Month: February 2009

Establishmentarian commentators like the New York Times’ David Sanger seem almost as flabbergasted by the breadth of President Obama’s legislative ambition as by the stunning collapse of the the global economy. The comparisons to Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, or some hybrid of the two, are coming fast and furious. We’re also hearing more and more talk about the end of the Reagan Revolution.

If [Lyndon] Johnson’s rallying cry was an end to poverty in the world’s richest nation, Mr. Obama’s is an end to the Reagan Revolution. With the proposed tax increases on couples making more than $250,000, Mr. Obama has declared that trickle-down economics — the theory that the entire country benefits as the nation’s richest amass and spend — was a fantasy. He denounced it in moral terms, declaring in his budget that “there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few.”

Before I comment on this new phenomenon in political reporting, I want to ask you if you have ever looked at a chart of the highest marginal tax rates since the income tax was created in 1913? Take a look because it’s instructive. Obama has made some sweeping proposals, but he hasn’t proposed restoring tax rates to anything close to what they were for the first six years of Reagan’s administration, let alone the 91% rate that prevailed under Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. Ask yourself a question. If every dollar a CEO made over $500,000 was taxed at 91%, would he or she bother asking for 20 million? Would any board even consider giving 18 million to the government just to give two million to their CEO? Of course not.

So, while we are entering a new progressive era that will be similar in many ways to the era of Roosevelt/Truman and the era of Kennedy/Johnson, we’re not there yet. The Republicans will continue their decline for some time because they don’t have ideas suited for the circumstances the nation is facing, and if they’re going to win the presidency they will need the Democrats to start an unpopular war in Korea, Vietnam, or some other country. It won’t hurt if the Republicans can find a likable war hero in the Eisenhower mold. But don’t worry about Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal becoming president because it isn’t going to happen.

The Reagan Experiment has ended in abject failure leaving the diehards, a la the Marxist-Leninists, to argue that it just wasn’t implemented correctly. But the Reagan hangover isn’t just the shattered global economy, it’s thirty years of stinking thinking that is so ingrained in the public that it will take a long time to unlearn. Obama is making strong steps in the right direction but, as the pendulum swings, we’re still far to the right of where Reagan left off when he retired. That’s not a knock on Obama. He doesn’t want to stun the system. It’s like adjusting the pH level in an aquarium or pitching yeast into a beer wort. You have to avoid making changes too quickly or everything shuts down and dies.

We can argue about how progressive Obama is, but he’s pushing aggressively enough to stagger the political commentariat who thought they’d killed this kind of thing off.

…[Obama] appears to have shed President Clinton’s fear of being labeled an old-fashioned liberal.

They also thought they’d cured of us of this trash-talk about the gray areas of capitalism, as Al Giordano points out:

From September’s reference to “crony capitalism” to yesterday’s “chaotic and unforgiving capitalism” the howls from the vestigial simpletons of Cold War mythology (they swallowed the lie that there are only two items on the economic menu: “capitalism or communism”) will continue to scream bloody socialism… and the vast majority of Americans will continue to yawn and tune them out.

In other words, we have a president who dares to question the efficacy and morality of unfettered capitalism. Times have changed. And it’s hard to believe I had to argue that Obama was progressive, and progressive in a way that the Clintons are not.

Even the Big Dog thinks the Republicans are completely out to lunch.

What are you doing this weekend?

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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

There’s a theme I see coming from Israel and friends of Israel that I find puzzling. Consider this nonsense from Mort Zuckerman, where he lays into Secretary Clinton for critizing Israel’s interference in Gazan reconstruction (emphasis mine).

“I am very surprised, frankly, at this statement from the United States government and from the secretary of state,” said Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News and member of the NYC Jewish Community Relations Council. … “I don’t believe that we should be in a position at this point to do anything to strengthen Hamas,” Zuckerman said. “We surely know what Hamas stands for as I say they are the forward battalions of Iran.”

On the surface, it’s impossible to know what Zuckerman means when he says that Hamas is a forward battalion of Iran. Hamas is an indigenous Palestinian organization. It’s membership is nearly 100% Sunni Muslim, although I am sure it has a few Shi’ite and Christian members. It does not share the goals of the Shi’ite Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. The only reason Hamas has any relationship with Iran at all is because Iran is willing to sell them arms and give them some financial support and military training.

Now, consider this exchange in an interview with Netanyahu adviser, Dore Gold:

Q – What do you think the priorities are in … dealing with the security issue that arises out of Gaza and then the political issue of having a substantial part of the Palestinian electorate … supporting a party that is not prepared to talk peace?

A – Gaza poses a very real problem. It’s a Mediterranean beachhead now for the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is supplying arms to Hamas, which is giving money to Hamas, and which is training Hamas operatives in military camps outside of Tehran run by the Revolutionary Guards.

But, again, Hamas is not acting as a proxy for Iran because their ambitions are for themselves and the Palestinian people, not for Iran’s brand of Islam nor for Iran’s regional political ambitions. Iran doesn’t have a beachhead in Gaza. What they have is street cred as one of the only governments in the Middle East willing to support armed resistance to the Israeli government. But the Israelis are continuously talking nonsense. Consider this recent performance by Israeli president Shimon Peres:

“The Iranian leadership’s grand design is to convert the Middle East into one religious bloc,” President Shimon Peres said Wednesday during his address to the British Parliament.

“The Iranian leadership is obsessed with its quest for regional religious domination. This quest is supported by long range missiles, enriched uranium and fanatic incitement – all fueled by the excessive price of oil,” he said.

“The Iranian leadership’s grand design is to convert the Middle East from a region of nations into one religious bloc. They attempt to impose their version on everyone. Whoever disagrees is deemed a heretic and is doomed to disappear.”

If this were true, why would Hamas have anything to do with Iran? Sunni Muslims, as a rule, have no interest in being forced to convert to the Shi’a creed. Even less so are they interested in being ‘disappeared’ if they refuse to convert. Hamas accepts aid from Iran because no aid is on offer from Egypt or Jordan, since they have made peace with Israel. But President Peres has no shame in lying to the British Parliament.

And consider Netanyahu’s performance after he was tapped by Peres to form an Israeli government.

Binyamin Netanyahu described Iran as the greatest threat that Israel has ever faced and failed to mention stalled talks with the Palestinians after he was asked to be the country’s new Prime Minister today.

In a speech made outside the residence of President Shimon Peres, the Likud leader said that protecting Israel would be his greatest responsibility as leader, and condemned “formidable” challenges posed by the Islamic Republic.

However, he did not once mention the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process or a two-state solution throughout his address, omissions that will cause concern within an Obama administration determined to advance the peace process.

It should be obvious that Israel is trying to use some super-hyped threat from Iran to avoid even discussing the Palestinian peace process. I can understand that Israel doesn’t want to deal with a nuclear-armed Iran. But suggesting that Iran is a bigger threat than the combined Arab armies that invaded and nearly overran Israel during the Yom Kippur War and then arguing that Iran is on a mission to forcibly convert the Sunni Arab world to Imami Shi’ism is an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Hamas receives aid from Iran, but they are not out to do Iran’s bidding. Iran is run by an unsavory government, but they have no territorial ambitions, they have no intention of starting a nuclear war with Israel, and their religious ambitions, whatever they may be, are nothing compared to their interests in commerce and security for their own people.

Iran gains influence by aiding the Palestinian resistance. Nothing more. Hamas is not a proxy for Iran.

When Nightline covers a topic, it’s safe to say it’s hit the mainstream.  Therefore, Twitter, on Nightline this past Wednesday has reached the public consciousness, albeit tepidly.

Even Nightline seems to have misgivings.  While one host, Terry Moran has amassed a very respectable following of 28,617 people (as of this writing) on Twitter, Martin Bashir seemed proud to announce that he doesn’t Twitter.  Despite his apparent antipathy, Twitter has racked up six million users as measured by Complete.com, a website that follows such things.

Taking a step back to explain, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform.  Users publish very short missives, of up to 140 characters, and these are displayed for other users who have signed up to receive them.  You can "tweet," as it’s called, from twitter.com, from your cellphone, and applications on your computer.  (Here’s a guide to get started if you’re interested.)
Twitter prompts you with its question "What are you doing?"  This leads many to publish inane details of their life but others ignore the question and use it to disseminate information.  This is where Twitter’s utility might lie for nonprofits.  Twitter has become a way to get news from traditional sources, from individual journalists, from political parties and politicians, and from charities and advocacy groups.*

The goal, of course, is to get your message through the din.  We are inundated with so much information, the hope is that if users choose to receive your "tweets," they will pay more attention to the message you’re trying to get out.  Conversely, if they signed up for your messages, you’re likely preaching the choir.  Also, as with anything on the web, people expect content and you have to work on continually disseminating engaging content.

Now that we’re all on the same page, here’s a list of nonprofits that Twitter.  So, the $64,000 question is: should a nonprofit Twitter?

We’ll explore further in an upcoming blog post, but for now leave your thoughts in the comments.

*There’s also a social networking aspect to Twitter, which partly explains the melodrama of the Nightline video and their talk of "touching the mind of the universe."  This is the subject for another day but David Pogue, technology writer at the New York Times would love to tell you more in the meanwhile.

David Brooks complains:

Obama enthusiastically perpetuates the myth that the American people can have everything they want without a dose of shared sacrifice. They can have health care, education reform, even a cure for cancer, and 98 percent of them need pay nothing. The burdens of progress will be borne by the rich while everyone else can enjoy their tax cuts and go shopping.

Brooks comes to this conclusion by looking at Obama’s submitted budget outline. He doesn’t have the best reading comprehension because there is no line-item in the outline for ‘curing cancer’ but his overall point is salient, if misleading. Obama raises taxes on the top 2% of income earners while generally lowering taxes on the rest of America. The normal Republican response to progressive taxation of this kind is to attempt to convince more than 50% of the population that their taxes have actually gone up. Brooks violates the spirit of this argument by stipulating up front that Obama has in fact raised taxes on only two percent of taxpayers. That’s a good start, but Bobo finds this fact troubling. Where is the shared sacrifice? It’s an ironic question to ask after eight years of a Bush administration that fought wars on our children’s dime (with interest). As for the other 98%, it’s not really true that they won’t have to make any sacrifices, it’s just that it will seem like a bargain to see some elements of the federal budget slashed when they get affordable health care, better schools, and a sensible energy policy in return.

Brooks’ real problem, though, is that the administration is not repeating the same mistakes the Clintons made on health care. By outlining principles that they want included in any health care reform and then deferring to Congress to work out the details, the Obama administration hopes to avoid seeing their bill rejected by Congress. But Brooks thinks the only responsible way to do a health care bill is the way the Clintons did it.

The bigger problem is health care. This is an issue where everybody wants benefits they don’t pay for, where perverse incentives have created an expensive system that doesn’t deliver results. This is an area where aggressive presidential leadership is mandatory…

…The balance of power will be clear. The White House will have no dominating figure to ride herd day to day now that Tom Daschle is out of the picture. Instead, the same old chairmen habituated by the same old interest groups will dominate everything…

…there will be a wide array of committee chairmen in the House and Senate scrambling for influence, maneuvering with and against each other through a Machiavellian process of secret negotiations and back-room deals…

Even though the budget is not all one would have hoped, I’d trust the folks in the Obama administration to craft a decent health care plan before I’d trust the Congressional Old Bulls.

I might better trust the Obama administration, too, but the important thing is to pass the bill. All the good intentions and sensible policy in the world doesn’t add up to a hill of beans if it is never translated into law. There may be a degree of backroom negotiation in the crafting of the bill, but there will also be many hearings in both the House and Senate. It will much less secretive than Hillary’s task force. Maybe Brooks is upset that Obama’s approach is going to work this time. One thing I’d agree with Brooks about is this:

If you watched Obama’s magnificent speech Tuesday night, you got the impression that he bestrides Washington like a colossus. He imposes his authority in ways large and small, purging old habits.

That was, indeed, the impression. Reality is a bit messier, and that’s precisely why Obama is deferring to Congress in the crafting of the health care bill. Obama isn’t a colossus of will, he’s a colussus of brains. Unlike, say, John Boehner.

Welcome to Friday Foto Flogging, a place to share your photos and photography news. We were inspired by the folks at European Tribune who post a regular Friday Photoblog series to try the same on this side of the virtual Atlantic. We also thought foto folks would enjoy seeing some other websites so each week we’ll introduce a different photo website.

This week’s theme: Random. Surprise us!

AndiF’s Mish Mosh

	Green Glow Click image for larger version
	Tulip (Poplar) Flower Click image for larger version
	Abandoned Cabin Click image for larger version

olivia’s gnome travels

	…Mediterranean Sea in France Click image for larger version
	…Olympic Stadium in Athens Click image for larger version
	…Notre Dame in Paris Click image for larger version

• Next Week’s Theme: Book or Poem Titles. We’re sure everybody has a picture that makes them think of Gone With The Wind.

Info on Posting Photos

When you post your photos, please keep the width at 500 or less for the sake of our Bootribers who are on dial-up. If you want to post clickable thumbnails but aren’t sure how, check out this diary:
Clickable Thumbnails. If you haven’t yet joined a photo-hosting site, here are some to consider: Photobucket, Flickr, ImageShack, and Picasa.

Previous Friday Foto Flogs

Inaugural Foto Flog	Song Titles & Lyrics	Fall
Red	Jest for Fun	Deja View
Critters!	In the Frame	Patterns
Silhouettes and Shadows	Water	Tools and Machines
Halloween	Light	Food
Roads, Rails, Trails	Happy Holidays	Color/Colour
Random	People	Cold
Blue	Morning, Noon, Night	Close Ups

Remember, not a progressive.

I promised you this morning that CPAC 2009 would deliver the crazy and they have not disappointed. Former interim UN Ambassador John Bolton delivered a speech about the threat of a nuclear Iran.

“The fact is on foreign policy I don’t think President Obama thinks it’s a priority,” said Bolton. “He said during the campaign he thought Iran was a tiny threat. Tiny, tiny depending on how many nuclear weapons they are ultimately able to deliver on target. Its, uh, its tiny compared to the Soviet Union, but is the loss of one American city” – here Bolton shrugged his shoulders impishly – “pick one at random – Chicago – is that a tiny threat?”

Bolton wasn’t the only one who thought this was funny. The room erupted in laughter and applause.

What good are our nuclear weapons if they cannot even deter Iran from setting off a rudimentary nuclear device in one of our cities? Bolton doesn’t say. Instead, he and the CPAC lunatics revel in the fantasy of seeing all the liberals of Chicago get taught a lesson in the wisdom of more preemptive war. Bolton also argued that Obama would abandon Israel if they were attacked.

Then there was Cliff Kincaid (ironically, the head of Accuracy in Media) who, while introducing Rep. Mike Pence, once again raised questions about whether Barack Obama is really a natural born U.S. citizen and called him a communist. Rep. Pence did not correct him.

Sam Joe the Plumber was in attendence and said he misses plumbing even though he isn’t and never was a plumber.

And then anti-immigrant zealot Tom Tancredo unsurprisingly panned anchor baby Bobby Jindal’s rebuttal speech and said it was ‘the nail in the coffin’ of any presidential aspirations Jindal might have had. I’m sure Tancredo’s opinion is objective and not tainted in any way by his deep-seated racism.

And all this is but a sample of the crazy that was on display today. <p.

One day down…two to go.

I’m all about Obama’s budget moves, but pretty soon folks will start to ask about the budgetary assumptions based on an emissions Cap and Trade Market that doesn’t really exist yet.

I like that it’s in there, but when you trumpet numbers based on god knows what model of something that doesn’t exist, what are you doing?

This market-spawning policy is pretty tough to make happen without rewarding polluters and therefore could easily be supplanted by another system in the mean time or soon after launch. What happens to the budget then?

If the Cap and Trade market collapses, the whole thing would just amount to pay offs to polluters. That’s pretty risky. There should be a more reliable policy that could ensure progress on pollution regardless of the result of the cap and trade experiment.

Cap and Trade plus/vs. Cap and Share

An un-implemented, yet impending Cap and Trade Policy in large part constitutes a subsidy for polluters – the worse you can get right now, the more you’ll get paid once the cap is on.

The very idea that such a system is on the way has really provided incentive to blindly increase pollution for several years now. Lord knows what the market’s response has actually been, but incentives tend to work.

If Cap and Trade is really to be the policy eventually, one can understand why we export ecological fear while increasing domestic pollution with impunity NOW: it positions us to take most advantage of the cap. So if it is coming, start now, please! Before things get even dirtier.

Cap and Share seems like a great way to get powerful results but with less important side-effects as far as I can see it. The idea is essentially a revenue share program that collects based on a pollution ‘grade’, waits a year, then redistributes to contributors based on a new grade, creating an incentive reduce pollution year-to-year without taxes or a fake market. He’s a hypothetical example of such a system:

Compel polluters or other sorts of environmental ‘degraders-by-design’ (like with like as pools) to pay (let’s say) 1% of revenue into a fund annually  that invests the money until the following year in the safest possible place that yields interest, with the requirement of redistributing it the following year, plus what interest is not spent on managing the fund (wait for the twist). This secures the money, so leveraging it could still be an option to contributors.

Contributions are to be made by a standard formula by pool, something based on units pollution balanced by benefit (revenue dollars perhaps). By standardizing the formula and pooling industries and pollutants, the government would not be in the business of picking winners and losers. The polluters would be determining their own fates:

Distributions would be along the same formula as the Contributions, but with the following years’ measurements so polluters are provided with incentive to reduce emissions and to do so in competition with their own industry rivals:

In the materials game especially, a 0.5% advantage over competitors could mean everything.

While the government might choose to assist with the initial payments to help things along, they should see no further costs as administration of the fund should be required to live within the interest on the fund for the year.

Oh, and if you cheat, you are publicly flogged, nationalized, shuttered or something else effectively draconian.

I’m kinda in love with this one, and it has the benefit of being pretty politically palatable and could supply a more reliable incentive to reduce pollution than a Milo Minderbinder Market experiment that I hope works desperately (and comes ASAP), despite my doubts and reservations.

What do y’all think?