for reelection this cycle and could be a top Democratic target.

MLK Day

Booker Rising and The Moderate Voice have written tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King. Both are worth reading. I wouldn't exactly call King a centrist, as some of his political views were more those of a social democrat, but in many respects he was the kind of radical moderate we admire. He was assertive in seeking major change rather than taking things at the pace which white liberals were comfortable with. On the other hand, in contrast to radicals of the Black Power movement, he projected not anger, but hope, optimism, and malice toward none. In politics, it's hard to be charitable and assertive at the same time. What lessons can we moderates draw from the life of Dr. King?

Plan B

The FDA is apparently about to make a decision about whether to make Plan B (otherwise known as the morning-after pill) available over-the-counter.

This is one of the many sub-issues within our national debate on abortion. It falls at the opposite end of the scale from the bans on late-term abortions that are considered by Congress quite frequently.

Plan B works during the first 72 hours after sex, after the egg has fertilized but before it implants in the womb. The medical community doesn't generally consider this an abortion. However, a number of religious conservative groups do:

• The Family Research Council, Christian Medical Association, and American Life League all consider it an abortifacient. They argue that anything that interferes with implantation of a fertilized egg causes an abortion.
• Another pro-life group, Concerned Women for America, calls for rejection of over-the-counter status (and even for rescinding the original approval as a prescription medication) based on health and safety issues.
• A few reports of pharmacists refusing to fill the prescription on moral grounds have emerged, including one where the woman had been raped.

It seems to me the case for pro-life opposition to the morning after pill is remarkably weak. It relies on some sense, I suppose, that the fertilized egg has a right to implantation in the mother's womb, even if she wishes to take steps to prevent it.

The pro-life argument is weak, here, in the same sense that it is strong when it comes to late-term abortions. The earlier in the cycle you consider these questions, the more reasonable the pro-choice perspective seems; the later you consider it, the more force the pro-life argument attains.

With Plan B, I believe the only reasonable argument is over health and safety.

Plan B was initially approved for prescription use by the FDA in 1999. There are, of course, hundreds of studies, some conflicting. But the weight of evidence seems to fall on the "safety" side. The FDA's expert advisory panel voted 23-4 to recommend over-the-counter approval in 2003, and there was a real dustup over the FDA's subsequent decision not to follow the panel's recommendation.

Groups that recommended approval include the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association of Family Physicians, and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

This is, I believe, an important issue for women's health. Plan B is more effective when taken in the first 24 hours (with a 95% success rate) than in the second (85%) or third (60%) 24 hours. Requiring a prescription, which usually means a visit to the doctor, has a significant impact on women's ability to use this drug effectively.

We should also consider that some women don't seek medical attention following a rape. For them, the morning after pill would presumably not be an option.

There are also arguments being made about the effect this may have on young women, whether they are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, etc. I suspect those fears are unwarranted, given that Plan B causes nausia in about 25% of the women who take it, and has other side-effects like abdominal pain (18%), headache (17%), and heavier menstrual bleeding during their next period (14%). It is also expected to cost about $30 per dose over the counter -- not an insignificant sum for most teenagers.

We should look at the health aspects of this decision closely. But if it passes a reasonable health and safety standard, I suspect this is something that should be available over the counter.

Good News From Iraq

The bi-weekly Chrenkoff column about what you're not seeing on the six o'clock news.

Good news from Iraq, Part 19

Shifting The Center

Here is a left-wing strategy I endorse

While the Democratic Leadership Council and Democratic National Committee stubbornly retool their centrist Southern and Western strategy, the liberal/progressive wing of the party should pursue its own strategy: a long-term, non-electoral campaign of ideas. Democrats, Greens, labor unions, Nader-ites and others must unify around a set of core progressive ideas on which to educate and organize “Main Street” America.

I heartily support left-wingers pursuing a non-electoral strategy, and I'm not being sarcastic. This is in fact a wise strategy for "progressives" who have enough power to decide the Democratic nomination, but not enough power to elect a President. The candidate closer to the center of the political spectrum is closest to the views of most voters. That gives centrists an advantage--if they can win a party's nomination. What those on the extreme can do, if they come up with plausible ideas, is to widen the spectrum, and quite possibly, shift the center a little closer to their side.

Britain's Private Accounts

Did you know that Great Britain has a system of private retirement accounts like the ones being proposed for the United States? I did not. They were introduced by Margaret Thatcher. If they wre such a success, how come their example is not front and center in the US debate.

The most important article about the Social Security debate may be A Bloody Mess by Norma Cohen, a reporter at the Financial Times, writing in the liberal American Prospect. This could be the analogy to the famous piece by Betsy McCaughey in The New Republic which was credited with sinking the Clinton health care proposal and launched her into the position of lieutenant governor of the state of New York.

Britain’s experiment with substituting private savings accounts for a portion of state benefits has been a failure. A shorthand explanation for what has gone wrong is that the costs and risks of running private investment accounts outweigh the value of the returns they are likely to earn. On average, fees and charges can reduce pension lump sums by up to 30 percent on retirement. The nation’s savings industry, which sells those private accounts, has already acknowledged this. Which brings us to irony No. 2: Just as the United States prepares to funnel untold billions to its private sector for the management of private accounts, back in 2002, many U.K. insurance companies, mindful of tough new rules against giving bad advice, began to write to their customers urging them to consider abandoning their private savings and returning to the state pension system -- something hundreds of thousands of Britons have done already.

The most basic due diligence of policy research is to see whether a policy has been tried, and whether it succeeded or failed. If failure has occurred, the reasons should be identified, and adjustments made before starting any new experiment. While the Bush plan has not been fully fleshed out, it sounds similar to the Thatcher plan, and clearly both them from the same set of ideas and principles.

I have been dubious about private accounts (they seem gimmicky, and proponents seem to ignore the increaed risk that accompanies increated return from equity) but I've been willing to give them a hearing. So now I'm all ears. Unless this article can be rebutted, I come out solidly in opposition to private accounts.

So far, I haven't found any rebuttals to the Cohen article. Here's an earlier post by Arnold Kling, a thoughtful supporter of privatization who I expect may take on this issue

I should add that the obvious solution to the problem that social security funds may run out in 2042 is to raise the retirement age. Life expectancies are much longer now than they were in the 1930's, when Social Security was first instituted. A simple change to the retirement age for my generation can easily and equitably defer the social security problem.

Update: The Heritage Foundation's policy blog has a great deal of discussion of the social security issue, including some mention of the British system. Perhaps the best argument against raising the retirement age is that African-Americans have a lower life expectancy. Perhaps that is why changing the indexing to be based on cost-of-living increases rather than wage increases is a live alternative. Both these methods would clearly, though at some cost, address the social security problem. Private accounts increasingly sound to me like a pet scheme without good evidence to support it.

Update II: Arnold Kling has commented on the Cohen article.

Open Thread

What's on your mind? Nothing is off-topic.

Judge Bounces Evolution Caveat Stickers

From CNN: Judge: Evolution stickers unconstitutional

I don't like these stickers, or share the motives of the people backing them. But I find the judge's reasoning peculiar. It seems to rely in large part on his sense that the content of the stickers is confusing. (Confusing rhetoric from a bureaucratic council caught in a political crossfire? I'm shocked!) We might all be in big trouble if confusing rhetoric is declared unconstitutional, although I admit there's a part of me that has wanted to punish inscrutable bureaucratese with severe beatings on more than one occasion.

The judge is right of course, if he's suggesting that it's a bad idea to try to teach kids about the scientific method and the meaning of "theory" with a 1-sentence sticker. But his lack of courage in failing to make a clear ruling based on a sounder principle seems calculated to let this drag on. I was hoping for a ruling based on free speech that told sticker supporters that if the book troubled them, their remedy was to write their own textbook and then try and get schools to buy it and teachers to teach from their book instead.

Instead we find the idea that because the sticker suggests the possibility of alternative explanations, this is an example of the government ESTABLISHMENT of a particular religion. I don't see it. The judge is trying too hard. He found a way. And even more troublesome is that we're left with the possibility that if the sticker becomes even more vague, talking only about theories but not singling out evolution, that it will actually pass muster, even if it confuses students even more.

In the meantime, expect textbook publishers to all respond to this controversy by changing their books to highlight the ideas of scientific method and theory right at the beginning of the book. They'll do so at minimum with a statement somewhat similar to what the stickers say, but which finds a nice way to say "some theories are better than others, and we're not teaching crappy theories in our books."

Such statements might look like a concession, like a door. But they'll be gates. Strong gates connected to high walls. This is not the first time religion has assaulted science, and make no mistake that scientists are passionate about this, and ready for the fight, and willing to play to win. I doubt the intelligent design people have any real idea what they are in for if they keep this fight up.

The New Media Landscape

Over the last few years I've written several times about the evolution of the modern media. These observations have come during discussions of media bias. With the advent of the Internet and cable television, the rise in popularity of conservative talk radio, and the easy accessability of alternative media, the main stream media (MSM) has lost traction. Many believe the media has become increasingly polarized. Others claim it is not. Many fingers have been pointed, blaming this and that and the other. They're mostly all wrong. The polarization of journalism is a natural result of market forces and changing technology.

What we think of as a neutral national media is an artifact of the advance of technology. A century and a half ago there was no discussion of media bias. It was simply a fact of life. Radio and television did not exist. ALL media markets were local. Newspapers served their markets and blatantly pandered to the politics of their readers. They were often even named The Democrat or The Republican. If the market was big enough there would be more than one paper so that minority views could also be served (and profited on). Even the rise of the media moguls such as Hearst did not change this--it simply consolidated the independents. National reporting was done by national chains, and by local papers selling each other articles for reprint. Even smaller cities had more than one newspaper.

By the 1970's that still applied only to large cities. When radio came along after WWI, followed by television after WWII, the nature of news reporting changed. Suddenly there was a market for standardized national news that could be profitably served, and the business success of a national media outlet was dependent on attracting the largest audience possible. This meant that news had to become more neutral and impartial, less biased, less slanted to the opinions of local markets. News became homogenized. And so began the journalistic tradition of neutral reporting as a standard, rather than an exception.

What resulted was a market oligopoly of national news. The big broadcast networks and the big newspaper chains ruled. Many local papers remained independent, but still relied on the wire services for their national news. Economics and technology had shaped the market--and the neutrality of journalistic ideology. Business is business, and in a capitalist economy formative forces lead to maximum market-seeking.

But once a market is seized, if there are no alternative sources of supply the oligopolist or monopolist can pretty much do what they want. And political bias began to creep back into the news. Not by leaps and bounds, but slowly, like water through a crack. By the late 1970's the national media establishment was solidly centrist to liberal, and conservatives began to grumble and complain and tune it out.

Time and technology march on. Along comes cable TV, and suddenly the barriers to entry in the national media market are much lower. Ted Turner leaps into the fray, not on ideological motives but pure profit motives, and CNN begins to erode the bottom lines of the Big Three. Rush Limbaugh hits the scene, demonstrating that there is a HUGE untapped market for right-of-center news and views. And along comes the Internet, with almost no barriers to entry at all. In steps Fox. And the Big Three begin to flounder.

The result of this was all predictable, and I've gone on at length about it here and in other places over the last few years. Having lost their oligopoly and under severe market pressures the media, ALL media, have begun to seek market niches to serve profitably. One-size-fits-all is simply not a profitable formula at the moment. The obvious result is that media news outlets have become more ideologically polarized as the news markets fragmented, and the ideal of objective and impartial journalism has taken a big hit.

As I mentioned there is much finger-pointing in the discussion of media bias, disagreement about who is biased how, the origins of bias, even the denial that this outlet or the other has a bias. But the fact is that the media do not shape the markets. The markets shape the media.

This long-winded background review of what I've said for years is leading into something, as you may have guessed. The release of the CBS report has brought the discussion of media bias back into the limelight. But for once, there are signs that some of the media are finally seeing beyond the spitball-throwing of the moment and noticing what has happened, and even figuring out the consequences, and starting to look ahead at what might be.

Some hate it--Howard Fineman, for example. Some like it--Peggy Noonan makes that case. And some, including Noonan and former CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter, see an opportunity for the phoenix to rise from the ashes. A chance for news media to re-assess their market positions and aim for the Big Prize of a stronger, healthier, less partisan reporting ethos that serves more than ideological niches and can capture the big central market through clear, fair, and accurate reporting.

Here's hoping they're right.

Is Kos The Liberal Armstrong Williams?

Jesse of Pandagon chides Zephyr Teachout of Zonkette

She essentially created a liberal counterpart to the Armstrong Williams controversy that is in no way the same, or in fact even a controversy besides revealing the secret wishes of a few Dean staffers who never said anything until months later. Congrats.

What Zephyr said was

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients. While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

A commenter rebuts Zephyr

Mr. Williams took taxpayer money and did not disclose it. Markos put up a disclaimer on his site when he was consulting for Dean. You have given the right ammmo to combat the Williams story and it's all over a non-issue.

So no, what Kos has been doing is not in the same category as Armstrong Williams. But it still is blurrying the line between a person who is giving you their opinions straight, and a person who is doing PR work. I certainly was aware that Kos was a Dean consultant. What I don't know, however, is whether he earned consulting fees from any candidates for any other offices that he may have mentioned on his blog. In any case, he's so far out there on the left that I'd be inclined to oppose any candidate he supported whether they paid him or not.

On a related note, my friend Lisa Williams has written a nice post on blog ethics and etiquette. And for the record, I've never earned any money from blogging or ever been paid by a political campaign.

Update: Slate condemns Kos

Moulitsas' crime isn't taking money from Howard Dean. He, too, can get away with a suspended sentence for insufficiently disclosing his role in the Dean campaign once he was off the payroll. The hanging offense is that Moulitsas took money from other, undisclosed, political clients. And while he may have disclosed—in 2003—that he wouldn't disclose them, that's not good enough. DailyKos raised money for a dozen congressional candidates this past election. Which, if any, of them paid Moulitsas for the honor of directing his grassroots minions to part with their wallets? If you gave one of Moulitsas' preferred candidates money, wouldn't you like to know if Moulitsas' endorsement was purchased?

When You Don't Read the User's Manual

Here's a great laugh for a Friday.

We're Meeting In Massachusetts

Here is a chance to meet your fellow political moderates in person. Announcing the FIRST EVER centrist meetup in the Boston area:

Thursday, January 27, 7:00 PM
Redline
59 JFK St (Harvard Square, near Eliot Street)
Cambridge, MA

This will be an opportunity to socialize, to discuss the issues, blogs, and debate who to support in the 2006 Massachusetts governors race. We will be meeting jointly with political independents. You can RSVP for the event by signing up at the meetup.com site for either centrists or independents. There is no charge to sign up.

If you are in the Boston area, but can't make this month's meeting, please sign up anyway and RSVP as No. That way, I will know how to contact you for future meetups. I don't know how many people will show up, but I will be there unless a Nor'easter drops more than one foot of snow. If you have any questions, email me at rick @ centristcoalition dot com

Make the House Bigger?

Here's an idea worth mulling over:

in the US House of Representatives, each lawmaker represents, on average, a staggering 674,000 citizens. That makes the "people's house" in Washington one of the least democratic bodies of its kind in the world. No wonder so many Americans feel alienated from Congress. The vastness of their constituencies has turned too many representatives into distant careerists, political moguls with bloated staffs and bloated egos who are more closely attuned to their campaign war chests than to the lives of the people they are supposed to represent.

.....

Enlarging the House to around 1,300 members -- triple its current size -- would doubtless take some getting used to. But the benefits would more than outweigh any inconvenience.

Among them: Congress would be enriched by a great infusion of new blood and new ideas. Congressional staffs could be sharply reduced. Smaller districts would promote greater political intimacy -- elections would be more likely to turn on personal campaigning and local ties instead of costly mass-media advertising. No longer would states have to lose seats in Congress even though their population had grown, and with fewer votes needed to get elected, the House would be more likely to reflect the nation's social and political diversity.

I'm sure there are some cons to this, including cost, and increased bureaucracy. I'd want salaries lowered and staff size per congressman diminished as mentioned. The wheels might well grind slower. But more reps might mean that local concerns would be better perceived and focused upon, and perhaps diminish the tendency of reps to grandstand politically on divisive national social issues that the broad middle is not as concerned with.

I'd love to see this seriously considered, and to have it linked to some sort of district-drawing reform under national guidelines that makes gerrymandering difficult.

Oh, and I know this column is by Jeff Jacoby. I'm not one to agree with him that much. For those who lean left, I'm asking that we not play "shoot the messenger" or dig into motives. I'm wondering what people think of the idea on its merits. After all, the founders intended for the house to continue to grow in size.

The DLC Agenda And Ours

I get the Democratic Leadership Council's daily email alert. A few days ago, I got one on redistricting reform which even has nice things to say about California's Republican governor

Schwarzenegger is right about the problem, and California Democrats would be wrong to oppose the very idea of redistricting reform as a GOP plot. The California congressional and legislative maps didn't do Democrats any great favors. Sure, it froze Democratic majorities in place, but at the price of sacrificing any opportunity to expand them; it placed a ceiling as well as a floor on Democratic political strength, while essentially making general elections meaningless.

The Centrist Coalition is looking to develop an issues agenda, and while we look favorably on Centrists.Org and the Republican Main Street Partnership, the DLC is clearly the centrist organization with the most fleshed out centrist agenda. I'm not even sure what the difference is between DLC and RMSP positions, though in this RMSP fact sheet, they identify specific votes where their members differed from moderate Democrats.

Because I'm lazy, and don't have time to read all of this, I move that the Centrist Coalition adopt, with the exception of the issues which you, our readers, specify in the comments to this post, the following DLC agenda items wholesale:

National Security
Foreign Policy
Economics
Trade
Environment
Social Issues
Education
Health Care

What's not to like?

I'm being a little facetious here. But seriously, if you are a centrist, and especially if you are a moderate Republican, what do you like, and what do you disagree with, in the above DLC agenda items? My sense is that the Centrist Coalition is a tick to the right of the DLC. But I'm not sure that we differ from them much on issues. Our main difference is that we have no loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Obviously, if we really adopted the DLC positions wholesale, we'd have nothing to distinguish ourselves from them. So we would like to find some points of distinction, and would greatly appreciate it if you could help us.

A Tale of Reid, Roemer and a Lean to the Right

This just in from the DC Dem 'stablishment: Phuk off netroots.

Pinch me. Am I dreamin? OUCH! Guess not. But can it be true? First Harry Reid, the moderate pro life Senate Minority Leader from Red America, is easily elected by his brethren (and sistren) and now both he and the uber politico House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosivic, back Hoosier Tim Roemer for DNC chair?!? Roemer? That red meat Dem just this left side of Mad Dog Zell Miller? Somebody pinch me! OUCH! Stop that!

Seriously folks, what do these developments portend? Could it in fact be that as we opine a reactionary realignment is being hatched behind the beltway? Methinks it could. And methinks it signals a less than subtle attempt to preserve the power and influence of the DC Dem machine. Can't beat the Party devolutionists, co opt em. And co opt them by tacking hard right and backing red heartlanders. And tellingly, backing heartlanders with decidedly pro-life bents.

Behold the writing on yon wall, oh my bloggerdly comrades. The party fat cats are apparently not going just to sit by while a bunch of overpaid and under-occupied carpal tunnel sufferers storm the Bastille. They're manning the ramparts. They will not go quietly into that good night. Go ahead, make their day.

And perhaps the barons of the beltway are correct in their rather dismissive assessment of the netroots' prowess. After all the whole nation, nay the world was witness to the wired ones' vaunted champion, Howard the Bellicose's, humiliating defeat when finally tested in the heat of an actual contest. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! cried good Howard as the fatal blow struck home. So no surprise that as they see Dean riding forth once again, the Barons deridingly shout "is that the best ya got?!?". Is it indeed.

So as ye, The choir of the Kos, sing to one another self indulgent praise of your bard's eloquence and your rhetoric's power, know this. Wisely or no, the DC Dems aren't afraid of you. Your mutual admiration society of the disaffected left has just been "left" behind. Your hot Air America propaganda is now seen as the price, not the source of renewed democracy. Welcome to the limbo of irrelevancy. There's some cheap seats open in the back.

Now let me say this about that. The ringmaster is decidedly centrist (and thus imminently relevant). But as a centrist let me state outright that Tim Roemer's far too much a right side lean for my comfort and taste. I still strongly favor a Fowler or a Rosenberg chairmanship and have said as much. But given the choice I'll back a Roemer over a Dean because Roemer is closer politcally to the future path of this party. Howard Dean, though once a proud centrist New Dem governor, now represents the impotent wing of the Democratic party. And where the rhetoric and delusions of that wing are, there also lies continued defeat and minority status.

The message is clear my friends. Wake up and smell the latte. DNC chair race results aside, the party's done headed right. Get on board or get left behind.

The Opposition

Democrats in Congress are united against the Bush agenda? Does it matter?

"The president's idea of bipartisanship is, 'Here's what I want to do, join me,' " said Rep. Robert Menendez (N.J.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "It isn't about negotiating. It isn't about compromise. It's almost this belief that they have the monopoly on what's best for the country." Democrats point to Bush's decision to renominate a group of conservative judicial candidates who had been blocked by Democratic opposition during his first term as evidence that he will aggressively push an ideological agenda in his second term.

Ending the Split-Scream

Another great article from John Avlon -- this time focusing on the polarizing nature of the political media. Check it out.

Ending the Split-Scream
By John P. Avlon
New York Sun January 11, 2005

Even in an era when most pundits sound like paid political operatives shilling
for one of the two parties, it was still somehow surprising to find that
Armstrong Williams was paid nearly a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars by
the Bush administration to promote its No Child Left Behind legislation in his
column, radio, and television show.

At the same time, on the opposite side of the aisle, CBS News released its
internal audit on the falsified Bush-bashing National Guard memo it paraded
during the closing months of the campaign, finding that "myopic zeal" had led
its producers to ignore journalistic standards of objectivity, giving the Kerry
team a heads-up about the breaking "story" before it was properly verified and
released to the public.

Both these incidents are symptoms of a larger problem: the attempted hijacking
of the news industry by partisan political interests. This corruption has helped
to artificially polarize the nation, and hurt the credibility of all news
organizations. We are in the process of devolving back to 19th-century standards
of journalism, where newspapers acted as wholly owned subsidiaries of political
parties. It's time to end the "split-scream" mentality that pits predictable and
equally intolerant voices from the left and right against each other and
pretends that all the heat generated amounts to light as well.

Which is why the concurrent decision by CNN to cancel its long-running
screamfest "Crossfire" offers an opportunity to reassess the road we're on. As
the comic nemesis of "Crossfire," Jon Stewart, pointed out, the show was "named
after what innocent bystanders get caught in during gang violence," and in a
sense that describes the state of our nation's political debate as well. A
tribal mentality has infused our politics, where Democrats and Republicans
function as Crips and Bloods, firing off personal attacks and ratcheting up the
political body count in the belief that you're either with us or against us.
Extremism is rewarded and ideological conformity is mistaken for personal
courage. This ignores the fact that at the end of the day, we are all on the
same team as Americans. In the crossfire between special interests, the national
interest is the first casualty.

We are in the middle of a real war with an enemy who sees the world through the
jihadist lens of "us against them." We don't have the luxury of subdividing
ourselves at this time. And yet, with all the hyped-up left-right, black-white,
blue and red state divides we are obsessed with exacerbating our fairly modest
differences.

Nowhere is this worse than in Washington, which is the only town in America
where your political registration is the most important thing about you. If
you're wondering why Congress is so poisonously polarized, walk into any
representative's office: If they are Republican, they will likely have Fox News
on in the background and a copy of the Washington Times on the coffee table; if
they are a Democrat, their news choice is likely to be CNN and the Washington
Post. It's no surprise that they interpret the same events in fundamentally
different ways. The fish is rotting from the head down.

Ironically, the proliferation of information in the age of cable news and the
Internet has instead led to a self-segregation on the part of viewers, who want
to impose the order of news sources that affirm their own biases. A Pew Research
Center poll from June of 2004 showed that Fox News ranks as the most trusted
news source among Republicans, but among the least for Democrats. Because
politics tends to follow the laws of physics, the proliferation of conservative
talk radio has inspired an equal and opposite reaction with the attempted launch
of liberal radio network Air America. Rush Limbaugh has provoked a left-wing
response from a Jerry Springer radio show beginning national syndication next
month. As the dialogue gets more partisan and more polarized, the moderate
majority of Americans withdraw in discouragement and disgust.

The time-honored idea that trusted figures like Edward R. Murrow could serve as
honest brokers amid partisan warfare logically suffers when journalists
enthusiastically become part of the spin cycle. The cost of this is evidenced in
the dramatically declining credibility of all print, cable and broadcast news.
No one knows where to go for the unbiased truth. Even C-Span, which offers
unedited coverage of public events without commentary, has experienced a decline
in believability, suggesting that in this hyper partisan environment people are
reluctant to trust what they see with their own eyes.

So what is a practical solution for ending this split-scream epidemic? First,
the broad popularity of figures like John McCain suggest the thirst for people
who are willing to criticize wrong-doing across party lines. It is only common
sense that a Democratic criminal is no better or worse than a Republican
criminal, but in this polarized time it is difficult to find people who are
willing to break ranks with the party line. Second, it is up to executives and
producers to recognize that there is a backlash brewing against the steady diet
of partisan talking points we are fed daily. As the new chief executive officer
of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said in a statement explaining the cancellation of
"Crossfire," "I doubt that when the President sits down with his advisers they
scream at him to bring him up to date on all of the issues...I don't know why we
don't treat the audience with the same respect."

There is an untapped market for a real alternative to the split-scream
phenomena, a desire for compelling figures who can punch both left and right as
equal opportunity offenders - keeping a sense of humor while respecting the
audience's intelligence.

Integrity has real appeal. Even Armstrong Williams understood this: In an
televised interview with Tina Brown on CNBC this past October he said, "One of
the things that I struggle with when I go on television like, let's say, a
'Crossfire,' [or] Wolf Blitzer, I'm expected to take a certain side. I'm
expected to defend the president. Now there are some areas I don't want to
defend the president in because I don't necessarily believe that, but you're put
in that position. And I think sometimes you're in a predicament that the public
is not really getting what you think is their best interests served, so I think
sometimes we get caught up in these labels and these stereotypes...we do the
public a disservice...It's something that we really should think about." Even as
a sad coda from a conflicted man, it is still good advice.

After all the damaging disclosures of the past week, away from the din of an
election year, news organizations have an opportunity to confront this
underlying problem directly. Cooling the split-scream spin cycle would not only
improve the battered reputation of the press, but also help heal the
increasingly bitter political divisions in our nation.

A Note About Tom Carter

Carla points us to Tom Carter's Notes, where Carter, a retired Colonel, has written a post questioning whether he is liberal or conservative and finding a little bit of both.

For most of my life I've described myself as a slightly left-of-center Democrat. Liberals often label me as a conservative, and conservatives are often convinced I'm a liberal. That doesn't bother me until it gets out of control. I've lost a few liberal and conservative friends along the way who couldn't abide the fact that I disagreed with their particular orthodoxy. I've also been the subject of pity by a few people who couldn't believe I could be so stupid or stubborn as to disagree with their vision of revealed truth. Even worse, I've been ideologically stereotyped now and then because of such things as my profession, where I was born, or where I went to school.

Many of us here at Centerfield feel the same way. Carla, however, stirs the pot by claiming

It all boils down to the lens you view through. One man's center is another man's right wing conspiracy (or left wing nuttery...whatever). The answers are not "in the middle" because there is no middle.

Au contraire. I've recently taken a glance at Morris Fiorina's new book, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. Fiorina claims, and seem to have data to back himself up, that most public opinion really is in the center, and that it's the political class that is polarized. Clearly, there are institutional reasons why politicians and their close supporters line up in two camps, but it is more natural for people's actual opinions to lie in a continuum with most in the center.

I'm a quant for the most part. When you have a scatter of data points, you try to draw a line among them so that there is as much deviation on one side as on the other. That line, expressing the central tendency, is generally the most accurate measurement of the underlying reality.

Moral Quagmire?

Mark Kleiman has a post on his blog referencing a story from Newsweek on MSNBC concerning a plan that the Pentagon is apparently considering to try to stem the insurgency. According to the story

one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

The story compares this plan to the death squads used in El Salvador in the 1980s:

Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.

Mark is pretty much outraged by this, especially this quote from a "military source":

He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

Mark seems to think this is similar to the death squad activities in El Salvador and is, thus, beyond the pale. I think Mark is exaggerating somewhat here. It appears that this plan is designed to target people actively aiding the insurgents from outside the country, not merely sympathizers or political opponents as the El Salvador death squads did. Still, I think it raises some troubling questions about what we are getting into, especially to the extent that it truly is designed to create a climate of fear among the Sunni population as the story and Mark suggest. I should emphasize, of course, that this is just a plan apparently under discussion and not something that is occuring now (so far as we know.)

It seems to me the crux of the problem is whether the insurgency is truly a broad-based nationalist movement or simply a sectarian movement controlled by ex-Saddam loyalists and Sunni militants. Obviously, the Administration believes or wants to believe it is the latter. My guess is it is a little of both.

CBS reports--110 days later

CBS Fires Four Staffers After Memo Probe

The story is direct from CBS itself, and includes a link to the entire report in PDF format.

The Washington Election heads for Round 3

The gubernatorial race in Washington state is making Florida 2000 seem downright clearcut, and the Democrat's Ohio protests look silly beyond words.

Rossi to Contest Wash. Governor Election

A stolen election in Washington state?

Good News From Afghanistan

Chrenkoff's monthly Afghanistan report--the news you don't see on CBS.

Good News From Afghanistan

Freshmen In the Vital Center

Broder wrote an interesting article about two centrist House freshmen, the pressures they face, and the huge contrast in partisanship between state and national legislatures.

Disengagement From Iraq

That's what people are talking about, and not just the cut and run folks.

One possibility quietly discussed inside the administration is whether the new Iraqi government might ask the United States forces to begin to leave - what one senior State Department official calls "the Philippine option," a reference to when the Philippines asked American forces to pull out a decade ago. Few officials will talk publicly about that possibility. But in a speech on Oct. 8, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, who had just completed a tour as commander of all marines in Iraq, said, "I believe there will be elections in Iraq in January, and I suspect very shortly afterward you will start to see a reduction in U.S. forces - not because U.S. planners will seek it, rather because the Iraqis will demand it."

If Shiite theorcrats win the election, it's going to get pretty awkward. It's one thing to talk about democracy in the abstract, but if the election winners are Khomenei-lite, how many Americans are going to want our boys and girls to die to protect that kind of government? American public opinion might turn on a dime.

If an Iranian-allied group does win the Iraqi elections, perhaps it would make cynical sense for us to pull out, and let troops from Iran fight to keep the Sunnis from overthrowing the new Iraqi government. Instead of draining our treasury, it would be a burden in Iran--and if we were lucky, it could even drain resources from their nuclear program!

Gingrich Or Bush

Who do you like better, Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush?

Regular readers of this blog know that I disdain President Bush. I consider him rash, more youthful that his years when it comes to judgment. He risked re-election by invading Iraq, and while he won, it's not yet clear whether the US has won as well. I'm glad to see that GOP booster Peggy Noonan agrees with my assessment of him as someone who is inclined to take big risks.

If I were a Democrat right now I would think big and get serious. Second terms are tough for incumbents; history has not handed George W. Bush an easy ride, and there's no reason to think that will change now; and Mr. Bush is a gambler who's not afraid to throw the dice, which means he will likely have not only stunning gains but stunning losses ahead.

In contrast, I have long admired Newt Gingrich. I've been saddened that along with his great vision he has large flaws. While after eight years of Republican rule, I won't be inclined to support a Republican candidate for President in 2008, I am heartened by reports that Newt Gingrich is thinking about getting back into the game. He's even considering a run for President, though I suspect if he were to run, it would be primarily as a platform for his ideas, rather than as a front-bench candidate. While Gingrich was partisan and polarizing, he also had a knack for presenting unorthodox ideas. I would welcome his return to prominence.

Government Propaganda

That the US government was subsidizing a conservative talk show host is outrageous.

What is the U.N. good for?

I ask the question because I'm having real trouble thinking of anything that the U.N. does that others don't do better. The Diplomad blog, direct from a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in tsunami country, has been asking the same question.

You don't want to hear about Aussies and Yanks working. You know all about that. You want to know about the UN. The UN, you ask, what about the UN? Gee, fUNny you should ask. I was just thinking about the UN. Yesterday the UN rep who flew up to Aceh solely for the event, held a press conference at which he criticized the US airlift of supplies. The little S.O.B sniffed that it was "uncoordinated" and that some villages were fed twice while others were missed and that no "assessment teams" were being sent. The Guardian and AP have picked up the story, but my internet is so s-l-o-w, that I haven't been able to find it and link to it. Maybe tonight the internet will speed up and I can find it. I learn from colleagues who were there, no journalist asked the little twit just how many people the UN had fed, and if, indeed, "assessment teams" are what is needed why haven't the gadzillion UN assessment teams hanging out in the capital moved into these remote villages. I'm sorry but I detest these Vultures more and more.

Diplomad has been reporting on the relief effort from the region since it began, and from an excellent vantage point. One thing he has made quite clear is that the U.N. has done nothing to date but demand a piece of the $pie$, call out for croissants, hold press conferences where they criticize everyone else. And when the U.N. does claim credit for doing something, it turns out that they're claiming credit for what member nations have done--namely the U.S. and the Australians.

UNHCR claims to have provided 20 thousand jerry cans for water, there's one problem with that claim: USAID provided the cans which are filled up on the USS Abraham Lincoln with pure water and flown to affected areas by USN Seahawk choppers -- the very ones that get criticized so very much.

So, what is the U.N. good for? Well, according to Diplomad, "The UN continues to send its best product, bureaucrats."

Open Thread

What's on your mind? Nothing is off-topic

The Establishment is bailing

According to the Washington Post, foreign policy realists are increasingly losing faith in the idea that a good outcome is possible in Iraq. The latest is Brent Scowcroft who thinks we are in trouble:

"The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict," Scowcroft said. He said he expects increased divisions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims after the Jan. 30 elections, when experts believe the government will be dominated by the majority Shiites. Scowcroft predicted "an incipient civil war" would grip Iraq and said the best hope for pulling the country from chaos would be to turn the U.S. operation over to NATO or the United Nations -- which, he said, would not be so hostilely viewed by Iraqis.

This is not particularly surprising because many realists have been skeptical about Iraq from the beginning. However, it is, of course, surprising that GW's father's advisers are coming out so openly against the war. It is interesting to me, however, that Bush 41's foreign policy is SO DIFFERENT from Bush 43. Obviously, 9/11 has a lot to do with it, but the father and son seem to see the world very differently. Personally, while I know a lot of conservatives and liberals thought Bush 41's foreign policy was too timid and status-quo oriented, I think his foreign policy will be seen in a much more positive light in the future.

There is a long way to go before we will know what the long-term impact of Iraq will be. But I think it is likely to be a watershed in US foreign policy, much like Viet Nam was. Even this administration, I suspect, will be chastened by Iraq and, IMO, likely to be less adventurous. The danger, of course, is that we swing back too far the other way, either out of weariness or lack of resources.

Note to Midnight Blue Dems: Get with the Program or "Move On"

Nobody likes a whiner.

This rather purple Dem is frankly sick and tired of what is generally a bunch of spoiled, relatively well heeled white people endlessly bitchin because the Party they willingly joined isn't liberal enough, radical enough, contentious enough..(spoiled enough?). This the same party that's on a losing streak precisely because it's seen as too liberal and partisan by too many sometime Dem voters. What's wrong with this picture?

Hey folks this is not the military. Ya got choices. Ralph Nader wants you. There's an apparent and persistent delusion out there that the Dem Party can't put together a congressional majority and/or win the white house without a couple hundred thousand left fringe votes from midnite blue Districts. I got a news flash for ya: Tain't necessarily so.

One can argue that by raising the big fat middle finger to some whiny yuppies, aging hippies and white college kids, the Party could more easily craft a centrist message and field a candidate that could hold the vast bulk of the base while successfully appealing to the ever fickle swing red staters. It can be so. I think the numbers are there. And gosh, would it ever feel good.

In order to unite and govern as a party and not just feed the divide we need more women, minorities and blue collar folks who have a stake in a better future in this country of opportunity and potential. We need to stick to our core principles but then sell precisely these folks on our ability to deliver on that dream. These the same folks that have of late felt alienated by an elitist liberal face of the party now too often in their faces. Michael Moore was once one of their own but he doesn't speak to or for them anymore. Susan Sarandon? I don't think so. Try a Ken Salazar or a Harry Reid.

If the republicans can successfully cast Democrats as America haters, then we're doing something very wrong indeed. And that something may well be pandering to the wrong kind of people.

So there it is. Suck it up and get with the program of building a winning coalition, or exercise your right to take a freakin hike. Whether you like it or not, this Party is simply not regressing to the bad old days of the "great" society; short of an economic collapse circa 1929 that is. And if you're looking forward to that then you are an ass, but not a Democratic one. Besides, how would you afford those lattes or look for a job without your volvo?

Believe it or not, I'm all about building bridges between the left and center. I can be a persuasive facilitator and was often just that when networking with liberal, even radical organizations in the past. But there were always those few bug eyed zealots that never wanted to be confused with the facts if those facts didn't happen to jive with their front loaded bias downloaded unfiltered from some equally dogmatic leftist prof. I learned to ignore and avoid these types and focus instead on those who think for themselves and are at least open to new ideas that might appeal to more people not less. You know the type. Bridge builders. Call em the progressive majority.

Being one of those bridge builders I hope and will continue to search for the common threads that bind this always diverse and often divergent cat herd of a party. But I'll have no time for those that refuse to build towards me in kind from their side. Life's too short and there's so many more new voters to reach out to that will reach back to us if we respect and speak TO them, not down to them.

In the end the choice is indeed yours oh ye of intransigent liberal faith. Open your minds and build with us or close the door behind you on your way out. Hey you could likely swell the Greens' vote totals to a whoppin 4 or 5%! (thus simultaneously spoiling and acting spoiled?) Of course you'll be missed in the winner's circle when we retake the reins of America and renew partnership with the world. But not missed too much.

Genocide: Always Again?

I was just in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and it occurred to me that, despite pledges of "never again" of WWII-era leaders, it keeps happening again. Current world systems are clearly unable to prevent genocide, because it keeps happening over and over again. The same thought occurred to Eddie Beaver as well, stationed on the Kitty Hawk (via Instapundit).

Since then, a decidedly partial list includes:

Episode	Result	Counterforce type
Pol Pot	unstopped	None
Bosnia, at first	unstopped	EU/UN peacekeepers
Bosnia, eventually	stopped	US bombed the bad guys
Kosovo	stopped	NATO declared war and bombed
Kurdistan	stopped	Iraq coalitions
East Timor	stopped)	Australia-led occupation force
Rwanda	unstopped	UN peacekeepers
Congo	unstopped	UN peacekeepers
Darfur	looks bad	AU peacekeepers

Maybe the biggest problem is that smallish, quasi-confrontational peacekeeping forces appear not to work to prevent genocide. I can't think of even one example where they have. Please let me know if you can think of any counterexamples. Although much sincere effort is put into them, they have allowed the world to grow complacent and feel that serious action was being taken when it did little to stop it. It's possible that peacekeepers have SLOWED genocide, and it would be interesting to investigate that. But the facts seem to be clear that peacekeeping missions don't stop it.

It seems like to stop a genocide, counterforces must be powerful enough to defeat forces committing genocide and/or occupy the region in question. Rules of engagement must clearly encourage broad engagement with genocidal forces. Countries contributing troops must be willing to go to war for the cause.

Problems

Interventions to end a genocide take two forms: either the limited, peacekeeping form mentioned above, or a strongly led coalition with strong military forces, ready to wage war with the guilty. Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to get together this kind of coalition.

In practice, there must be a trusted democracy at the head of the coalition, willing to contribute most of the resources to end the genocide. And it must be a country that actually cares alot about genocide. And it must be big enough that its military contribution alone is a substantial fraction of what's needed to beat the bad guys' army.

All this isn't easy, because there are very few countries that can do this atall, and they can generally only do one at a time. It seems likely that those who planned the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur deliberately chose moments when the U.S. was already engaged elsewhere (Iraq, Serbia).

What's Going on in Darfur?

Petty Officer Eddie Beaver asked what seemed like a fairly good question to me:

Why then ... is America not justly using its mighty military force to stop them?

Well, there are two parts to the answer. One is that with most of the military engaged elsewhere and materiel stocks low, military planners are probably pretty worried that what's left is just enough for the US to fall on its face with.

But as big a part of the answer is that the President probably has or had overly high hopes that the AU peacekeepers would work. It's time to move beyond setting too many hopes on the limited-size peacekeeping missions for ending genocide. Genocide is likely to be more successfully confronted if countergenocidal groups know they must raise serious military strength to have an effect.

Questions

So, some questions to ponder: given this reality, is it all reasonable to try and fulfill a pledge of "never again?" Do you see ways this could be helped? Would a reformed, more democratic UN help? If many genocides can't be stopped, how should we prioritize actions?

I Didn't Know I Was a Commie

Bill Gates just called me a communist in a CNET interview. Does this mean I have to make it farther than p5 in the Communist Manifesto now? Via a fairly funny slashdot thread, Gates Nose-Dives at CES.

Well, maybe I am a commie - I even believe in workers owning the means of production, if via widespread stock ownership rather than a nebulous hope that the state will act in workers' best interest.

Michael Kanelios (CNET):
> In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, "We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights." What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

Bill:
> No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned--including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.

Newdow Is Back

The atheist who lost a case brought to the Supreme Court to strip the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance is back with a new lawsuit. The Court ducked the issue by ruling that Michael Newdow did not have standing. So now he's recruited some other parents who clearly do have standing to join him.

Oh!pinion has a sensible take on this

Church-state separation is an essential guiding principle for America. It’s vital to our democratic tradition and for our highly diverse society. That’s not only because separation protects people from having a religion forced on them but also because it keeps government from subverting or dominating any religion or all religions.
Government’s proper attitude is polite, respectful but neutral indifference. It’s proper role with respect to religion is to protect and defend every American’s right to follow the dictates of his or her own conscience.
Yet we recognize practical limits beyond which overly assiduous assertion of this principle becomes threatening and offensive, where certain traditional references to God, generically, and to religion are concerned.

The Newdow case is one which anyone who wants to be politically relevant should stay away from. Kerry's religion advisor, Rev. Brenda Peterson, supported Newdow in his previous lawsuit. I can assure you that the religious right made certain that anyone who cared knew that Kerry's religious advisor was against "under God."

This is why the religious left is no match for the religious right at the ballot box.

Non-routine Certification

Democratic members of Congress have objected to including the votes in Ohio in the certification of the presidential election. A routine certification process has turned into a rather heated debate about what Congress needs to do to protect voting rights and to improve access. This is an extremely interesting debate, and is a real study in the breakdown in the art of listening and the art of communication among Democrats and Republicans. It can be seen on C-SPAN.

Now I'm depressed

The reason that Kevin Drum is depressed makes me depressed.

Governor Arnold delivered his State of the State speech last night, and I came away deeply depressed. But not for the reason you might expect. . .

No, what depressed me was Schwarzenegger's proposal to end gerrymandering in California — and that's hugely ironic, because . . .this is a great idea . . .

So why am I depressed? Because the insanely partisan atmosphere of contemporary American politics means I can't support this proposal even though I think it would be good for the state. . .

So as much as I hate myself for this, count me out.

Even when Democrats and Republicans agree on substance, they can't take positive steps forward because to do so would be to give aid and comfort to the enemy. I guess that I should at least give Drum credit for admitting the absurdity of this.

UPDATE: Here is an update from Drum's site:

"UPDATE: I note from my trackbacks that many moderates and conservatives are unhappy with my stand on gerrymandering reform. I don't blame them. But how about if we make a deal?

Here it is: get Texas to adopt Arnold's reform. As soon as they do, not only will I support Arnold, I will personally gather signatures, raise money, contribute money, and blog endlessly for the cause. Any takers?"

No On Alberto Gonzales

The Washington Post has a tough editorial on the President's nominee for Attorney General.

Mr. Gonzales played a key role in the formation of military commissions, a system that, three years after detainees began arriving at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has yet to produce a single trial. The military commissions are now the subject of litigation, with one judge having already declared them illegal. Last year the Supreme Court rejected other Bush administration policies in the war on terrorism as well: its contention that American citizens like Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi could be indefinitely detained without access to attorneys and the notion that Guantanamo could operate without judicial supervision.

and a critical assessment of Gonzales role as advisor to then-Gov. Bush on death penalty cases.

The Alliance for Justice, a coalition of 70 civil rights and other organizations, charged in a statement released yesterday that "the deficiencies in Gonzales' memoranda may have played a role in Bush's failure to grant clemency." They said his record on the issue, along with policies he embraced on the detention of prisoners in the war on terrorism, raised questions about "whether he can properly serve as the nation's chief law enforcement officer."

Besides the sole commutation, Bush granted a single 30-day death penalty reprieve, in a case that arose after Bush had appointed Gonzales to the Texas Supreme Court. In non-death-penalty cases, Bush granted 19 of the 149 pardons "for innocence" or compassion that were urged by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, an official review body for such requests. Scholars at the University of Pittsburgh have said that was the lowest number by any Texas governor since the 1940s.

Gonzales does not appear to be an impressive nominee. He's made a number of mistakes, by far the worst being his position that any American citizen can be held in prison indefinitely without access to counsel. He's been nominated in part because his ethnicity is valuable in attracting Hispanics to the Republican Party. But more than that, his chief qualification is his unquestioned loyalty to the President. More than that, in his mediocrity, Gonzales in perfectly in sync with the attitudes and manner of thinking of President Bush.

If I were a Senator, based on what I know now, I would vote no on the Gonzales nomination, but I would make no attempt to filibuster it, as such an effort would be criticized as "anti-Hispanic prejudice."

I will take issue with one detail of the Post editorial

Mr. Gonzales commissioned the now-infamous torture memorandum from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The memo followed a meeting in his office regarding the interrogation of a key al Qaeda detainee, in which participants discussed such methods as "waterboarding," mock burial and slapping.

I believe that a discussion of torture was appropriate, and that waterboarding, which sounds like a form of torture to me, was applied appropriately in the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attack, who was widely believed to be planning further attacks at the time of his capture. I justify the treatment of KSM under the "ticking time bomb" theory, that he had knowledge which could prevent future attacks on civilians. My position is that torture should be illegal, and that the torturer should be exposed to prosecution, but that in the rare case, like that of KSM, where torture may be justified, it's unlikely a jury would convict.

Most Americans are loathe to admit it, but they do condone torture in the case of the perpetrators of 9/11. There certainly has been no outcry against the torture of KSM. There has been an outcry against the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Partially, this is because of the availability of pictures. However, it is also because most Americans realize that the Iraqis who were tortured were not terrorists seeking to come to the United States and attack us.

Thus, my opposition to Gonzales is not because of his "torture memo" but because of his generally shoddy advice, and most especially the doctrine that any American can be imprisoned indefinitely based on Presidential decree.

Powell Farewell Piece

I wanted to share this latest column by John Avlon about Colin Powell. There's some interesting background and history in there, along with his usual sharp commentary. I recently asked John about posting his articles in full on this site, and he said go ahead and he would handle any resulting issues.

BY JOHN P. AVLON
New York Sun, December 31, 2004

Tonight Colin Powell will be at Times Square, pushing the button that will drop
the crystal ball to usher in the new year.

Announcing the appearance, Mayor Bloomberg praised this immigrant son of the
South Bronx and City College graduate turned secretary of state as "the American
Dream come true" - a statement that few would contest. But when he added the
additional accolade, "one of the things about Colin Powell is that he is
everybody's favorite," the mayor overreached.

This is the paradox of Colin Powell. He is by far the most popular member of the
Bush administration across the nation. In a Fox News Channel poll taken two
weeks after this fall's election, the outgoing Secretary Powell enjoyed a 77%
job-approval rating. That is 24 points higher than President Bush and more than
30 points higher than Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. And yet, instead of being
seen as a unifying asset by this White House, Mr. Powell has by most accounts
been treated as an outsider. The highest-ranking former military official in the
hawkish Cabinet has been recast as its resident "dove." Conservative elites
consider him too moderate, too independent and not sufficiently ideological - a
disappointment that will soon be history.

But there may still be history for Mr. Powell to make. The striking disconnect
between the broad popularity of Mr. Powell and the distrust directed toward him
by the right-wing of the Republican Party has been long-simmering. It is further
evidence of political fault-lines that exist underneath the GOP and threaten to
erupt in the coming four years.

After all, this New Years' Eve could have marked the triumphant end of a second
term for President Colin Powell. Leading up to the 1996 election, the
draft-Powell movement for president was gaining real steam in the wake of the
release of his autobiography, "My American Journey," and his service as chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for both the George H. W. Bush and Clinton
administrations. In October 1995, the Louis Harris Poll showed him beating
President Clinton in both a head-to-head matchup, or amazingly, winning a
three-way race against Mr Clinton and Senator Dole, with Mr. Powell running as
an independent.

But even with this strongest imaginable candidate there was thunder on the right
directed at Mr. Powell. In an interview with David Brinkley, Patrick Buchanan
warned that if Mr. Powell were the Republican Party's nominee, "you'd have
Christian Coalition folks breaking loose, you'd have people walking out of the
convention, if Colin Powell tries to impose his agenda," adding that "I will not
support that platform." This raised the not-so subtle specter of a walkout
unseen since the days of Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats, this time ostensibly
directed at Mr. Powell's support of affirmative action, gun control, and choice
on abortion. In the end, Mr. Powell decided not to run, and President Clinton
easily beat Senator Dole just two years after the Republican revolution of 1994.

Mr. Powell entered the political fray in 2000 by campaigning prominently for
George W. Bush and was subsequently appointed the nation's first
African-American secretary of state by something close to acclamation. But it
has not been all smooth sailing since reaching Foggy Bottom. Mr. Powell takes
pride in the strengthened relations with China and the dramatically increased
AIDS outreach to Africa. His public comments provided a tipping point that
spurred international attention to the genocide in Sudan as well as called into
question the legitimacy of the now-overturned election results in the Ukraine.
But in the war on terror, Mr. Powell has been portrayed as something of an
apologist for the international community, and Bob Woodward's book "Plan of
Attack" presents the image of a State-Department that was cut out of planning
for Iraq in favor of the Pentagon. Relations appear to be strained below the
surface, with occasional eruptions.

In a April 2003 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, the former speaker
of the House Newt Gingrich, accused the State Department of engaging in "a
deliberate and systematic effort" to undermine Bush administration foreign
policy. This year, Mr. Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, launched an
attack on the administration's neoconservatives in an interview with Wil Hylton
for GQ Magazine, saying, "I have some reservations about people who have never
been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about
sending men and women out to die. A person who comes immediately to mind in that
regard is Richard Perle...I call them utopians," he said. "I don't care whether
utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz.
Utopians, don't like. You'e never going to bring utopia, and you're going to
hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it."

These internal struggles could subside with the withdrawal of Mr. Powell from
the Bush Cabinet, but it is likely that they will instead be played out on a
more public stage, via debate by proxies. As secretary of state, Mr. Powell has
again played his lifelong role of loyal soldier, refusing to speak out or resign
when there were whispers he did not support administration policy. Consequently,
he leaves office with his sterling image tarnished among both liberal and
conservative elites, but still overwhelmingly popular with the American people.

Mr. Powell has so far declined suggestions that he run for the Senate or
governor from New York, but looking forward the Republican Party ought to hope
that this American icon does not walk away angry. If the gap between moderates
and hard-liners grows wider, the Republican administration may find they miss
his ability to reach out as they seek to strengthen and broaden their coalitions
at home and abroad in the new year.

Deals Before Principles II

The Radical Centrist has a post that fleshes out some of the ideas I discussed previously in response to Carla's original post.

The Republicans did not "give-up" their principles when they made deals. They made progress in stages, winning as much as they could in each compromise position but retaining their particular position. They kept plugging and made incremental gains. No one should expect to set aside their fundamental principles unless their fundamental principles is "my way or the highway" or "accept no compromise!" People who feel that way can sit tight on their fundamentals while the other guys make deals and make progress towards their goals.

The point you raise about giving up 'advocating' for the sake of winning is a better one. In the process of a campaign one might have to line up in support of a candidate who's positions don't align with yours. I guess I don't see being temporarily silent on an issue as setting aside or abandonment of principles. Winning is an excellent way to gain influence for your positions, even if it means biting your tongue or even "holding your nose".

There's also an article in the LA Times by Ron Brownstein (free reg. required) which summarizes the recent debates about centrism sparked by Sirota's piece.

One reason I'm flexible about principles is that in principle I reject the notion that good policy can be captured in a set of rules. There's a significant literature about the limits of rule-based thinking.

People who are stuck on principles believe the "means justify the ends." That is, they focus on the inputs--actions taken--rather than outcomes. I'm not adopting the opposite, that the "ends justify the means." Rather, I believe that ends and means have to be judged as a whole.

Getting The Other Side Of The Story

I've been listening to an interview with Alissa Rubin, the head of the Baghdad bureau for the LA Times. She notes that unlike other insurgencies, the Iraqi insurgents have not articulated what their program is. She seems to be frustrated not to be able to get their side of the story.

I find it somewhat bizarre that the American press would think they can interview people who are at war with us. I know that a few reporters have managed to do it. But I wonder, how many reporters were in the Washington Post's Berlin bureau in 1943?

Tsunami relief: the orphans

The escalating nature of the pledges (both public and private) from around the world to help the tsunami victims has been astounding. My agenda with this post is to try to find a way to funnel some of that relief to help a specific group: orphans.

For me, although tragedy is everywhere, the stories of the sale of orphans into prostitution really touch a nerve. So my question is this: What organization is best positioned to effectively combat this specific problem, and how do we donate to them? I have already made out the check. I just need to fill in the payee.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I have considered UNICEF and if I don't learn of a better option, that is where my money will go. I guess I'm so skeptical of the UN's ability to administer effectively and efficiently any aid relief program that I am hoping that there is another, better option.

Retirees Won't Keep Up With Jones

The details of the President's Social Security plan are coming out, and their sure to draw howls. Besides the private accounts, a huge change would be to change the payout indexing from tracking the rise in wages to tracking inflation. Certainly, a case can be made for retiree income preserving their current buying power without sharing in the benefits of increased labor productivity in the future. Senior citizens of the future (i.e. you and me) will still be able to eat and keep a roof over our heads. But without other sources of income, we won't be able to buy new things--the equivalent of today's seniors not being able to afford Internet service.

This may be my future, and yours too. I find it troubling, but not outrageous. What do you think?

Update: Brad DeLong nails the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz's for a piece that ran October 20, 2004. In it, Kurtz slammed Kerry for warning "Now Bush has a plan that cuts Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent." Factcheck.org did the same thing, calling it on one of the Whoppers of 2004. To the extent that Kerry's ad implied that current retiree benefits would be cut, the ad was inaccurate. But it did have a factual basis in terms of the President's proposal for future retirees.

Pressure Works

The House has reversed itself

The so-called DeLay Rule had been heavily criticized. At Monday night's meeting, lawmakers praised DeLay for seeking the reversal. Rep. Zach Wamp, a Tennessee Republican, had opposed the rule change. It would have allowed DeLay to remain in power if he were to be indicted by a grand jury in Travis County, Texas, that is conducting a campaign finance probe that involves DeLay.

It's nice to know that overwhelming public opinion does make a difference.

Update: The Moderate Voice has a nice post on this.

Anti-Gerrymandering Proposals

The Democratic Leadership Council has a page on Nonpartisan Redistricting, which discusses the Iowa system. A few more states have redistricting commissions. Arizona had an initiative (pdf)

Does anyone have experience or ideas they could contribute related to nonpartisan redistricting? I see this issue as having the potential that term limits did in the 1990's. Term limits were a way to try to address the problem of members of congress in safe districts getting re-elected year after year without having to pay much attention to the voters. That issue lost steam after the Republicans took over Congress in 1994. However, I think we're building to a new level of frustration over non-competitive districts and entrenched politicians.

The Good News From Iraq

Arthur Chrenkoff once again compiles the Iraq news you don't see in the MSM.

Good news from Iraq, Part 18

Cautious optimism about Iraq

Elsewhere last week, I called attention to a Fred Hiatt column that presented "reality-based" reasons for hope in Iraq despite the horrific violence. From the Washington Post today, another reason for cautious optimism.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 1 -- The number of Iraqis making sure they are properly registered to vote has surged dramatically, officials said Saturday, calling the rise evidence of enthusiasm for the Jan. 30 elections despite continuing security concerns that have blocked the process in two provinces.

The bad news in Iraq is very real. But so is the good news. And in my view, there could not really be any better news than that, despite relentless violence aimed at intimidating would-be voters, Iraqis are nevertheless flocking to register to vote.

The Oregon Experiment

In 1998, Oregon voters passed a ballot measure directing all elections to be conducted by mail. Instead of voters going to traditional polling places to cast ballots on Election Day, a ballot is mailed to each registered voter. Voters return their ballot to the county elections office and it is counted on Election Day.

Yesterday, the Washington Post carried an article by Oregon's Secretary of State praising the vote-by-mail system. And it does indeed seem to deserve praise. High turnout, voter-friendly, automatic paper trail, some built-in checks that help keep the rolls current, and lower costs than traditional voting.

And there's a few other, less obvious advantages--time to consider the ballot and research the candidates before filling it out, instead of the "get 'er done" rush at the booth, for example.

So my question is, what (if any) are the disadvantages?

New Centrist Blogs

I've come across a couple of new blogs in the general centrist orbit.

Take a look at Ambivablog, neither right nor left.

Pay a visit to the Common Sense Desk.

Stop by, say hello, leave a comment.

Dr. Dobson's Prescription

Evangelical leaders Dr. James Dobson issues a threat to vulnerable Democratic senators

Dr. Dobson recalled the conservative efforts that helped in the November defeat of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader who led Democrats in using the filibuster to block 10 of Mr. Bush's judicial nominees.

"Let his colleagues beware," Dr. Dobson warned, "especially those representing 'red' states. Many of them will be in the 'bull's-eye' the next time they seek re-election."

He singled out Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Bill Nelson of Florida. All six are up for re-election in 2006.

I can't say what the political calculus is for each of this senators, but this sort of religious impingment on politics is something which moderates ought to resist. Religion is a province of faith and certainty, and while Dr. Dobson is certainly within his constitutional rights, I see it as something of an ethical abuse for a religious leader to take the faith vested in him and use it to deliver votes.

Ivy League Know-It-Alls

Centerfeud has a post on the Sirota piece debunking centrism discussed here some time ago. I agree with much of the post, but I think it neglects the cultural aspects which are more important than the issues. Many if not most votes are cast "tribally" to the candidate who appears to be most like the voter. That's why I think Sirota's economic populism won't appeal to working class voters, until Democrats and particularly liberal Democrats stop presenting themselves as Ivy League know-it-alls (in fact, both Bush and Kerry were Ivy Leaguers, but Bush didn't seem like one).

As a matter of fully-disclosure, I am myself an Ivy League grad who knows some things, but finds the world rather unpredictable.