Picked up the newspapers this morning. The Wichita Eagle had better things in it than the New York Times. First, Richard Crowson's editorial cartoon:

The cartoon was also reinforced by a letter from Chris Darnell, titled "What Choice?":

Your employer chooses a health insurance company. That insurance company has a list of doctors you can use, but only those in network. The insurance company tells your doctor what medicines are best for you and won't pay for those outside their formulary. It may even tell you which pharmacy you can use. The insurance company tells you which hospital you can use. Where is all this choice you think you will lose with President Obama's health care plan?

Are you afraid of rationing of health care? An estimated 45,000 people die each year for lack of medical coverage and health care. That is rationing.

Are you afraid we will become a socialist nation if we have affordable medical coverage available for everyone? The United Kingdom has a national health service -- unlike what we are planning here -- and everyone knows the U.K. is not socialist.

It just can't be moral to allow people to suffer and die because they can't afford health care. Health care for everyone is the right thing to do.

They also have a long piece by Les Blumenthal of McClatchy, Tanker bid rhetoric heats up in Congress. This is the $35 billion boondoggle contract to build new tankers for the Air Force, a scam that was originally cooked up by Boeing to extend the life of their obsolete 767 airliner assembly line, which has now turned into a political tussle between Boeing and Northrup, the latter the US front for Airbus. Kansas politicians have always dutifully lined up behind Boeing and its promise of 500 (originally 1000) jobs for Wichita. (I mean, where else can you get a jobs program for only $70 million per job, a feat so awesome even Republicans get stimulated.) Each side has their bought representatives -- Sen. Richard Shelby the most vocal for Northrup, while Kansas Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a Boeing employee until he was elected to Congress, is so obsessive about Boeing tankers that Bush nicknamed him Tanker Todd. On the other hand, Tiahrt's stock at Boeing seems to be dropping: recently Boeing announced that if they get the contract they may do the work somewhere else than in Wichita -- depends on where they find the political clout to land the deal. In that case the jobs payola for Wichita will probably turn out to be negative: once the Air Force decomissions its aging KC-135 tankers (and even older B-52 bombers), there will be no reason to keep Wichita's McConnell Air Force Base going. No one here seems to grasp the jobs-value of keeping old planes flying where the only skills to do that are here, versus buying a bunch of unneeded new planes that can be built and serviced somewhere else.

Still, nobody's asking the real question, which is why do we need or want a new generation of tankers in the first place? The main thing they do is make it easier to get involved in foreign wars. You would think that a president who promised to change the way we think about war would start by changing the way he thinks about subsidizing the war machine.

Speaking of which, the New York Times has an op-ed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, A Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe. The tanker deal is small potatoes compared to missile defense, the grandaddy of all war industry scams. It has been a bad idea ever since Melvin Laird put it on the Republican agenda: insanely expensive, brazenly aggressive, and flat-out unworkable. Obama could have killed it off once and for all, but instead he merely scaled it back and tried selling that as "smarter missile defense." Gates, who's done his share over the years to keep it going, puts it this way:

The future of missile defense in Europe is secure. This reality is contrary to what some critics have alleged about President Obama's proposed shift in America's missile-defense plans on the continent -- and it is important to understand how and why.

He then goes on to hype the Iran threat, at a time when the usual hawks are clamoring again for bombing Tehran. While many progressives are elated that Obama cancelled installation of missiles and radars in Poland and Czechoslovakia that Bush had planned for little purpose other than to irritate Russia, I find Obama's relatively sane plan disappointing. Strategic missile defense is one of the weakest pillars of US defense posture, a clearcut case where one can explain that the technology cannot and will not work, and that the only viable options are non-military. In playing along with this game, Obama is missing a prime opportunity to effect the sort of change he was elected for promising. Plus c'est le même chose, jamais change.

Trying to clean up my virtual desktop, closing browser tabs on pages I opened up but hadn't done with. Some quick notes:

• Matthew Yglesias: Huckabee Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Territories [August 18]: It used to be that Americans would show their support by making Israel seem more benign than it is, but now we're seeing ambitious Republicans starting to move beyond Israel's far right flank. I've said all along that the neocons didn't love Israel so much as they envied it: they wanted the US to attack the world with the same arrogance Israel showed. Of course, it's hard to tell with Huckabee: he may be part of the GOP's race to the bottom, or he may just be pining for the apocalypse. More on Huckabee by Richard Silverstein and Glenn Greenwald.

• Nicholas Beaudrot: The Flowchart: This was copied by Krugman, Yglesias, probably others, but has gone through a couple of extra iterations here. One problem with this is that Obama isn't out reassuring the 78 million folks on Medicare or Medicaid that there will be "no change" -- he keeps talking about the need for cost savings there. The "new consumer protections" are also likely to cost more, especially in private insurance premiums -- not that they won't go up otherwise. Possible cost savings is an interesting wonk topic, but what people need to know is that reform won't make the current situation worse. How much better is far less important.

• Robert Reich: The Public Option's Last Stand, and the Public's [August 17]: Response to Obama's (or Sebelius's?) concession on the public option, a willingness to go with private sector insurance co-ops. I can see some ways to make the latter work, but public insurance would have a lot more clout in the marketplace, would be able to drive better bargains, would have the numbers to ignore adverse selection problems, and would have a political commitment to success. Moreover, the main reason for not having government-backed insurance is precisely the political turf we're fighting over. The only reason not to go that way (unless you own one of the rackets masquerading as private insurance companies) is that you fear Republicans will wind up running it. That would indeed be awful, but that's also an avoidable scenario.
• Paul Krugman: The Swiss Menace [August 16]: Perfectly reasonable and sane explanation of public health care options, and why Obama's isn't all that bad. "At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies." One thing that Krugman didn't mention is that while the US spends 15.3% of its GDP on its non-universal health care, Switzerland ranks as the second most expensive nation, at 11.3%.
• Barack Obama: Why We Need Health Care Reform [August 15]: "This is a complicated and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate." Still, this is sketchy, and while it seems reasonable and well intentioned, doesn't allay my fears, much less the paranoid fantasies fanned by the Republicans.
• Margaret Talev: Who's behind the attacks on a health care overhaul? Hint: follow the money.

• David Goldhill: How American Health Care Killed My Father [August 14?]: "And what about us -- the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? [ . . . ] blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability?" Long article promising a "radical solution" I haven't gotten to yet, but want to get back to.
• Paul Krugman: Republican Death Trip [August 13]: "This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing."
• Lara Jakes/Anne Gearan: Gates: 'A few years' of combat in Afghanistan [August 13]: Press conference, reporting that "the Afghanistan mission can only succeed if troops are there far longer -- anywhere from five years to 12 years." Doesn't say what success means, leaving them 5-12 years to dial it even further down.
• Paul Krugman: Even more gilded [August 13]: Emmanuel Saez updates his top 0.01% income share chart to include 2007: sharp rise, to a level higher than any year as far as his chart goes back (1913).
• Carrie Peyton Dahlberg: If U.S. health care's so good, why do other people live longer? [August 12]: Good question. One reason is all the people who have no insurance. One study shows that Americans who make it to 65 and medicare are much more evenly matched with the rest of the world.

• Tony Karon: Obama, Foxman and Israel's Purpose [July 16]: "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . . Where on Earth did Barack Obama get this idea that Israel's foundation was intimately tied to the Holocaust? Maybe it's the fact that the first place Israel takes every visiting dignitary is to Yad Vashem, which as Avrum Burg has so eloquently argued, a visit designed effect what he calls the "emotional blackmail" that sears into the minds of the guest that Israel is the answer to the Holocaust, and that any criticism of the Jewish State must be muted for that reason." I just read a series of books by Rich Cohen, Idith Zertal, and Tom Segev that pound home this very point.

• Hussein Agha/Robert Malley: Obama and the Middle East [June 11]: Bush did "the wrong things poorly"; however, doing the right things poorly isn't much of an improvement.
• Lynsey Hanley: The way we live now [March 14]: Review of a book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, published in UK by Allen Lane, not available here (yet). Strikes me as a very important book: we are rich enough, but we do a bad job of sharing the wealth, and we're almost completely ignorant of how inequality hurts everyday life.

The Wichita Eagle can't let go of the Henry Louis Gates case, at least on the opinion pages, with Cal Thomas and Clarence Page weighing in today after Leonard Pitts earlier this week. It's not like they have nothing else to talk about -- health care? Afghanistan? -- but this hits their comfort zone. Not clear whether it's a teachable moment, but it's a conjecturable one. Still, I have yet to read a thing about the "concerned citizen" who called the cops on Gates -- only occasional comments accepting that the call was proper. Still, I have to wonder, what sort of neighbor pays enough attention to notice Gates prying his door open but hadn't paid enough attention to know who was living in the house? One reason this occurs to me is that I know of another recent case, across the river in Boston, where someone sicked the cops on a friend who had come to town to help out on a move. The charge -- that he had a gun -- was purely fictitious and vindictive, called in by a drunken ex-girlfriend of the movee, but the result was that my guy was cornered and shaken down by cops waving their pistols in his face. They cleared it up quickly, sent him on his way, and had a talk with the woman who filed the false complaint. But you can't say that no harm was done. I know that I, for one, wouldn't have regarded the cops' guns as any less lethal or threatening as the guns of the robbers who broke in on us a few years back.

OK, my examples don't have a race angle, whereas the Gates case does. My own view is that most likely the cops were just being cops, and they would just as readily have pushed a white guy around as they did him. The difference is that Gates stood up for his rights, whereas I, for instance, would have figured that the safest way out of the problem would be to cower under their bullying. I think the race angle comes two ways. One is that Gates knows the whole story of emancipation and struggle for civil rights and managed from that to draw the courage to stand up for his rights -- something the cop couldn't handle. The other is the curious neighbor who caused this incident. Maybe we're stuck with cops being cops, but we should pay some attention when neighbors cease to be neighbors.

Update: Not sure, but I thought I overheard something about the person who sicked the cops on Gates on the TV news tonight. Walked in and saw a rather sorry-looking woman behind a bunch of microphones making excuses for herself -- so maybe that part of the story is finally getting examined. But before I figured out what was going on, the report cut to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh complaining that Obama doesn't like white people, and someone I didn't recognize defending Obama by listing a bunch of white guys (most or all of whom are Jewish). This all strikes me as coming rather late in the day and lacking, uh, credibility: are they trying to tell me that a guy who works his way through Harvard Law, spends four years in the US Senate, and gets himself elected president of the United States has problems dealing with white people. Seems more likely to me that the problem with Beck and Limbaugh is personal.

Matthew Yglesias: The Next Tax Revolt: Had this stuck in a window for a week now, and didn't want to lose it, even though I don't have time to dig into it. Interesting point:

The United States already does about as much as any other country to curb inequality through the tax code. Where we fall short is in fighting inequality through government spending -- we just don't spend very much. If you care about inequality, in other words, the thing to focus on is not soaking the rich through the tax code but rather ensuring that there's enough tax revenue to finance generous public services. Broad social-insurance schemes like Social Security and unemployment insurance, as well as government operations more generally, are strongly progressive in their impact.

The most important issue is whether or not the government has the revenue needed to finance generous spending on social services. The Scandinavian model of a cradle-to-grave welfare state financed largely through regressive taxation is not regarded as punitive to the poor. By contrast, the pre-New Deal United States had an extremely progressive tax structure -- a simple income tax levied only on the wealthy -- but it resulted in meager revenue and financed no noteworthy social-insurance system or public services.

One thing that seems to be a general rule of US tax policy is to make taxation as visible, and therefore as painful, as possible. This actually runs counter to one of the basic (and oft-repeated) considerations in taxation: the belief that taxes disincentivize behavior. This is even considered a selling point for sin taxes. But if taxes are such a drag on the economy, it would make much more sense to make them less visible, as well as to focus them on cases where disincentives are trivial or non-existent -- e.g., taxing dead people. For the living, the least painful time to tax is whenever a transaction occurs: when you buy and sell something, or when you pay someone a wage or other remuneration. With few (if any) exceptions, the robust tax base countries Yglesias favors raise most of their taxes through a VAT, which (unlike American sales taxes) is generally buried within the cost of the purchase. VATs raise prices, which has some negative effect on demand, but they don't hit you out of the blue like property taxes do. It also helps if the burden of tax collection is placed primarily on business, which used to be the case in the US but is less so now: it is both less visible to most people and it fits in with accounting procedures that businesses need to do anyway.

I can't vouch for Yglesias's assertion that the US tax code is relatively progressive compared to other countries. One thing that is certain is that it is much less progressive than it used to be. There are a lot of ways that progressivism could be used that aren't now. In particular, I would make both corporate income and VAT taxes mildly progressive based on company size: a break for small and especially new competitors and a brake against WalMart-sized monopolies. I also think that unearned income -- interest, dividends, capital gains, gifts, estates -- should be taxed progressively according to total lifetime gains: a break for anyone starting to build a nest egg, and a brake on excessive accumulation.

Of course, there's no point raising taxes unless you plan on spending the revenues on something useful. I can come up with a long list there, too -- subjects for many future posts.

Getting ready to take a vacation of sorts. A long road trip, anyhow. Some interesting articles that I had kept open with some vague notion of writing something about them, but now will have to pack up:

• Tony Judt: Fictions on the Ground: On Israel's settlement occupation.
• Tony Karon: Iran's Crisis: The Opposition Weighs Its Options: Realistically, it's a long shot to bet against the house.
• Ezra Klein: Wealth-Care Reform: Yes, it's more about money than medicine, which is the reason health care reform is such a struggle: a lot of money is at stake, for uncertain medical outcomes.
• Paul Krugman: Not Enough Audacity. On health care: "The point is that if you're making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. You might think that half a loaf is always better than none -- but it isn't if the failure of half-measures ends up discrediting your whole policy approach." Also: "Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified."
• Kathleen Parker: Runaway Goveror: The Sequel: On Gov. Sanford, more or less, before all the facts were in, which is why she had time/space to survey the rest of the GOP. Don't miss the Newt bit at the end.

By the way, Iraq is getting bloody again, with over 200 civilian deaths this past week. I've just slogged through Thomas Ricks's Surge-celebratory The Gamble, and it's worth noting that the intelligent people behind the strategem -- a group excluding politicians like McCain and Lieberman, pundits like Kristol, and self-appointed experts like Fred Kagan -- never saw as anything more than a beachhead that would depend on significant political reconciliation to secure. The latter didn't happen for a lot of reasons, and now it's closing. Of course some people, including Ricks in his prognosticating epilogue, will attribute this to the imminent US withdrawals, implying that we can fix the problem by launching Surge II. But the fact is that there will always be a day of reckoning when US forces leave, and putting that off tries the patience of everyone in Iraq who wants to get this war settled. The idea that Iraq is a "forever war" is stuck in the heads of a few American hawks who invested heavily in it, but it's plainly absurd to most Americans, who sooner or later will manage to pull the plug. When that happens, Iraq will sink or swim. I've always felt that Iraq's odds would be better if the country is not tied to the dead weight of American imperialism. Nothing that has happened, including the adjustments Petraeus and Odierno made, has changed that.

I envy Matthew Yglesias's ability to crank out a dozen-plus blog posts per day, but he's mostly going with whatever the day throws out at him, and his added value is hit and miss. Today was dominated by the news that Sen. Arlen Specter decided he'd rather be a Democrat, so Yglesias came up with a bunch of posts revealing how little he's had in common with Democrats over his career. Yglesias's term for Specter is "flexible." Sounds more like opportunist. We have in the past seen Republicans turn into pretty good Democrats -- Wayne Morse is still the classic. I doubt that Specter will be one, although it wouldn't hurt for him to start keeping better company.

Matthew Yglesias: Financial Innovation and Financial Compensation: Cites a Paul Krugman column, citing in turn a Ben Bernanke speech about how innovative the financial sector has been. (Bernanke cites three big innovations: credit cards, overdraft protection, and subprime mortgages. For some reason he forgot about derivatives, which some wag described as a financial weapon of mass destruction.) But the most important thing here is a chart from Simon Johnson showing the financial sector's percentage of all US business profits over time. As late as 1980 -- the year Reagan was first elected -- it stood at 7%, admittedly depressed from the past 20-year average of 10-15%. It increased steadily from then, peaking over 40%. To some extent this represents decline in other sectors, like manufacturing, but it's not as if other sectors, like health care, haven't made money at the same time. Still, the profit levels here are suspicious on multiple counts. First, they suggest that finance is not subject to limits of competition. In most industries, when profits rise, competitors are willing to take them down. It's not like there aren't plenty of banks, so why no competitition? I don't have an answer to that. The peculiar mix of lax regulation may have some sort of effect here. Shoddy accounting is also suspect. Then there is politics: clearly the finance industry is very well connected with both parties and intimately represented in the government. The one thing we can be sure of is that the profits didn't get reinvested in the real economy, which is one reason so much ado turned into nothing.

Matthew Yglesias: McCain: Bush Should Get Off The Hook -- Just Like Nixon: It's easy for a Republican to say that Ford did the right thing pardoning Nixon so we could "move on": "we" in that case was the Republican Party, which cleansed of Nixon's sins was free to subject us to Ronald Reagan. Reagan's administration was, if anything, more criminal than Nixon's. Of course, it helped hide the fact that the criminality was scattered all through the administration, not just concentrated in the person of the president. The Bushes just added to the evidence that the GOP is corrupt from top to bottom, and megalomaniac to boot: Bush II was a pretty complete synthesis of Nixon + Reagan, at least in this regard. You can see why Republicans want to forget all that. But it will be harder this time, because the party was so completely complicit in Bush's crimes.

But the Republicans never wanted to "move on" when Clinton was president. The Paula Jones lawsuit was allowed to proceed on the grounds that no president is above the law (except, of course, for Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes). Clinton and his administration had to endure numerous special prosecutors, mostly turning up nothing. Some, like Kenneth Starr, abused their position so flagrantly that the law was changed -- just in time to give Bush free reign.

Update: I looked for a post with this chart before, but it has vanished into the backfiles. Popped up again, so I thought I'd add it here.

Matthew Yglesias: Orzag on Saez: The chart shows how the top 1%, 1-5%, and 5-10% of income earners have fared over time. The top 1% is relatively volatile, with booms coming with financial bubbles, both in the Roaring 1920s and the upslope from Reagan's S&L looting through Bush's subprime mortgage bubble. Interestingly, while the lower tiers of the well off roughly tend to track the top 1% through the New Deal, their split has remained remarkably consistent ever since 1943, with a very slight uphill trend. This means they've basically become unhitched from the top 1%, which was the sole beneficiary of the Reagan-Bush era.

Steven Coll: Decoding Mumbai. This seems about right. Pakistan's longstanding grudge against India over Kashmir -- over lots of things, really, including the fact that India is an intrinsically stronger and richer country that Pakistan could have been part of in 1948 except for the machinations of the Muslim League and the selfish perversity of the British -- is the context from which these and a long line of terror attacks originate. On the other hand, India's hands aren't exactly clean in this. They have about as much right to Kashmir as the UK does to Northern Ireland, and they've handled it about as ineptly. Moreover, they've never seen any reason to settle their differences with Pakistan. Not only do they figure that when push comes to shove, it's Pakistan that will wind up in the dirt. They seem to take some pleasure in that thought, maybe because it seems to validate the choices India made that Pakistan didn't -- like building an educational system, and keeping their military forces under democratic control. On the other hand, you can't say that the whole nation of Pakistan is equally guilty. One of the peculiar features of Pakistan is that as the top levels of leadership have been forced to bow to international pressure over Pakistan-based terrorists, the chain of command has been obscured so thoroughly that nobody you can shake down seems to have anything to do with it.

The interesting, and promising, thing here is that India doesn't seem to be itching for a casus belli -- unlike certain trigger-happy countries we can name, including the right-wing party ruling India back in 2002. This seems like a rare lapse of sanity, but there isn't much else anyone can realistically do about it. The best outcome would be for Zardari to effect a purge of any more/less rogue elements in the military-security complex -- something the PPP has had plenty of reason to want ever since Zia ul Haq overthrew Zardari's father-in-law. But to do that, Pakistan needs to feel less insecure, most of all from India. Which means India should put its own house in order. Established powers on both side have something to lose there, but most of the people have a lot to gain. The power imbalance between India and Pakistan is roughly similar to that between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War years, where keeping parity against the discretionary spending of the much richer party turns out to be bankrupting. India could afford to develop and still spend enough to cajole Pakistan; for Pakistan the same choice, tragically, was either/or, and that's dug them into the hole they're in today. It behooves everyone to help them out.

Tony Karon: Mumbai Massacre May Sink Bush-Obama Strategy. Some cold water splashed on my theories. Political pressures are likely to push India toward a more aggressive posture, especially if Pakistan proves unwilling or unable to cough up the terrorist groups. The US has already been through that with Pakistan, and that's hardly been a heart-warming experience.

One thing to add here is that the general purpose of terrorist tactics is to produce a reaction, especially a stupid one. The evident rationale for the Mumbai attacks is to drive a wedge between India and Pakistan: the more likely you think the two countries are to settle their differences, the more urgent the attack became. With India and Pakistan at each other's throats, the local Kashmir conflict becomes big business. It also moves Pakistani forces away from the Afghan-oriented tribal areas, which is the war the US wants Pakistan to be fighting -- not this nonsense with India, a country we see more and more as a key business partner.

Needless to say, what really hurt the US wasn't the 9/11 attacks but the stupid, senseless reaction that sent us off into endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One can argue over whether Al Qaeda benefited from that, but clearly we hurt ourselves big time. Politicians like to posture about how we can never bow to terrorism, but that's just what they did.

Frida Berrigan: Who Rules the Pentagon?. Tom Engelhardt's introduction is the most disheartening review of Obama's emerging team in the defense/security/state sectors yet. Not really a big surprise: it is, after all, impossible to have had experience in those sectors without having been complicit in the construction of the imperial edifice. Moreover, despite repeated failures it's hard to find any of them who have learned anything more basic than to pin the tail on somelike like Donald Feith. Then, of course, beyond the political hacks, there's the enduring professional military, and their equally enduring industrial suppliers. It's this inertia, with so many fingers in so many pots, that makes it impossible to do a break-before-make -- i.e., to break the war machine before making peace. That's unfortunate, given how effective the war machine is at staving off peace. But I'm afraid it's also realistic.

Two things I've seen recently strike me as positive. One is that Obama says that "vision" is his department, not something he's planning on delegating to the staff. The other side of that coin is that the staff is being hired for their practical skills, useful to implement Obama's "vision." Given how sorely lacking most of those people were in the vision thing, that suggests that their pasts may not be so indicative of their futures. The second thing is that even with large stimulus spending in the works, Obama has some critical budget people sharpening their red pencils. I've seen assertions that defense spending isn't "discretionary," but in fact no spending is more discretionary -- and since it's largely escaped critical review for the last eight years, or really a good deal more, none is riper for cuts. Initially we're likely to see more arguments of the form: we need to expand X so we need to cut back Y, not just to cover the expense but to manage the whole effort better. But if/when Obama can reduce the sense that we live in a hostile world, a lot of defense crutches could crumble away. That will take a lot more "vision" than we've seen lately, but it's a far cry from utopianism to think that virtually all countries and virtually all peoples would like to take a break from the endless and fruitless wars eight years of Bush and Sharon and their kin have embroiled us in. Never before has "give peace a chance" seemed like such a simply aggreeable proposition.

Tom Engelhardt: Stuff Happens. Explores one of the standing arguments for why it's impossible to get out of Iraq on any fixed timetable: there's just too much stuff in place to get it all out. That's how lame these arguments get. Even if it were impossible to move everything back you didn't want to leave behind, the US military is sure as shit skilled enough to blow it up. Maybe it would help if they disguised those excess tanks and such as civilian wedding parties?

Tariq Ali: Operation Enduring Disaster. I just finished reading Tariq Ali's The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, which is more focused on Pakistan than on the Bush administration's hapless botch of an occupation of Afghanistan, but the two are related, especially in the sense that however bad the signals emanating from Afghanistan, Pakistan has the potential to amplify them thunderously. This piece brings the focus back here, with a title that rings so true it should henceforth be impossible to read "Operation Enduring Freedom" without correcting it.

Robert Baer: When will Obama give up the Bin Laden ghost hunt? Just the latest of several piece I've seen arguing that we'd be better off just declaring Osama Bin Laden dead than continuing to fail chasing a pretty cold trail. The reasons are pretty good, starting with the fact that we have no real business tramping through Pakistan, blowing up shit left and right. But the real issue isn't whether Bin Laden is dead or alive; it's whether we pursue him through legal channels or by criminal means. Declaring him dead might be a practical way of avoiding admitting that the whole fevered revenge war did nothing but compound the original crime.

But what if bin Laden really is dead, buried under a hundred tons of rock at Tora Bora, or so weakened that he might as well be dead? Indefinitely crashing around Afghanistan's and Pakistan's wild, mountainous tribal region on a ghost hunt cannot serve our interests. The longer we leave troops in Afghanistan, the worse the civil war there will become. One day Obama will need to give up the hunt -- declare bin Laden either dead or irrelevant.

Note I started writing to Matthew Yglesias in response to a couple of posts today ( Long and Deep; A Big Difference), but got off on a tangent:

Let's put it this way: either Obama is going to be judged on his programs, or on his failure to implement them. He's not going to win anyone over by failing to deliver -- not his enemies, who'll view him as weak and inept as well as deceitful, and not from his supporters either. So he has to put effective people on the field, make his case against many entrenched interests, and avoid getting blind-sided over something stupid, like Clinton did several times in 1992-94. Bush, or rather Cheney, did just what they promised (minus a few obfuscations) in 2001: a model of practical politics which was, admittedly, abetted by the Democrats lack of partisan unity. Bush's big problem was that everything he wanted to do was wrong, often disastrously so. Obama needs to find the right answers, even if they stray from what he found politic to say on the campaign trail. But where he thinks he has them, he has to charge ahead. Otherwise, we'll never know.

There are at least some cases where he should enjoy easy success. Iran has been eager to improve its relationship with the US for at least a decade -- rebuffed by US intransigence that often seems to have no purpose other than to puff up a security threat. Talking to them could produce a quick breakthrough, which should have a rapid effect on calming Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, not to mention Iraq. It would also give Obama further reason to kill the missile defense scam, which would reduce tensions with Russia. And a little positive nudge to Israel to settle the Palestinian question might be all it takes, in contrast to the Bush-Sharon fantasy that "a little force helps to clarify things." So a lot of good could come from something simple -- not least that Obama would have some real defense against right-wing security attacks: results that facilitate peace.

Ross Douthat is arguing that Obama will be more hawkish (e.g., than McCain) on Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran to "safely guard . . . his right flank"; but surely Obama knows that none of those wars can be won, and that fighting such wars will only undermine everything else in his platform (cf. what Vietnam did for LBJ). I don't know what Obama was thinking behind his sometime belligerent Afghanistan/Pakistan rhetoric, but surely he understands (as most counterinsurgency experts admit) that what's really needed is nation building -- a concept anathema to Bush Republicans. I can imagine putting more troops into Afghanistan as a political ploy to change strategy and scale back the war; e.g., to reduce the damage caused by bombardment. I think fewer troops would work even better, but maybe not politically. As for Pakistan, it's possible to say you're going to go more aggressively after Osama Bin Laden and still be more cautious about the collateral damage that threatens to blow back so seriously. That's a tricky game, but Obama's success depends on him not getting it wrong -- as, e.g., LBJ did.

The other big thing that is happening now is that the economy has deprioritized the Bush wars. That's one more reason to take easy steps that reduce conflict. Sooner rather than later Obama will have to face much tougher problems, like deciding whether the US will still be in the auto industry.

Just a draft; didn't send this in.

Tom Engelhardt: No Breathing Space in Washington. Also titled: "Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart." I see that Doris Kearns Goodwin is coming to Wichita to speak at the Chamber of Commerce, pushing her line that Obama needs a "team of rivals" like Lincoln had. Obama is well known for seeking out alternate points of view. He also has the reputation for being able to think for himself, so maybe his choice of advisers won't be as fateful as it has been for others -- Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan come readily to mind. Still, most of what you hear these days is about how he needs to stock his team with the very same sorts who got us into this mess in the first place -- e.g., former Treasury Secretaries Lawrence Summers and Richard Rubin; current Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The instinct may just be to be cautious; after all, who wants to rock a sinking boat? On the other hand, we hear very rarely hear a name even from short left field -- Robert Reich, maybe, about as short as you can get.

The other problem, which is more in Engelhardt's sights, is that Obama still accepts much of the American empire paradigm, especially as regards using military force against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He may have wanted to change the way we think about war, but it isn't clear how much he's changed his own way of thinking. This is unfortunate for lots of reasons: one being that there is a lot of opportunity to make some dramatic changes fast. Iraq is more than ready for a major drawdown of US forces. Iran and Syria have been anxiously awaiting a US government willing to deal with them. Afghanistan and Pakistan need a lot more sympathy and understanding, which doesn't come about by escalating the air war -- we need more tools, including a willingness to indulge in "nation building." And, of course, the big game changer would be to broker a fair deal in Israel/Palestine. All of those things have been blocked primarily by the Bush administration's war fetishism. Obama could change all that, but he'll have to overcome a lot of institutional inertia to do so -- much more than he was willing to tackle during the campaign. Engelhardt writes:

Political Washington is a conspiracy -- in the original sense of the word: "to breathe the same air." In that sense, there is no air in Washington that isn't stale enough to choke a president. Send Obama there alone, give him that "breathing space," don't start demanding the quick ending of wars or anything else, and you're not doing him, or the American people, any favors. Quite the opposite, you're consigning him to suffocation.

Mark LeVine: Obama will have to go where no other president has dared. If Obama really wants a "team of rivals" he needs to bring experts like LeVine into the fold. Good, succinct summary of the real problems Obama will face in the Middle East, far removed from the political lens of the campaign media: Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran.

Paul Krugman: Franklin Delano Obama? There seems to be more discussion of the New Deal very recently than at any time I can remember in all my 58 years. Krugman may have been the one who started this off (cf. The Conscience of a Liberal, and look forward to a revised edition of The Return of Depression Economics), but others have brought up similar points, including Robert Kuttner (The Squandering of America and Obama's Challenge) and James Galbraith (The Predator State). I've also seen a few books from the right attempting to discredit the New Deal, such as Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man. Krugman helps clarify some of the history here, including the false starts that allow for right-wing nitpicking, and notes that the stimulus package that really did the trick was WWII -- spending at a level that no one could have previously conceived of, but which had the effect not just of raising the whole economy but of creating a long-lived middle class. Long-lived, that is, until Reagan and his followers started knocking the essential props out from under. Advice to Obama: think big, spend big.

George Packer: The New Liberalism. A post-election sample of the liberal breeze, mostly about Obama but starting with six paragraphs on FDR. Packer argues that Obama is a cautious sort, but circumstances are making him bolder:

Obama began to refer to the financial meltdown as "the final verdict" on a "failed economic philosophy" -- words that one of his advisers called "the key line in the campaign narrative." Another adviser told me that, in the final months of the race, economic conditions pushed Obama to the left. "Barack is a progressive person but also cautious," the adviser wrote in an e-mail. "He understands politics and understands the limits it can create on progressive policy. But as the times have moved, he's moved quickly along with them." Early on, during the more vaporous and messianic phase of his candidacy, Obama took more cautious stands than Hillary Clinton did, but this fall he began to embrace some of Clinton's positions that he had once refused to support, such as a moratorium on foreclosures and a government buyout of mortgages.

Obama was able to make a powerful case for a break with conservative economics, in part, because he doesn't carry the scars of recent history. "He's not intimidated by the issue frames that have bedevilled Democrats for the last couple of decades," one of the advisers said. "There's never been a sense of having to triangulate." By the end of the campaign, Obama wasn't just running against broken politics, or even against the Bush Presidency. He had the anti-government philosophy of the entire Age of Reagan in his sights.

Emphasis added. More on those changing times:

Obama will take office with a number of advantages that were unavailable to the last Democratic President. The Party is more united, the Democrats in Congress energized by their recent return to a majority. As stagnant wages and pressing public needs have become the focus of Democratic domestic policy, the old line between deficit hawks and economic liberals has dissolved -- last week, the Times published an Op-Ed piece co-written by a leading representative of each group: Rubin and the economist Jared Bernstein, respectively. (They met somewhere around the forty-yard line on Bernstein's half of the field.) Bill Clinton began his Presidency as the country was coming out of a recession, and Alan Greenspan, the semi-divine chairman of the Federal Reserve, could hold the new President hostage to Wall Street. Now Greenspan, in retirement, has confessed to Congress that his free-market world view was flawed; Wall Street lies prostrate after suffering something like a paralyzing stroke; and, with the country entering a deep recession, both deficit spending and financial regulation are givens. More profoundly, the conservative tide was still high when Clinton entered the White House, and it quickly swamped him. Obama will take power at its lowest ebb. It is for all these reasons that 2009 will be more like 1933 than like 1993.

The biggest problem I see with a new New Deal is no longer political; it's resource bound. FDR could argue that there's nothing to fear but fear itself because the economy could still grow as fast as you could force money into the system and get people back to work. That's less obviously true now, in large part because we're increasingly pinched by supply shortages of critical goods -- most importantly oil, but the list is growing. While there's probably room for some forced growth, at some point the economy is bound to contract. A lot of American myth is vested in the notion that equal opportunity is a fair substitute for equality because opportunity in general is boundless, but that won't be the case when we start to choke on limited supplies. (More myth is vested in the idea that science will solve all problems, but that too may just be misplaced optimism.)

Actually, fairness becomes even more critical whenever the economy shrinks, whether due to financial mischief like we've witnessed of late or more intractable resource crunches. Anyone who thinks Democrats, even smart ones like Obama, will be able to solve such problems and bring back the giddy heights of "the American Century" is likely to be disappointed. What's far more critical is that they soften the landing -- that they respond to crises like people who give a damn and can think their way through tough issues. How good they are at that remains to be seen, but the Republicans have been nothing less than catastrophic.

One more hint on how the New Deal may come back is a 2004 book I hope to get to soon, by Obama advisor Cass Sunstein (better known recently for co-authoring Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness): The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution -- And Why We Need It More Than Ever.

Andrew Loenard: My Father's Vote. I didn't realize until this week that Andrew Leonard is the son of the late John Leonard. Short memoir piece here, the critical time being Obama's election. I first read John Leonard in my late teens, most likely on education, something I was interested in because I got so damn little of it growing up in Wichita. I always regarded him as a pillar of civilization.

Rumors, or maybe just arguments, are going around to the effect that Obama should keep Robert Gates around as Secretary of Defense. I suppose that would be like Richard Nixon keeping Clark Clifford because he didn't screw up as badly as Robert McNamara -- which, by the way, Nixon didn't do. Actually, that wasn't the first analogy that popped into my mind. First thing was that it would be like the Allies letting Albert Speer stay on to keep German industry afloat after WWII.

Thomas L Friedman: Show Me the Money. President-elect Obama's getting lots of bad advice these days. The New York Times' star opinionist has nothing in his kit but bad advice, so it's not surprising that he'd use his soapbox to spread some around. Still, his column today is spectacularly stupid:

To all those Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Indians, Africans and Latin Americans who are e-mailing their American friends about their joy at having "America back," now that Obama is in, I just have one thing to say: "Show me the money!"

Don't just show me the love. Don't just give me the smiles. Your love is fickle and, as I said, it will last about as long as the first Obama airstrike against an Al Qaeda position in Pakistan. No, no, no, show me the money. Show me that you are ready to be Obama stakeholders, not free-riders -- stakeholders in what will be expensive and difficult initiatives by the Obama administration to keep the world stable and free at a time when we have fewer resources.

There's an obvious contradiction here. What makes all those people all around the world so happy is the expectation that Obama will not continue Bush's arrogant, bellicose, and disastrous foreign policy, yet Friedman assumes that he will -- in particular, that he will keep up the sporadic bombing of Pakistan, which Friedman admits is bound to cause blowback. There's no reason why any nation unwilling to back Bush should back Obama doing the same. Indeed, if Obama gets stuck in the same policies, his worldwide popularity will wane too.

One thing that Obama needs to learn, if indeed he doesn't understand it yet, is that American imperialism is not in the best interests, let alone desirse, of the people who voted for him, and therefore is not a platform he can build a successful political career upon. This was a hard lesson for past Democratic presidents to learn, mostly because the propaganda against Communism had been so successful, partly because Clinton was so insecure viz. the military. Still, time and again, war has kept Democratic presidents from delivering on their promises, and as such has weakened their political position. This is even true for Roosevelt, easily the greatest of American war presidents, whose New Deal never delivered on two of his Four Freedoms because WWII got in the way.

Uncle James weighs in on the election with a letter in the Wichita Eagle today:

What an amazing election. I never thought the day would come to this "righteous nation" when we would elect a person to be president and leader of our country who openly approves abortions and wants homosexuals to have the same rights and privileges as married couples. That a black man who the election shows the best of what the United States is, but the core beliefs he maintains show the worst of what we are -- that we are not that "shining light."

It is no less amazing for our state to have a Roman Catholic governor who supports President-elect Obama and, at least by implication, the same beliefs, and who is still apparently receiving Communion -- somewhere. I wonder what God thinks.

Thus goes the meltdown of the right-wing brain. Just think: if you could peel Obama's skin off and wrap it around McCain or Bush or Rush Limbaugh you'd get the best of all worlds. Of course, it would be easier for the Republicans to celebrate "the best of what the United States is" by nominating Alan Keyes, but somehow they didn't think of that in time. Even if they did, it's unlikely he would have been any more successful than he was running against Obama in Illinois in 2004. Then, as now, Obama won on issues, on the voters' willingness and confidence to trust him to better represent their interests and views. In particular, it shouldn't be surprising that Americans would elect someone who supports abortion rights, given that a majority of Americans do too.

The thing I find peculiar is how James singles out abortion rights and basic civil rights for homosexuals as "the worst of what we are." Way back when I was a Boy Scout, I thought that rights were the very essence of what America was about. The Declaration of Independence started with a declaration of rights. More rights were enshrined in the Constitution, forming a Bill of Rights that were placed high above the political winds of Congress and the Presidency. I've never been able to see how someone could claim to be an American patriot and not support those rights, let alone try to extend rights in reasonable cases the founding fathers didn't spell out explicitly. Yet, much to the nation's shame, we have a long history of trampling on our own rights, and no one has suffered worse in that history than Afro-Americans. After several decades of Republicans exploiting social fears for votes to back their oligarchy, and eight years where the Bush administration has ignored the constitution any time it seemed convenient, it's good to see the candidate who best stands up for our rights to win.

By the way, that "shining light" has always shined brighter in theory than in practice, and has dimmed in both respects lately, with two wars taking the greatest toll: the Vietnam conflict which showed the US as the last defender of colonialism and introduced such lovely locutions as "destroying the village to save it"; and the post-9/11 global tantrum, which spread far more terror than it ever sought to have controlled. One result is that our standard of living, once the envy of the world, has dimmed, torn apart by the growth of inequality, made less secure by governments controlled by special interests, by people whose commitment to the public is purely selfish.

It's possible to see Obama's election as a vote for restoring and extending our rights, and for reigniting that fabled "shining light." James can't see this, hence his mental breakdown.

FiveThirtyEight: I've followed this site for polling information over most of the campaign. Their slogan is "Electoral Projections Done Right." For the most part, they looked right, and backed it up with a surfeit of data and reasoned analysis. (They also didn't have any Flash I couldn't handle, an issue that knocked out several competitors.) Their final predictions were damn close: they said Obama would get 52.3 percent and McCain 46.2 percent; looks like both candidates did 0.1 percent better. Only state they got wrong was Indiana, which they had very narrowly for McCain and was barely won by Obama. Their biggest glitch was the Alaska senate race, but that still isn't over.

Andrew Gelman: Election 2008: what really happened. Some stats on the election results, including scatter plots of how Obama did in 2008 vs. Kerry in 2004. The upshot there is that with very few exceptions, Obama outperformed Kerry across the board. There's also a state map, but this county-by-county map is clearer. The shifts in AK/AZ (and the small shift in MA) can be attributed to homefield candidates. That leaves a swathe from eastern KY to southern OK (and bits of northern TX), plus LA, northern AL, and the FL panhandle, all places where Obama lost ground. There's a lot of talk about how the election proves that racial bias is history in the US, and there's something to be said for that, but this map suggests that there is still a sizable chunk of the South that hasn't got the message -- probably more than is evident, since areas with many black voters balanced out the white shift (e.g., Mississippi, except for its northeast corner, and southern Alabama). Obama got a slightly larger percentage of white voters natiowide, but not necessarily (or even likely) in the South.

Matthew Yglesias posted this version of the map:

His comment:

You can see why John McCain's principled stand against higher taxes on the wealthy would have a special resonance in this region. Liberals who thought race had something to do with those appeals should be ashamed of themselves.

The other thing to note is that the baseline here is 2004, when John Kerry (white catholic) already lost a lot of ground compared to 2000 (Al Gore, white baptist, from Tennessee). It's also possible that Arkansas is the last redoubt of Clinton PUMAs. One reason they may have not come around to Obama is that, unlike OH and PA, there never was a concerted Obama campaign in AR, not even in the primary. Ignored, overlooked, they never got the message, so fell back into their ignorant rut.

While Obama got a lot of crap for his "condescending" analysis of why poor (white) people from Appalachia through the Ozarks keep voting against their interests, he is at least aware of the problem, and is no doubt aware of the opportunity to flip those votes. All it should take is for government to actually do something to help out, as opposed to the Republican/Dixiecrat norm of trampling them at every opportunity.

I caught Saturday Night Live's last pre-election opening sketch. I recognized Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, but couldn't make the actor playing her running mate. Damn good likeness, I thought. Turns out that it was John McCain parodying himself. The skit was mostly concerned with the candidates hawking campaign memorabilia. I don't know what McCain thought he was doing, but the obvious points were that he has so little self-esteem that he's just happy to be on TV, even to the point of admitting he's just a shill for other interests. My first reaction was to wonder why he'd allow himself to appear so unpresidential. I can't imagine Obama indulging that whim. Why, after all, would he have even run for president unless he took the office seriously?

Of course, the presidency is way overrated. Most days I wouldn't mind someone so exalted pricking those inflated pretensions. But the real problem here isn't that this exposes McCain as a buffoon, which is one of his least objectionable character traits. Last post, I likened him to a platter of shit with shards of glass. I suppose we could update that image by having him bury some rubber worms in the shit, then pluck one out and eat it. But how does making McCain even more surreal help his case, let alone make his supporters any more credible?

But the thing that bothers me the most about this is how completely a major party presidential candidate has surrendered to the sadistic delights of the media -- and SNL isn't even respectable media. People on both sides complain about media bias, but more disturbing is the way the media disciplines candidates to fit their own perverse notions of acceptable behavior. One of the most remarkable things about Obama is that he's managed to survive this gauntlet with his dignity intact. McCain hasn't, not that he ever had any. He built his whole career sucking up to the media, which treats him like a well-trained dog: sit, roll over, beg, play dead. That got him this far, so why not go all the way?

Still, were McCain to succeed George Bush, we would have moved from tragedy to farce in record time.

Paul Woodward comments:

John McCain's willingness to fight a dirty campaign has been taken as indicative of his ruthless determination to win, but to my eye that determination has never been clearly evident. The tactics he has employed seem to say less about his core drives than they do about the lack of imagination in those around him. [ . . . ] Look at McCain on Saturday Night Live. He is more at ease standing next to Tina Fey than he is with his actual running mate.

David Foster Wallace wrote an essay about McCain's 2000 campaign, way back when McCain's buffoonery was more amusing and seemingly more harmless. It was republished earlier this year as a standalone book, titled McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope. Shortly afterwards, Wallace committed suicide. I don't know that the two events were related, but it does weigh one's mind.

One thing that's weighed on my mind is an early-2001 quip in a letter to the editor of the Wichita Eagle that "we survived one George Bush; we can survive another." The author, a friend and an impeccably well-meaning person, has thankfully survived, but the list of people who haven't has grown steadily, including way too many people who were thoroughly appalled by what's come of our nation under George Bush. One of the most recent was Studs Terkel, whose books on the depression (Hard Times) and WWII ("The Good War") are models of how to come to grips with history.

Other personal losses range from Lucy Fishman to Kalman Tillem. We live today in a much poorer world.

Andrew Leonard: Consumers vote with their wallets. Several interesting things here, especially a quote from James Livingston:

The Great Depression was the consequence of a massive shift of income shares to profits, away from wages and thus consumption, at the very moment -- the 1920s -- that expanded production of consumer durables became the crucial condition of economic growth as such. This shift produced a tidal wave of surplus capital that, in the absence of any need for increased investment in productive capacity (net investment declined steadily through the 1920s even as industrial productivity and output increased spectacularly), flowed inevitably into speculative channels, particularly the stock market bubble of the late 20s; when the bubble burst -- that is, when non-financial firms pulled out of the call loan market in October -- demand for securities listed on the stock exchange evaporated, and the banks were left holding billions of dollars in "distressed assets." The credit freeze and the extraordinary deflation of the 1930s followed; not even the Reconstruction Finance Corporation could restore investor confidence and reflate the larger economy.

Leonard adds, underscoring the key point:

Livingston does a much better job of unpacking that dense paragraph than I can, but the essential point is that in the decade leading up to the Great Depression, the profits from a growing economy did not get recycled back into worker wages, but were diverted into speculative activity. Just so, in recent decades, we have witnessed enormous increases in productivity and huge corporate profits, but wage growth for most Americans has barely kept up with inflation.

This expresses something I've long suspected: that a big part of the growing inequality gap is really just hot air, nothing more than a speculation-fired inflation of asset prices that have no relationship to real (or even normative) values. In saying this, I don't mean to disparage anyone upset over growing inequality, which regardless of its lack of economic substance has been damaging politically, and threatens to get much worse. But this argues for something even more basic: that wealth not based on labor is ultimately illusory, and that our fascination with such wealth is ultimately disrespectful and derogatory to the labor that actually keeps the world working. Moreover, this disrespect of labor threatens to undermine the world working, to an extent that we can hardly conceive of.

It is very important that we recognize how critical labor is to our well-being. If there is a silver lining to our current economic collapse, it's the growing suspicion that capital isn't anywhere near what it's lately been cracked up to be.