After a lazy week, some more links to ponder:

• Igor Bobic: Obama Promises to Hold IRS Accountable on 'Outrageous' Targeting: Given the history of the federal government harrassing left-wing political organizations, "outrageous" isn't the first word that pops into my mind regarding the revelations that some IRS personnel singled out "tea party" group applications for review of 501(C) status. My reaction was more like a giggle, but then I found out that none of the "targeted" organizations were actually denied. I'm not expert in the relevant law, but I do know that a peace organization I'm close to has both a 501(C) fund that is strictly non-political ("educational") and another funding stream that isn't tax exempt but can be used for more political activities (although in practice it isn't used for anything partisan or electoral). So it doesn't exactly surprise me that "tea party" groups would skirt that law: they are primarily political propaganda outlets, funded by rich right-wingers who can use the tax-exempt feature to stretch their self-interested bucks. Unlike most of the people who donate to our little peace group. (We haven't itemized deductions in many years, so our donations don't save us a dime on our taxes.) Obama is right that the IRS should be non-partisan, but his reaction shouldn't be an outrage that feeds into enemy talking points. (For instance, I see Glenn Beck now claiming that the "IRS scandal" is "all connected" with the Benghazi attack and the Boston bombings. On the Republicans' ability to keep these pseudo-scandals in the news cycle, crowding out real issues, see Julian Rayfield: Sunday Shows Round-Up: All About the IRS and Benghazi. As for real but ignored issues, see Conor Friedersdorff: The Biggest Obama Scandals Are Proven and Ignored -- a list Republicans don't care about or even applaud.)

  See Connie Cass: A Look at Why the Bengazi Issue Keeps Coming Back for a useful review of what happened there and who said what when. Of the various facts, the one that jumps out at me was that the "US consulate" in Benghazi was actually a CIA station, and aside from Ambassador Stevens the people involved were CIA agents and contractors, so the instinct to lie and cover up is deeply ingrained. The other key point is that the real political issue here was Obama's decision to intervene in Libya's civil war and help ouster Moammar Gaddafi. Obama promised not to put US military forces on the ground in Libya, but it seems inevitable that the CIA were active, routing guns and information to anti-Gaddafi forces -- some of which were bound to be anti-American Islamists (proving again how little the CIA learned from Afghanistan, where US clients included future leaders of the Taliban and indeed Osama Bin Laden himself).

  Of course, intervention in Libya isn't on the Republican's own "talking points": they'd rather attack the administration for trying to substitute "extremists" for "terrorists," mostly in the belief that their language is a more potent stimulus to further US-backed wars in the region. Even there, what they loathe Obama for isn't that he hasn't been belligerent enough for their taste -- excepting McCain and Graham, of course, who never met a war they didn't want to plunge into -- but that Obama isn't jingoistic enough.

• Paul Krugman: How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled: Book review of: Neil Irwin: The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire (Penguin); Mark Blyth: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press); and David A. Stockman: The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (Public Affairs). But starts off with the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco -- the paper that claimed that when a nation's debt/GDP ratio crosses the 90% mark the economy sinks into catastrophe, but turned out to be wrong in so many ways:

  The real mystery, however, was why Reinhart-Rogoff was ever taken seriously, let alone canonized, in the first place. Right from the beginning, critics raised strong concerns about the paper's methodology and conclusions, concerns that should have been enough to give everyone pause. Moreover, Reinhart-Rogoff was actually the second example of a paper seized on as decisive evidence in favor of austerity economics, only to fall apart on careful scrutiny. Much the same thing happened, albeit less spectacularly, after austerians became infatuated with a paper by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna purporting to show that slashing government spending would have little adverse impact on economic growth and might even be expansionary. Surely that experience should have inspired some caution.

  So why wasn't there more caution? The answer, as documented by some of the books reviewed here and unintentionally illustrated by others, lies in both politics and psychology: the case for austerity was and is one that many powerful people want to believe, leading them to seize on anything that looks like a justification.

  Here's a very good explanation of how recessions (depressions) happen, especially following a prolonged expansion of debt:

  All that was needed to collapse these houses of cards was some kind of adverse shock, and in the end the implosion of US subprime-based securities did the deed. By the fall of 2008 the housing bubbles on both sides of the Atlantic had burst, and the whole North Atlantic economy was caught up in "deleveraging," a process in which many debtors try -- or are forced -- to pay down their debts at the same time.

  Why is this a problem? Because of interdependence: your spending is my income, and my spending is your income. If both of us try to reduce our debt by slashing spending, both of our incomes plunge -- and plunging incomes can actually make our indebtedness worse even as they also produce mass unemployment.

  Krugman could have extended these paragraphs into a tutorial on how [Keynesian] macroeconomics has learned how to ameliorate and reverse recessions, but he wound up illustrating the principles negatively, by showing how actual central bankers ignored standard prescriptions and made their economies worse. The key insight is that if my income is someone else's spending, and others in the private sector aren't spending, that deficit can be made up by having government spend more. In other words, all it takes to avoid disaster is the political will to deliberately do something constructive about it. That will power was undone by a coalition of bankers and conservative politicians, partly because they fixated on threats (to them, anyway) that were mostly imaginary, and mostly because they didn't give a damn about the hardships their welfare forced on everyone else.

  Krugman notes how many advocates of austerity see it as a morality play -- as Andrew Mellon put it "to purge the rottenness" from the system (nor is this view limited to curmudgeonly bankers; see Alex Pareene: Kinsley Loves Austerity Because It Is "Spinach") -- and he finds examples in Stockman's book (a tirade against one "spree" after another). Krugman then adds:

  So is the austerian impulse all a matter of psychology? No, there's also a fair bit of self-interest involved. As many observers have noted, the turn away from fiscal and monetary stimulus can be interpreted, if you like, as giving creditors priority over workers. Inflation and low interest rates are bad for creditors even if they promote job creation; slashing government deficits in the face of mass unemployment may deepen a depression, but it increases the certainty of bondholders that they'll be repaid in full. I don't think someone like Trichet was consciously, cynically serving class interests at the expense of overall welfare; but it certainly didn't hurt that his sense of economic morality dovetailed so perfectly with the priorities of creditors.

  It's also worth noting that while economic policy since the financial crisis looks like a dismal failure by most measures, it hasn't been so bad for the wealthy. Profits have recovered strongly even as unprecedented long-term unemployment persists; stock indices on both sides of the Atlantic have rebounded to pre-crisis highs even as median income languishes. It might be too much to say that those in the top 1 percent actually benefit from a continuing depression, but they certainly aren't feeling much pain, and that probably has something to do with policymakers' willingness to stay the austerity course. [ . . . ]

  I'd argue that what happened next -- the way policymakers turned their back on practically everything economists had learned about how to deal with depressions, the way elite opinion seized on anything that could be used to justify austerity -- was a much greater sin. The financial crisis of 2008 was a surprise, and happened very fast; but we've been stuck in a regime of slow growth and desperately high unemployment for years now. And during all that time policymakers have been ignoring the lessons of theory and history.

  It's a terrible story, mainly because of the immense suffering that has resulted from these policy errors. It's also deeply worrying for those who like to believe that knowledge can make a positive difference in the world. To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers and economists who told the elite what it wanted to hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how often they got it right.

  It would take a much longer piece, but at some point it would be worth breaking out the things that constitute "immense suffering": the unfairness of so much unemployment; discrimination against all sorts of marginalized workers, especially the old (who policymakers expect to work longer and longer) and the young (who face extra difficulties in starting careers, and in many cases start with unprecedented debt burdens); and much more. Nor is public spending only needed to counterbalance the drop in private spending -- the need for infrastructure and public goods has never been greater, and the austerity fixation is crippling us (physically, mentally, aspirationally).

Another last-minute link grab:

• Nicholas Blanford: Hizballah and Israel Spar as Syria's Conflict Threatens to Spin Out of Control: Israel's 2006 war against Hezbollah (effectively Lebanon) should have yielded several clearcut lessons. One is that Hezbollah is a very effective defensive fighting force against Israeli land assaults. Another is that Hezbollah's cache of Iranian or Syrian rockets aren't worth a thing, either as a deterrent against Israeli attack -- if anything, their existence provoked that attack -- or as an offensive weapon. Yet Hezbollah is evidently so concerned about maintaining their Syrian weapons pipeline that they've joined Assad's Syrian army in fighting against the rebels. Hezbollah's presence in Syria, in turn, gives Israel all the excuse they think they need to fly into Syria and bomb targets they think are related to Hezbollah -- presumably pro-Assad forces, although they've also claimed to be neutral in the Syrian Civil War, and some Israelis have argued they would prefer Assad (you know, "the devil you know"; see Israel has no desire for Assad to fall) to stay in power, so they may not care who they bomb. Needless to say, both Israel and Hezbollah are making the mess in Syria worse, adding dangerous factors that make it very likely to spill over into Lebanon, while Israel is just stirring the pot in Syria, giving all sides more reason to hate it and plot revenge.

  Also see Robert Fisk talk about Syria, attesting to the extreme brutality of the war, also questioning the logic of Israel's intervention:

  Are they really bombing missiles going to the Hezbollah, the so-called Fateh-110 missile, which was first test-fired by Iran, what, 11 years ago? Conceivable. But when you consider the Syrians have also used these missiles, according to the Americans, last December against rebel forces, why would they use armaments, which they use against -- in this ferocious life-and-death battle against the rebels, why should they be shipping them out of Syria en route to Lebanon, where the Hezbollah don't appear at the moment to have any need for them, since they have thousands of other weapons, a weapon which I would have thought the government would want to keep in Damascus?

  Fisk also says something about the state of journalism:

  And I think one of the problems is, as I say, this parasitic, osmotic relationship between journalists and power, our ever-growing ability, our wish, to -- you know, to rely on these utterly bankrupt comments from various unnamed, anonymous intelligence sources. And I'm just looking at a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail, February 1st, 2013. It's a story about al-Qaeda in Algeria. And what is the sourcing? "U.S. intelligence officials said," "a senior U.S. intelligence official said," "U.S. officials said," "the intelligence official said," "Algerian officials say," "national security sources considered," "European security sources said," "the U.S. official said," "the officials acknowledged." I went -- boy, I've got another even worse example here from The Boston Globe and Mail [ sic ], November 2nd, 2012. But, you know, we might as well name our newspapers "Officials Say." This is the cancer at the bottom of modern journalism, that we do not challenge power anymore. Why are Americans tolerating these garbage stories with no real sourcing except for very dodgy characters indeed, who won't give their names?

• E Douglas Kihn: The Political Roots of American Obesity:

  It was during Reagan's first term that the phrase bean counter came into prominent usage. These were the efficiency experts whose job it was to increase profits for the major corporations, mainly by introducing speedups, job consolidations, forced overtime, the hiring of part-time workers -- along with artful and ruthless union-busting.

  This was also the beginning of the "War on Iran," the "War on Drugs," the war against the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador (all of them Marxists doubtless bent on rampaging through the streets of US cities) and a dangerous escalation of threats against the Soviet Union/Evil Empire.

  As social fear and insecurity rise, mental health declines.

  Apparently, so does physical health. According to a new study from Rice University and the University Colorado at Boulder in Social Science Quarterly, despite modest gains in lifespan over the past century, the United States still trails many of the world's countries when it comes to life expectancy, and its poorest citizens live approximately five years less than more affluent people. The United States, which spends far more money on medical care than other advanced industrialized countries, has the sickest residents in every category of unwellness.

Didn't squirrel away any links last week, but came up with a few anyway.

• Ed Kilgore: America Haters: A recent poll found that 29% of Americans agree with the statement, "In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect out liberties." The poll also found that 25 percent of voters "believe the American public is being lied to about the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting 'in order to advance a political agenda.'" The NRA had a convention last week where the incoming president called for a "culture war" but at least they stopped short of adopting a new slogan like, "Guns: they're not just for self-defense any more."

  Why is revolutionary rhetoric becoming so routine these days? Some of it stems from the kind of "constitutional conservatism" that raises every political or policy dispute to a question of basic patriotism or even obedience to Almighty God. But a big part of it can also be attributed to cynical opportunists who manipulate those fearful (usually without much cause) of tyranny for their own very conventional ends -- usually power and money.

  Wherever you think it's coming from, it needs to stop, and if it can't stop, it must be made disreputable as part of ordinary partisan politics.

  At a minimum, those who toy with the idea of overthrowing our government to stop Obamacare or prevent gun regulation need to stand up to the charge that they hate America. It will make them crazy to hear it, but it's the truth.

  This puts several observations together. One is that nearly everything conservatives put forward these days is objectively damaging to the lives and welfare of large segments of the American public. Austerity is a good example: it directly hurts everyone the government had previously attempted to help, plus it drags down the economy weakening the labor market -- i.e., the job security and prospects of everyone who works for a living. Another observation is that many of the people who support conservatives clearly do hate large segments of the American people. Add those up and you have to wonder whether conservative policies aren't just foolishly misguided but deliberately malevolent. And since then intend to hurt some Americans, how many targets does it take to add up to hating America?

• Robert Kuttner: Austerity Never Works: Deficit Hawks Are Amoral -- and Wrong: An excerpt from his new book, Debtor's Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility (Knopf):

  In today's economy, which is dominated by high finance, small debtors and small creditors are on the same side of a larger class divide. The economic prospects of working families are sandbagged by the mortgage debt overhang. Meanwhile, retirees can't get decent returns on their investments because central banks have cut interest rates to historic lows to prevent the crisis from deepening. Yet the paydays of hedge fund managers and of executives of large banks that only yesterday were given debt relief by the government are bigger than ever. And corporate executives and their private equity affiliates can shed debts using the bankruptcy code and then sail merrily on.

  Exaggerated worries about public debt are a staple of conservative rhetoric in good times and bad. Many misguided critics preached austerity even during the Great Depression. As banks, factories and farms were failing in a cumulative economic collapse, Andrew Mellon, one of America's richest men and Treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932, famously advised President Hoover to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate . . . it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life." The sentiments, which today sound ludicrous against the history of the Depression, are not so different from those being solemnly expressed by the U.S. austerity lobby or the German Bundesbank. [ . . . ]

  The combination of these two trends -- declining real wages and inflated asset prices -- led the American middle class to use debt as a substitute for income. People lacked adequate earnings but felt wealthier. A generation of Americans grew accustomed to borrowing against their homes to finance consumption, and banks were more than happy to be their enablers. In my generation, second mortgages were considered highly risky for homeowners. The financial industry rebranded them as home equity loans, and they became ubiquitous. Third mortgages, even riskier, were marketed as "home equity lines of credit."

  State legislatures, meanwhile, paid for tax cuts by reducing funding for public universities. To make up the difference, they raised tuition. Federal policy increasingly substituted loans for grants. In 1980, federal Pell grants covered 77 percent of the cost of attending a public university. By 2012, this was down to 36 percent. Nominally public state universities are now only 20 percent funded by legislatures, and their tuition has trebled since 1989. By the end of 2011, the average student debt was $25,250. In mid-2012, total outstanding student loan debt passed a trillion dollars, leaving recent graduates weighed down with debt before their economic lives even began. This borrowing is anything but frivolous. Students without affluent parents have little alternative to these debts if they want college degrees. But as monthly payments crowd out other consumer spending, the macroeconomic effect is to add one more drag to the recovery.

  Had Congress faced the consequences head-on, it is hard to imagine a deliberate policy decision to sandbag the life prospects of the next generation. But this is what legislators at both the federal and state levels, in effect, did by stealth. They cut taxes on well-off Americans and increased student debts of the non-wealthy young to make up the difference. The real debt crisis is precisely the opposite of the one in the dominant narrative: efficient public investments were cut, imposing inefficient private debts on those who could least afford to carry them.

  The 1929 and 2008 crashes are more similar than most people recognize: if you look at charts of economic output, they start at almost the same trajectory and spread equally fast throughout the world. The difference is that the latter crash was arrested in early 2009, the result of three things: a much larger public sector which was (at least initially) free from the crash mentality; automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance and welfare; and extraordinary government intervention to prop up failing banks. Perversely, since so much of the recovery was pushed through the banking system, the rich were the first satisfied by the recovery, and they celebrated by engineering an economic pogrom against the middle class: they used the crisis to depress the labor market, and they lobbied for more austere government to cut services and put further pressure on wages. Consequently, the human costs of the current recession rival the 1930s -- the big stories of the last few weeks concern the number of long-term unemployed and the stigma against them, and a sudden increase in the suicide rate of Boomers -- but there is scarcely any viable political effort to help out. To me, the most striking difference between Obama and FDR was that the latter was pre-occupied with keeping both wages and prices up, whereas Obama doesn't seem to grasp that there is even an issue here.

• Jordan Smith: The Real Reason Not to Intervene in Syria: Well, one real reason:

  More generally, a significant body of international-relations scholarship suggests that not only can outside intervention in humanitarian emergencies in places like Rwanda not ameliorate the situation -- it can actually make things worse. Even simply dispensing aid can prolong suffering, in what the former Doctors Without Borders leader Fiona Terry calls "the paradox of humanitarian action."

  Why are humanitarian interventions so difficult? Kuperman theorizes that when rebels are assisted by outside forces, they are unintentionally encouraged to become more reckless in fighting a regime or provoking it, resist negotiations, and expand their ambitions. Intervention can thereby produce a perverse situation of prolonging a conflict that results in more deaths. He calls this the "moral hazard of humanitarian intervention." Even the expectation or the mistaken belief of outside support can encourage rebels to continue fighting or resist settlements.

  Another real reason is that military interventions in other countries is a bad habit that the United States sorely needs to break. The reason is not just because it doesn't work out very well -- Afghanistan and Iraq are recent examples, but you can go back to 1898 and find more examples in Cuba and the Philippines, and most of the cases in between (especially including CIA operations) are more/less as unambiguous. But even if we (or, say, a more appropriate body, like the UN) could push a button and magically bring the conflict to a close, ask yourself what that solution would look like. It wouldn't be to tilt the arms balance so the rebels could take over, since doing that would only create a new regime at war attempting to suppress yet another segment of the Syrian public. No, such a solution would be to arrange a ceasefire, an amnesty, and a democratic path forward with sufficient minority protections. I don't know whether Obama has tried to do that, but many decades of hostilities between the US and Syria have resulted in the US having very little leverage there. (Egypt, for instance, was a different case: the US had a longterm military alliance there which helped to ease Mubarak from office.) Maybe Russia, China, and Iran could have more influence on the Assad regime, but the US doesn't have a lot of influence with them either.

  Smith goes on to write:

  The humanitarian impulse is a noble one, spurred by good intentions. But good intentions, even if they don't pave the road to hell, can sometimes take us a good way there.

  I would caution, though, that not every "humanitarian impulse" is a noble one. Individuals, perhaps, but nations rarely practice foreign policy to attain nobility. They usually have some sort of interest or agenda, and one should be especially suspicious of a nation that claims to be the advocate and defender of free markets, since the only acts expected in the market are ones that advance self-interests.

• Ben White: Sidelining Palestinians in Israel Will Doom Prospects for Peace: Headline's a bit off as there are no "prospects for peace," but the real point to draw here is that the longer Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza continues, the more the brutality Israelis -- both the IDF and settlers often acting on their own -- is reflected back on the second-class citizens of Israel.

  In mid-April, the United States state department published its annual human rights review -- and the country report for Israel makes for interesting reading. An ally praised in public as the embodiment of liberal democratic values in a "tough neighbourhood" is described as practising "institutional discrimination" against its own Palestinian citizens (the so-called Israeli Arabs).

  Even in a far-from-comprehensive summary of Israel's systematic racism, the report notes discrimination in the education system, the land regime and housing, and the legal restrictions on a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza living with his or her spouse in Israel. [ . . . ]

  But it is not just discrimination and segregation that raise concerns. There are those in Israel who would like to be rid of Palestinian citizens altogether -- and see an opportunity to do so in the context of the "peace process."

  Responding to recent protests by Palestinian citizens to mark their expulsion in 1948, the former foreign minister and current chair of the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee, Avigdor Lieberman, called the Nakba commemoration events proof that "any arrangement with the Palestinians must include Israeli Arabs as well".

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Eric Harvey: Writing the Record: Interview with Devon Powers, author of Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, which focuses on Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau. Lots of stuff here, and I should probably dig into the book. One comment I have, based on this quote:

  When Christgau talks about monoculture, he's talking about the idea that there was a period before fragmentation. A period before audiences were segmented, where all kinds of people were listening to the same thing, some of it out of necessity just because there weren't other options. When you have people who are listening to the same kind of things, they have something in common to talk about that they simply don't when there is more variance in the media landscape.

  Two problems here. One is that monoculture means something else: not a single all-encompassing culture but an isolated stripe of only one thing -- as in agriculture: wheat, soybeans, oranges, etc. -- which may coexist independently with lots of other monocultures. Music has never been that formally constrained, and never will be, in large part because it's always being mediated and deconstructed, and most often as a social activity. The other is that the idea of integrating most musical strands into a common pool of experience was new in the late 1960s, itself a political project rooted in the newfound equal integration of all divisions in a relatively classless society. It didn't exist earlier because people grew up in a divided (segregated) world, and since then the right-wing counterrevolution with its increasing inequality has done all it could to strain the ideal.

  Paul Krugman and others have made a big point recently about "the great compression" which reduced income and wealth inequality and culminated in the 1960s. I must say that it didn't feel like much of a class-free utopia at the time, but the idea was present, and there was a sense of it being progressively realized -- and that sense of progress helped fuel the great upheavals of the decade, including the civil rights and women's movements. Still, that atmosphere of equality was propitious for critics inclined to jump from genre to genre, to poke into music from all over the world, and who believed that popular music could storm the citdels of "high culture" -- the last refuge of the ancien regime.

  Circa 1973, I dropped out of college, stopped reading critical theory, and took up rock crit. Seemed like the way forward, and was practical at the same time.

• Alex Parrene: Bush Family Furiously Selling Itself to Americans Once Again: As ever, Bush realizes the importance of timing when rolling out a new "product" -- his library, of course, but that's the easy part given that every ex-president (at least from Truman on) has one (and a figure as insignficant as Gerald Ford has two). The harder part is rehabilitating the entire family brand name, but polls indicate the ignorance of the average American is hard to underestimate -- I very much blame Obama and the Democrats for letting Bush off the hook.

  More Bush links:

  • Kathleen Geier: What Was the Single Worst Thing About George W. Bush's Presidency? "Lying was institutionalized to a degree that we rarely see outside outside of explicitly authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes."
  • Paul Krugman: The Great Degrader: "Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover."
  • Alex Seitz-Wald: How to Debunk George W. Bush's Attempts at Revisionism

  My vote for the single worst thing about George W. Bush goes to his instinctive, visceral attrraction to violence as a way of solving problems. Even before 9/11, Bush rejected the Saudi peace plan for Israel-Palestine by saying (as Ronald Suskind reported), "Sometimes a show of force can really clarify things." His green light for Sharon destroyed eight years of fitful progress toward resolving the most intractable conflict in the Middle East. He reacted to 9/11 the same, only with more vigor and ambition, going after Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and threatening wars against Iran and North Korea. Then there was his encouragement of Israel's brutal 2006 carpet-bombing of Lebanon, an act of war that his secretary of state memorably described as "the birth-pangs of a new Middle East."

• MJ Rosenberg: Time to Admit US Policies Can Cause Terrorism: To prevent something you have to have some concept of causation. The Boston bombings again raise the question of terrorism, but we are stuck within an officially sanctioned blind spot.

  There is one change that the United States could make in response to the terrorism threat that is never discussed. That is to consider the part U.S. policies have played in creating and sustaining it.

  I understand that we are not supposed to say this, as if discussing why we are hated justifies the unjustifiable: the targeting of innocent Americans because of the perceived sins of their government.

  But nothing justifies terrorism. Period. That does not mean that nothing causes it.

  Acts of terror do not come at us out of the blue. Nor are they directed at us, as President George W. Bush famously said, because the terrorists "hate our freedom." If that was the case, terrorists would be equally or more inclined to hit countries at least as free as the U.S., those in northern Europe, for instance.

  No, terrorists (in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings Muslim terrorists) target the U.S. because they perceive us as their enemy.

  One reason they perceive us as enemies is that we regard them as enemies. Nor is this just a matter of opinion: the US has, ever since FDR met with King Saud in 1945, backed the most repressive regimes in the Middle East, training and arming their secret police, their armed forces; we've backed wars, and in a pinch we've jumped in and invaded countries ourselves; and we've fomented civil wars, creating massively destructive contagions, such as the Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq. (For some of this history, see Tom Engelhardt: Field of Nightmares, on Jeremy Scahill's new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.) If we don't like this "blowback," the place to start is in reconsidering our own actions.

  But even if there was no terror blowback, the US record in the Middle East has been an unmitigated mess. Most often we've backed forces based on the shabby enemy-of-my-enemy principle: from the Saudi regime to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, we've repeatedly backed the most extremely reactionary Islamists because they were anti-communist, only to discover that their anti-communism was part of an anti-western agenda bound to bite the hand that feeds them. We've backed Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, then backed Iranian-backed militias against Hussein. We've backed Israel against everyone, even against our own policies -- we even backed Israel when they attacked and sunk a US Navy ship in 1967. Presumably some arms and oil companies have profited along the way, but what has the average American gotten out of this incoherency? Nothing but the task of fighting a series of useless, hopeless wars.

  Yet the right-wing still clamors for more -- see the recent Cal Thomas rant: "How many more Americans must be killed and wounded before we fight back, not just overseas, but here?" As Mort Sahl said about someone else, "if he were more perceptive, he'd be a happy man." Still, Thomas is as incoherent as anyone. He notes the vast size of America's homeland security force, yet bemoans their inability to stop two disaffected young men from "shutting down a major city." Aside from calling for a more bigoted immigration policy and a fevered, nativist witch hunt mentality, how exactly are we supposed to "fight back"? And is it even justified in a democracy to talk about enemies at home? The Tsarnaevs, after all, were US citizens, Americans, entitled to dissenting opinions. When weren't enemies, and when they set off those bombs, they didn't become our enemies -- just criminals.

• Tom Engelhardt: The Enemy-Industrial Complex: Or, "How to turn a world lacking in enemies into the most threatening place in the universe." Out of alpha order, but this follows up nicely on the above entry. Consider 9/11 as a "Wizard of Oz" facade:

  The U.S., in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century. There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China. It's true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died. When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn't actually an apocalyptic event.

  The enemy was still nearly nonexistent. The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars. It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects. It in no way endangered the state. In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers. It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one. It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years. It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.

  When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less. And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment -- a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country. The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on "A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century." If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban's Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.

  Engelhardt then tries to put 9/11 into perspective by bringing up stats for "suicide by gun and death by car" -- numbers which annually dwarf even the 9/11 death toll. Actually, it would make more sense to write off 9/11 as a fluke and look at more typical terrorist tolls. You don't have to look hard. On the same day as the Boston bombings, a fertilizer plant in West, Texas caught fire and exploded, killing many more people. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay attention to terrorist threats -- indeed, one reason we should is that many could be avoided by policy changes that we should implement anyway; but we should keep them in perspective. Even the 9/11 death toll was ultimately topped two times over by the number of US soldiers we sacrificed in post-9/11 wars -- wars meant to do little more than restore the invincible lustre of US imperial power, and perhaps blindly punish people only vaguely related to those who actually planned 9/11.

  Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable. The vast national security building and spending spree -- stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world's intercepted communications -- would have been unlikely.

  Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety. The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.

  Without 9/11 and the perpetual "wartime" that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit U.S. Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the "drone lobby" that goes with them might never have developed; and the U.S. military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it -- effectively the president's private army, air force, and navy -- and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.

  So there is a lot of money at stake on convincing you that we have to fight such unscrupulous enemies. But it also fits a political agenda: conservatism, as Michael Tomasky explains below, depends on fear to promote its political agenda.

• Michael Tomasky: The Conservative Paranoid Mind:

  The common thread through all of this is the conservative need to instill and maintain a level of fear in the populace. They need to make gun owners fear that Dianne Feinstein and her SWAT team are going to come knocking on their doors, or, less amusingly, that they have to be armed to the teeth for that inevitable day when the government declares a police state. They need to whip up fear of immigrants, because unless we do, it's going to be nothing but terrorists coming through those portals, and for good measure, because, as Ann Coulter and others have recently said, the proposed law would create millions of voting Democrats (gee, I wonder why!).

  And with regard to terrorism, they need people to live in fear of the next attack, because fear makes people think about death, and thinking about death makes people more likely to endorse tough-guy, law-and-order, Constitution-shredding actions undertaken on their behalf. This is how we lived under Bush and Cheney for years. This fear is basically what enabled the Iraq War to take place. Public opinion didn't support that war at first. But once they got the public afraid with all that false talk of mushroom clouds, the needle zoomed past 50 percent, and it was bombs away.

  Conservatism, I fear (so to speak), can never be cleansed of this need to instill fear. Whether it's of black people or of street thugs or of immigrants or of terrorists or of jackbooted government agents, it's how the conservative mind works.

• Matthew Yglesias: The Koch Brothers Might Be Just What Conservative Journalism Needs: Sometimes smart people can be pretty stupid, especially when they let their logic run away from reality. The Koch brothers are rumored to be in the market for the Tribune Company, which would give them control over the largest newspapers in Los Angeles and Chicago, among other cities. Yglesias writes:

  Certain niches -- talk radio and cable television -- are very friendly to a conservative editorial product but others are not. Which is exactly why what conservative media needs is a couple of extremely rich people to buy a newspaper company and lose a ton of money building a great conservative media product.

  After all, the big problem with right-leaning media in America isn't that it doesn't exist. It's that it's terrible. There is a large audience out there that's so frustrated with the vile MSM that it's happy to lap up cheaply produced content from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and you can make lots of money serving that kind of thing up. By contrast, to build a great media company that's top-to-bottom staffed with conservatives is going to be very expensive. The possible talent pool of great reporters is tilted toward liberals. The talent pool of great photographers and graphic designers is probably even more tilted toward liberals. Finding the great conservatives out there and hiring them is going to be relatively costly, and there's no real economic point to doing so. Is your much worse cost structure going to get you a larger audience than Rush? No, it won't. It's a bad bet.

  But the Kochs have plenty of money. If they want to see it happen, they can make it happen. And America would be better off for it.

  The obvious problem here is that there is no latent pool of "great conservatives" ready to move into newspaper journalism at any price, because they simply don't exist. Conservatives in media are hacks, not because they're lazy but because their message is nothing more than a crock of lies and distortions. The net effect won't be "a great conservative media product" -- it will just reduce marginally decent newspapers into ever-deeper hackdom. And America will be worse off on two counts: one is that it increase our current trend toward shoddiness in all manner of work; the other is that it will reinforce the notion that politics is purely cynical -- a fixed game controlled by the rich (the Kochs a particularly egregious example).

  One cautionary note is that the Kochs have never gotten into a business to lose money, which makes it unlikely they would jump on such a losing proposition. On the other hand, they have shown a deep commitment to undermine democracy, both through their political spending and through their use of corporate control as a channel for pushing their political beliefs. Major urban newspapers have a huge "first mover" advantage -- it's impossible to capitalize new competition, so they are effectively monopolies, and as such should be subject to public trust. Allowing them to be taken over by extremist political ideologues like the Kochs will irreparably destroy that trust, and America would be worse off for that.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Kevin Drum: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead.

• Susan Faludi: Death of a Revolutionary: on Shulamith Firestone.

• Jacob Heilbrunn: Israel's Fraying Image: No breaking news here; indeed, this is well behind the learning curve.

• Bill McKibben: Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

• Matt Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever: Explains the Libor scandal.

• Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Zionism's Colonial Roots

Some scattered links of special interest. Caught most of them today, which shows it isn't all that hard to find trouble these days:

• Joe Conason: Protecting the 'Second Amendment Rights' of Thugs and Terrorists: The NRA used to push the mantra, "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Now they seem to be saying, if criminals are denied guns, no one will be permitted them.

  As Will Saletan pointed out in Slate last January, the NRA has consistently (and successfully) sought to kill the most basic efforts to keep guns away from convicted criminals and other dangerous characters -- including abusive spouses under court protection orders, drug dealers and even individuals listed on the Justice Department's terrorist watch list.

  In the wake of the Boston bombing, as the nation ponders how to bolster its security, the gun lobby's tender concern for the Second Amendment "rights" of terrorists and thugs ought to permanently discredit them and their political servants.

  Background checks and registration should not prevent people who have legitimate reason for owning guns from doing so, nor establish a "slippery slope" leading to gun confiscation (as is routinely asserted). They would, however, do much to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them, and they would help law enforcement track gun violence. There is, after all, enough gun violence in America to warrant precautions, and it should be clear that there are people who should not be entitled to own or use guns. Reasonable people should be able to find some common ground here, but the NRA has taken a position far beyond reason, and it's time to start calling it what it is: their main purpose is to safeguard the gun-owning rights of criminals, because if criminals can't own guns, no one can.

  As near as I can tell, the NRA is mostly a front for gun manufacturers, and their business is booming because they're able to promote fear -- of crime, of terrorists, and of the government -- into ever more gun sales. For an example of his this works, here's a Wichita Eagle letter from Hank Price, of Goddard, KS:

  I need an AR-15. Furthermore, I need several 30-round magazines to go with it.

  Why, you ask? Well, let's put aside the fact that it is none of your business or, for that matter, none of government's business to ask. (The Second Amendment affirms my right to keep and bear arms.)

  I need an AR-15 because the bad guys have them. I need an AR-15 because the police, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have them. If someone is attempting a home invasion with semi-automatic or even automatic weapons, I don't want to wait the 15 to 20 minutes it takes for the police to arrive with their semi-automatic weapons.

  I need an AR-15 because as long as I and other law-abiding citizens have them, the government will think twice before infringing on the other rights affirmed by the Constitution. That is the real reason we have the Second Amendment. Not so we can hunt. Not so we can target practice. Not so we can defend our home and family until the police come to file their reports. But to protect our rights.

  This is a good example of the NRA business plan: let the "bad guys" have X and "good guys" like Price will have to buy the same thing -- an arms race, which certainly won't stop with AR-15s. Moreover, if the "bad guys" include the US government, Price is already way down the technology curve: they already have helicopters, tanks, snipers, noxious gas, and enough firepower to obliterate your house -- no need to merely "invade" it. Also, that bit about using guns to protect your rights, how's that worked out over time? From the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791 up until any recent example you can cite, not very well. To pick one relatively recent example, Leonard Peltier is in jail for life for allegedly defending himself against federal agents. Why should Price expect to fare better? The fact is that the only way to defend yourself against the government is through the courts -- your best friend there, by the way, is the ACLU. Better still, elect a government that will respect your rights -- shouldn't be that big of a problem, if you really are one of the "good guys." If not, at least you have the NRA working for you.

  By the way, here's today's Crowson:

  

• David Graeber: There's No Need for All This Economic Sadomasochism: More on austerity politics, piling on the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle:

  The morality of debt has proved spectacularly good politics. It appears to work just as well whatever form it takes: fiscal sadism (Dutch and German voters really do believe that Greek, Spanish and Irish citizens are all, collectively, as they put it, "debt sinners," and vow support for politicians willing to punish them) or fiscal masochism (middle-class Britons really will dutifully vote for candidates who tell them that government has been on a binge, that they must tighten their belts, it'll be hard, but it's something we can all do for the sake of our grandchildren). Politicians locate economic theories that provide flashy equations to justify the politics; their authors, like Rogoff, are celebrated as oracles; no one bothers to check if the numbers actually add up.

  Also on Reinhart-Rogoff: New Tools for Reproducible Results.

• Glenn Greenwald: What Rights Should Dzokhar Tsarnaev Get and Why Does It Matter?: When I heard Sen. Lindsey Graham insisting that the Boston Marathon bomber should be declared an "enemy combatant" I thought that was the dumbest thing I've heard him say in, well, weeks. As I understand it, the main purpose of the "enemy combatant" designation is to allow the Feds to hold people indefinitely they suspect but don't have any evidence against, at least that wouldn't hold up in court. Assuming they got the right person, the odds that they wouldn't be able to secure a conviction are vanishingly small -- unless they did something really stupid, like waterboarding him in Guantanamo. Tsarnaev is a US citizen, captured in the US after (allegedly) committing a major crime on US territory. Isn't that what the US justice system is about? Then I read that Obama's DOJ decided not to "Mirandize" him, as if not reminding him that he has rights under the constitution strips him of those rights. To get on top of this, I consulted Glenn Greenwald, and he explains it all here.

  Now, the cheers for this erosion of Miranda are led not by right-wing Supreme Court justices such as William Rehnquist (who wrote the opinion in Quarles), but by MSNBC pundits like former Obama campaign media aide Joy Reid, who -- immediately upon the DOJ's announcement -- instantly became a newly minted Miranda expert in order to loudly defend the DOJ's actions. MSNBC's featured "terrorism expert" Roger Cressey -- who, unbeknownst to MSNBC viewers, is actually an executive with the intelligence contractor Booz Allen -- also praised the DOJ's decision not to Mirandize the accused bomber (if you want instant, reflexive support for the US government's police and military powers, MSNBC is the place to turn these days). [ . . . ]

  Just 30 years ago, Quarles was viewed as William Rehnquist's pernicious first blow against Miranda; now, it's heralded by MSNBC Democrats as good, just and necessary for our safety, even in its new extremist rendition. That's the process by which long-standing liberal views of basic civil liberties, as well core Constitutional guarantees, continue to be diluted under President Obama in the name of terrorism. [ . . . ]

  Needless to say, Tsarnaev is probably the single most hated figure in America now. As a result, as Bazelon noted, not many people will care what is done to him, just like few people care what happens to the accused terrorists at Guantanamo, or Bagram, or in Yemen and Pakistan. But that's always how rights are abridged: by targeting the most marginalized group or most hated individual in the first instance, based on the expectation that nobody will object because of how marginalized or hated they are. Once those rights violations are acquiesced to in the first instance, then they become institutionalized forever, and there is no basis for objecting once they are applied to others, as they inevitably will be (in the case of the War on Terror powers: as they already are being applied to others).

  Also see Greenwald's earlier post, The Boston Bombing Produces Familiar and Revealing Reactions. Greenwald also links to an interesting piece by Ali Abuninah: Was the Boston Bombing Really a "Terrorist" Act? Aside from the specialized legal aspects, I have no problem describing any bombing as an act of terror (including those bombs released by US drones in Pakistan and elsewhere), just because of its intrinsically indiscriminate nature. But at this point there is very little that can be said about the motivations and intentions of the perpetrators. But somewhere I read that this was the first "terrorist attack" on US soil since the November 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood by Major Nidal Hasan -- a statement that overlooks dozens of mass shootings since, many (e.g., the recent murder of schoolchildren in Newtown, CT) truly terrorful. At the very least, we've managed to muddle up the language here: the 9/11 attack were both terrorizing and a radical affront to the image of US power as projected across the world. The Boston bombing and the Newtown shootings were both terrorizing, but what they have to do with US power is still mostly confined to the fevered imaginations of US politicians, who, as always, are happy to use whatever tragedy is at hand to further their own interests.

• Glenn Greenwald: Margaret Thatcher and Misapplied Death Etiquette: Missed this post from April 8, but still timely. The fact is, when you hear that someone has died, you remember what they did. If what you say then usually seems positive, that may be because we are predisposed to forget or forgive the bad and cherish the good. Or perhaps one feels a tinge of relief that the threat of the bad has passed. But the threat of someone like Thatcher hasn't passed with her, and it would be grossly unresponsible to gloss over much of what she actually did. As Greenwald says:

  This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here.

  But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms.

• Ed Kilgore: Fertilizer Explosion Update: Weak Inspections and Strong Kolaches: While the nation's media was fixated on the bombings in Boston, a far larger (and deadlier) explosion occurred in the place where you might most expect it, a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, but nobody was looking there:

  The explosion shone a harsh light on the US fertilizer industry and the weak, toothless regulation thereof. One problem Plumer notes is that, "the Occupational Safety and Health Administration tends to be understaffed and inspections are relatively infrequent. The Texas fertilizer industry has only seen six inspections in the past five years -- and the West Texas Fertilizer Co. facility was not one of them." This was despite the West facility receiving a $2,300 fine from the EPA in 2006 for poor risk-management planning. The last time the facility had been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was in 1985. Think Progress reports that the plant had been inspected in 2011 by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which resulted in a $10,100 fine for missing placards and lack of security plans. The fine was reduced in 2012 after improvements were made at the plant.

  Fertilizer explosions are relatively common in history. There have been 17 unintended explosions of ammonium nitrate causing casualties since 1921. The worst of these was the explosion of a cargo ship in the Port of Texas City that killed 581 people and injured 3500.

• Mike Konczal: Mapping Out the Arguments Against Chained CPI: Konczal has been linked to by everyone commenting on Reinhart-Rogoff recently (see Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff and There Are Serious Problems, followed up by Andrindrajit Dube: Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt). Here he analyzes another real bad idea: Obama's budget proposal to cut Social Security by fudging the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). (If you were really paying attention, you'll recall that this has already been done once before, by Clinton as a favor for Greenspan: in the 1990s, the government changed how the consumer price index (CPI) was calculated, nominally lowering inflation and thereby reducing Social Security COLA increases.) With "friends" like Obama (and Clinton) you enemies are already halfway home.

  If you look into the data, the elderly spend a lot more of their limited money on housing, utilities, and medical care. Health care costs have been rising rapidly over the past several decades, and it is difficult to substitute on other necessary, fixed-price goods like utilities. With the notable exception of college costs, the things urban wage earners spend money on haven't increased in price as quickly as what the elderly purchase. As a result, the CPI-E (the index tailored to the elderly) has increased 3.3 percent a year from 1982 to 2007, while the CPI-W (tailored to wage earners) has only increased 3 percent a year. [ . . . ]

  You'll hear arguments that a Grand Bargain is necessary, so it's better to bring Social Security into long-term balance now, with Democrats at the helm, than in the future, when there will be less time and an uncertain governance coalition. You can get fewer cuts and more revenue than you would otherwise and take the issue off the table for the foreseeable future to concentrate on other priorities.

  But if that's your idea, then this is a terrible deal and sets a terrible precedent, because this deal would accomplish none of your goals. You'd cut Social Security without putting in any new revenue. And it wouldn't be sufficient to close the long-term gap, so the issue would stay on the table. Indeed, the deficit hawks would probably be emboldened, viewing this as a "downpayment" on future cuts, and require any future attempts to get more revenue for Social Security, say by raising the payroll tax cap, to involve significant additional cuts.

  Konczal also points out that the longer you live, the more "chained CPI" eats into your check; also the more likely you are to have exhausted your savings. The net result is to plunge the very elderly into poverty. One thing he didn't mention is that some big expenses, like nursing home care, are means-tested. The effect of this is to first confiscate all of your savings before making you a ward of a state that has never been known for generous welfare policies. Over the last twenty-some years, we've done a lot to lighten estate taxes for the rich, never noticing that for the poor the effective tax rate is 100%.

• Matthew Yglesias: Banning Late-Term Abortions Reduces the Quality of Late-Term Abortion Providers: Same for extra-legal bans, like murder. Talks about the Kermit Gosnell case in Philadelphia, but he starts with a more commonplace example:

  I used to buy illegal drugs sometimes and in addition to me, personally, not being a huge fan of said substances I really didn't enjoy the purchasing process. The quality of customer service was just deplorable. And the problem, roughly speaking, was that even though it was not in practice all that difficult to obtain marijuana you still had to get it from a drug dealer rather than, say, a highly efficient global retailer operating with industry best practices and huge economies of scale. And for better or for worse, that's one of the goals of drug prohibition in the United States. It's not simply that making something illegal deters some people from use. It inhibits the emergence of above-board providers with strong franchises and brand value and robust competition between multiple high quality providers.

  It also opens up opportunities for police to profit through bribes or other favors, and it makes it easier for criminals to rob drug dealers, and it opens up drug dealers to further crime, etc. But back to medicine: any operation is more likely to be performed competently by someone who does it often, thereby developing skill and experience. One reason universal health care is better even for the people who can afford whatever you call our health care system is that doctors learn from experience.

Some links and comments. Originally started last week, then postponed to mid-week, then a bit later:

• Gerry Adams: Thatcher's Legacy in Ireland: On the late UK prime minister:

  Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Her right wing politics saw Thatcher align herself with some of the most repressive and undemocratic regimes in the late 20th century -- including apartheid South Africa and Chile's Pinochet. Her description of the ANC and Mandela as terrorists was evidence of her ultra conservative view of the world.

  She championed the deregulation of the financial institutions, cuts in public services and was vehemently anti-trade union. She set out to crush the trade union movement. The confrontation with the miners and the brutality of the British police was played out on television screens night after night for months. The current crisis in the banking institutions and the economic recession owe much to these policies. And she went to war in the Malvinas.

  But for the people of Ireland, and especially the north, the Thatcher years were among some of the worst of the conflict. For longer than any other British Prime Minister her policy decisions entrenched sectarian divisions, handed draconian military powers over to the securocrats, and subverted basic human rights.

  Her most immediate impact on the US came out of the Malvinas (Falklands) War, which played so jolly well on British TV that she got a big popularity boost. She later used it to convince the first George Bush how he could use war in Kuwait to push up his own ratings, a lesson Bush's idiot son not only learned but refined, thus sparking the neverending War on Terror.

  Thatcher has been all over the pundit-world recently. On two succesive days, the Wichita Eagle had opinion pieces that doted on her: one by the Kansas Republican chairman extolling Brownback as a Thatcherite; and one by Cal Thomas on how the left is full of hate for pointing out her supposed faults. One thing that I haven't read about recently was how Thatcher was so extreme in her reactionary views that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party, which replaced her with John Major. Now the efforts to canonize her are reminiscent of the much more organized efforts to name things after Ronald Reagan.

• John Cassidy: The Crumbling Case for Austerity Economics: Starts off with a nod to Thatcher, who put austerity into practice back in 1979, a prescription for national impoverishment that the current Conservative cabal running the UK has embraced, once again disastrously. Cassidy then moves on to "glaring faults and omissions in the widely cited research of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff" -- turns out that their paper predicting doom when a national debt exceeds 90% of GDP was severely fudged ("omitted relevant data, weighted their calculations in an unusual manner, and made an elementary coding blunder," slanting their results in favor of their thesis). For more on Reinhart-Rogoff, see Mike Konczal (wonkish), and Paul Krugman (although if you rumage through his blog you'll find several more).

• Maureen Dowd: Courting Cowardice:

  Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy grumbled about "uncharted waters," and the fuddy-duddies seemed to be looking for excuses not to make a sweeping ruling. Their questions reflected a unanimous craven impulse: How do we get out of this? This court is plenty bold imposing bad decisions on the country, like anointing W. president or allowing unlimited money to flow covertly into campaigns. But given a chance to make a bold decision putting them on the right, and popular, side of history, they squirm.

  "Same-sex couples have every other right," Chief Justice John Roberts said, sounding inane for a big brain. "It's just about the label in this case." He continued, "If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, 'This is my friend,' but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend." [ . . . ]

  Charles Cooper, the lawyer for the proponents of Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, was tied in knots, failing to articulate any harm that could come from gay marriage and admitting that no other form of discrimination against gay people was justified. His argument, that marriage should be reserved for those who procreate, is ludicrous. Sonia Sotomayor was married and didn't have kids. Clarence and Ginny Thomas did not have kids. Chief Justice Roberts's two kids are adopted. Should their marriages have been banned? What about George and Martha Washington? They only procreated a country.

  As Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out to Cooper, "Couples that aren't gay but can't have children get married all the time."

  Justice Elena Kagan wondered if Cooper thought couples over the age of 55 wanting to get married should be refused licenses. Straining to amuse, Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in: "I suppose we could have a questionnaire at the marriage desk when people come in to get the marriage -- you know, 'Are you fertile or are you not fertile?'"

  Scalia didn't elaborate on his comment in December at Princeton: "If we cannot have moral feeling against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?"

• Paul Krugman: Europe in Brief: A good basic summary of what's happened to the Euro:

  The first effect of the euro was an outbreak of europhoria: suddenly, investors believed that all European debt was equally safe. Interest rates dropped all around the European periphery, setting off huge flows of capital to Spain and other economies; these capital flows fed huge housing bubbles in many places, and in general created booms in the countries receiving the inflows.

  The booms, in turn, caused differential inflation: costs and prices rose much more in the periphery than in the core. Peripheral economies became increasingly uncompetitive, which wasn't a problem as long as the inflow-fueled bubbles lasted, but would become a problem once the capital inflows stopped.

  And stop they did. The result was serious slumps in the periphery, which lost a lot of internal demand but remained weak on the external side thanks to the loss of competitiveness.

  This exposed the deep problem with the single currency: there is no easy way to adjust when you find your costs out of line. At best, peripheral economies found themselves facing a prolonged period of high unemployment while they achieved a slow, grinding, "internal devaluation."

  The problem was greatly exacerbated, however, when the combination of slumping revenues and the prospect of protracted economic weakness led to large budget deficits and concerns about solvency, even in countries like Spain that entered the crisis with budget surpluses and low debt. There was panic in the bond market -- and as a condition for aid, the European core demanded harsh austerity programs.

  Austerity, in turn, led to much deeper slumps in the periphery -- and because peripheral austerity was not offset by expansion in the core, the result was in fact a slump for the European economy as a whole. One consequence has been that austerity is failing even on its own terms: key measures like debt/GDP ratios have gotten worse, not better.

  One thing to note is that aside from his concern about the human costs of austerity programs little in Krugman's critique of the euro is political. The euro could easily be seen as a liberal project, and as a failure of liberalism. And while one could argue that the failure had less to do with its liberal intent than with an implementation that was overly controlled by conservative bankers -- regulation of those capital flows would have helped -- Krugman tends not to do so.

  Also see Brad DeLong: The Future of the Euro: Lessons From History:

  How did this come about? Why didn't Maastricht set up a single Eurovia-wide banking regulator and supervisor to align financial policy with monetary policy? Why didn't Maastricht set up the fiscal-transfer funds that would be needed when -- as would inevitably happen -- some chunk of the future Eurovia went into recession while other chunks were in boom? Why did Maastricht leave a good chunk of lender-of-last-resort authority in the hands of national governments that could not print money and so fulfill the lender-of-least-resort function rather than placing all of it in the European Central Bank, which could? And why -- given that one country's exports are another's imports -- does the adoption of policies in deficit countries to reduce their imports and boost their export not automatically trigger the adoption of policies in surplus countries to boost their imports and reduce their exports?

• Barry Ritholtz: 12 Rules of Goldbuggery: Mostly about gold as a speculative investment, which is easy to see as a psychological disorder. As for tying the economic system to the gold standard, that is the all-time number one stupid idea in the history of economics.

• MJ Rosenberg: Netanyahu to US: Drop Dead: What's the difference between Binyamin Netanyahu and Yitzhak Shamir? Netanyahu will make a bit of effort to string you along, whereas it was obvious even to Americans that Shamir would never budge on anything. The first Bush administration's displeasure with Shamir led to his downfall, replaced by Yitzhak Rabin, which led to the ill-fated Oslo Accords. Lots of things made them ill-fated, but pride of place went to Netanyahu, who when pushed hard enough agreed to things he'd never get around to implementing. Well, Netanyahu's back, but with Oslo dead and Congress in his pocket, is reverting to his inner Shamir:

  The good news is that Netanyahu has made everything so clear. He has no interest in peace, negotiations, any kind of territorial withdrawal or even freezing settlements. Like Shamir, he just wants to buy time until it will be absolutely impossible to create a Palestinian state, if it isn't already. As for the United States, Netanyahu is not interested in what it wants.

  The only question left is what the Obama administration will do in response. It could follow Baker's example and take a walk. Even better, it could tell Netanyahu that future aid from the U.S. will be linked to its occasional compliance with U.S. wishes regarding the occupation. Or it could say, it won't keep following Israel's dictates on sanctions or Palestine's right to recognition by the United Nations. Or it could, as Bush and Baker did, squeeze the Israeli prime minister until the Israeli public dumps him.

  It could do any of those.

  Will it? I'm taking bets.

  But here is a sure one. There is no possibility of serious negotiation so long as Binyamin Netanyahu is prime minister of Israel.

  I personally thought that was obvious when Netanyahu became prime minister shortly after Obama won his first term. Netanyahu's victory and coalition were so shaky that it wouldn't have taken much to nudge them apart, but Obama did nothing and got nothing (but a second term for Netanyahu).

Missed Weekend Roundup on Sunday -- was working on another post that didn't quite work out -- but I hit a few scattered links today that I might as well post now.

• Chris Hedges: The Treason of the Intellectuals: Excoriates a long list of liberal-or-left-identified "academics, writers and journalists" who supported Bush's invasion of Iraq (missing some key figures like Kenneth Pollack), pointing out not just their complacency but how they labored to discredit all those who didn't join the war effort. Hedges takes this personally:

  Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing "patriots" and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own "patriotism" and "realism" about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics.

  Actually, the "treason" -- really, a lapse both in principles and in judgment that betrayed a secret identification with the powers in Washington as opposed to people all around the world -- that bothered me worse was the even-more-widespread post-9/11 support for attacking Afghanistan. Had Al-Qaeda indeed attacked civilization, wouldn't a civilized response had been more appropriate? Instead, Bush took it as an attack on American power, and responded with more power, the way thoughtless brutes do -- the way Osama Bin Laden expected. In that moment, an awful number of people you would generally regard as good natured, thoughtful, civilized, rushed to side with Bush, as if the only alternative to Bin Laden was a bigger army. Moreover, the liberal hawks of 2001 were far nastier to dissenters than their 2003 Iraq subset was. Without the supposed success in Afghanistan, invading Iraq wouldn't have been an option. While the liberal hawks weren't strictly responsible for the disasters, they gave aid and comfort those who were, and blunted our understanding of why.

• Tom Engelhardt: The 12th Anniversary of American Cowardice: I slipped this out of alphabetical order to follow up on what I had already written under Hedges. With the 10th anniversary of Bush's Iraq misadventure behind us, that 12th anniversary is still a few months in the future: the Congress's Authorization of Use of Military Force on September 14, 2001 that plunged us into war in Afghanistan, but Engelhardt mentions many other anniversary dates, then asks:

  When it comes to the Marines, here's a question: Who, this November 19th, will mark the eighth anniversary of the slaughter of 24 unarmed civilians, including children and the elderly, in the Iraqi village of Haditha for which, after a six-year investigation and military trials, not a single Marine spent a single day in prison? Or to focus for a moment on U.S. Special Forces: will anyone on August 21st memorialize the 90 or so civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children, killed in the Afghan village of Azizabad while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had reportedly been anti-Taliban?

  And not to leave out the rent-a-gun mercenaries who have been such a fixture of the post-9/11 era of American warfare, this September 16th will be the sixth anniversary of the moment when Blackwater guards for a convoy of U.S. State Department vehicles sprayed Baghdad's Nisour Square with bullets, evidently without provocation, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding many more. [ . . . ]

  So perhaps the last overlooked anniversary of these years might be the 12th anniversary of American cowardice. You can choose the exact date yourself; anytime this fall will do. At that moment, Americans should feel free to celebrate a time when, for our "safety," and in a state of anger and paralyzing fear, we gave up the democratic ghost.

• Thomas Homer-Dixon: The Tar Sands Disaster: A Canadian chimes in on the Keystone XL pipeline:

  The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world's most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.

  Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.

  There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don't like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.

  Homer-Dixon goes on to explain how Canada's ruling Conservative Party is entwined with the oil industry, but he doesn't go quite far enough: he doesn't point out that the very worst thing about the oil industry is the production of oil men. We should know all about them in the US, where they form the most reactionary, extremist crust on the ultra-right: sworn enemies of government despite the fact that their fortunes are totally based on the laws that grant them rights to suck as much oil as they can from the ground -- laws that few countries other than the US and Canada have.

  Also see Sally Kohn: New Spill Reveals How Horrible Keystone Could Be.

• Dilip Hiro: How the Pentagon Corrupted Afghanistan: This is a big part of the story, but after Homer-Dixon's reference to Canada becoming a "petro state," it's worth pondering whether the windfall in war spending isn't having the same adverse effects in Afghanistan. Certainly it's resulted in tremendous inflation in Kabul, pushing up the cost of living and making exports (other than opium) unviable, thereby stunting an economy that didn't amount to much anyway. Of course, that point may be too subtle, given the gross numbers.

  Corruption in Afghanistan today is acute and permeates all sectors of society. In recent years, anecdotal evidence on the subject has been superseded by the studies of researchers, surveys by NGOs, and periodic reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). There is also the Corruption Perceptions Index of the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI). Last year, it bracketed Afghanistan with two other countries as the most corrupt on Earth.

  None of these documents, however, refers to the single most important fact when it comes to corruption: that it's Washington-based. It is, in fact, rooted in the massive build-up of U.S. forces there from 2005 onward, the accompanying expansion of American forward operating bases, camps, and combat outposts from 29 in 2005 to nearly 400 five years later, and above all, the tsunami of cash that went with all of this. [ . . . ]

  Later, the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) took over this role. As with the Pentagon, most of the money it distributed ended up in the pockets of those local power brokers. By some accounts, USAID lost up to 90 cents of each dollar spent on certain projects. According to a Congressional report published in June 2011, much of the $19 billion in foreign aid that the U.S. pumped into Afghanistan after 2001 was probably destabilizing the country in the long term.

  Staggering amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars allocated to aid Afghanistan were spent so quickly and profligately that they circumvented any anti-corruption, transparency, or accountability controls and safeguards that existed on paper. However, those who amassed bagsful of dollars faced a problem. Afghanistan's underdeveloped $12 billion economy -- a sum Washington spent in that country in a single month in 2011 -- did not offer many avenues for legitimate profitable investment. Therefore, most of this cash garnered on a colossal scale exited the country, large parts of it ending up in banks and real estate in the Gulf emirates, especially freewheeling Dubai.

• Dahr Jamail: "My Children Have No Future": In his intro, Nick Turse reminds us of the costs of invading Iraq:

  According to a recent report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University, at least 123,000-134,000 Iraqi civilians have died "as a direct consequence of the war's violence since the March 2003 invasion." In fact, while the U.S. military left Iraq in 2011 and war supporters have advanced a counterfeit history of success there -- owing to then-General (now disgraced former CIA director) David Petraeus's military "surge" of 2007 -- the war's brutal legacy lives on. Last year, the casualty watchdog group Iraq Body Count tallied 4,570 Iraqi civilian deaths from violence, a small increase over the death toll from 2011.

  And on the day of Obama's 10th anniversary announcement, car bombs and other attacks killed and wounded hundreds in the Iraqi capital Baghdad alone. Add to these numbers the countless wounded of the last decade and the approximately 2.8 million Iraqis who, to this day, remain refugees outside the country or internally displaced within it and the words of both presidents ring hollow indeed.

  Jamail goes into the country and finds out things like this:

  As he said this, we passed under yet another poster of an angry looking Maliki, speaking with a raised, clenched fist. "Last year's budget was $100 billion and we have no working sewage system and garbage is everywhere," he added. "Maliki is trying to be a dictator, and is controlling all the money now."

  In the days that followed, my fixer Ali pointed out new sidewalks, and newly planted trees and flowers, as well as the new street lights the government has installed in Baghdad. "We called it first the sidewalks government, because that was the only thing we could see that they accomplished." He laughed sardonically. "Then it was the flowers government, and now it is the government of the street lamps, and the lamps sometimes don't even work!"

  Despite his brave face, kind heart, and upbeat disposition, even Ali eventually shared his concerns with me. One morning, when we met for work, I asked him about the latest news. "Same old, same old," he replied, "Kidnappings, killings, rapes. Same old, same old. This is our life now, everyday."

  "The lack of hope for the future is our biggest problem today," he explained. He went on to say something that also qualified eerily as another version of the "same old, same old." I had heard similar words from countless Iraqis back in the fall of 2003, as violence and chaos first began to engulf the country. "All we want is to live in peace, and have security, and have a normal life," he said, "to be able to enjoy the sweetness of life." This time, however, there wasn't even a trace of his usual cheer, and not even a hint of gallows humor.

  "All Iraq has had these last 10 years is violence, chaos, and suffering. For 13 years before that we were starved and deprived by [U.N. and U.S.] sanctions. Before that, the Kuwait War, and before that, the Iran War. At least I experienced some of my childhood without knowing war. I've achieved a job and have my family, but for my daughters, what will they have here in this country? Will they ever get to live without war? I don't think so."

• Ed Kilgore: Bleeding Kansas: Good to see that The Washington Monthly is at least paying some attention to "the state that is trying very hard to outdo all its many extremist rivals, even those steeped in the toxic cultural wastes of my own Deep South." Subject here, as is so often the case, is abortion:

  The dirty little secret of "personhood" initiatives is that they would proscribe not only abortions, or "abortion pills," but IUD's and "Plan B" contraceptives on grounds that such devices and drugs are actually "abortifacients," identical morally to murdering an infant. And indeed, some "personhood" folk would ban the routine anti-ovulant "pill" used by many millions of Americans on grounds that it sometimes operates by interfering with the implantation of a fertilized ovum -- i.e., a "person" -- in the uterine wall.

  If regular Republican-voting Americans had any idea of the radical vision underlying such legislation -- something straight out of the Handmaid's Tale, folks -- the solons supporting it wouldn't even last until the next election. So you'd think they'd be extra careful about supporting efforts to ensure that most of the female population of the state of child-bearing age wouldn't have to worry about being hauled off to the hoosegow and told they needed to get their procreative groove on or put an aspirin between their legs.

  But no: Kansas Republicans consider that sort of concession to the twentieth century a "little gotcha amendment" they find irritating.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• John Cassidy: Whither the GOP? A Republican Report Worth Reading: Well, not really. Focus groups show the Party to be "scary," "narrow-minded," and "out of touch," and some of the Party apparatchiki think they'd like to change it, but what they offer is cosmetic -- "we need a Party whose brand of conservatism invites and inspires new people to visit us." Problem is, the Republicans made most of their gains when people didn't realize where the party is going, and now that the party is, as even the report puts it, "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac," it's become all too clear what the Party stands for.

  It remains to be seen how these strictures go down with the billionaires that increasingly fund the Republican Party. But in this report, there is a definite recognition that the party's image as a tool of the one per cent is doing it great damage. Interestingly, this skepticism towards being tied to the ultra-rich extends to the activities of the Super PACs, such as those controlled by Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, which last year spent about a billion dollars in advertising in swing states, and all to no avail. Unless the activities of "lone wolf groups" are coördinated with the activities of the party, the report warns, they are "more likely to waste their donors' money and act in a redundant, unhelpful manner."

• Noura Erakat: Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Beyond Bantustans, Beyond Reservations: Lots of things here, including some points on Israeli citizens who happen not to be Chosen People:

  In 2011, Israel passed the State Budget Law Amendment. Popularly known as the Nakba Law, it penalizes, by revoking state funding, any institution that either challenges Israel's founding as a Jewish and democratic state or commemorates Israel's Independence Day as one of mourning or loss. The threat any such commemoration poses is a challenge to Israel's narrative of righteous conception.

  The Prawer Plan, named after its author, former deputy chair of the National Security Council Ehud Prawer, seeks to forcibly displace up to 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their homes and communities in the Negev Desert to urban townships to make room for Jewish-only settlements and a forest. The plan, approved in September 2011, has no demographic impact, as these Palestinians are already Israeli citizens. It does, however, violently sever these Bedouin communities from their agricultural livelihoods and centuries-long association with that particular land.

  Similarly, in 2001 the High Court of Justice rejected an appeal from internally displaced Palestinians to return to the villages of Ikrit and Kafr Bir'im, near the Lebanon border, from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948. Like the Negev-based Palestinians, these Palestinians are Israeli citizens and therefore pose no demographic threat. In fact, they currently live only miles away from their demolished villages. Their return to them only threatens a Zionist narrative that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. To further the erasure, Israel plans on building Jewish settlements where these communities once lived.

  Israel's land and housing planning policies in the Galilee demonstrate that the threat is not just about demographics and memory but the cohesion of Palestinians within the state, and the potential for Palestinian nationalism. In Nazareth, home to 80,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel, bidding rights for public building opportunities are reserved for citizens who have completed military service. This excludes nearly all of Nazareth's Palestinian population, who do not serve in the Israeli military for historical and political reasons. In other Galilee cities, "Admissions Committees" can legally exclude Palestinians from their residential communities for being "socially unsuitable" based on their race or national origin alone. Together with its policy of Jewish settlement expansion within Israel as well as a matrix of similarly discriminatory urban planning laws, Israel forces its Palestinian citizens to live in noncontiguous ghettos throughout the state.

  Until 1967, Palestinian "citizens of Israel" were second class, subject to military rule. Later in 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, seizing chunks of land and established military control over anyone who failed to flee, much like their earlier exercise but even more repressive. At the time, it was widely assumed that Israel would realize that the occupied territories didn't fit with the model of a democratic Jewish state, so would be swapped out for peace guarantees -- as happened with Egypt, although only after a further round of war. However, there were powerful groups within Israel who hated the idea of ever giving up land, and they worked hard to make "land-for-peace" and "two-state solution" impossible. Erakat explains that they succeeded:

  Nevertheless, Israel has obliterated the two-state option since the signing of Oslo in 1993. It sanctioned, funded and encouraged, as a matter of national policy, the growth of the settler population in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, from 200,000 to nearly 600,000. It built 85 percent of the separation barrier on occupied West Bank land, circumscribing its largest settlement blocs and effectively confiscating 13 percent of the territory. Rather than prepare Area C (62 percent of the West Bank, now under interim Israeli civil and military jurisdiction) for Palestinian control, it has entrenched its settlement-colonial enterprise. Israel's siege has exacerbated the cultural, social and national distance between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. And its intense Judaization campaign in East Jerusalem has accelerated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians there, hardly preparing it to become the independent capital of the future Palestinian state.

  As the settlements chopped up the West Bank, some people on both sides started advocating a "one-state solution" whereby Israel would keep its settlements but grant citizenship to the remaining people living in the seized territories. Many Zionists treat this proposal as such a non-starter that even mention of it gets you tossed from the room. In a two-state scenario based on 1967 borders with return of the 1947-49 refugees barred, Jews would enjoy a large majority, but adding in the occupied territories changes the balance to 5.9 million Jews vs. 6.1 million non-Jews, threatening the Jewish State's democratic trappings. Netanyahu and his cohort are unwilling either to part with land or to unify its people, so they pretend they can keep their current two-caste system working indefinitely. And the more Jews appear as overlords in the occupied territories, the more they target Israel's "Palestinian citizens" -- it's hard to check the racism, the brutality, the paranoia at the Green Line, so it's no surprise that Israel's occupation mentality corrupts the whole country.

• Paul Krugman: Marches of Folly: Noting the tenth anniversary of Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq:

  There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war -- having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war's boosters predicted -- left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.

  So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn't look like it.

  The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that "everyone" thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents -- but they were out of the mainstream.

  The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration. This was true in political circles; it was equally true of much of the press, which effectively took sides and joined the war party.

  CNN's Howard Kurtz, who was at The Washington Post at the time, recently wrote about how this process worked, how skeptical reporting, no matter how solid, was discouraged and rejected. "Pieces questioning the evidence or rationale for war," he wrote, "were frequently buried, minimized or spiked."

  Closely associated with this taking of sides was an exaggerated and inappropriate reverence for authority. Only people in positions of power were considered worthy of respect. Mr. Kurtz tells us, for example, that The Post killed a piece on war doubts by its own senior defense reporter on the grounds that it relied on retired military officials and outside experts -- "in other words, those with sufficient independence to question the rationale for war."

  As I recall, at the time it was not difficult to find dissenting views, but they were always hard pressed to keep up with the avalanche of pro-war propaganda, disadvantaged by lack of access to sources, and by being shut out of the limited media sources that seem to sway Washington, as opposed to public, opinion. But more than media complicity, the one thing that stands out in my mind as allowing Bush to get away with all the lies and nonsense was the administration's ability to steer the entire cast of Democratic Part 2004 presidential aspirants to vote for the war: Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, Daschle, Clinton, Schumer, Biden, Dodd, Lieberman. None wanted to be caught up opposing a successful war -- as had happened to some Democrats opposed to the first Iraq war in 1990, the definition of success being rather murky there -- and none had the foresight to see how this war would turn out differently.

  Krugman likens this group-think to the current nonsense he struggles with daily on the mass misunderstanding of Very Serious Persons of basic macroeconomics. Valid complaint, perhaps even clearer here how moneyed interests have corrupted even basic science for their own purposes, and how successfully the elite media has wrapped itself around Washington's fickle brains.

• MJ Rosenberg: The Times Eviscerates the Occupation: Use this link as an introduction to the long New York Times piece by Ben Ehrenreich: Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?:

  The best news about the Ehrenreich piece is that he simply describes the occupation in all its ugliness, forcing the reader to forget for a time all the propaganda about Palestinians and instead focus on the conditions Palestinians are subjected to simply because the settlers (and the Israeli government that supports them) wants their land. And, beyond that, he defends non-violent resistance to the occupation as the one means that can end it. (He quotes one Israeli army official saying that he prefers dealing with resisters who shoot, "you have the enemy, he shoots at you, you have to kill him." But he is confounded by non-violent resistance. Another is quoted as saying, "We don't do Gandhi very well." In short, Ehrenreich eviscerates the occupation and describes how it can be ended.

  Also see Rosenberg for his review of Obama's Israel-Palestine trip, No Big Surprises but He Accomplished His Goal. The key point here was when Obama "compared the Palestinian struggle to the civil rights movement in America, invoking his own daughters as beneficiaries of that struggle." This doesn't inspire me with much confidence, but it does clearly focus on equal rights, as opposed to the caste regime that Israel has constructed.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• John Cassidy: Paul Ryan in Wonderland: Chapter Six: Loosely following Brad DeLong's quote:

  Having wandered back into writing about U.S. politics for the past eighteen months or so, I sometime wonder how the full-time Washington correspondents, the lifers, do it: cover the same old junk year after year. The key to career longevity and job satisfaction, I suppose, is to buy into the notion, assiduously promoted by the politicians and their flacks, that what they are doing is serious. Budgets, national security, energy policy, health policy -- these things matter. . . . .

  Sorry folks. After watching Representative Paul Ryan launch his much-anticipated budget for the fiscal year 2014, I can't keep up the pretense. The plan is a joke . . . and nobody should pay much attention to it, except as another exhibit in the indictment of latter-day Republicanism. Ryan's numbers don't add up. His proposals -- cutting domestic programs, converting Medicare to a voucher program, returning Medicaid to the states, reducing the top rate of income tax to twenty-five per cent -- were roundly rejected by the voters just five months ago. And the philosophy his plan is based upon -- trickle-down economics combined with an unbridled hostility toward government programs designed to correct market failures -- is tattered and shop worn. . . .

  In a more just world, Ryan and his visionary shtick would have been jeered off the stage after last year's Presidential campaign, when, apart from ensuring that Mitt Romney didn't face any blowback from the right at the Convention in Tampa, his presence added virtually nothing to the G.O.P. ticket, and, arguably, handicapped it. . . .

  I can't let a few things pass without comment. Ryan's proposal to reduce the top rate of income tax to twenty five per cent would be a huge giveaway to the rich. How big? . . . people earning more than a million dollars a year would each gain, on average, $264,970.

  DeLong also links to Ezra Klein on the budget proposed by House Progressives, which has no chance but would actually do some good for the economy (and not just the people who own it). Also, DeLong catches Tyler Cowen going 0-for-4 on "standard stuff" economics. Cowen is arguing against public spending on public goods and basically trying to run up the perceived costs so you don't do anything like that. DeLong knocks those costs down, rightly, but doesn't go near the main point, which is the value of public goods.

  DeLong also quotes Paul Krugman, on the stock market (and other things):

  Stocks are high, in part, because bond yields are so low, and investors have to put their money somewhere. It's also true . . . that . . . corporate profits have staged a strong recovery . . . workers [are] failing to share in the fruits of their own rising productivity [and] hundreds of billions of dollars are piling up in the treasuries of corporations that, facing weak consumer demand, see no reason to put those dollars to work. . . . What the markets are clearly saying, however, is that the fears and prejudices that have dominated Washington discussion for years are entirely misguided. And they're also telling us that the people who have been feeding those fears and peddling those prejudices don't have a clue about how the economy actually works.

• Ed Kilgore: The Anti-Choice Olympics: Somehow he missed Kansas.

  Ever since the 2010 elections, Republican legislators and governors have been in a competition to see who can enact the most blatantly unconstitutional -- at least according to existing precedents -- laws on abortion in the country. The first batch, typically banning abortions after around 20 weeks of pregnancy, were keyed to dubious claims that this is the stage when a fetus could experience pain. Earlier this month the Arkansas legislature picked up the pace with a bill banning abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, this time making the alleged earlier point of detection of a fetal heartbeat the rationale. That bill was passed over Gov. Mike Beebe's veto.

  Now North Dakota -- a state with just one abortion clinic -- is springing into action with a bill (just sent to Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple) banning abortions after just 6 weeks of pregnancy, based on an even earlier assumption about the advent of a fetal heartbeat. Also under consideration in one chamber of the legislature is a bill emulating Mississippi's efforts (temporarily held up in the courts) to harrass abortion providers out of the state via bogus medical certification requirements, and a couple of bills adopting the "personhood" principle (giving a fertilized ovum the full protections of the law). So I guess Dalrymple will have the opportunity to sign the 6-week bill as a "compromise."

  With Republican-controlled legislatures all over the South talking about emulating Arkansas' law (which may already be behind the times if North Dakota trumps it), the rather transparent purpose of this trend (other than bragging rights) is to force a fresh Supreme Court review of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the decisions banning state prohibitions on pre-viability abortions.

• Ed Kilgore: Costs of a "War of Choice":

  Most Americans are vaguely familiar with the number of U.S. combat troops killed in Iraq: 4,488. Less well-known is that another 3,418 U.S. contractors were killed, plus 318 troops from other allied countries, and 10,819 Iraqi government troops. Maybe Americans don't care about the 36,400 Iraqi insurgents killed, but we should care about the 134,000 Iraqi civilians who perished, which doesn't count the hundreds of thousands who died of war-related diseases. All told the direct human costs of the war are estimated at 189,000.

  The Brown study predicted the ultimate cost of the war to U.S. taxpayers at $2.2 trillion dollars -- a bit higher than the initial U.S. government estimates of $50 to $60 billion issued in 2002 -- and that doesn't count another $1.7 trillion in interest costs associated with borrowing to cover war spending.

  It would appear that the conclusions in Joseph E. Stiglitz/Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (2008, WW Norton) were in fact too conservative.

• Paul Krugman: Ten Years Later:

  And there's a very big [tenth] anniversary coming up next week -- the start of the Iraq war. So why does there seem to be so little coverage?

  Well, it's not hard to think of a reason: a lot of people behaved badly in the runup to that war, and many though not all people in the news media behaved especially badly.

  It's hard now to recall the atmosphere of the time, but there was both an overpowering force of conventional wisdom -- all the Very Serious People were for war, don't you know, and if you were against you were by definition flaky -- and a strong current of fear. To come out against the war, let alone to suggest that the Bush administration was deliberately misleading the nation into war, looked all too likely to be a career-ending stance. And there were all too few profiles in courage.

  The war, then, was a big test -- a test of your ability to cut through a fog of propaganda, but also a test of your moral and to some extent personal courage. And a lot of people in the media failed.

  This remind me that I should go back to March 2003 and check what I wrote at the time (may be good for a mid-week post). Meanwhile, see Corey Robin: Bush Did Not Simply Lie in the Run-up to the Iraq War.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Michael Hudson: The Big Threat to the Economy Is Private Debt and Interest Owed on It, Not Government Debt: From 1980 on, Americans have built ignored stagnant wages and built the illusion of an improving lifestyle on credit, which reached a peak just before the 2008 crash and is unlikely to ever recover. For other reasons, businesses have accumulated ever more debt -- here, tax deductability of interest has rewarded owners, especially private equity scavengers, for converting equity to debt. All this debt overhang is dead weight dragging down the economy. On the other hand, as long as government debt can be financed at low rates, it is no problem at all [emphasis below in original]:

  The problem is that "fiscal responsibility" is economically irresponsible, as far as full employment and economic recovery are concerned. less government spending shrinks the circular flow between the private sector's producers and consumers. [ . . . ] What really is responsible is for the government to spend enough money into the economy to keep employment and production thriving.

  Instead, the government is creating new debt mainly to bail out the banks and keep the existing debt overhead in place -- instead of writing down the debts.

  So governments from the United States to Europe face a choice: to save the economy, or to save the banks and bondholders from taking a loss by keeping the debt overhead in place and re-inflating real estate prices to a level high enough to cover the debts attached to the property whose underwater mortgages are weighing down the banking system. [ . . . ]

  Second, on that flow chart, you will see that for every half a trillion in federal deficit spending since the 2008 crisis, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have spent twice as much -- $1 trillion -- in providing new credit to the banks.

  President Obama announced that he hoped the banks would lend it out. So the solution by his advisors, including some here today, is for the economy to "borrow its way out of debt." The aim of the Fed and Treasury subsidies of the commercial banks is to re-inflate housing prices, stock and bond prices -- on credit. That means on debt.

  This obviously will make matters worse. But what will make them worse of all is the demand that the government "cure" the public-sector deficit by spending less generally, and specifically by cutting Social Security and Medicare. As in the case of the recent FICA withholding ostensibly to fund Social Security, the effect of less public spending into the economy is to force the private sector more deeply into debt.

• Phillip Longman: The Republican Case for Waste in Health Care: Fearful that knowledge might make government programs more effective, the health care industry (helped by Republicans) "slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research." (As I recall, there is a similar prohibition against research that might prove troublesome for the gun industry.)

  In its final language, the ACA specifically bars policymakers from using cost-effectiveness as a basis for even recommending different drugs and treatments to patients. In practical effect, the ACA ensures that such research won't even be done, let alone be used as a criterion for guiding how the nearly $2.6 trillion the U.S. spends on health care each year might be put to best use. Here's what you need to know to understand how the fix was put in behind the scenes and why correcting it must become a high priority for health care reformers.

  Of course, cost-effectiveness research is fallible, especially at the level of the individual, who may be unstudied or simply the exception. Doctors and patients should be able to carve out space for exceptions, but they should do so on the basis of the best available information, not the least. Moreover, one needs to look at the expense side of the ledger. Major cost differences are often the result of patents or other forms of rent-seeking. Take those rents away and the costs will matter much less, making it easier to evaluate results on their merits.

• Dylan Matthews: Washington Hates Deficits. Why It Hates Them Is Less Clear: Several charts, including a scatter of "Debt vs Interest Rates, 2008-2011" which shows that highly indebted Eurozone countries are indeed in trouble, but hardly anyone else is. We're told we should fear a high debt/GDP ratio because such a thing would bring high interest rates, but Japan's ratio is 218 percent and its interest rate is 0.67%, so? James Galbraith offers a scenario where government debt could keep growing indefinitely with no real adverse effects.

• MJ Rosenberg: My Position on a Fair Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict:

  It's time Israel read the handwriting on the wall. It should stop any expansion of settlements and fully end the blockade of Gaza, as first step towards acknowledging its new situation. Those actions alone would restore its friendship with Turkey. And it should acknowledge through words and deed that it is ready for negotiations based on the Arab League Initiative.

  Negotiations won't start now, in the midst of the current turbulence in Syria and elsewhere. But Israel needs to be ready as soon as the dust settles. Additionally, it should end its threats toward Iran and let the Obama administration know that it favors lifting sanctions in return for tangible steps by Iran toward ensuring that its nuclear program is a civilian program and will remain one. Currently it supports "crippling sanctions" until Iran give up its right to any form of nuclear development. That simply won't fly.

  All those who care about the survival and security of Israel should encourage it to take these steps. It is no act of friendship to encourage Israel to dig in when the tides of history are running against it.

  I've been thinking about this issue a lot lately. My bottom line is that I'm agreeable to anything Israel might conceivably agree to that ultimately provides for equal rights for everyone somewhere. That could be the Arab League plan, and there is good reason adopting it because most of the concessions Israel could reasonably ask for have already been included. Or it could be something else, maybe something way out of the box. But it isn't going to happen, because Israel doesn't feel the need to agree to anything, because they feel like they're in charge, and they're convinced time is working for them. (Richard Ben Cramer had a story about a rabbi who promised to teach a dog to talk, who keeps begging for more time even though he knows he can't do it. Why, in the face of such a hopeless task, do you stall for time, he is asked? The answer: well, maybe the dog will die.)

  You can imagine Israel as being split between two types of Jews. One follows only their own counsel, convinced that the world is ultimately against them, and that "only what the Jews do matters." Such people are condemned to fight forever, and they see any attempt to accommodate the rest of the world as letting their guard down, inviting destruction. The other feels that Israel can be part of a world at peace, at least with the support of critical allies. Indeed, Israel has depended on foreign support throughout the history of the Zionist movement: first from Britain, then Russia, France, and finally the United States. That group of Jews can be pressed into concessions if the world, especially the US, applies enough pressure. (Of course, there is also a third group of Jews -- those with a conscience -- but they don't seem to have any practical influence within Israel, even though the number of people who would like to think of themselves as in this group may be substantial.)

  What's happened, at least since Bush came to power in 2001, is that the second group hasn't experienced any pressure to come around, so they've naturally deferred to the first group. Nor has Clinton or Obama been able or willing to apply any real pressure -- the fact that both primarily operated through an Israeli flack name of Dennis Ross attests to their lack of seriousness, erudition, and even self-respect. Meanwhile, first group leaders like Sharon and Netanyahu learned to feign enough flexibility to deflect half-hearted US efforts, all the while digging in deeper.

  It is clear that world public opinion is turning against Israel. What isn't clear is whether as opinion turns there will be a moment when the US and Europe resolve to put effective pressure on Israel to make peace, nor is it clear that the second group of Israeli Jews can coalesce and take charge of Israel to do what needs to be done. If either fails the long run will be bleak indeed, with the first group controlling an Israel that is estranged from the world and locked in mortal combat with those it tramples, and the world as a whole will be a far nastier place.

  Rosenberg has the right idea here -- not so much the details as the notion that it is urgent for constructive groups both in Israel and the US to come forward, otherwise they're likely to perish under the hawks that currently dominate both. (I also think it is fair to say that the Palestinians have never been more accomodating in their search for peace -- unless you insist on inequal treatment and denying their human rights, they are not at present the problem.)

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week, but first, today's Crowson:

• Paul Krugman: What the Malaysians Know: Quotes several cases where right-wingers, including the Heritage Foundation, have switched tunes and started praising Malaysia -- after money changed hands:

  It seems that some years ago Malaysia's ruling party took a good look at leading pundits and policy intellectuals in the conservative movement, reached a judgment about their personal and intellectual integrity or lack thereof, and acted in accordance with that judgment.

  Funny how Malaysia gets who these people are and what motivates them -- while our own press corps doesn't.

• Matthew Yglesias: Ben Bernanke Has a Terrible Record on Inflation:

  Testifying before Congress recently, Ben Bernanke bragged, "my inflation record is the best of any Federal Reserve chairman in the postwar period, or at least one of the best, about 2 percent average inflation."

  Catherine Rampell's numbers show that Bernanke has, in fact, delivered the lowest inflation of any postwar Fed chair, coming in at an average of 2 percent. On the other hand, Floyd Norris notes that unemployment under Bernanke has been second-highest of any postwar Federal Reserve chairman. Now if you ignore the "postwar" qualifier, the picture looks different. Several Depression-era Fed chairs had less inflation and more unemployment than Bernanke. And putting those Depression-era bankers into the mix serves to highlight how absurd Bernanke's bust is. No sensible person would look at America's economic performance in the 1929-1933 period and say "man, they did a great job of fighting inflation."

  I've often remarked on how dumb I thought it was for Obama to nominate Bernanke for a second term as Fed Chairman: if he's going to be blamed for a depressed economy, and he was, Obama should at least insist on putting his own man in charge of the one government job that has the most day-to-day impact on the economy, but he succumbed to a wave of hype and renominated Bush's man, and got Bush's economy in the bargain. Seems unlikely that Bernanke will get a third term, not so much because Obama's finally decided to appoint people who will help but because the Republicans have developed a huge grudge against Bernanke for trying to do anything at all to expand the economy. Bottom line, though, is that he didn't try much, it didn't work very well, and he has yet to show any visible displeasure with the results.

  Also take a gander at Businessweek Warns That Minorities May Be Buying Houses Again. Isn't the real story here in the fine print: "Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns. What could possibly go wrong?" That says much more about the failure of Dodd-Frank to end the practices that caused the housing bubble and recession in the first place.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Steven Brill: Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us: Extensive reporting on how hospitals, doctors, etc., rack up charges to individuals far in excess of what they charge insurance companies and Medicare; e.g.:

  Dozens of midpriced items were embedded with similarly aggressive markups, like $283.00 for a "CHEST, PA AND LAT 71020." That's a simple chest X-ray, for which MD Anderson is routinely paid $20.44 when it treats a patient on Medicare, the government health care program for the elderly.

  Also see Paul Krugman here and here for a sanity check on the conclusions. From the latter:

  So why does Obamacare run through the private sector? Raw political necessity: this was the only way that it could get past the insurance industry's power. OK, that was how it had to be.

  But you should really be outraged at the efforts of some states to ensure that the Medicaid expansion is done not via direct government insurance but run through the insurance industry. What you need to understand is that this is a double giveaway, both to the insurers and to the health care industry, because private insurers don't have the government's bargaining power. It is, bluntly, purely a matter of corporate welfare for the medical-industrial complex.

• Tim Dickinson: The Gun Industry's Deadly Addiction: Hook the kids, seduce the ladies, turn shooting ranges into live-action video games, prep the preppers, supply cartels and criminals.

• Henry Farrell: Slaves of Defunct Economists: Review of Mark Blyth: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013, Oxford University Press). Normally we like to believe that growth is good for all, even if its promotion is lavished on business (the job creators get profits, the jobs trickle down). In other words, the growth paradigm is to suck profits up the class scale. What austerity does is push losses down, making sure they are suffered as much or more by the masses as by the rich. Sharing the misery seems to comfort the rich, probably because it isn't shared equally.

• John Quiggin: Open Thread on Hugo Chavez: The comments here are often as good or better than the pieces. PlutoniumKun seems to have a good start:

  The problem with Chavez is that it was so hard to see past his charisma and ego. His anti-Americanism was justified in many ways, but the manner in which this extended to supporting the likes of Ahmadinejad and Assad was less endearing, although I suppose its no worse than considering the house of al Saud to be a friend. He was good at the broad brush, but it seems that he wasn't particularly good at building up the internal structures which Venezuela so badly needed to ensure his reforms had long term benefits. I fear that he has not left a lasting legacy of deep structural reform in governance in Venezuela, something which it desperately needs. Although arguably the problems are so deep rooted that they are unfixable. But it is absolutely unquestionable for anyone who has looked at the recent history of Venezuela that his policies greatly benefited the poor and dispossessed and that he gave great pride to many South Americans.

• Amir-Hussein Firouz Radjy: A Forgotten Anniversary: Iran's First Revolution and Constitution: December 1906, when the Qajar monarchy gave way to a first effort at democracy in Iran.

• Dennis B Ross: To Achieve Mideast Peace, Suspend Disbelief: Proposes 14 steps, evenly divided as if the obstacles to peace are evenly distributed. For the Palestinians, these tasks reduce to wait patiently and pretend this is working. For Israel, he wants to step down from further settlement expansion -- a non-starter with the current government not that he says so nor suggests any remedy to -- and tread a bit lighter. The silliest proposal is to "commit to an exchange of classrooms or regular youth exchanges starting as early as third grade" to mitigate against "children on each side are being . . . being socialized to demonize and dehumanize the other." This is typical Ross: a nice liberal idea that will take forever and accomplish nothing. He forgets that the main attraction of the "two state" plan is that it doesn't require either side to like or even forgive the other, and that it's tolerable now only because the separation it assumes has been accomplished, for the most part long ago. Otherwise, if Israelis accepted Palestinians they could implement a "one state" equal-rights solution on their own, immediately. That they don't -- that they won't even consider the possibility -- shows that they won't: that they are too wrapped up in their insistence on ethnic rule and the violent suppression of others to conceive of living in an equitable society.

Didn't pay much attention to the world last week -- too preoccupied digging out from the biggest snowstorm to hit Wichita since 1962 -- so I scrambled a bit today. Turns out there's plenty to get worked up about, and this barely scratches the surface:

• Brad DeLong quotes Josh Barro: Why We Need Republicans:

  Democrats make their own errors in evaluating the economy . . . Republicans have an often-healthy skepticism of regulation . . . When they try, Republicans can make government more efficient . . . Republicans aren't all out to lunch . . . Republicans are succeeding in states where their national brand is severely damaged tends to be that their state-level policy agendas are markedly better than the party's national one.

  This sounds like wishful thinking going back to the 1970s or 1980s when Reagan's "11th Commandment" allowed some moderate, pragmatic Republicans to run "good government" campaigns, notably winning some mayoral campaigns in solidly Democratic cities (New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, etc.), governorships in Massachusetts and New York, etc. Even in Kansas, where Republicans didn't have to appeal to Democratic voters, a long string of moderate Republicans were reasonably competent stewards of government. (I loathed Bob Dole going all the way back to his House days, and never forgave him for his scurilous campaigns against Bill Avery and Bill Roy, but even he came to be seen as a Republican with enough sense of responsibility and reality to deal with real national problems.) But none of this stuff is remotely true today.

  Democrats do have weak spots in "evaluating the economy" -- they're much too fond of finance and high-tech as growth engines -- but the Republicans have thrown out the entirety of macroeconomics, pushing an austerity program that seems gleefully self-destructive. Their "often-healthy skepticism of regulation" is at best a minor merit, and is often expressed in absolute excess. (For instance, there is no evidence that environmental regulations in oil and gas are too strict -- Deepwater Horizon is just one counterexample.) Far more important is an effort to restore losses in equal opportunity, to reinforce the safety net that protects ordinary people from ravages of the (increasingly laissez faire) business cycle, and maintenance and expansion of public goods like infrastructure and science.

  While there is some evidence that Republicans become marginally saner in power, that's getting to be little comfort. When Republicans gained state power in 2010 from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, they did nothing to make government more efficient much less fair; they spent all their efforts attacking public employee unions and trying to rig voting in their favor. And Kansas, under Sam Brownback, has gone from being a boring Republican fiefdom to a dangerous experiment in how badly mismanaged government can become. (One example is that the Koch Brothers are now exempt from paying state income taxes because they're small businessmen.)

  Maybe if the Republicans actually had the sort of influence the idiocy of their policies deserved -- down around 10-15% of voters, which is still pretty generous considering how many fewer people would actually benefit from their policies -- it might make sense to try to cheer them up a bit. But now isn't the time. And given how frequently they vote in lockstep in Congress, the notion that there are other Republicans elsewhere who aren't so embarrassing isn't much comfort. For all practical purposes, the Republican mind these days ranges from Cantor to Ryan, a diversity that's harder to calculate than all those angels on pins.

  Also see this No More Mister Nice Blog piece on Kansas.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Jelani Cobb: Lincoln Died for Our Sins: "The greatest impediment to achieving racial equality is the narcotic belief that we already have." Also see Thomas Frank: Team America for its jaundiced view of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Both of these touch on Steve Spielberg's film Lincoln, which I have yet to see. In the end, Frank taunts:

  If you really want to explore compromise, corruption, and the ideology of money-in-politics, don't stack the deck with aces of unquestionable goodness like the Thirteenth Amendment. Give us the real deal. Look the monster in the eyes. Make a movie about the Grant Administration, in which several of the same characters who figure in Lincoln played a role in the most corrupt era in American history. Or show us the people who pushed banking deregulation through in the compromise-worshipping Clinton years. And then, after ninety minutes of that, try to sell us on the merry japes of those lovable lobbyists -- that's a task for a real auteur.

• Chuck Eddy: Mindy McCready: When the Angels Stopped Watching.

• Mike Konczal: How Is Inequality Holding Back the Recovery: Follows up on Joseph E Stiglitz: Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery, with links to Paul Krugman and John Judis, and some twists.

• Andrew Leonard: Conservatives Declare War on College: Notably, governors Scott Walker (WI), Rick Perry (TX), and Rick Scott (FL): cut funding, cut costs, purge humanities from the curriculum.

• Mark Perry: Elliot Abrams' Plan to Divide the Palestinians: On the 2006 coup that Fatah attempted against Hamas in Gaza, which led to Hamas seizing power in Gaza and Israel, Egypt, and the US blockading Gaza and driving it to the brink of catastrophe. That was just one of many brainfarts from the ever fertile mind of one of the few people who actually got convicted for Reagan's illegal Iran-Contra scheme. He was later rehabilitated by G.W. Bush and given responsibility for the Middle East, and, well, you know how that turned out. Abrams has a new book out, promsing an inside look at the Bush era in the Middle East, and he should know, but he's never shown any awareness of how badly his ideas have worked out, nor much interest in expressing his motives. But no one has done more in the last 10-15 years to make peace impossible. He is a one-man axis of evil, or if you insist on three, remember that he was the inevitable go-between of G.W. Bush and Ariel Sharon.

• Annie Robbins: Autopsy Reveals Arafat Jaradat Died of Extreme Torture in Israeli Custody: As I recall, some years ago Israel's Supreme Court ruled that Israel could not practice torture of prisoners, but this is more evidence (beyond the Zygier affair reported last week) that the cuffs are off. One commenter writes: "you do get the impression that Israel is deliberately trying to provoke another intifada, to provide cover for god knows what."

• Alyssa Rosenberg: As George Tiller's Wichita Clinic Reopens, 'After Tiller' Reframes the Abortion Debate: After Dr. Tiller was murdered, Wichita lost its only women's health clinic that provided abortions of any kind. One of Tiller's former associates is working to open another clinic in Wichita, and may succeed despite an extraordinary amount of legal and extra-legal harrassment. (The KS legislature has even more anti-abortion bills on the way, including one to convict doctors of a felony if a woman decides to abort based on the sex of the child.) Piece also talks about a documentary, After Tiller, which goes into the late-term abortions that Tiller was one of the very few doctors in the country able (and willing) to perform. The new clinic in Wichita will not help on that front, but will fill a need and restore a right. It's a shame that it takes such heroic dedication to do something so basically just.

• Matthew Yglesias: Steve Brill's Opus on Health Care: Brill's piece in Time is the further study, but Yglesias' summary should be quoted here and now (his italics):

  The analytic core of the article shows that when it comes to hospital prices, who pays determines how high the price is. When an individual patient comes through the door of a hospital for treatment, he or she is subjected to wild price gouging. Insane markups are posted on everything from acetaminophen, to advanced cancer drugs, to blankets, to routine procedures. Because these treatments are so profitable, internal systems within the hospital are geared toward prescribing lots of them. And even though most hospitals are organized as non-profits, most of them in fact turn large operating profits and their executives are well-paid.

  In addition to providing insurance services, a key service that a proper health insurance company provides is bargaining with hospitals so you get screwed less. No insurer worth anything would actually pay the crazy-high rates hospitals charge to individuals. But in most markets, the hospitals have more bargaining leverage than the insurance companies, so there's still ample gouging. The best bargainer of all is Medicare, which is huge and can force hospitals to accept something much closer to marginal cost pricing, although even this is undermined in key areas (prescription drugs, for example) by interest group lobbying.

  I can see two reasonable policy conclusions to draw from this, neither of which Brill embraces. One is that Medicare should cover everyone, just as Canadian Medicare does. Taxes would be higher, but overall health care spending would be much lower since universal Medicare could push the unit cost of services way down. The other would be to adopt all-payer rate setting rules -- aka price controls -- keeping the insurance market largely private, but simply pushing the prices down. Most European countries aren't single-payer, but do use price controls. Even Singapore, which is often touted by U.S. conservatives as a market-oriented forced-savings alternative to a universal health insurance system, relies heavily on price controls to keep costs down.

  Yglesias also affirms common sense that Raising the Minimum Wage Is Overwhelmingly Popular.

Haven't run one of these in more than a month (and I'm backdating this one -- had it collected but didn't finish it due to an achey back):

• Paul Krugman: Hearsay Economics: Chart here shows that federal government total expenditures has basically remain flat since 2009 when the stimulus ran out, contrary to the opinions of Joe Scarborough (and many others):

  Well, I've gradually come to the realization that most of the commentariat doesn't do what, say Martin Wolf or I do -- grub around in published data, read reports, and all that. Instead, they rely on what they heard somebody say the facts are; hearsay economics. Of course, they don't listen to any old bum on the street; they listen to people of repute, people in their circle. But the repute in question has nothing to do with technical expertise; hey, Admiral Mullen is a serious person, so if he says something on any subject, such as economics, it must be solid.

  And where do the reputable people get their information? Why, it's what they heard somebody in their circle say. It's hearsay economics all the way down.

  You can see how this leads to the incestuous amplification I've written about. Everyone they know -- tous le monde, as Tom Wolfe used to say -- says that we have exploding spending and the deficit is a crucial problem. How could it not be true?

  Krugman has the same chart framed more explicitly here: as federal spending relative to potential GDP.

• Yitzhak Laor: Israel needs to be threatened by international sanctions: From Haaretz, quoted by War in Context:

  The tendency to blame the Palestinians for failing to compromise is part of the colonialist hauteur. We imprison Palestinians, torture, steal, spread out on their land and ask them to compromise with us? In the name of what? In the name of fear of the extreme right?

  Now Avigdor Lieberman comes along and declares that a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians is impossible and everyone is silent. The Palestinians are actually offering a peace deal. The big obstacle and the one that grows from year to year is the settlement enterprise, which promises that no solution will be achieved until it sinks us all.

  In order to put pressure on the government, it is worthwhile learning from Beitar Jerusalem and its fans' racist war: The fear of international sanctions work. The time has come to encourage the international community to fight Israeli intransigence and pressure Israel to give up on the occupied territories and its residents, who lack a voice from the perspective of our democracy.

  I think one can make this argument more emphatically. Due to various political factors, Israeli politics is in a right-wing death spiral -- the Palestinians have been utterly marginalized as a possible influence on Israeli behavior, and no Israeli faction is able to resist the drive toward expanding the settlement or using brute force as the answer to to every problem. The only way to moderate Israeli policy is to hold up a standard of morality and impress that onto public consciousness, and one effective way to do that short of violence is sanctions.

• Chase Madar: Government Persecution, From Aaron Swartz to Bradley Manning:

  "Prosecutors destroy a life." That could be a headline in every newspaper every day in a land where the answer to every problem (and many nonproblems) is police and prisons. When 26-year-old Internet prodigy and freedom of information activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11, the tragedy was the direct result of US attorneys deciding to throw criminal charges at him for violating a website's "terms of services" while accessing publicly subsidized academic research. [ . . . ]

  The Justice Department's legal assault on Swartz is of a vindictive piece with the prosecution of others who have carried important information into the public realm. Front and center is 25-year-old Bradley Manning, the Iraq War enlistee accused of being WikiLeaks's source in the military. The restricted foreign policy documents that Manning allegedly released don't amount to even 1 percent of the 92 million items the government classified last year, but the young private faces life in prison at his court-martial in June for the charge, among twenty-one others, of "aiding the enemy." Then there's Jeremy Hammond, age 28, who in his freshman year at the University of Illinois hacked the computer science department's home page, then told them how they could fix its problem. He got thrown out of school for that; now he's in a federal prison facing thirty-nine years to life, charged with various hacks and leaks (all apparently led by an FBI informant) including the 5 million internal e-mails of Stratfor, a private security firm hired by corporations to surveil private citizens, among other activities.

  I don't know enough about Swartz to write intelligently about him. There are aspects of "hacker culture" that I deeply disapprove of, but I have no doubt that the public would be better off if government and corporations had far less leeway to keep secret the information that is needed to check their excess powers. It would be better if this were done through a public policy that would limit possible excesses -- a system that would reliably redact info that should remain private -- but lacking any such policy I can't help but sympathasize with those who act in the public interest now. Swartz seems to have done that more often than not, putting him in a long and honorable tradition.

  That leads us to the prosecutor, who appears to have abused his power and misjudged this case, tragically. I suspect this is part of a deeper cultural problem -- everything in the system selects for hardline prosecutors, which is part of the reason America jails so many people for so long -- but it's rarely so glaring as in cases over the unauthorized leak of information the public needs (e.g., the Bradley Manning case).

  Another paragraph from Madar which is sort of tangential here but bears repeating:

  Circulation of knowledge is a social justice issue, too. Dean Baker estimates that reforming the patent law regime for pharmaceuticals -- currently a system that guarantees Big Pharma's monopolies -- would shrink annual spending on prescription drugs from $300 billion to $30 billion, a savings some five times the annual cost of Bush's tax cut for the richest 2 percent. Meanwhile, grotesquely prolonged copyrights for literary and artistic properties are fencing off the cultural commons, a boot on the throat of a generation's creative voice.

  Also see: Andrew Leonard: Aaron Swartz, Freedom Fighter.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Paul Krugman: The Japan Story: Various points, including that Japanese output per age 15-64 worker hasn't been nearly as bad as they'd like you to think (1.2% growth per year), that this has happened despite persistence of a long-term liquidity trap, and that government macroeconomic policy has never been as willing to permit inflation as it should have been.

• Jamie Malanowski: Richard Ben Cramer, 1950-2012: Recalls the late journalist's much bruited book on the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes, regarded by many as the best-ever campaign book, certainly much more ambitious than anything before or since. Doesn't mention Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions, which I have read and regard as the single best book on Israel's neverending conflict with its people and neighbors -- in large part because it locates the conflict not in every side's wrongs in the past but in the fear of a future without the reassuring identities of the present conflict.

• Josh Marshall: Speaking for My Tribe: on guns, and the author's phobia of them -- one that I share, so I'm reluctant to describe the fear as irrational. Also: Not for Everyone: "I do not want to be in a bar, in a mall, at a school -- and I do not want my children in those places -- where lots of even well-meaning but absolutely ordinary people have fire arms."

• Karen Narefsky: Why Does the US Postal Service Have to Be Profitable? Good question. Sub: "Losses have forced the USPS to cut back on its services, and we have only our fetish for privatization to blame." This would be a good place to drop a brilliant quote from Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island if I could find it quickly, but the gist is that there are things that government should do even if they aren't cost-effective -- indeed, given the profit imperative of business, only government can provide for goods and services that business can't. The USPS is actually a mixed case: some things it does are good business, and some aren't.

• Joseph Stiglitz: Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth: Mostly talks about education, since education has long been touted as the path for lower/middle-class youths to advance and since higher education has become more and more expensive and inaccessible over the last few decades. Still, there's much more to the story: I think the superrich sense that there are fewer slots at the top, and have been closing ranks to keep what's left in the hands of their heirs. Conversely, the penalties for starting out poor are becoming more slippery and severe. Just because a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama can slip through the gauntlet doesn't offer much encouragement, as so few of us have their instinct or knack for sucking up to power.

• Matt Taibbi: Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail: Focuses on HSBC, engaged in "drug-and-terrorism money-laundering" as well as the usual financial shenanigans.

• Paul Woodward: The Zygier Affair: One of many posts at this site on Ben Zygier, an Australian who worked for Mossad, crossed them, was kidnapped by them, then died in an Israeli prison. Probably a real story there. While on the subject, some posts say all they need in the title: If it's time to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, it's also time to include Mossad.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• William Astore: Generals Behaving Badly: Among other things, this answers one question I've been wondering about: how damn many generals (and admirals) are there?

  America's military is astonishingly top heavy, with 945 generals and admirals on active duty as of March 2012. That's one flag-rank officer for every 1,500 officers and enlisted personnel. With one general for every 1,000 airmen, the Air Force is the worst offender, but the Navy and Army aren't far behind. For example, the Army has 10 active-duty divisions -- and 109 major generals to command them. Between September 2001 and April 2011, the military actually added another 93 generals and admirals to its ranks (including 37 of the three- or four-star variety). The glut extends to the ranks of full colonel (or, in the Navy, captain). The Air Force has roughly 100 active-duty combat wings -- and 3,712 colonels to command them. The Navy has 285 ships -- and 3,335 captains to command them. Indeed, today’s Navy has nearly as many admirals (245 as of March 2012) as ships.

  Any high-ranking officer worth his or her salt wants to command, but this glut has contributed to their rapid rotation in and out of command -- five Afghan war commanders in five years, for instance -- disrupting any hopes for command continuity. The situation also breeds cutthroat competition for prestige slots and allows patterns of me-first careerism to flourish.

• Justin Elliott: Have US Drones Become a "Counterinsurgency Air Force" for Our Allies?: US drone strikes have killed about 2500 people since Obama became president. Some of those were "high value targets" that have been publicized, but most weren't. (The number works out to about two per day.)

  Under the Obama administration, officials have argued that the drone strikes are only hitting operational Al Qaeda leaders or people who posed significant and imminent threats to the U.S. homeland. If you actually look at the vast majority of people who have been targeted by the United States, that's not who they are.

  There are a couple pieces of data showing this. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation has done estimates on who among those killed could be considered "militant leaders" either of the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, or Al Qaeda. Under the Bush administration, about 30 percent of those killed could be considered militant leaders. Under Obama, that figure is only 13 percent.

  Most of the people who are killed don't have as their objective to strike the U.S. homeland. Most of the people who are killed by drones want to impose some degree of sharia law where they live, they want to fight a defensive jihad against security service and the central government, or they want to unseat what they perceive as an apostate regime that rules their country.

• Robert Reich: Wal-Mart and McDonald's: What's Wrong with U.S. Employment: "The walkouts were no coincidence. Low wages are strangling the economy."

  Jobs are slowly returning to America, but most of them pay lousy wages and low if non-existent benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage -- like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains. That's why the median wage keeps dropping, especially for the 80 percent of the workforce that's paid by the hour.

  It's also part of the reason why the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has been increasing even as the economy has started to recover -- from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2011. More than 46 million Americans now live below the poverty line.

  Many of them have jobs. The problem is that these jobs just don't pay enough to lift their families out of poverty. [ . . . ]

  The wealth of the Walton family -- which still owns the lion's share of Wal-Mart stock -- now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

  Last week, Wal-Mart announced that the next Wal-Mart dividend will be issued on December 27 instead of January 2, after the Bush tax cut for dividends expires -- thereby saving the Wal-Mart family as much as $180 million. (According to the online weekly "Too Much," this $180 million would be enough to give 72,000 Wal-Mart workers now making $8 an hour a 20-percent annual pay hike. That hike would still leave those workers under the poverty line for a family of three.)

  Reich reminds us that in Paul Ryan's Republican budget 62 percent of spending cuts fall on the poor. But it's hard to see just how much can be squeezed there: one key thing that spending does is to make it possible for workers to work for less, so you might as well view the "safety net" as a bizarre form of subsidy for low-wage employers. Take that away and what happens? Hard to say, but it's already ugly, and getting worse. Businesses feel pressure mostly from their financial backers to push wages down, but that in turn pushes the buying power of the economy down, which increases those financial pressures (as if sheer greed wasn't enough), into a form of death spiral. It's one of those trends that can't go on forever without something breaking bad.

Also, for further study:

• Bruce Bartlett: Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: Oh, to be young and Republican again. Well, not really. I had pretty much written him off as a possibly useful source after his series of special pleading books, but I saw him on TV recently and no one -- and on a panel where everyone was respectable or better -- managed to be so sharp and pointed. This piece explains how he got to where he is now, a combination of push (revulsion over George W. Bush) and pull (realization that Paul Krugman is always right). Still, he probably does still yearn to be young and Republican again: he just knows that neither are possible.

Some scattered links I collected over the previous week:

• John Cassidy: Gaza: More Funerals, More Questions: A thoughtful piece putting the small picture in big picture context.

  As is often the case in Israel, some of the most enlightening commentary is coming from former intelligence officers and members of the armed forces, who have learned the hard way the limits of military action. Writing in Monday's Financial Times, Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, noted that the operation, although militarily successful, could have unanticipated and negative effects, such as strengthening Hamas' standing in the Arab world and causing unrest in countries friendly to Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan. If it doesn't want to become increasingly isolated, Israel will have to "contribute to an Egyptian-crafted and American-supported formula for the region," Halevy wrote. And moreover: "Israel will have to do what no government has done before: determine a comprehensive strategy on the future of Gaza and its 2m inhabitants."

  It's worth noting that these are issues that didn't need a war to discover, and can't be fixed by war -- although some people evidently need to be reminded of war's futility before they're willing to move on and do something constructive. The Israeli exes are always a good case in point: invariably, they rose through the ranks by being hawks, only to discover by their retirement that they hadn't accomplished a damn thing.

• Helena Cobban: West Point Military Historian Denies the Net Value of a Decade of War: Cites a New York Times piece by Elisabeth Bumiller on Col. Gian Gentile, a name I've run across in several books on Iraq. Bumiller writes:

  Narrowly, the argument is whether the counterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq and Afghanistan -- the troop-heavy, time-intensive, expensive doctrine of trying to win over the locals by building roads, schools and government -- is dead.

  Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars.

  "Not much," Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point's military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. "Certainly not worth the effort. In my view."

  Colonel Gentile, long a critic of counterinsurgency, represents one side of the divide at West Point. On the other is Col. Michael J. Meese, the head of the academy's influential social sciences department and a top adviser to General Petraeus in Baghdad and Kabul when General Petraeus commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [ . . . ]

  The debate at West Point mirrors one under way in the armed forces as a whole as the United States withdraws without clear victory from Afghanistan and as the results in Iraq remain ambiguous at best. (On the ABC News program "This Week" on Sunday, the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, called the Taliban "resilient" after 10 and a half years of war.)

  But at West Point the debate is personal, and a decade of statistics -- more than 6,000 American service members dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than $1 trillion spent -- hit home. [ . . . ]

  In Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal so aggressively pushed the doctrine when he was the top commander there that troops complained they had to hold their firepower. General Petraeus issued guidelines that clarified that troops had the right to self-defense when he took over, but by then counterinsurgency had attracted powerful critics, chief among them Mr. Biden and veteran military officers who denigrated it as armed nation building.

  When Mr. Obama announced last June that he would withdraw by the end of this summer the 30,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan -- earlier than the military wanted or expected -- the doctrine seemed to be on life support. General Petraeus has since become director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where his mission is covertly killing the enemy, not winning the people.

  Cobban, of course, didn't have to do the math to figure out that the "war on terror" wasn't worth it. It never is. Cobban talks more about Syria and Iran: countries that the US threatened to invade from Iraq in 2003, and which are still in the warmongers' planning book. Elsewhere, she's trying to raise money to get Gareth Porter to write what promises to be an important book on Iran: Manufactured Crisis: The Secret History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare. She also wrote Obama Admin Willfully Blind on Gaza Crisis?.

• Juan Cole: Top Ten Steps That Are Necessary for Lasting Gaza-Israeli Peace (or, Good Luck!): Most of this is basic and should not be controversial. I would emphasize that every Palestinian should be a citizen with full and equal rights wherever he or she resides. If, in any given locale, Israel does not offer such citizenship, that locale should be completely independent of Israel, with a democracy established there and freedom to trade and travel with the rest of the world. And while, as a practical matter, I think it is Israel's choice what to keep and what to discard, a Palestinian state in the West Bank must be contiguous, have external borders, and control of its own air space in order to be completely independent, so not just any arbitrary whim would work there. (Return to the 1967 borders would work, and is preferable for many other reasons.) Also, it is important to recognize that whoever wins elections in Palestine should be absolved of any past "terrorist" associations. Indeed, that's pretty much the norm throughout the world, where there have been many leaders of independence movements who were once branded terrorists but wound up as respectable heads of state -- Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir are two who somehow come to mind.

  Cole's blog, by the way, has numerous pieces since this one on Egyptian President Morsi's executive power grab, which instantly turned him from the hero of the Gaze cease fire to anti-democratic demon. It certainly looks like he overreached, but bear in mind that thus far the only targets of Morsi's efforts have been residual elements of the Mubarak dictatorship.

• Gershom Gorenberg: Israel's New Gaza Mess: Israel's strategy of acting unilaterally, as opposed to negotiating, is inherently unstable, in large part because it lets each side choose its own favored narrative, whereas agreements bind both sides to a common resolution. Case in point: Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which Hamas viewed as vindicating their militancy, Fatah regarded as a step toward negotiation, and Sharon saw as a way of simplifying the firing zone.

  Of course, those talks never happened. Sharon chose a unilateral pullout precisely to avoid peace negotiations, since they could only succeed if Israel agreed to leave nearly all of the West Bank as well. As he planned, disengagement squelched interest in Israel in the Geneva Accord, the model for a peace agreement unofficially hammered out by Palestinians and Israelis. As one of Sharon's top advisers predicted, the disengagement put President George W. Bush's roadmap for peace "in formaldehyde." It allowed Sharon to evade the challenge posed by Mahmud Abbas's accession to the Palestinian presidency: Abbas very publicly wanted (and wants) to negotiate Palestinian independence in the West Bank and Gaza.

  Sharon believed that Israel could safely leave Gaza without peace, and without the security arrangements of a peace agreement. Israeli military power and its control of Gaza's borders would deter Palestinian attacks.

  He was mistaken. What failed was not withdrawal from occupied territory. The failure was doing so unilaterally. Abbas's unfulfilled promise of diplomatic progress contributed to Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 legislative election. That was the first step in the chain reaction leading to the violent split in the Palestinian Authority, the Hamas takeover of Gaza, and all that has followed. [ . . . ]

  Dealing with Gaza, one American option is to promote rather than block creation of a Palestinian unity government. Another is to push to extend the indirect Israel-Hamas negotiation of recent days in Cairo, and aim at turning Gaza into a Taiwan-style non-state: able to claim all of Palestine as long as it does nothing about it, able to develop free of the Israeli blockade.

• MJ Rosenberg: Ugly Senate Gaza Resolution, and Ceasefire Agreement: What It Means: The two posts mostly quote core documents, providing a neat summary of Israel's latest Gaza war. I started to write a post on the former, which shows how completely Congress has given up both mind and heart to AIPAC. If you follow their subservience through, the logical conclusion is that the US can have no foreign policy of its own in the Middle East -- we should just let Israel call the shots. It's not clear what exactly Obama and Clinton did in the run up to a cease fire agreement that they graciously let Egypt take credit and blame for, but despite some lame and embarrassing statements[*], they don't seem to have goaded Israel on, like Bush and Rice did with Lebanon in 2006. I don't see any winners in war, but will note that faces in Israel were most often glum after the cease fire while those in Gaza were jubilant. The ugly blood lust spewed by right-wing Israelis wasn't even attempted[**], and the "significant degradation" of the rocket arsenal in Gaza was mostly accomplished by provoking "militant" groups in Gaza to fire the rockets harmlessly over the wall. But it wasn't really the resolve of either side that endured or failed. The cease fire validates the new normal, which is mostly the result of Egypt's revolution opening up the Gaza border, putting an end to Israel's stranglehold over "the world's largest outdoor jail."

  [*] Aren't you sick of hearing about "Israel's right to defend itself," especially when that claim is used to justify attacking others? Rockets from Gaza were a nuisance this year, but had killed zero Israelis until Israel started this operation, which provoked the firing of over 1,450 rockets, resulting in six Israeli deaths -- all of which could have been avoided by relaxing the blockade that had been strangling 1.7 million people in Gaza. By Israel's same logic, Mexico would have been more than justified using F-16s to bomb gun shops in Arizona and Texas.

  [**] Israel killed 189 Palestinians (Israel's own stats say 177), a senseless and totally unnecessary number -- far below the 1,417 killed during Operation Cast Lead in 2008. Six Israelis were killed: two soldiers and four civilians. Injuries, of course, were far more numerous. On the last day, 21 Israelis were injured (none killed) by a bomb on a Tel Aviv bus -- the first such bombing in eight years. Whether this bombing or the use of more powerful, longer range Iranian rockets had any influence on Israel's decision to agree to the cease fire is anyone's guess. Hamas "militants" are likely to conclude that they should replenish their missile stocks to deter future Israeli attacks -- an argument that can be undercut by Israeli actively seeking to normalize relations with an independent Gaza. Israel has shown no interest in any such thing -- a stance where the "militants" on both sides reinforce each other.

• Adam Shatz: Why Israel Didn't Win: The cease fire stopped the shooting (for now) but didn't solve the conflict:

  The fighting will erupt again, because Hamas will come under continued pressure from its members and from other militant factions, and because Israel has never needed much pretext to go to war. In 1982, it broke its ceasefire with Arafat's PLO and invaded Lebanon, citing the attempted assassination of its ambassador to London, even though the attack was the work of Arafat's sworn enemy, the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal. In 1996, during a period of relative calm, it assassinated Hamas's bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, the 'Engineer,' leading Hamas to strike back with a wave of suicide attacks in Israeli cities. When, a year later, Hamas proposed a thirty-year hudna, or truce, Binyamin Netanyahu dispatched a team of Mossad agents to poison the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman; under pressure from Jordan and the US, Israel was forced to provide the antidote, and Meshaal is now the head of Hamas's political bureau -- and an ally of Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi.

  Operation Pillar of Defence, Israel's latest war, began just as Hamas was cobbling together an agreement for a long-term ceasefire. Its military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, was assassinated only hours after he reviewed the draft proposal. [ . . . ]

  Israeli leaders lamented for years that theirs was the only democracy in the region. What this season of revolts has revealed is that Israel had a very deep investment in Arab authoritarianism. The unravelling of the old Arab order, when Israel could count on the quiet complicity of Arab big men who satisfied their subjects with flamboyant denunciations of Israeli misdeeds but did little to block them, has been painful for Israel, leaving it feeling lonelier than ever. It is this acute sense of vulnerability, even more than Netanyahu's desire to bolster his martial credentials before the January elections, that led Israel into war.

  Hamas, meanwhile, has been buoyed by the same regional shifts, particularly the triumph of Islamist movements in Tunisia and Egypt: Hamas, not Israel, has been 'normalised' by the Arab uprisings. Since the flotilla affair, it has developed a close relationship with Turkey, which is keen to use the Palestinian question to project its influence in the Arab world. It also took the risk of breaking with its patrons in Syria: earlier this year, Khaled Meshaal left Damascus for Doha, while his number two, Mousa Abu Marzook, set himself up in Cairo. Since then, Hamas has thrown in its lot with the Syrian uprising, distanced itself from Iran, and found new sources of financial and political support in Qatar, Egypt and Tunisia. [ . . . ]

  The Palestinians understand that they are no longer facing Israel on their own: Israel, not Hamas, is the region's pariah. The Arab world is changing, but Israel is not. Instead, it has retreated further behind Jabotinsky's 'iron wall,' deepening its hold on the Occupied Territories, thumbing its nose at a region that is at last acquiring a taste of its own power, exploding in spasms of high-tech violence that fail to conceal its lack of a political strategy to end the conflict.

• Stephen M Walt: The Real Lessons of L'Affaire Petraeus: Best snark I've seen so far was on the back page of Entertainment Weekly which proclaimed All In, Paul Broadwell's hagiography of her paramour ex-Gen. David Petraeus, the yuckiest book title of all time. Walt makes several good points, including that Petraeus's reputation d for Iraq wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and that his performance in Afghanistan came up even shorter. Also:

  Second, this whole episode reminds us of the corrupt and incestual relationship that exists throughout the national security establishment, to include lots of people in the media and commentariat. As I've written before, the excessive deference -- indeed, veneration -- often given the U.S. military is not healthy, because it encourages both journalists and academics to suck up to powerful and charismatic generals instead of treating them as public servants who need to be aggressively challenged.

  He also quotes Glenn Greenwald:

  So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell's physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime -- at most, they had a case of "cyber-harassment" more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people -- and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court.

  Walt also links to Michael Hastings: The Sins of General Petraeus, who offers this:

  But the warning signs about Petraeus' core dishonesty have been around for years. Here's a brief summary: We can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or that, in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. The policy wasn't working, but Bush repaid the general's political advocacy by giving him the top job in the war three years later.

  There's his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He's more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as "Iraqi death squads." On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called "surge," he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.

  He did it by papering over what the surge actually was: We took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we'd help them out too. It was a brutal enterprise -- over 800 Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus' policies fueled. Then he popped smoke and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. [ . . . ]

  Petraeus was so convincing on Baghdad that he manipulated President Obama into trying the same thing in Kabul. In Afghanistan, he first underhandedly pushed the White House into escalating the war in September 2009 (calling up columnists to "box" the president in) and waged a full-on leak campaign to undermine the White House policy process. Petraeus famously warned his staff that the White House was "fucking" with the wrong guy.

  The doomed Afghanistan surge would come back to bite him in the ass, however. A year after getting the war he wanted, P4 got stuck having to fight it himself. After Petraeus frenemy General Stanley McChrystal got fired for trashing the White House in a story I published in Rolling Stone, the warrior-scholar had to deploy yet again.

  The Afghan war was a loser, always was, and always would be -- Petraeus made horrible deals with guys like Abdul Razzik and the other Afghan gangsters and killed a bunch of people who didn’t need to be killed. And none of it mattered, or made a dent in his reputation. This was the tour where Broadwell joined him at headquarters, and it's not so shocking that he'd need to find some solace, somewhere, to get that daily horror show out of his mind.

  My first guess was that the affair was just one more aspect of Petraeus' cultivation of the press -- although it did make me wonder what Thomas Ricks got out of him. Walt also links to Robert Wright: The Real David Petraeus Scandal, which focuses more on Petraeus' tenure at the CIA:

  The militarization of the CIA raises various questions. For example, if the CIA is psychologically invested in a particular form of warfare -- and derives part of its budget from that kind of warfare -- can it be trusted to impartially assess the consequences, both positive and negative, direct and indirect? [ . . . ]

  What's wrong with this opaqueness? For starters, you'd think that in a democracy the people would be entitled to know how exactly their tax dollars are being used to kill people -- especially people in countries we're not at war with. But there's also a more pragmatic reason to want more transparency.

  These drone strikes are a radical departure from America's traditional use of violence in pursuit of national security. In contrast to things like invading or bombing a country as part of some well-defined and plausibly finite campaign, our drone strike program is diffuse and, by all appearances, endless. Every month, God knows how many people are killed in the name of the US in any of several countries, and God knows how many of these people were actually militants, or how many of the actual militants were actual threats to the US, or how much hatred the strikes are generating or how much of that hatred will eventually morph into anti-American terrorism. It might behoove us, before we accept this nauseating spectacle as a permanent feature of life, to fill in as many of these blanks as possible. You can't do that in the dark. [ . . . ]

  The vision implicit in this program is of an America whose great calling is to lead the world into a future of chaos and lawlessness.

  This prospect was vividly highlighted when, a bit more than a year ago, Obama had David Petraeus turn in his stars so he could move to the CIA and keep fighting wars. There have been other military men who headed the CIA, but never has there been one whose move to Langley brought so much continuity with what he was doing before he went there.

  The circumstances of Petraeus's departure from the CIA are a little alarming; you'd rather your chief spy not be reckless. But the circumstances of his arrival at the CIA a year ago were more troubling. Yet no alarm was sounded that was anywhere near as loud as the hubbub surrounding Petraeus now. That's scandalous.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Gershon Baskin: Israel's Shortsighted Assassination: Hamas military chief, Ahmed Al-Jabari, the person who negotiated the Gilad Shalit deal: can't have people like that running free; they night negotiate with you again, and then where would you be? Of course, the title could have referred to nearly any of Israel's assassinations. One of the most short-sighted was when Shimon Peres ordered the murder of Yahya Ayyash (a previous Hamas military commander, one of a neverending supply) in 1996, triggering a series of reprisal attacks that cost Peres his job. But then Peres wouldn't have been Prime Minister at the time but for another Israeli assassination, the one that killed Yitzhak Rabin, and with him the Oslo Accords Peace Process.

• Brad DeLong: The Morgenthau Plan and the Marshall Plan: How to rebuild (or wreck) post-WWII Germany.

• Brad DeLong: Somehow I Think that They Are Still in Kansas, Toto: An outsider's analysis of what's happening in Kansas politically -- some useful comments here, especially from "Kansas Jack"; I wanted to do a whole post on this, but never got to it -- partly because I only have minor quibbles.

• Michelle Goldberg: The Obama-Bashing Book Bonanza: On Dinesh D'Souza's Obama's America, and the market for histrionic Obama-bashing books. Goldberg also has a review of Robert O. Self: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Breadwinner Conservatism:

  Self has set himself an ambitious goal in his new book: to explain why, ever since the 1960s, battles over sex, gender and the meaning of family have become inextricable from battles over the size and scope of the government. For conservative activists since the '80s, the defense of the autonomous, idealized nuclear family "was intimately linked to the way they also sought to limit government interference in the private market," Self writes. "These stories are not often told together. Questions of gender, sex, and family have been isolated as part of the 'culture war' -- a struggle that has been seen as tangential to the politics of equality, power, and money."

• Jim Lobe: Israel Ranked World's Most Militarised Nation: As ranked by Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC). Looks like US was underrated at 29 (China 82, India 71, Iran 34) -- seems to be a bias toward small countries (Greece 14, Jordan 5), not that Israel didn't win fair and square. (North Korea, which might have been a rival, was disqualified.)

• Oded Na'aman: Is Gaza Outside Israel?: Quotes from the book Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies From the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010 (Metropolitan Books).

Some scattered links, as usual. But first, the quote of the week comes from Maureen Dowd (of all people):

Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change.

Also good that she quoted Karen Hughes (who had much more claim to having been Bush's Brain than Karl Rove ever did): "If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue."

• James K Galbraith: The Coming Debt Battle:

  That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know. The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the "Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget" is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.

  Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades -- since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the "Mississippi of cash flows." Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.

  And the campaign is also partly political. The fact is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the main way ordinary Americans connect to their federal government, except in wars and disasters. They have made a vast change in family life, unburdening the young of their parents and ensuring that every working person contributes whether they have parents, dependents, survivors or disabled of their own to look after. These programs do this work seamlessly, for next to nothing; their managers earn civil service salaries and the checks arrive on time. For the private competition, this is intolerable; the model is a threat to free markets and must be destroyed. [ . . . ]

  Can a federal insurance program go bankrupt? Of course it can't. Bankruptcy is a legal process for private citizens seeking relief from unpayable debts. How can the obligations of Social Security or Medicare ever be unpayable? These are public programs, not private companies. All the federal government has to do is to write the checks, pursuant to law. As for the size of the checks, it will be whatever Congress prescribes at any given time. Bankruptcy as a concept does not apply. So what are they talking about? Lies and nonsense, nothing more. [ . . . ]

  Do we have budget problems? Yes: We spend too much on military hardware and wars; the talent, materials and technologies that go into that are wasted and cannot be used, say, to protect New York from storm surge. Our rich build too many mansions, thanks to their CEO incomes and their low tax rates; letting the Bush tax cuts expire will usefully dent that purchasing power.

  But Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid impose no such future burdens. They are transfers in current time. They meet today's commitments to seniors, survivors, dependents, the disabled and the ill -- commitments they have earned through work -- providing them with income and services at the expense of others also currently alive. This any community can always do, to the full extent of its will and resources. The future has nothing to do with it. Except that, from a moral point of view, it's useful for the young to learn that we are a community, in which working people take care of those who can't.

  By the way, and I can't say this often enough, Galbraith's book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, is the most important political book of the last decade.

• Sally Kohn: How Obama Can Turn a Campaign Into a Movement:

  More than 10 million Americans donated to the Obama campaign this election. At least a million volunteered to knock on doors and make phone calls. Now that the election is over, they can do more than click on a petition now and then and sign the president's Father's Day card. They can be organizing in House districts around sequestration or mounting state-by-state campaigns to pass a constitutional amendment getting money out of our politics. Converting the president's electoral base into a vibrant, independent progressive movement in America will help the president, the Democratic Party and, in the long term, our nation.

  Could be done, although I've never seen any evidence that Obama wants to build up the Democratic Party for anything other than his own reëlection, and that's over.

• Mattea Kramer/Chris Hellman: It's the Politics, Stupid: Co-authors of the book, A People's Guide to the Federal Budget, they explain the "fiscal cliff," finding it more an obstacle course, a set of political evasions timed to look like a crisis until they can be evaded again. Most items, including sequestration of spending cuts, they expect will be kicked down the road, while the middle class fraction of the Bush tax cuts can be repassed if the Republicans don't hold it hostage for the rich. That leaves:

  Among all the spending and tax changes in the queue, and all the hype around the cliff, the great unknown is whether it's finally farewell to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. And that's no perilous cliff. Letting those high-end tax cuts expire would amount to a blink-and-you-miss-it 0.003% contraction in the U.S. economy, according to Moody's, and it would raise tens of billions of dollars in desperately-needed tax revenue next year. That's no small thing when you consider that federal revenue has fallen to its lowest point in more than half a century. Ending these tax cuts for the wealthy would bring in cash to reduce deficits or increase funding for cash-starved priorities like higher education.

• Paul Krugman: Let's Not Make a Deal:

  Even though preliminary estimates suggest that Democrats received somewhat more votes than Republicans in Congressional elections, the G.O.P. retains solid control of the House thanks to extreme gerrymandering by courts and Republican-controlled state governments. And Representative John Boehner, the speaker of the House, wasted no time in declaring that his party remains as intransigent as ever, utterly opposed to any rise in tax rates even as it whines about the size of the deficit.

  So President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.'s demands?

  My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a "grand bargain" on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

• Alex Pareene: Hey, Obama, Let's Actually Fix Elections: I'll spare you the link to Pareene's bizarre "Why I Voted for Mitt Romney" post, but this much is worth quoting:

  The president should obviously be elected by national popular vote, and it's outrageous that Wyoming has two senators and D.C. has none, but short of junking the Constitution, we're stuck with those sad realities for the time being. It's bizarre that there's not more outrage over the fact that the House will be majority Republican (likely until 2022) despite more votes being cast for Democrats, but unlike the existence of the U.S. Senate, this can be fixed without altering or amending our nation's archaic founding document. While I'd obviously most prefer a larger House with proportional representation and instant-runoff or ranked voting (and, sure, multiple member districts -- let's dream big!), we should at the very least stop allowing district drawing to be a partisan-controlled affair. (And, again, an anti-gerrymandering crusade could be sold as bipartisan -- fighting back against the extremists in both parties!)

  But back in reality, none of these things can be fixed as long as either side thinks it has an advantage in the status quo, and as long as either side has no commitment to the fundamental idea of democracy (the Republicans sure don't, and often one wonders about the Democrats). If you asked ordinary people there'd be a lot of support for getting rid of the system of bribery known as campaign fundraising, but everyone elected has more or less been selected by just that system. A few decades ago one might have looked to the courts for help in cleaning up partisan efforts to distort elections, but judges themselves are increasingly selected for their political allegiances, so they are increasingly part of the system.

• Rick Perlstein: America Didn't Vote for a "Grand Bargain": Now that the Great Compromiser has been reëlected, the great fear is that he'll cut a deal with Republicans that trades long-term damage to Social Security and Medicare for a bit of short-term economic boost. Perlstein argues that that's not his mandate, and it certainly is true that the key to Obama's recovery and surge after his weak first debate came from his sudden will to stand up for principle. Still, politicians routinely walk away from their pre-election commitments, and he backed off from a bunch of them in 2009.

  America's government is not too big. It is not "out of control." Measured by the number of public sector employees compared to the overall population, in fact, it is at its smallest size since 1968. The Democratic compulsion to take the lead in making it smaller, to "control" it, is in itself a serious historic problem -- and a perverse one at that. For it doesn't work. Bill Clinton tried it in the 1990s, working with Republicans in Congress both to obliterate the deficit caused by Republican budgetary mismanagement, and "end welfare as we know it."

  What happened to the resulting budgetary surplus they created? Republican mismanagement and ideological extremism obliterated it [ . . . ]

  A simple historical fact: There is no political payoff for Democrats in presiding over governmental austerity. The evidence goes far back to long before Bill Clinton. In the mid-1970s, the first superstar of the Democratic austerity movement, William Proxmire, a budgetary obsessive whose campaign bumper stickers read "Waste Will Bury Us," began awarding a monthly "Golden Fleece Award" to the government expenditure he judged the most wasteful -- a clown show that frequently had no more effect than making things difficult for scientists doing basic research that frequently led to revolutionary breakthroughs. Austerity was the ideology of Gov. Jerry Brown in California, too -- and also the man who beat Brown for the Democratic presidential nominee in 1976, Jimmy Carter, who announced, in his 1978 State of the Union address that "Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or provide energy."

  What Carter said wasn't even true; for instance, he did deploy the power of government to reduce inflation, by appointing a Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, with a mandate to squeeze the money supply, an act of deliberate austerity that induced the recession that defeated him. Like I said, there was no political payoff: Ronald Reagan, depicting Carter on the campaign trail as just another Democratic spendthrift, defeated him, reappointed Volcker, then harvested the political credit when Volcker's governmental policies did slay inflation.

  It should be telling that fiscal responsibility is always the prescription for Democrats, but for Republicans, as Dick Cheney famously said, "deficits don't matter." Obama makes us nervous because his commitment to fiscal balance does seem to be real. However, he must realize that the only way he can get there is to raise taxes, and primarily on the rich, and also that cuts and privatization deals on Social Security and/or Medicare don't save him anything -- they result in less effective less efficient programs that cost more in the long run. If he wants something that would actually work to bring deficits under control, he can't do anything that stupid. What he can shoot for is more tax revenues (both through higher rates on the rich and through growth), less wasteful discretionary spending (ending the war in Afghanistan, not starting any more, trimming the military budget back), and most important of all, controlling health care costs. And the key to the latter is the opposite of the privatization the Republicans demand.

  By the way, I'm a big fan of William Proxmire, and he actually did benefit electorally for his efforts -- he was hugely popular, often running up 80% margins in Wisconsin. But he mostly attacked wasteful military spending, and he doesn't seem to have been all that effective at it, even though he scored lots of small wins.

• Mat Stoller: Obama's Second Term: Can Liberals Trust the President?: Well, no: "My bet is that Obama will continue the policy framework he pursued in his first term." Stoller lists some "domestic flash points": Fiscal Cliff, Budget; Global Warming; Fannie/Freddie/Foreclosures; Dodd-Frank; Marijuana; Trade and Trans-Pacific Partnership; Immigration, Race to the Top, Strikes; The Post-Election Narrative. I think there is reason to think Obama will do some things better than four years ago. For one thing, he has some experience now about what doesn't work. He also faces smaller problems: even if he gets another dip into recession, it won't be like the freefall he inherited last time; he's out of Iraq, and he's given Afghanistan enough of a shot that he can unwind that. Too bad he didn't do anything useful on housing, but at least some of the urgency is off that. Too bad about global warming, but at least FEMA has been saved. He's going to be less cowed by his staff -- he's been president a while, he's gotten more used to throwing his weight around, and that whole "team of rivals" shtick is finished: Gates is gone, so are Summers and Emmanuel and Orszag, and Clinton and Geithner and probably Holder are leaving, and good riddance to all of them -- and especially to Petraeus. They won't necessarily be replaced by better people politically, but they'll give way to people who will owe Obama more and serve him better. None of this changes Obama's personal conservatism or political pragmatism -- he won't do anything radical because he's just not that sort of guy. What might nudge him to the left (or to the right) is grass roots political activism -- like Occupy, or the Tea Party (they do seem like a spent force, not that the money behind them is all spent).

• Rich Yeselson: Rage Machine vs. Turnout Machine: Interesting contrast here to Canada's Conservative Party, which successfully appeals to immigrants, doesn't fret about gay marriage or abortion let alone Canada's hugely popular Medicare system.

  In the US, any possibility of the GOP appealing to the economic interests of most white men, as opposed to massaging their beleaguered sense of identity, must be subsumed to the antithetical economic priorities of the GOP's plutocratic donor class. In short, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers are ardent rent seekers from the federal government, union haters and tax avoiders, while promoting the demolition of social insurance for the 99.9%. They do not share most of the same economic goals as the guy wearing the "Put The White Back in the White House" t-shirt at a Romney rally. Yet rage and paranoia paradoxically bind these billionaires and white male small business owners and contractors: see, for example the Adelson owned newspaper in Israel's headline after Obama's victory, "Socialism Comes To America."

  The historian Steven Fraser has called the modern Right's proprietary and gendered authority over both the workplace and the family unit, "family capitalism." Family capitalism is a shared value system of both the billionaires and the base. [ . . . ] Bridging the gap between the rich and the ranks is the professional activist class that puts forth lunatic politicians like Steve King and Michelle Bachmann, and the conservative entertainment complex of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge.

  The three rings of this circus -- the paranoid billionaires, the activist and media crackpots, and the resentful elderly and white men (and, frequently, their spouses) -- are tied so tightly that it would destroy the party if the links were broken.

I suppose I could inaugurate a section on truly stupid ideas, like Kevin Drum's nomination of Mitt Romney for Treasury Secretary: "How much friendler toward banks could he be than Tim Geithner?" Is that the standard to look for? And I thought Erskine Bowles was a bad idea.

Haven't found anything useful yet on the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, but it strikes me as something of more than prurient interest: no general since MacArthur has worked so assiduously and successfully at courting the press than Petraeus (unless it was Colin Powell, who if he did managed the feat much less conspicuously) but did you really expect him to stoop this low? At this point, Broadwell's motives are less clear, especially with all the innuendo, but the least one can say is that she went well beyond professionalism to get the story -- or a story, the one that promoted her source's career.

Reading Chandrasekaran's recent book on Afghanistan makes it clear that Petraeus threw his COIN strategy under the bus as soon as he was dropped into his protégé McChrystal's command post, then he hastened his exit before he could get excessively tarred with the war's utter failure. It was only a matter of time before history caught up with one of the great frauds of our time. Still, surprise that the tabloids got him first.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Charles Duhigg/Steve Lohr: The Patent, Used as a Sword: Long piece on the evils of patents, especially software and design patents used in smart phones. I'm personally much more negative about patents than the authors. I'd get rid of them even if the result is that nothing new ever gets invented. But, of course, that wouldn't be the result. The result would be that no one ever gets sued for inventing something that someone else has some vague legal claim to. And another result would be that companies couldn't extort rents from customers, especially in health care where patented products are claimed to be lifesaving.

• Mark Lilla: The Great Disconnect: Review of Charles R. Kesler's book, I Am the Change, what Lilla calls "a cheap inflationary takedown" of Obama, contrasting the book to the more "deflationary" takedowns typical of right-wingers like Dinesh D'Souza. Kesler accuses Obama of Hegelianism and finds the missing link in Woodrow Wilson, while Lilla is so desperate to find a rational conservative counter to his centrism that he follows him down the rat hole. Lilla even starts out with an attempt to paint Nixon as the socialist Obama isn't, an amusing little bit of bullshit. No need to quote this stuff -- I'm bookmarking it because I'm morbidly fascinated with right-wing books on Obama. But what I will quote is Denis Clifford's letter:

  "The level of political discourse has dropped," Mark Lilla says (Up Front, Sept. 30), and his review contributes mightily to diminishing it. He claims that "the Great Society's liberal architects vastly overreached and overpromised," without mentioning that the Vietnam War, so vehemently pursued by many of President Lyndon Johnson's "liberal architects," ruined the hopes of the Great Society domestic policies. We'll never know what might have happened in America if those "best and brightest" hadn't made their first priority the insanity of the Vietnam War.

• Nate Silver: As Nation and Parties Change, Republicans Are at an Electoral College Disadvantage: Seems like it's long been the other way, what with the Republican domination of the small mountain states and their disproportionate power in the Senate. Plus you hate to give Republicans even a whiff of a notion that they're victimized by something structural. But I have to admire how artfully Silver puts his chart together. The other thing this shows is while Democrats are effective where they bother to compete, they don't have a lot of obvious options for growth -- with Missouri and Indiana sunk, and the deep south still locked in the white column, maybe Arizona or Montana?

• Drew Westen: America's Leftward Tilt?: From before the election, argues that both candidates became more popular when they moved toward the left.