Jun
30
Are Al-Jazeera Turning Neocon?
Filed Under American Politics, Foreign Policy | 8 Comments
A fascinating piece on the Al-Jazeera website by Mark Levine who’s bio states that he is “a leader of the new generation of historians and analysts of the modern Middle East and Islam”. Whether that’s true or not is beyond my knowledge of the new generation of Middle East historians.
He takes to task the fact that the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh should be dictating Obama’s impulses with regards to Iran.
It took two weeks of intensified government repression against protesters in Iran before Barack Obama, the US president, moved from cautious commentary to describing the crackdown as “violent and unjust”.
The acknowledged elephant in the room preventing a more robust US response to the Iranian crisis is the Anglo-American-organised coup in 1953, which overthrew Mohammed Mossadeqh, the nationalist prime minister, and brought the 33-year-old Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, back to the country as unchallenged ruler.
The coup was motivated by Mossadeqh’s and the Iranian parliament’s decision to nationalise the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, and by the fear that Soviet-inspired communists might take over the government.
The US-sponsored overthrow of Mossadeqh and our subsequent whole-hearted support for the Shah’s brutal rule are ignominious chapters in the history of US foreign policy.
But does a coup 55 years ago really disqualify the US from standing up forcefully for democracy in Iran today?
It is highly unlikely.
It is not the actions of previous administrations that is hamstringing Obama, it is the actions of his own administration that are preventing him from being more outspoken on Iran. It his political support of oppression across the region that prevents more hawkish rhetoric on Iran being taken seriously:
Obama is acutely aware of the real reason why he cannot be too forceful in supporting the millions of Iranians demanding to have their votes counted. The problem is not with US administrations long past, but with the policies of the current administration.
The fact is that the US counts as its closest allies in the Middle East regimes who routinely rig elections – if they even bother to hold them at all – which produce governments that are far less legitimate than Ahmadinejad’s today.
The substance of Obama’s foreign policies in the Middle East and North Africa remain in many key areas strikingly similar to, and are in some cases more aggressive than, those of George Bush, his predecessor.
Saudi Arabia remains our most crucial Arab ally despite the fact that its government is among the world’s most repressive and undemocratic (about which Obama has had nothing to say since becoming president).Rather than encourage Arab democrats, the Obama administration is improving ties with Libya and returning an ambassador to Syria, where today we are courting Bashar al-Assad as a “key player” in the region, despite his country’s abysmal record on human rights and democracy.
But it is not just in Iran, Saudi, Libya and Sudan that Obama has legitimised the anti-democratic forces, even Egypt, where Obama made his appeal to the Islamic world, is bolstered by Obama’s support:
In Cairo, where Obama made only a fleeting allusion to democracy during his “historic” speech last month, Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, won his most recent re-election bid by deploying the usual assortment of undemocratic techniques.
Then he jailed his main opponent, Ayman Nour, for more than three years for election fraud just to make sure everyone got his point.
Yet the Obama administration, like its predecessors, regularly celebrates him as a key ally and a crucial mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the ironic thing is that the will for democracy in the Middle-East is there and Iran is as good a place to start as any:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, do not fear the US but rather their own people’s desire to live in a country more like the US.
In fact, in poll after poll Iranians have revealed themselves to be among the most pro-American and pro-democratic people in the Muslim majority world.
The point is, that unless you push the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable engagement with the powers in the Middle-East, no-one will know what the outcome may be. The previous administration (and administrations long before) can rightly be criticised, at least in part, for their myopic view of the Middle-East and the Islamic world in general. But that is a lesson for historians, what matters now is how we move forward. Is the status quo acceptable? Does having to deal with Ahmedinejad over nuclear weapons mean that the rights of his citizens should be ignored out of expediency? Certainly Obama should be credited for seeking a new method of dialogue with the Middle-East. Unfortunately he has chosen to throw his lot in with the current bad actors within the region. I would be much more supportive if he expressed his empathy for the people and not their oppressors:
Ultimately, it is the reality of the Obama administration’s support for a discredited status quo across the region, and not the actions of the Eisenhower administration half a century ago, that makes it impossible for the US to play a forceful role advocating for democracy in Iran at this crucial moment in the history of the Islamic Republic, and ours as well.
I started off by asking whether Al-Jazeera had gone neocon on us. Well no, they quite carefully state that the views expressed in the article are not necessarily the views of Al-Jazeera. Not that the author is a neocon, have a look at his biography, he’s quite careful in expressing his progressive credentials. Also read his article, it’s much more coherent and better expressed than my effort.
Jun
30
I found this a useful analysis of Obama’s healthcare proposals. It’s by the Cato institute, so skewed towards opposing Obama for small government reasons and therefore not a non-partisan judgement. But nevertheless, it shows up the pitfalls to Obama’s plan.
I’m happy to post a leftwing equivalent if anyone can find me one. It’s always useful to get both sides of the story.
Jun
29
Open Post
Filed Under American Politics | 17 Comments
A good place to chat about Honduras, Obama’s foreign policy or anything else that takes your interest.
Question: There is a disparity between Obama’s handling of Iran and Honduras. Does this reflect Obama’s flexible approach to foreign affairs or something less competent? Will we see an Obama doctrine develop, or will Obama be ever the pragmatist on foreign matters?
Jun
29
That was how Barack Obama described John McCain’s plan to tax health care benefits:
Joe Biden also had some things to say about it:
“They (McCain/Palin) said that we’re going to raise taxes on the middle class. That is simply not true“.
They are proposing the largest increase on middle-class taxpayers in history
Fast forward a few months and it seems that the Obama administration are considering the very thing that they criticised John McCain for. As the New York Times reports:
The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.
David Axelrod refused to count anything out on George Stephanopoulos’ This Week saying:
One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches us. He is very cognizant of protecting people — middle class people, hard-working people who are trying to get along in a very difficult economy. And he will continue to represent them in these talks,” Axelrod said.
“But they’re also dealing with punishing health care costs, and that’s something that we have to deal with.”
So it seems that Obama doesn’t do “line(s) in the sand”.Except of course he did do exactly that:
“I can make a firm pledge,” he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”
A campaign “line in the sand” is obviously not firm enough to withstand the winds of spend-happy Democrats in Congress but they are doing what they can to ensure that only the rich provide. Or so they would have us believe. The proposed plan looks to only tax benefits that exceed approximately $17,000, the type of gold plated policy that only high-earners get. Except it isn’t high earners that get these levels of benefits:
In 2008, only about one in five employer-sponsored plans carried the high premiums likely to be hit by the tax. But research shows that those people tend not to be wealthy highfliers with gold-plated insurance plans, as advocates assert, but those who have to pay high premiums just for basic coverage — the old, the sick, women of childbearing age and residents of high-cost urban areas. Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, found that a similar cap suggested by a 2005 tax reform panel would have raised taxes mainly on workers with family coverage, many of them in smaller firms with high concentrations of older, female or unionized workers.
Except scratch “unionized workers from that list. It looks like they will be exempted from this tax hike:
The exception, which could make the proposal more politically palatable to Democrats from heavily unionized states such as Michigan, is adding controversy to an already contentious debate. It would shield the 12.4 percent of American workers who belong to unions from being taxed while exposing some other middle-income workers to the levy.
The benefits of bankrolling a political campaign. Under this proposal, the politically connected unions are prevented from sharing the burden that hard-working but non-unionised employees will be expected to shoulder. Government for the people? Hardly. Government for the paymasters is more appropriate.
Jun
27
President Of All The People
Filed Under American Politics, Videos | 2 Comments
This is just taking invasive bureaucratic micro-management too far.
Obama To Hold Job Performance Review With Every American Worker
Jun
27
That is the excellent one line summation by the commentator Mikey, responding to a post by Tim Montgomerie at Centre Right.
He makes the point that Barack Obama’s civility is allowing him to carry out the radical reform that he is:
It’s true that he has passion and charisma and a brilliant campaigning machine but it is his civility that has persuaded Americans to swallow his policy radicalism.
Obama has demonstrated that voters are more persuaded by moderation and reasonableness of character than moderation of policy. Voters, as Sarah Vine suggests, don’t take a lot of interest in policy detail. Obama won over middle America because of his generosity to opponents, his optimism, his image as a family man. Republicans have hated this and have gotten more and more heated, more and more angry in the process.
I think that this is an excellent point, although I would argue that it is the American public’s perception of his civility that is counting, I am less convinced of Obama’s civility per se. My reply to Tim Montgomerie’s post is below, slightly modified:
The thing about his civility though is that it is only skin deep. For every tea and scones invitation for Republican leaders is an “I won” quote. For every appeal to bipartisan empathy over abortion, there are the unprecedented digs at George Bush in his inauguration speech.
He has benefited from the honeymoon period given to him from the MSM (I don’t want to get all shouty and accuse them of bias). They are excited by what they (want to) perceive as a new type of politician and are prepared to ignore his more snide and glib moments to perpetuate his uniqueness. The question is, can they keep it up for four years or will they get bored and go for blood.
One thing I was struck by when reading his “Audacity of Hope” was that whenever he discussed a policy issue, he would without fail acknowledge the benefits of the conservative position and criticise some of the liberal positions, leading one to think that he would adopt some middle ground. But on every position, he ultimately took about as liberal a position as is possible. An interesting and successful dance, but he must be really struggling to keep a straight face as he does it.
You are right that the GOP are going to have to learn to dance like Obama and knock on the head idiotic proposals like renaming the Democrats as the Socialist Party. But patience will be the key to their success. We’ve had a stimulus that isn’t working and a Cap and Trade bill that amounts to the biggest tax increase in American history, a tripling of the deficit and some foreign policy prevarication. There will come a time when Americans will see Obama for the tax and spend liberal that he is and not the embodiment of change that he portrays.
Jun
27
Cap And Trade Passed!
Filed Under American Politics | 7 Comments
The Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade Bill passed in the House last night by a slim 219-212 margin. 44 Democrats voted against the bill, but 8 Republican Representatives put the bill over the top, no doubt putting them at risk of earning similar treatment from the right wing blogosphere that Specter, Snowe and Collins received after they were the casting votes that helped pass the stimulus package. From it’s conception, this bill looked like a tough one to pass; rural Democrats didn’t like it but were, to a degree, satiated by a serious post 2020 back loading of the financial pain that this bill will represent. However, certainty over whether it would pass was still elusive until the last minute. As much as it pains me to say it, kudos will have to go to Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama who I’m sure were hitting the phones yesterday and trying to persuade waverers.
Nate Silver has had a look at how the Cap & Trade bill will affect consumers on a state by state basis. His methodology is fairly complex and I won’t go into it in detail here (check the linked post if you want to understand it), but basically he takes the domestic consumption of carbon in the home and transport and then uses the recent CBO projection that predicted that each household face an extra $175 fuel charge. Silver also allows for different income levels per the CBO report. Here’s the map:
As you can see, the Atlantic and Pacific coastal states do fairly well out of the bill whilst the “flyover” red states fare much worse. It would be a simplistic determination that blue states are being rewarded whilst redder states are being penalised, the truth is that transportation accounts for a lot of the carbon emissions referenced in this data and redder states are much more spread out. Hence the higher the amount of transportation, the higher the fuel costs.
The data that this map represents may be important for the long term fortunes of the bill. Now that it has passed the House, it’s next stop is the Senate sometime later this summer. It is here that the bill could well face defeat, in fact a number of the political commentary blogs are predicting that it will go down to defeat. Four states in which the cost to the consumer are the highest may prove to be the deciding factors in this bill, Alaska, Louisiana, Maine and North Dakota.
To defeat Cap and Trade in the Senate, 41 votes will be needed. The Stimulus vote in the senate secured 36 nay votes and it isn’t too much of a stretch to think that they will be nay votes on Cap & Trade too. That means five more need to be found. Democrat Mary Landrrieu in Louisiana is a very possible no vote. Not only is Louisiana the fourth hardest hit of all the states, it also has a significant oil based economy and her electoral margin in 2008, 52%-46% isn’t completely immune from a concerted attack should she vote yes. Mark Begich in Alaska is also a potential no vote. Alaska is the hardest hit of all the states and it’s oil industry goes without saying. With only a 4,000 vote margin, trying to justify a vote for an effective $1,600 tax increase would be difficult electorally despite him having five years to live it down. North Dakota, the fifth hardest hit state has two Democratic Senators in Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan. Both are friendly to Obama and Kent Conrad is the Senator with the highest approval rating, so they aren’t certain no votes. However if one of them votes no, that leaves two more to find. And that means Maine and the two Republican turncoats Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. They may have been able to vote in favour of the stimulus, they could rationalise that it was going to help the people of Maine cope with the recession, but trying to persuade those people that their fuel bills will go up significantly because Maine happens to be very cold will be a tough needle to thread. So Landrieu, Begich, Dorgan or Conrad and Snowe and Collins gets 41 no votes and a defeat of Cap and Trade; and this doesn’t take into account other Democratic senators from ‘coal states’ like Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Robert Byrd (W.Virginia).
Naturally there will be a lot of horse trading between now and then, but this bill looks like a hard one to pass and the American economy will be able to breath a huge sigh of relief.
Jun
26
Have You Seen Hillary Recently?
Filed Under American Politics | 4 Comments
Probably not.
Politico notes that Hillary has gone missing in terms of the news cycle since becoming Secretary Of State.
I wrote earlier this week about how Hillary Clinton’s cabinet appointment has come with a dramatic reduction in her public profile, at least at home, as President Obama has asserted himself clearly as the face of American foreign policy.
They even kindly came up with a chart to show how much she has disappeared off the political news radar screen:
So her appearances in the media have been at the lowest level since 2007. This is a current Secretary of State, who is high profile not only as the wife of an ex-President, but as a serious politician in her own right. America is facing possible nuclear missiles being lobbed at them from North Korea, a serious commitment to engagement in the Middle East centered around Israel and Iran and a war in Afghanistan in which America is hoping for further engagement from her allies and yet Hillary has become ever so low profile. There are a number of interesting things going on here:
- I think this demonstrates how focused on domestic policy the Obama Administration is
- It shows that the White House is to a large degree running foreign policy
- It is evidence towards the much quoted belief that Obama’s appointment of Hillary was to keep her from becoming an in-party critic of the administration.
Perhaps she’s very contented in her new role, but a politician without the oxygen of publicity is like an impotent man in Argentina – very frustrated.
Jun
25
Cap & Trade; The Demise of Science- Based Policy Development
Filed Under American Politics | 11 Comments
By Shockwaver
The earth may or may not be warming. If the earth is warming, that may or may not be due to human activity. But I can assure you that the present public discussion on this subject is not a scientific debate. Rather it is predominately political and emotional. Special interest groups are driving the agenda, skeptics are treated like heretics, contrary evidence is ignored, and nonsensical solutions to the supposed problem are being proposed while obvious remedies are not pursued. I fear that the good name of science and the ability of science to impact policy in a beneficial way are being compromised by the sloppy way in which this topic is being treated in the scientific community.
Modeling has many valid uses too numerous to cover here. For just one example: a good experimentalist is able to computationally turn a single phenomenon on and off in a model and by clever experiment design, do the same thing physically, thus gaining confidence that the phenomenon being analyzed is properly identified and quantified.
The most useful benefits of models are that they sharpen understanding of the relative importance and interactions of the parts of a process and that they can be used for trend and error propagation analyses.
Model results for long-term predictions are more problematic, especially in cases where there are enormous sets of equations trying to capture a multitude of complex interactions. A complete mathematical definition of Gaia is a mind-boggling concept and modelers necessarily restrict their attention to high priority ingredients.
Of course seemingly unimportant (or unknown) things can grow to dominate a real situation but can be absent in a model result. As a non-mathematical example, who would have guessed the insertion of a camera into a cell phone ten years ago could contribute to the destabilization of a dictatorial “Islamic Republic” today. The same thing happens in stock markets, elections, evolution and, importantly, the weather. They all take bends and twists that are unforeseeable and certainly are not apparent by simplistic extrapolations of the present. And there are many unknown unknowns in climate prediction.
My concern is that I have not seen reports on this manner of scrutiny of the modeling (red team, murder board, or whatever you call it, questioning the results) and am not sure it has even been done. Here we are about to over-regulate a large fraction of the U.S. economy, and risk growth suppression, based on un-validated models that extrapolate an observed anomaly of less than 0.06% in absolute temperature to a predicted catastrophe.
Worse, there is a deliberate effort to suppress discussion. The American Physical Society (APS) solicited a pro and con companion piece for one of their rags. (That is a good thing). When published, the editor placed a disclaimer at the top of the con piece saying the views did not represent the position of the APS. This outrageous behavior caused the appropriate uproar among APS members but a modified disclaimer stuck. The APS demonstrates the attitude held by many others. “It is settled science.” In another case, the EPA did an internal evaluation of AGW. They refuse to release their report leading me to conclude that they too have misgivings that they do not wish to share lest their agenda be disrupted. These are just two of many examples.
There are serious shortcomings of AGW predictions. They cannot predict the present data from the past, they cannot explain the high correlation of sunspot activity with terrestrial temperature, their models generate thermal anomalies above the equator that are absent in the data, they cannot explain why historically, carbon dioxide changes lag temperature changes by 800 years during both periods of increase and decrease (Al Gore cleared this up nicely. When asked he said, “well, it’s complicated”).
Even if you accept there is a problem, proposed solutions are nonsensical. Kyoto delayed calculated effects by about one year. Cabbie’s reference on an earlier post had comparable conclusions. The U.S. Senate believed the effect Kyoto would have on the economy would be so bad, owing to the de facto unilateralism of that treaty, that they voted 95-0 to ask Clinton to not send them the treaty for ratification. We already find ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with China and India and driving up our costs with a U.S.-only Cap & Trade will only worsen our economic outlook.
Alternative energy has promise for the future but presently it is not economically competitive. Much of the government “investment” to be made will be pork demonstration projects. Ample land for these demonstrations is probably available at the graveyards that contain the bones of Carter’s demonstration project orgy that fell flat in the late ‘70’s.
It is arguable that ethanol as a fuel produces more net carbon dioxide than fossil fuels. And it drives up food costs worldwide precipitating misery and social instability. So what do we do? Ethanol mandates are set to increase.
Carbon offsets are another sham. Let’s say we want to offset aviation fuel generated carbon dioxide. Daily worldwide aviation fuel consumption is about 500 million kg/day. Assuming a tree grows a nominal 300g/day, aviation fuel carbon offsetting requires >250,000 trees/day be planted — every day! And after 20 years of maturing you would have to harvest and sequester 250,000 trees/day as you plant your 250,000 new ones lest the mature trees burn or rot releasing the carbon dioxide right back into the atmosphere. You can imagine the land required. Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it.
There is a healthy community of dissenters but they have been mostly relegated to the internet/blogosphere. e.g., the 31,000 petition signers (scientists and engineers) found at http://www.oism.org/pproject/ but they get little attention. Others fear to speak out lest they be branded deniers and burned at the professional stake. Lots of examples of this happening are available on Google.
Special interest groups get the majority of the attention in the media (who love a catastrophe). Anti-industrialists, environmentalists, the entertainment community, and some scientists looking for the next grant feed ammunition to the politicians who can’t wait to gain more control in order to create their utopia. Meanwhile the legislation races through the House essentially unfettered by legitimate criticism.
Finally, many C & T proponents are not credible. Even the most heartless ideologue would not deny a massive push for nuclear power, the best carbon-free energy source, if it truly meant avoiding Armageddon. But they do and that suggests to me that there is really a different agenda.
Update – Some numbers changed in the carbon offsets paragraph.
Jun
25
A Fresh Open Post For You
Filed Under Uncategorized, Videos | 40 Comments
A great night and morning of comments – thankyou, I had a lot of fun.
Question for you all – In light of Mark Sanford’s indiscretions. Does anyone know of a female politician who has been caught having an affair? I can’t think of one. Maybe there’s a justification for affirmative action. Just elect women.
Second question – The leaked Sanford love letters suggests that Sanford is really in love with this woman. I’m not trying to justify a man having any type of affair, but aren’t his actions preferable to the under the desk/in the Oval Office cupboard sordity of Clinton?
Here’s a class act for you: