Party of 1

Sunday was a big day for sports fans. My buddy, John Lambremont, who toils as an attorney and part-time poet in Baton Rouge, is a long-suffering Saints supporter who has come up with some reflections in rhyme. I’m sure he won’t mind if I share his handiwork with readers of this site.

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Edward Luce, Washington bureau chief of the UK’s Financial Times, penned a lengthy piece last week suggesting that President Obama is being undermined by the Chicagoans in his inner circle — such as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

At The Washington Note, Steve Clemons comments that US media, by and large, have not picked up on the article — perhaps because they fear being cut off from access to the White House….

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In the UK’s Guardian, Joe Queenan diagnoses the Democrats’ problems with the “tea party” movement. “What is it about tea parties that make them off-limits to Democrats? Well, for starters, everything….”

“A more pertinent explanation, though, is demographics. The Democratic party, always a weird melange, is now truly the party of the rich and the poor, with millions of civil servants and intellectuals filling out the mix. Rich people don’t attend tea parties, not only because they can find ways to hide income and avoid paying taxes, but because tea parties are corny. After all, Sarah Palin was there. Poor people don’t go to tea parties because poor people don’t go anywhere. Civil servants don’t go to tea parties because they’ve got nice pensions – so who’s complaining? And intellectuals don’t go to tea ­parties because the whole iconography of populist insurgency repels them.”

“One of the things that helped get Obama elected was that he was really cool. This made Democrats feel cool. Tea Party types are not cool. But there are an awful lot of them out there. The Democrats thus find themselves in a bind. They cannot continue to cede the public stage to the Tea Partyers. They cannot simply sit back and do nothing. Maybe they should try torchlight parades. Or coffee claques. Perhaps even fistfights. But they better try something soon. Trouble’s a-brewin’.”

They’re a party of rich and poor people, then — but with the poor people humiliated and on the sidelines, effectively they’re a party of rich people — or, at least, of relatively affluent people of a certain type, full stop. Sounds like a funny way to run a left-of-center party to me….

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John Hofmeister, former president of US operations for Shell Oil, is granted space for an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. In his commentary, Hofmeister espouses a view that will not necessarily make the paper’s editorial board happy: “The U. S. Needs an Industrial Policy.”

Hofmeister: “The next decade could see negative growth thanks to our foolhardy fondness for “free market” philosophies that tell us it’s OK to export all our jobs. The U.S. is down to four world leading industries: entertainment, out of Los Angeles (heavily indebted to Democrats); information technology, out of the Bay Area (likewise); energy, out of Houston (heavily indebted to Republicans); and financial services, out of New York (indebted to both parties). That’s it, folks. We’re otherwise second- or third-rung suppliers across the range of manufactured products—except for biotech, a small industry—and we can still (mostly) feed ourselves. Even aerospace has suffered.”

A handful of readers were moved to comment, and they were not especially happy. Said one: “One man’s ‘industrial policy’ is another man’s Stalinist command economy.” Said another: “Just think… with an industrial policy in place, our economy would look like Japan’s: moribund.”

Well, yes — Japan has gone through a “lost decade” — but did its economy never achieve anything? Just asking….

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At the National Journal website, Stuart Taylor writes that two mistakes — the bungled questioning of the would-be Christmas Day bomber, and the decision to try the 9/11 terrorists in New York — have created the mistaken impression that the Obama administration is soft on terror. Taylor holds that the administration should make it clear that terror suspects will be questioned aggressively. There need be no constitutional qualms about doing so, he argues, due to the “recognized ‘public safety’ exception to Miranda.”

Taylor believes that advocates of military commissions have overstated their case, since “the panels have so far been something of an embarrassment, managing to convict only three men, two of whom have since been freed, in the eight years since Bush announced them.”

I suppose I am of two minds about these issues. On the one hand, there is that  view that, since nothing can make us absolutely safe, the anti-terrorism and national-security complexes might as well accept some constraints.

On the other hand, it may still be the case that governments are obligated from time to time to do things that otherwise would be beyond the pale, “for reasons of state.” The people involved are not choirboys — and the public, which is disposed to demand that anything and everything be done to protect us from terrorism, and is willing to look the other way at whatever has to be done to accomplish this, does not understand the qualms….

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Walter Russell Mead has penned a follow-up to his earlier musings on climate change and the “Climategate” controversy on the American Interest website. The comments section following Mead’s article suggests strongly that the readership of this publication leans strongly toward climate-change skepticism and feels that Mead has been too easy on the climate researchers.

Mead: “Scientists don’t get to write the Endangered Species Act all by themselves; other interest groups (real estate developers, for example) also get a bite at the apple.  If cigarettes cause cancer, whether to discourage smoking, ban it altogether or otherwise regulate it is a political decision not a scientific one.  Once the controversy crosses this line, scientists turn from experts and authority figures into ordinary citizens and it is their voting strength and their ability to persuade non-scientists about the merits of their views and priorities, rather than the number and quality of their peer reviewed publications, that determines their weight in the political process….

“If climate scientists are even half right, they are going to have to get used to intrusive and unrelenting public scrutiny.  Their work will be second-guessed and disputed; their financial interests examined with a fine-toothed comb.  Hostile critics will go through their emails;  every jot and tittle they publish will be closely examined by lynx-eyed skeptics.  The debates over the policy implications of global warming will be waged mendaciously, tendentiously and unscrupulously — just like the debates over issues ranging from abortion to stem cell research to animal rights….

“The findings of climate science will (and should) be held to a much higher standard of accuracy and certainty than normal scientific studies.  Scientists can be wrong about the lesser spotted skink for twenty years and then change their minds; no harm, no foul except maybe to the skinks.  But if the implications of the work of climate scientists lead to serious proposals for the entire world to make dramatic shifts in its basic patterns of energy usage, it would be utterly naive and idiotic for scientists to expect that there wouldn’t be lots of people second guessing their work and checking over it in the hope of discovering mistakes.”

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Walter Russell Mead has penned a follow-up to his earlier musings on climate change and the “Climategate” controversy on the American Interest website. The comments section following Mead’s article suggests strongly that the readership of this publication leans strongly toward climate-change skepticism and feels that Mead has been too easy on the climate researchers.

Mead: “Scientists don’t get to write the Endangered Species Act all by themselves; other interest groups (real estate developers, for example) also get a bite at the apple.  If cigarettes cause cancer, whether to discourage smoking, ban it altogether or otherwise regulate it is a political decision not a scientific one.  Once the controversy crosses this line, scientists turn from experts and authority figures into ordinary citizens and it is their voting strength and their ability to persuade non-scientists about the merits of their views and priorities, rather than the number and quality of their peer reviewed publications, that determines their weight in the political process….

“If climate scientists are even half right, they are going to have to get used to intrusive and unrelenting public scrutiny.  Their work will be second-guessed and disputed; their financial interests examined with a fine-toothed comb.  Hostile critics will go through their emails;  every jot and tittle they publish will be closely examined by lynx-eyed skeptics.  The debates over the policy implications of global warming will be waged mendaciously, tendentiously and unscrupulously — just like the debates over issues ranging from abortion to stem cell research to animal rights….

“The findings of climate science will (and should) be held to a much higher standard of accuracy and certainty than normal scientific studies.  Scientists can be wrong about the lesser spotted skink for twenty years and then change their minds; no harm, no foul except maybe to the skinks.  But if the implications of the work of climate scientists lead to serious proposals for the entire world to make dramatic shifts in its basic patterns of energy usage, it would be utterly naive and idiotic for scientists to expect that there wouldn’t be lots of people second guessing their work and checking over it in the hope of discovering mistakes.”

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“When somebody steps up and says their purpose in putting on a convention like this is to make a profit, that’s really the antithesis of a grass roots movement,”  complained Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots, objecting to the profiteering aspect of last week’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville. Blogger Dan Riehl suggested that convention organizer Judson Phillips “wants to be a tea party millionaire.”

A comeback was issued by convention spokesman Mark Skoda: “Have we gone so far in the Obama-socialist view of the nation that ‘profit’ is a bad word — in particular, if we’re using it to advance the conservative cause?”

I suppose the Tea Party enthusiasts wouldn’t think much of the political views expressed on this website. I wonder, however, whether the above exchange doesn’t suggest that the movement may culminate in something that the activists won’t be especially happy about, should it come about. They’ll end up feeding a juggernaut of unlimited corporate prerogative, and if they try to resist it they’ll be accused of harboring an “Obama-socialist view of the nation”….

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“In fact, the Republican tradition of campaign finance reform in which I stand dates to the trust-buster, Theodore Roosevelt.” So writes former Senator Warren Rudman in Friday’s Washington Post. Rudman favors new public-financing legislation in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

I’m afraid that Rudman may be out of luck when it comes to invoking the memory of Teddy Roosevelt.  George Will and Glenn Beck don’t think much of “TR.” Beck seems to think that he’s some kind of Communist — never mind that he’s on Mt. Rushmore….

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Here is a fascinating exchange from earlier this week on the Washington Post website.

Ezra Klein: “I’m a big Wyden-Bennett guy, frankly.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI): “I have a lot of respect for that plan. If I were a Democrat, it’s the bill I’d be on. He’s got more mandates than I’d like. But if Ron Wyden and I were in a room, we could hammer out a deal by tomorrow.”

I know people who object to the Wyden-Bennett bill as too much of a giveaway to the insurance companies. However, that’s true to some degree of just about any bill that might pass.

If this is the kind of bill that can pass, why don’t we pass it? If the point is to keep people from being bankrupted, this should do the job in most cases. It bears the name of one Democrat and one Republican — members of both parties can take credit for it. That will make everybody happy — or, at least, some people on both sides of the aisle. So, why not pass it and forget about it?

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California, like so many other states in the Far West, has for most of its history allowed for ballot initiatives by voter petition. As has been widely reported, the Golden State is not in especially good shape, and some people think that overreliance on voter initiatives is part of the problem. It’s been proposed that the state needs a constitutional convention, and a campaign is underway to bring this about — by ballot initiative.

Signatures are being collected to put a convention call on a statewide ballot, but this is opposed by Fred Kimball of Kimball Petition Management, the London Economist reports. Constitutional change might include limitations on ballot initiatives. Kimball: “As a business, I oppose it.”

What a commentary on the condition of this political system. As far as Kimball is concerned, California shall not have constitutional reform — because it might be bad for the petition-collection business….

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We’re seeing a widely admired multinational corporation suffer through what could be an existential crisis — although I imagine that Toyota has built up enough goodwill through the decades that, although it may take a hit, it should be able to recover if it responds prudently to the problem with Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) in so many of its vehicles. In Toronto’s National Post, Terence Corcoran sees protectionist sentiment at work from the American automobile industry and its political supporters. “Was Toyota panicked into doing something — anything — when faced with a looming full-bore economic attack from the United States Economic Marines, with the media imbedded [sic] as part of the crusade?”

The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins is the type of fellow who sees ambulance-chasing personal-injury lawyers behind any such scare. Elsewhere on this site I’ve expressed my aversion to an “everything-is-a-scam” mindset. However, in a column from last week, Jenkins does have some pertinent points to make. In the first place, Toyota is not the only manufacturer to have experienced a SUA problem, although its vehicles are affected by the phenomenon far more frequently than are those of its competitors. Furthermore, if the problem lurks in the vehicles’ electronics, rather than the floor mats or the acceleration pedal (as has been speculated in the media), then the root cause may never be found. “Toyota may or may not have a legitimately bigger problem with unintended acceleration than other manufacturers, but Toyota clearly is hunting desperately for some problem, any problem, it can declare ‘fixed.’… The first thing to notice is that SUA complaints afflict all manufacturers without a cause necessarily ever being assigned. Strange things happen in small numbers when you put millions of cars on the road. Secondly, hardly certain is whether Toyota’s overweighting is significant…. Reinforced by Toyota’s own flopping around is the impression that even Toyota doesn’t really know whether it has a problem. That won’t stop the company from finding causes and fixing them anyway. But Toyota’s deliverance may ultimately have to come from the same ghost in the machine that likely brought about its SUA purgatory in the first place.”

In a December column, before the matter had risen to this week’s crescendo, Jenkins noted that “even a midpriced car nowadays can contain dozens of microprocessors and 30 million lines of code.”  Toyota employs a “drive-by-wire” system that uses microprocessors rather than a traditional steel cable to connect the accelerator to the engine. Observes Jenkins: “Racecars and motorcycles increasingly have drive-by-wire systems too—but the trusty kill switch remains part of every design.” The solution, then, might be “simple analog overrides of the digital systems we increasingly rely on…. The world needs simple, straightforward on-off switches, with the inestimable virtue of having only two states—on and off.”

UPDATE: Friday’s WSJ features another Jenkins column on the matter here.

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What sort of cause could unite such worthies as Brent Bozell, David Corn, Ana Marie Cox, Todd Gitlin, Ed Morrissey, Markos Moulitsas, Grover Norquist, Bill Press, Glenn Reynolds, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and a cast of — well, maybe not thousands, but at least a dozen or two others? Why, it’s an online petition to “Demand Question Time” — in the wake of President Obama’s appearance last week before Congressional Republicans gathered in Baltimore.

This would be at least a little bit of a constitutional innovation.  To my knowledge, the president has never visited Capitol Hill for such a question-and-answer session, at least not in the 20th or 21st centuries. There’s been a feeling that such a thing would be contrary to the separation of powers — although I’m not sure whether the argument is that this would violate the letter of the document, or just its spirit. For the moment, it doesn’t appear that there is a willingness to schedule such a thing on a regular basis. If it ever happens, it probably will take place once again in an informal setting like last week’s exchange in Baltimore, rather than in the halls of Congress.

The reason that it might be a bit idea is that, while we do not have a parliamentary system, our polarized political parties are coming to resemble parliamentary parties….

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A couple of weeks ago I posted on this item about an attempt to disenfranchise Sunni politicians in Iraq, in which the notorious Ahmed Chalabi appeared to have had a hand. The Wall Street Journal reports Thursday that an Iraqi court has overturned the ban, and the Sunni politicians will be permitted to run as candidates in March 7 parliamentary elections….

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The Overlord of the Left Side of the Blogosphere, Markos Moulitsas, earlier this week produced a column for the Washington insider publication The Hill on the “myth” of a “center-right nation.” Readers may take a look at the column and judge it for whatever it is worth. The content will not be surprising to anyone who has ever spent any time hanging around progressive activists. “After decades of hearing pundits make the claim, Democrats inside the Beltway seem to have internalized the fiction that they are a minority in a conservative country. There is no other way to explain their lack of faith in their own policies and their inability to fight for strong progressive legislation, even after voters gave them an unambiguous mandate to govern.” In other words, the only problem is that the Democrats have not going far enough left.

He ought to know better than to say that any election delivers an “unambiguous mandate.” An election is not a plank-by-plank referendum on each item in a party platform. The smartest thing I ever heard about the notion of a mandate is that an election delivers a mandate to the winner — to do whatever he or she can get away with.

Kos has an unsurpassed record as an Internet entrepreneur. My problem with him is that, born in 1971, he cannot have come of age any earlier than the late 1980s — and I don’t see that he has much awareness of anything that happened before that. Those who are bit older have lived through nearly a half-century of backlash. It’s far from clear that the election of Obama has ended this, although we heard quite a bit insistence that it did, a year or so ago. We we see a political realignment in 20 years? Maybe so. But, how are we going to get by in the meantime?

I share Kos’s frustration at (for instance) the apparent inability to push through a health-care reform bill. I have to insist, though, that one way of looking at this situation might be to compare the progressives to the Wall Street banks — they are overextended. They overestimated the extent of their mandate. November 2008 was practically the apogee of their support, and that situation has deteriorated ever since. Better to pull back, think more carefully about setting priorities, and shore up your standing with the low-to-moderate-income voters who are balking at supporting you, than to barge ahead and go ever further left,  as far as I am concerned….

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“Climategate,” “Glaciergate,” and the wider ongoing controversy and discussion over climate change continue to rage on, with many major developments originating from the UK. On Tuesday, activist George Monbiot, on his blog for the Guardian, call for heads to roll at the University of East Anglia. He wants the resignation of both Phil Jones,, head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU), and Annie Ogden, head of communications at the university. “When the emails were first published in November, I called for Professor Jones’s resignation as head of the CRU. Though he has stepped down temporarily, his position is now even less tenable. The longer he leaves it, the worse this will get.” Ogden, for her part, “was warned repeatedly that the university’s handling of this issue was a catastrophe, and still the policy – of utter passivity in the face of crisis – remains unchanged.”

At least for the moment, Monbiot is sticking with IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri. “It’s worth remembering that he was appointed to run the IPCC after the Bush administration had his predecessor, Bob Watson, booted out at the behest of ExxonMobil…. Once it had extracted Watson, [the Bush administration] accepted Pachauri as his replacement. The very qualities which made him acceptable to the climate change deniers in the White House – he wasn’t a climate scientist, he had friendly relations with business – are now being used by climate change deniers as a stick with which to beat him.”

Monbiot sees little reason to back down on the wider questions. Skeptics “stoutly ignore far graver evidence of falsification and fabrication by their own side, even when there is smoking gun evidence that their champions have secretly taken money from fossil fuel companies to make false claims…. In fact, as [Guardian environment correspondent] Fred Pearce has shown, even their claims about the material in the hacked emails are almost all false.”

Pachauri, for his part, granted an interview to Amy Kazmin of the Financial Times in New Delhi yesterday (Wednesday). Pachauri suspects that he and the IPCC have become the targets of an orchestrated lobbying and public-relations campaign. “It doesn’t take a genius to arrive at the conclusion that apparently this is carefully orchestrated. These things are certainly not happening at random. The one unfortunate thing that has happened is the mistake that the IPCC made on the glaciers. We have acknowledged that; we have put that on our web site…. What they are indulging in is skulduggery of the worst kind…. I don’t want to get down to a personal level, but all you need to do is look at their backgrounds. They are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder – I hope that they apply it to their faces every day – and people who say that the only way to deal with HIV/Aids is to screen the population on a regular basis and isolate those who are infected…. You can look at the names of the authors of these articles that have appeared in the Sunday Telegraph. These are the persons I’m referring to…. It’s only a surmise. I have no evidence. But there is enough documentary evidence to show that, for instance, in Washington DC, the number of lobbyists (trying to influence US climate change policy) has increased many fold and from what I read from the Centre for Public Integrity, 770 companies are supporting some of these lobbyists. And certainly some of them are active on the other side of the Atlantic as well.”

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Germany’s Der Spiegel reports on political tensions between the United States and China, including Chinese resistance to American demands for currency “rebalancing.”

“The ‘American elite’ has ‘no idea’ what fatal consequences a revaluation of the yuan could have, says political commentator Liang Jing, adding that it would lead to a collapse in Chinese exports and ’cause a worsening in domestic income distribution.’

“What that means in plain language is that Chinese factories would need to lay off many workers and the divide between rich and poor would quickly grow wider — potentially plunging the country into social unrest.

“And if the Chinese government were to start allowing money to flow freely across its borders, something Washington is also pushing for, it would mean an ‘unprecedented exodus’ of capital from the country, the commentator says.”

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The right side of the blogosphere is excited because the premier of Newfoundland, Danny Williams, has traveled to the United States to have heart surgery. This is supposed to be evidence of the inferiority of the Canadian single-payer system. I question seriously whether these commentators know what they are talking about.

A look at the website of the local paper in St. John’s, Newfoundland reveals that the exact nature of Premier Williams ‘ illness has not been disclosed, nor has the exact United States location to which he has traveled. He is expected to be laid up for anywhere from 3 to 12 weeks.

I wonder whether the commentators on the right side of the blogosphere even know where Newfoundland is. It is, as a matter of fact, a remote island with a population of a half-million, practically in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. Transatlantic flights stop at the airport in Gander, Newfoundland for refueling; you might remember hearing reports of passengers being stranded there after 9/11. I understand that Newfoundland has suffered economic hardship, like the other Atlantic provinces, due to the decline of the North Atlantic fisheries. Remote though it may be, I am sure the local population loves the place, which I understand is known as “The Rock.” Nevertheless, not every specialized medical procedure will be available in such a place — no matter the details of the health-care system.

The right-of-center National Post in Toronto says that there is no reason Premier Williams could not have had his procedure there.

The National Post reports: “Long wait times for cardiac surgery were a problem 15 years ago but are generally ‘a thing of the past’ in most parts of Canada, physicians insist. Where queues develop for elective operations, patients are routinely sent to other provinces for speedy care, with their own government’s medicare plan picking up the tab, they say.”

The paper spoke to Dr. Chris Feindel, a cardiac surgeon at Toronto’s University Health Network: “”Virtually all forms of cardiac surgery are looked after in Canada, and I would say extremely well…. Personally … I would have my cardiac surgery done in Canada, no matter what resources I had at my disposal.”

And, get a load of this: “In fact, [Dr. Feindel] said, patients from the United States and other countries come to the UHN’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre for valve repairs, a procedure developed by Toronto surgeons. Meanwhile, the death rate after bypass surgery in Ontario is among the lowest in North America, reports the province’s Cardiac Care Network.”

Nevertheless, I suppose that on this side of the 49th parallel, the denizens of the right side of the blogosphere think themselves competent to say that the hospitals in Toronto are no good. You know, I heard something about some Americans traveling to Mexico for surgery….

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William Kristol has editorialized in favor of keeping the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in place with regard to gays and lesbians. The London Economist’s “Democracy in America” blogger responds with a lengthy dissection, beginning with this proviso: “I’m not sure why I continue to read Bill Kristol’s work….”

Kristol can indeed be tendentious. I tend to share many of his reservations with regard to the gay-rights question, especially marriage. Any change, regarding marriage, military service, adoption by same-sex couples, or what-have-you, is sure to provoke backlash. However, momentum on behalf of this particular change has been building for some time, and I am afraid the opponents’ case has some weaknesses.

More serious than that of Kristol may be the case for the opposition made by Mackubin Thomas Owens of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s journal Orbis in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. Mr. Owens allows this much: “There are many foolish reasons to exclude homosexuals from serving in the armed services. One is simple antihomosexual bigotry.” Nevertheless, he insists that there are good reasons for keeping the prohibition in place, most notably a threat to unit cohesion.

The problem is that I don’t know whether the perception of threat to cohesion can be separated from the simple bigotry. The perception of threat may be based upon a sort of innuendo to which gays and lesbians, and those who advocate for them, will object: namely, that gays and lesbians are sexual predators, moreso than their heterosexual counterparts.

If this policy change is made, I’m sure it will represent something of a burden for the military. Many personnel will react viscerally against it. And, its opponents may yet be able to fight it off. But, while acquiescence may be a burden, acceptance of it may turn out to be a consequence of maintaining a military force that is representative of the United States….

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Germany’s Der Spiegel reports on political tensions between the United States and China, including China’s reasons for resistance to U. S. pressure for currency “rebalancing.”

“The ‘American elite’ has ‘no idea’ what fatal consequences a revaluation of the yuan could have, says political commentator Liang Jing, adding that it would lead to a collapse in Chinese exports and ’cause a worsening in domestic income distribution.’

“What that means in plain language is that Chinese factories would need to lay off many workers and the divide between rich and poor would quickly grow wider — potentially plunging the country into social unrest.

“And if the Chinese government were to start allowing money to flow freely across its borders, something Washington is also pushing for, it would mean an ‘unprecedented exodus’ of capital from the country, the commentator says.”

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