In Favor of Lockdown

I am very sympathetic to the president and VP wanting to get out and about. But please stop the motorcades through the middle of Georgetown and down Penn right in the middle of rush hour. All they do is make everyone sit there for 10 minutes then deal with completely insane traffic. Loved the speech last night, but would love being able to get to work in a reasonable time even more.

WTF

The more I hear about Roland Burris the more I am blown away by just how stupid he is.

And for the record, I blame you for this African Americans. Your community is a rich tapestry of hard working, accomplished americans, yet you insist on being represented by shiesters. When bobby rush started playing the black card, you were the only ones who could stop the Burris train and you did nothing.

Let Them Eat Cake

Tom Ricks on the news out of Pakistan that Swat is getting the Sharia the Pakistani Taliban have been asking for:

I know it looks like a setback but I suspect this might be a smart move. Give the people of Swat sharia law, and see how they like it. Meanwhile, bolster your security forces in the area so they can pick up the ball when the Taliban has sufficiently alienated the populace. Risky? Sure. But better than losing Swat altogether.

I know it is tempting to believe that if we just give them what "they" want, then in no time the people of Swat will see their mistake and come back to Islamibad begging to have the Taliban kicked out (I am just as guilty of falling prey to the vindictive false pragmatism that drives the sentiment). But that was the theory behind sitting back when the Taliban tool power in Afghanistan - and didn't that work out great!

Power matters. People don't really like being at the whim of some theocratic dictators. But when speaking up just gets you and your family killed, people develop an amazing capacity to just get by in spite of the status quo. The key is providing a credible alternative.

For Posterity

Things I am thankful for: LOLing

D shared this post with the comment "The perils of the twittering and inter tubes."

H replied:

So, um, at risk of sounding really, really ignorant, what exactly is twittering???? I feel like I'm one of 15 people under 28 who don't know what it is...

worse yet, even dumb celebs are supposedly "twittering", and I still have no friggin clue what they're actually doing

The whole thing was reminiscent of the South Park World of Warcraft episode.

NYT Goodness

The New York Times was unusually compelling this morning and I wanted to highlight a few interesting articles:

- Roger Cohen has one of the best pieces written on Iran in a while. Cliff notes version: Iran is not some back water, kleptocratic autocracy; it is a sophisticated and complex society in transition. If we want them to keep going in the right direction and make progress on the both the democracy and regional security fronts we need to stop saying our goal is to overthrow the people in charge.

- The business section has a piece about the interesting phenomena that Wall Street "analysts" continue to recommend people buy 95% of stocks whether the market is up or down. Of course since Wall Street makes most of its money on transaction fees and growing the overall capital pool it makes sense that there sole purpose it to get people to buy more regardless of whether or not it is a good buy. On a larger point, this is why small investors actually shouldn't be buying individual stocks; they lack the time, expertise, and clout to actually exercise oversight of their companies and are forced to just follow the waves.

- Also in business, the death of the junket. Big companies are being forced to - perish the thought - only spend money on things that produce business results, rather than paying for executives to take vacations at club med. Ominous warnings from the trade groups that rep corporate spas that the bailout restrictions may put 2.4 million jobs at risk.

Fun with numbers note, they claim the retreat industry is $270m annually and employs 2.4m workers. That means per worker earnings (assuming the Ritz doesn't earn any profit) are $100 a year. Sounds like very credible math at work.

Public Service Announcement

Kindle 2.0 is out.

SNAP!

CNN has a nice feature on food stamps. And they have one of their hosts of American Morning blogging his experience living on under $200 for the next month. They should certainly be applauded for shining light on the issue. But there are a few things I wish they had done different.

First, the feature article seems to only interview African Americans in Washington DC. Would have been nice for them to get out to suburbs and rural areas and show a little more diverse portrait.

The second thing is that while the experiment adds for some interesting - albeit predictable - commentary, I would rather see one of CNN's host's make their whole family live at food stamp levels. Now, that would never happen because no one would ever want to subject their young kids to having to skip meals or eat junk just to get calories. Why? Because the biggest cost of food stamp stinginess is its toll on child development, which has long term impact.

The last thing that would be nice would be for them to use the feature to put some context around their stimulus bill coverage. When the Nelson-Collins deal cut a few billion for SNAP that is something that has real consequences. It would be nice for someone to move beyond the "bipartisan" and "moderate" rhetoric and talk about the substance. Like "Instead of providing families living below the poverty line an extra $30/month to deal with rising food prices, the new Senate bill will provide people doing well enough to buy a new car with a $2,500 tax cut." Then again, I have a feeling I know which of those groups most CNN producers are in.

Why Iran Picks on the Holocaust

Over at the FP Shadow Government blog Christian Brose mentions the tirade by Iranian Ali Larijani at the Munich Security Conference.

Larijani launched into a 20-minute rant about America's many historical sins against Iran, enumerating them as he went, beginning in 1958 with the backing of the Shah (#1) and continuing on up to the recent war in Gaza (#10 as I recall). Presumably this was just the abridged, modern history. Surely the Declaration of Independence was an affront to Persian dignity and an attempt to destabilize the Zand dynasty.

Emphasis mine. I know a lot of people are pretty annoyed by the ongoing official discourse by the Iranians on the Holocaust. But there is actually a neat little message wrapped in it that people seem to all miss.

The Holocaust was a major, historic tragedy in the West. And there is no dispute that it occurred - there are mountains of evidence. In Iran, the regime of the Shah was an undeniably brutal and tragic period in their history. And that it was abetted by the US is not in dispute - there are mountains of evidence. We rightly denounce them for casting doubt on the Holocaust; but when the Iranians mention the horror and pain of that period all they get is smug little remarks like above to the effect of "stop crying about it". The past does matter - all of it.

Another solution

Of course the more spiteful part of me would prefer to see obama play this gambit with year stimulus bill.

1. Get republican leaders to publicly declare that they do not think government spending has any positive impact on mitigating the recession and that the bill should have less spending. Try to get a dollar amount of how much smaller the spending piece should be in an on the record quote.

2. Repeat the quote from step 1. Repeat it again. Then acknowledge you are listening to their concerns and will be introducing a new version that meets their lower threshold.

3. To meet that lower dollar amount take a hack saw to every dollar that will hit a state with two republican senators. If you need more cut half the dollars going to states with a split delegation. That's your new proposal.

4. Release the proposal. Make sure to repeat the quote from McConnell or whomever about spending not doing anything at least twice. Brand the deal the republican plan. Announce that since you have met their demands they had better vote for it or shut up. Tell people if they prefer the house version they should contact their senator and tell them to support the democrat version.

5. Sit back and enjoy.

The alternative is to tell the republican governors they had better start cutting commercials against their senators or you are going to take the senate repubs up on their state aid is pork proposal.

White House Blues

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/04/AR2009020402835.html

EJ Dionne, who is rapidly emerging as a go to guy for getting the Obama message out (a Bob Novak of the left), has a good piece today on the highkacking of the stimulus debate. Everyone is carrying on about tiny pieces, republicans are disingenuous and allowed to get away with it, there is bipartisan support from governors, etc etc. But he had one anonymous white house quote I found really telling:

"We lost a week."

Remember Obama the campaign, where everything was about the long term strategy. As McCain won week after week, he kept slipping further and further behind. It really was a pretty remarkable feat in retrospect
Fast forward today and that quote makes me wonder if part of the problem is them getting caught up in the weekly wars. It explains the almost daily token issue - ones they themselves recognize are pretty inconsequential - that is thrown under the stimulus bus and the slavish devotion to at least one bipartisan photo op every few days. People don't need the president making the rounds talking about how he has changed the process, they need a solution.

A Community of Non-Community

Finally, someone is vocalizing my frustration about the absolutely dismal failure of Washington DC to clear out snow and ice after a gimpy little "snow storm" last week, or all the snow storms before that.

I know none of you who live in NW DC truly truly claim DC as home, and don't care or in fact probably hate your neighbors, but please just put a little salt on your part of the sidewalk.

Now to Mr. President: the thing that you should really be introducing to DC is not "flinty Chicago toughness", it's neighbor ethics, or "snow/ice ethics", and giving a bit more of a damn about the place in which we're all temporarily residing.

Been here 5 years and I have still not changed my mind about the number one reason why I don't like DC -- it is the epitome of racial and class segregation, with those in power having every intention of keeping things this way. And did I say that these DC transients are all a bunch of arrogant, self-important pricks?

I know I'm also part of the problem here, but I really do feel for those that live here, and know only DC as their home. Sorry for trespassing.

Good Takes Time

Josh Marshall passes along the story that:

President Obama is "frustrated by the public perception that the recovery bill was becoming laden with partisan pet projects."

I am not sure where the partisan label comes from. But on the pet project side, wasn't that inevitable? If you are only going to give money to "shovel ready" projects then some member of Congress or Governor has to have a plan sitting in their back pocket. And if we actually need rapid stimulus there is nothing wrong with this, since the alternative is allocating giant blocks of money to agencies, setting up grant applications, giving people 6 months to apply, weeding through them for the next year, and finally dispursing the first dollars in 2011 (at which point the economy is completely in the crapper).

I am pirating this from somewhere else (can't remember exactly where though) but while the goal is for government spending to be good, fast, and cheap, you can only pick two. With the size of the stimulus we haev already picked cheap, so what is the other one going to be?

Grrr....

I am always sort of amazed by the implicit hegemonic tone in the work of otherwise great national security writers. The US not only spends more on their military - from troops to procurement to R&D to war gaming to military aid to non democratic states - then the rest of the world put together. We also are far and away the biggest arms dealer. We have traded nuclear secrets, supported coups, armed drug-peddling rebels, and backed death squads. And we are the only nation to drop a nuke or launch a sustained carpet bombing campaign against the civilian centers of another country (Japan, Germany, Vietnam, Serbia twice, and Iraq).

So forgive me if our criticism of countries like Iran rings a little hollow. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Today I read that Iran claims they have launched a satellite into orbit and am told it is a "troubling development". First, people need to stop calling every technological leap by a non allied country "troubling". The funny thing about science is that you just need smart people and a few bucks (relative to the size of most economies) and you can indigenously replicate anything I can do. The US keeps spending massively to upgrade the effectiveness and breadth of our weapon systems, which means unless other countries want to have to worry about becoming the next Iraq they have no choice but to invest and try to at least prevent the technology gap from continuing to grow.

I think Iraq was a mistake for a lot of reasons. But the biggest from a long term perspective has to be the introduction of preemptive war into the IR equation. This adds a whole new level of instability because it does show that people are willing to go straight from bad mouthing you to bombing you in an instant. It is this paradigm that we are now applying to everyone else for the benefit of the defense establishment. There is good reason to worry about things blowing up around Iran, but it is less that they are driven by cowboys and more that you have the possible next Israeli PM saying they may have to nuke Iran if the US doesn't sell them even more advanced weapons.

The saddest part is that there is a pretty simple solution (conceptually, not to actually build) to all of this. Like trade, you just have to move to a rules based system of security. Then again, that means we wouldn't be able to back death squads and invade countries willy nilly, so guess it won't happen any time soon.

It seems the Obama people have yet another stupid plan to gut the Federal workforces management ranks. Despite my own personal struggles with the Federal beaurocracy, I actually agree with Darryl Perkinson (sans the length of service):

In my 29 years, I have worked with only a handful of people that had no business being employed in the government. I have seen people in the wrong jobs at times, but if they were properly placed they could function and be useful.

The biggest problems facing the government are related to human capital (along side the broken IT process). But it isn't that their are too many Feds. It is that no money is put into training and development, mentorship and the career ladder are a joke, the hiring process is completely broken, way too many contractors (and not enough oversight), too much energy is wasted babysitting clueless political appointees and members of congress, and risk aversion created by politicals jumping at the opportunity to throw middle managers under the bus as soon as anything goes wrong (rather than fostering organizational learning).

Enforcement

Before heading off on vacation, Matt Yglesias did a post on trade wars and noted correctly that:

The details of roquefort’s problem, the key issue is that in a "trade war" like this, everyone loses:

1. The Europeans won’t buy our beef. We’re mad.
2. So we refuse to buy their cheese.
3. This doesn’t help our cattle guys. But it does make me sad, since I love roquefort.
4. And it’s terrible for some French dairy farmers.
5. So maybe they’ll have enough political clout to persuade the Europeans to retaliate by refusing to buy a wider set of our goods.
6. At which point everyone is even more worse off.
7. Bad scene.

It’s a downward spiral of mutual retaliation that makes people on both sides of the Atlantic poorer.

Of course an alternative solution to save us from this bad ending would be for the French to have not put up their trade barriers in the first place. Standards-free trade - open trade with no labeling requirements, quality standards, or enforcement of basic worker protections on the producer side - is a bad thing. But so long as French consumers are being told that the beef they are buying has been injected with hormones the government has no business banning or taxing it. If Frenchmen are really that concerned about the living conditions of the food being slaughtered for their tasting pleasure they won't buy it, the local supermarket won't order it from the American cattlemen, and we will stop importing it to France - what we like to call the free market.

But why do we have to retaliate? Because we have a rule based system that governs the terms of international trade. If everyone just did "what was best" there wouldn't need to be rules. But most states act in their own self interest.

Since the US exports beef it is safe to assume that French ranchers costs per pound of beef are either more than than the American cost plus the cost of freezing and shipping it across the Atlantic, or French farmers raise less cattle than Frenchmen want to eat. But French cattlemen decide they want more money so they lobby their government, and since the President likes his job and wants a second term he orders his trade department to ban US beef. America, your move.

We have a choice: retaliate or not? If we do not retaliate Matt gets to eat his roquefort, the French cheese producers keep making money, and American cattlemen keep getting screwed. If we retaliate, well, we know how the story ends. But there is a missing future piece to this equation. If the French know we will retaliate - regardless of how much it pisses off the DC foodie crowd and lobbyists - it will make them think twice next time before they decide to BREAK THE RULES and send us all into the trade equivalent of mutually assured destruction.