Matthew Yglesias: Maliki's Walk Forward. Many Iraqi politicians, including Prime Minister Maliki, have been saying in vague terms how they want US military forces to quit Iraq. Polls indicate that most Iraqis are even more adamant on the point. Maliki crossed a line last week when he more/less endorsed Obama's 16-month pullout proposal, much to the chagrin of McCain (with his 100 year plan) and the Bush administration. Yglesias walks through this whole incident, including the denial that wasn't. Quote:

Conservatives like Bush and McCain used to acknowledge that if Iraq's leaders want us to leave, we have to leave. More recently, McCain's been singing a new tune, claiming to know what Maliki really wants irrespective of what he says, and suggesting that the only thing that really matters is what Gen. David Petraeus says.

This does a nice job of highlighting one of the most important unreported stories of the Iraq War: how the Bush administration has managed to prolong the war by dissuading Iraqi politicians from calling for a pullout. This has been done in lots of ways, like the scheme to arm Sunni tribal leaders, whom the Americans are able to keep in check. All this changes with Obama, who has no reason or desire to continue the subterfuge.

Meanwhile, back in the deep red plains states, this is Wichita Eagle editorial cartoonist Richard Crowson's take on the Maliki timetable affair:

I've continued to watch FiveThirtyEight almost obsessively, an activity not far removed from watching paint dry. Over the last couple of weeks, I've seen Obama's 3-point popular vote lead decline to 1.5 points, a slip that cost him slim edges in Indiana and Virginia. Presumably the big world tour will give him a bit of a boost, and indeed the margin inched up today to 1.8 points. In the electoral count, Obama is consistently running four states better than Kerry: Iowa, Ohio, Colorado, and New Mexico. This seems much closer than it should be, but there's a long time to go, and there's a good chance lots of people are enjoying the relative quiet between the primaries and the conventions. A lot of money is riding on the election, which will become painfully obvious soon enough.

My interest in grimey details of electoral politics predates my late-1960s-vintage embrace of the new left. I've colored in county-by-county vote results going back to the Civil War (much as Kevin Phillips did), so I have a lot of framework I can hook these new numbers onto, and enjoy using it. Obama is locked in right now as the officially designated lesser evil, but from a practical standpoint he also provides a measure of where the country is: if he can't win a majority, it's very unlikely that someone much better can. So tracking how he's doing has some relevance to tracking where we're at.

Rory Stewart: How to Save Afghanistan. Stewart wrote a pretty good book, The Places In Between, about walking across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul in 2002. He later spent a year in the British government in Iraq, wrote a book about that, and returned to Kabul to found a NGO. He provides a succinct list of what the US/NATO/etc. have done right and what's gone wrong, and seems to be personally committed to keep doing his part. But he starts off criticizing both McCain and Obama for their campaign planks to put more troops and money into Afghanistan. He argues for fewer troops and less money, albeit some of each, much more intelligently used. Don't know whether he's right, but he's certainly less wrong than McCain and Obama (let alone Bush, who's escalated bombings to new record levels). Final line is one I do agree with: "We do not have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do." From the beginning, there were two big reasons to reject America's Afghanistan war: one is that we would, by the very nature of who we are and how we think and act, do far more damage than we could ever possibly repair; the other is that in doing so we would make ourselves even worse. We've seen both happen, but we keep falling for the argument that we have to hang in there until we succeed. To some extent Stewart's still making that argument, but at least he's hedging it in the right direction.

Barnett Rubin: Afghan Government Charges on Killing Afghans -- U.S. 47, Terrorists 41. Rubin's another western Afghanistan expert who wants to help but is generally appalled by everything that's happening there. That makes him a particularly good source for information on Afghanistan. This is just one example of his posts at Juan Cole's "Informed Comment: Global Affairs" blog, worth following mostly for Rubin's posts. But it is a good example to follow up on Stewart's assertion that the US is doing more harm than good. And not just by a 47-41 margin: the 41 killed in the terrorist bombing were 41 the US strategy failed to stop.

Meanwhile, Air Force Times reports that the US dropped a record number of bombs on Afghanistan for the first six months of 2008. Also, Obama started his world tour in Afghanistan, where he argued for an additional 7,000 troops, while looking grimacingly at the Pakistani border. One might hope that he'll develop a sense of reality once he actually has to face it, but running for office in the US isn't conducive to that. On the other hand, once he has to face reality one reality he'll have to face is the established biases of the military-security state he'll inherit, and they're still pretty much the same as the ones who pushed/followed Bush into disaster after disaster. Obama may be different, but so was Jimmy Carter in 1976 and John Kennedy in 1960, and they still got swept along with the tide, sometimes catastrophically.

Right now, Obama doesn't seem to be any closer to calling a halt to the War on Terrorism than Carter was to ending the Cold War in 1976 (or to falling the logic of his human rights stance toward a clean break with the Shah of Iran). This despite the fact that the War on Terrorism is a bogus charade, a pretense at doing the impossible, showing the world we're boss when we only have the vaguest clue how our own country is working.

Paul Krugman: L-ish Economic Prospects. Argues that the last two recessions -- officially, starting in 1990 and in 2001 -- are different from previous recessions. The older ones were often instigated by the Fed as a way of controlling inflation, so they were able to recover relatively quickly once the Fed returned to normal interest rates. On a graph the earlier recessions would look like a V. The 1990 and 2001 recessions were different, in that they were caused by the collapse of asset bubbles -- the former real estate, the latter stock market. When the bubbles burst, the economy shrunk. But when the shrinkage stopped, there was no rebound: growth remained sluggish for several years, so most people didn't sense any real recovery from the recession. These plot out more like an L -- a sharp fall then a flat recovery. The recession we are either in or rapidly approaching is like that, with real estate and other financial bubbles deflating while oil prices make it all the worse. Krugman points out that this makes it more likely that Obama will win in November, but also likely that he won't be able to pull much in the way of quick fixes. I'm even more pessimistic: I think the magnitude of the problem has been much understated, and I also think that the right things to do will in many cases look wrong in the politically critical short term. On the other hand, Obama didn't get to run on a "change" platform because it's a clever marketing take; he's running on change because it's needed.

David Warsh: Getting On With It. Starts with a line that could benefit from more elaboration than the mere mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: "It is becoming clear that the US is indeed facing its most serious economic crisis since 1932." Then this turns into a book review, principally of Peter Gosselin's High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families, even though Warsh's interest is as much in the decline of newspapers -- Gosselin works for the Los Angeles Times. The book sounds like a reporter's version of academic Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream.

There is relatively little in his book about the forces that have brought about the new volatility, increasing global competition and trade. He recognizes that for a quarter of a century, growth-oriented policies of deregulation, restructuring and openness have legitimately gained ground because most people have preferred being richer to being more fair. He is concerned mainly with rendering a clear accounting of the costs. It is as if he were to say of the war in Iraq, I know it was undertaken because they thought it would make everyone better off; but here is how many dead there may have been, and how they died, soldiers and civilians alike. High Wire is a remarkable act of witness.

Gosselin documents, persuasively, that life's "beta" has increased in these United States during the latest binge of globalization, an argument first advanced nearly fifteen years ago by Peter Gottschalk, of Boston College, and Robert Moffitt, of the Johns Hopkins University. The frequency has nearly doubled in which reversals of fortune turn catastrophic for everyday folk -- a lost job, a divorce, a traumatic injury, a serious illness, the death of a spouse -- thanks mainly to the erosion of the insurance principle. After more than a quarter century of globalization, there is plenty of damage to report, and it is impossible not to be moved by Gosselin's careful and mellifluous reporting. His purpose is to persuade us "to reset the balance point between what's acceptable as good for the individual and what must be recognized as good for the many."

The term "beta" seems rather spurious here: fairly clear what he means, but not why he calls it that. The less insurance people have against catastrophes and mishaps, the more important it becomes for one to save money -- in effect, to self-insure. Hence, the more important it becomes to make more and more money -- the need can be infinite because one never knows all of life's future risks. All this money-making and saving can be politically justified as a personal virtue, but spread across the entire population it becomes impossible -- as should be obvious from what's happened in the US over the last 20-30 years.

We all know that inequality has increased over the last 30-40 years, but we systematically underestimate how much because we tend to just look at tangibles like income or wealth and don't adequately factor in the costs of increased risk. Moreover, this oversight has been essential to the rise of the conservatives, who not only refuse to acknowledge it but go further -- e.g., through their gospel of personal responsibility -- in trying to make think that the inevitable victims of these risks bear some fault in their misfortune.

In a world of infinite growth people might conceivably make enough progress to, if not catch up in terms of equality, at least become sufficiently well-to-do to have little to complain about. However, we're becoming increasingly aware that we live in no such world: essential resources like oil are fixed and becoming increasingly exhausted and expensive; the carrying capacity of the earth is also limited; and in many regards our lifestyles would be richer and saner if we developed a limited set of widely attainable needs instead of dog-eat-dog struggle of capitalism. Given these limits, we're actually better off increasing social insurance: it's more efficient economically and more fair politically.

Tom Engelhardt: Collateral Ceremonial Damage. A report on five or six weddings Bush was involved in, all but one ending badly as US air power rained death on unfortunate parties.

We Americans have only had one experience of death delivered from the air since World War II -- the attacks of September 11, 2001. As no one is likely to forget, they shocked us to our core. And you know how those deaths were covered, right down to the special pages filled with bios of civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the repeated invocations of the barbarism of al-Qaeda's killers (and barbarism it truly was).

These wedding parties, however, get no such treatment. Initially, they are automatically assumed to be malevolent -- until the reports begin to filter in from the hospitals, the ruined villages, and the graveyards, and, by then, it's usually too late for much press attention. When that does happen, their deaths are chalked up to an "errant bomb," or that celebratory gunfire, or no explanation is even offered.

Juan Cole: Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan: A Friendly Critique. On Obama's recent posturing, Cole offers a "quibble" -- that keeping a small force in Iraq to fight Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia wouldn't be effective, let alone prudent -- and a bigger complaint. The latter concerns Obama's proposal to build up US forces in Afghanistan: an extra 10,000 troops over current levels that only seem to be making matters worse. The most obvious problem is that the US (or NATO, if you prefer) is no longer fighting the war they started: instead of chasing Al-Qaeda, which has largely vanished, they're fighting an indigenous group of people (whose links to the vanquished Taliban are uncertain at best) just to show who's the real power, and mostly failing at that. Cole sees this as even more unwinnable than Iraq, and asks:

When was the last time that an al-Qaeda operative was captured in Afghanistan by US forces? Is that really what US troops are doing there, looking for al-Qaeda? Wouldn't we hear more about it if they were having successes in that regard? I mean, what is reported in the press is that they are fighting with "Taliban". But I'm not so sure these Pushtun rural guerrillas are even properly speaking Taliban (which means 'seminary student.') The original Taliban had mostly been displaced as refugees into Pakistan. These 'neo-Taliban' don't seem mostly to have that background. A lot of them seem to be just disgruntled Pushtun villagers in places like Uruzgan.

Many Democrats still entertain the vogueish idea that Afghanistan is the good war and Iraq the bad war -- that if we hadn't gone into Iraq we could have focused and won in Afghanistan, which because of the centrality of 9/11 and Al-Qaeda was the struggle that mattered. Obama's playing into that sentiment. The problem is that regardless of how foolish the Iraq misadventure was, the Afghanistan war was the original US blunder: the US couldn't attack Afghanistan, at least with its cherished military power, without assuming imperialist robes, and imperial subjugation is just something that isn't possible any more, least of all in Afghanistan.

Helena Cobban: Obama's Plan for Iraq: Strengths and Weaknesses. Another analysis of Obama's op-ed -- similar conclusions, more details.

TalkingPointsMemo cites a post-op-ed speech by Obama where he leads: "I Strongly Stand By My Plan to End This War."

Mark Benjamin: McCain, Obama find common ground on Afghanistan. After noting a New York Times headline "Obama and McCain Duel Over Iraq," Benjamin lines up quotes from both showing very little space between the two on Afghanistan. As Iraqis take Iraq off US hands -- the difference between the two candidates there is that Obama should welcome the reprieve -- Afghanistan becomes the more important war. At one inspirational moment Obama promised to change the way we think about war -- note that Helena Cobban has lately dropped the Obama quote she featured on her blog -- but he keeps falling back on the old nostrums himself.

Meanwhile, note that the Green Party nominated Cynthia McKinney to run against Obama, McCain, and fellow Georgian Bob Barr. The left will probably cut Obama a lot of slack this time around, but there are essential issues (and not just Israel) where McKinney would be a much better choice. (Hell, even Barr beats Obama on civil liberty issues, starting with FISA.)

Fareed Zakaria: True or False: We Need a Wartime President. There are two key things to this argument. The first is:

It is by now overwhelmingly clear that Al Qaeda and its philosophy are not the worldwide leviathan that they were once portrayed to be. Both have been losing support over the last seven years. The terrorist organization's ability to plan large-scale operations has crumbled, their funding streams are smaller and more closely tracked. Of course, small groups of people can still cause great havoc, but is this movement an "existential threat" to the United States or the Western world? No, because it is fundamentally weak. Al Qaeda and its ilk comprise a few thousand jihadists, with no country as a base, almost no territory and limited funds. Most crucially, they lack an ideology that has mass appeal. They are fighting not just America but the vast majority of the Muslim world. In fact, they are fighting modernity itself.

You can argue that WWII was a genuine existential threat, although you'd probably be wrong even there. You can argue that Korea and/or Vietnam were genuine threats, if not directly to us, at least to the world's hopes to share our way of life; even there, you'd certainly be wrong. But once you realize that Al Qaeda represents at most a very tiny sliver of Islam, you should understand that all attacking them does is flattery.

The other key thing is what does having a "war president" do to us? Nothing good. One lesson we should have learned from self-perpetuating Cold War was that it undermines the left and bolsters the right, leading to a militarization of society and industry, a vast degree of economic waste and corruption, and other debilitating policies. Zakaria could develop that further, but at least he ends:

In fact, America is an extremely powerful country, with a unique and extraordinary set of strengths. The only way that position can truly be eroded is by its own actions and overreactions -- by unwise and imprudent leadership. A good way to start correcting the errors of the past would be to recognize that we are not at war.

And therefore we have no use for a war president.

Tom Engelhardt: Why Cheney Won't Take Down Iran. As the last days of the Bush-Cheney junta wind down, Iran remains their last best chance to launch one more really catastrophic war. The nominal excuse for such a war remains Iran's potential to develop nuclear bombs -- an argument both more realistic than the one proferred for invading Iraq but still poorly grounded in reality or realpolitik, and widely recognized as such (admittedly, less in the decisive world of political discourse, still easily swayed by demagoguery, especially propagated by Israel, than in the overstretched and oft-fooled military-security establishment, where such acts are most certain to blow back). Still, Engelhardt's argument is based on more elementary grounds: the pocketbook effect of an oil crisis that any attack on Iran would trigger. Simply stated, the higher the price of oil, the less the world can afford to fuck with the supply chain -- especially given that we're not just talking about taking Iran's oil off the market. Iran could conceivably take the whole Persian Gulf down with it.

The list of things Iran could do in response to an American and/or Israeli attack has been kicked around for several years now. Some, such as a flare-up against Israel by their buddies in Hamas and (especially) Hezbollah don't seem likely to get much respect. Indirect threats in Iraq and direct threats in the Straits of Hormuz are another story. But one thing that's never mentioned is: what if Iran, before striking back, takes its case to the UN, demanding censure and sanctions against the aggressors? Technically, the US can block such a move, but only by making a mockery of the whole UN.

Michael Massing: Embedded in Iraq. A field report as the New York Review's media correspondent goes undercover to see what little can be seen in post-surge Iraq. He sees some "progress," aggressively sold by the Pentagon's PR staff. He also sees the frustration and ineptness in his guardians. The resulting cascade of negatives suggests we've fallen into a black hole of non-reporting from Iraq. Things are getting better but we can't see the results because better is still too bad to permit any form of monitoring.

Gareth Porter: Pull-out Demand Signals Final Bush Defeat in Iraq. The current UN sanction for the US occupation of Iraq expires at the end of 2008. Bush has tried to legitimize further occupation past that date by negotiating a SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) with the al-Maliki Iraqi government by that time, which would have the extra effect of saddling the next administration with commitments to keep up the fight. However, al-Maliki appears to have other ideas, leading toward sending US troops packing. This should have happened several years ago, and might have except for the deviousness the US exercised in playing each group off against the other. While Porter may be right that this spells Bush's ultimate defeat, the key thing for Bush has always been that it didn't happen on his watch.

For some time now it's looked like the al-Maliki government might be able to control and stabilize the country without the support of US troops -- US arms, of course, will still be welcome, although Iran is readily available as a fallback. This would be a change from the pattern set in Vietnam and Afghanistan, where rump governments held on for a few years before falling. But it still seems that it would require more power-sharing than al-Maliki has been willing to commit to, or the US has been willing to permit. The latter, at least, is likely to change in January 2009. Obama doesn't need to want to withdraw so much as he needs to just go along with the flow, unlike Bush, who fought tooth and nail to protract the war in every way.

Fred Kaplan: Obama Gets Help From Iraq's Prime Minister. This is another way of looking at the Iran and Iraq stories. That both countries are even stories is mostly due to the dilligent work of the Bush administration stirring up conflicts where there is little reason for them. Obama's desire to extricate us from those conflicts, as opposed to Bush's (or McCain's) eagerness to crank them up, may be all the tilt it takes to make change. Especially when indications from the other side look favorable.

My militarist uncle, James A Hull, has a letter in the Wichita Eagle today:

It is a well-known fact that John McCain was shot down and became a prisoner of war in Vietnam. I agree with his critics that getting shot down and becoming a POW does not qualify him to be president. But it should not disqualify him, either.

The real reason that critics of McCain consider him to be unqualified to be president is that he has not denounced the Iraq war or apologized for his part in it.

That's actually about as true and well-reasoned as Uncle James has ever gotten. Gen. Wesley Clark's original complaint about McCain had more to do with McCain's failure to move up in rank to a command position than anything deprecatory about McCain's service, dedication, sacrifice, etc. It was meant to imply that real Generals, like Clark, are far more qualified than mere pilots, like McCain. The subtext is the notion that senior military management prepares one better than most other career paths for becoming president. There's not a lot of historical evidence supporting that position -- more importantly, there are no examples from the permanent military that was formed after WWII and freed from the draft after Vietnam.

The reason people mistake Clark's comment is that McCain has done little but trade on his fame and misfortune ever since he got back from Hanoi. He built his whole political career on being a Vietnam POW. The fact that he was almost unique in doing so may show that he had something more going for him -- a rich wife bankrolling him, a father who did match Clark's rank, genuine skill at bamboozling the media. Over 20-some years in the House and Senate he has accumulated the level of policy experience that others with similar credentials regard as qualifying. However, during those 20-some years, he's made numerous bad policy decisions, of which his rabid and unrepentant advocacy of invading and occupying Iraq for the next century or two ranks especially high.

Uncle James may have meant his last paragraph as a point of pride -- as evidence of McCain's real heroism -- but it cuts the other way just as cleanly and decisively.

Chris Hedges: Real Journalists Don't Make $5 Million a Year. Glad to see something about the late Tim Russert that makes a lick of sense. I didn't particularly dislike Russert, but I can't see that his passing is going to have any effect on the quality of broadcast journalism (forgive all the oxymorons in that sentence).

James Wolcott: Bridge over Troubled Blather. On an op-ed by former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey advising Obama to win favor with voters by agreeing with McCain on many issues; e.g., "Sen. McCain, I appreciate your leadership on campaign finance reform, and my opting out of public financing isn't meant to abandon the system. There is a lot more that needs to be done to clean up the influence of money in politics. I will need your help to accomplish that objective." Actually, he'll only need McCain's help if he loses, which is what this advice is bound to do. One thing to remember is that Kerrey has flat out flunked two basic tests for any Democrat: by propagandizing for privatizing Social Security, he has shown: (1) he doesn't appreciate an issue where the Democratic Party brand has unassailable strength vs. the Republicans; and (2) he doesn't understand how Social Security works, and therefore why it's impossible to replace it with a private savings program that doesn't devastate retirement security for everyone now in the system.

Speaking of bad advice, I don't have the link but here's George Packer in the July 7 & 14, 2008 New Yorker:

Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia's recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: "We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

One thing this shows is that people who were fooled into supporting the Iraq war in the first place can be fooled again and again, no matter how many times they think they've recognized their errors. Packer is merely assuming that it's the US troops that have held Al-Qaeda and Al-Sadr in check, that only they can continue to do so, and that doing so is worth all the cost of keeping them there. Big assumptions for a bill that is running into trillions of dollars plus all sorts of other costs. Obama, at least, doesn't have Packer's checkered history of fuzzy thinking. If he wavers from his commitment to remove US forces from Iraq within 16 months in favor of Packer's favored "conditional engagement" he'll lose control of his policy and sight of where he wants and needs to go. The surge propaganda is a lot of wishful thinking insulated by a general dearth of facts. The dip in violence is little more than a lull, allowing marginal gains to be showcased without really changing much of anything. The US presence and manipulation is still the root cause of the violence, and Iraq will never stabilize until US forces leave.

One thing that's likely to happen is that Obama will weasel around the Iraq issue between now and November and possibly further until he figures out just how to effect withdrawal. This is partly to avoid having to swim upstream against the surge propaganda, partly to not let McCain pin the defeatist label on him. For an example, see this note by Steve Benen. This stuff may make his supporters nervous (as does the FISA flip-flop), but there is no reason to think he won't, once he gets the chance, take the most expeditious exit strategy out of Iraq, if for no other reason than that it's totally fracking insane that the US is there in the first place.

Jesse Helms is dead. He's the only politician I've ever seen spend an entire victory speech taunting his opponents and gloating over their humiliation. It would be totally disrespectful to him to say anything at all kind on this occasion, not that it's possible to actually recall anything. He was a complete, utter piece of shit, and inordinately proud of the fact.

Salon War Room: Did lobbyists influence McCain's "straight talk" on Boeing?. The underlying question is: do senators ever do anything without the interest of some lobbyist? Not a big surprise -- not even news -- that McCain had/has connections to EADS lobbyists. Still, his efforts at derailing Boeing's original tanker lease deal qualify as being in the public interest, and his $6B estimate of how much he saved taxpayers is credible. A couple of people wound up in jail over this scam, and you can't just chalk that down to political influence. The first thing to understand about the tanker deal was that it was concocted wholly inside Boeing: it wasn't something the Air Force cared much about one way or another -- the AF would much rather go for something cutting edge, and there's no real sex appeal in tankers. The reasons are easy enough to grasp: Boeing's 767 was obsolete, due to be replaced by the 787 ("Dreamliner"), but converting it to a tanker would stretch out a little more ROI on the tooling and assembly line; the lease deal was a way of fudging the lack of any budget for tankers, and by the time you added it all up more than doubled Boeing's return (that alone is good for McCain's $6B); and the obsolescence of the old KC-135 fleet should have been an easy sell (they're based on Boeing's original 707). So Boeing's first task was to get the AF to buy into the scam, which was the source of the first round of convictions. Once the AF was on record as wanting $35B of tankers, EADS figured they had their own line of airliners that would work just as well, and somehow they managed to get the bid specs tweaked in their favor -- whether that means we'll be seeing more parties in court remains to be seen. Once the contract was awarded to Northrup Grumman (fronting for EADS), Boeing's political division -- Wichita congressman Todd Tiahrt is so obsessed with the issue Bush nicknamed him Tanker Todd -- went apeshit, putting a full court press on everyone from McCain to the GAO, which signed off on Boeing's talking points last week. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the only thing that matters is political clout, so we're constantly bombarded with arguments about how many jobs the program will create and where will those jobs go? (The EADS jobs obviously go to France and the UK, but a big chunk of the mod work goes to Alabama. The Boeing jobs are promised to Kansas and Washington, but less obviously also include Japan and China.) Boeing (headquarters Chicago) can even get someone like Obama to opine that those government-paid jobs should be American jobs, without giving any thought to how inefficient a jobs program this is, let alone the more basicquestion of what we need tankers for. The core mission of the USAF tanker fleet is to make it possible to rapidly deploy US forces, especially tactical bombers, anywhere in the world. After eight years of Bush Doctrine, you'd think we'd start to have second thoughts about being the world's block bully. But rather than ask such philosophical questions, the next best thing may be to follow the money and unravel the corruption. If we're lucky they'll all wind up in jail, and we'll never get around to rebuilding a fleet we don't need and shouldn't want.

I went ahead and posted the above paragraph as a comment at Salon, where it will be quickly forgotten. None of the other comments came anywhere close to my points. I am surprised that the story gets next to no attention outside of Wichita. The jobs actually won't make much of a difference even here. Net, even if Boeing wins the contract, we may wind up losing jobs -- the old KC-135 fleet depends on Wichita stay in the air, but the new tankers could just as well be moved to some other tax haven. But it's such an extraordinary example of how corruptly politicized defense spending has become in the US. At the same time, Boeing has transformed itself from America's top export company to a den of scam artists who do nothing but exploit their political graft, willing to do anything for government bucks, no matter how badly -- check out their Mexican border fence, or their latest anti-missile technology. There are many ways you can look at what's wrong with America, and a lot of them show up here.

Just some scattered links below. The presidential campaign has entered a period of doldrums, reflected in Salon's numerous speculative articles on VP candidates: pro and con for Obama/Hillary, McCain/Lieberman, Obama/Hagel, and other such nonsense -- Camile Paglia likes Kathleen Sebelius as Obama's VP, which makes more sense than any of the above, although I'm ambivalent at best. Also read some talk about how Obama should retain Gates as Secretary of Defense -- no doubt he could do worse, as Clinton did in replacing Gates with Woolsey at CIA, but at this point we should still hope for better. Obama has made some noise about bringing Republicans into his administration, but this doesn't look like a year where he has to double cross the Democratic base to inch over the finish line.

Meanwhile, I have been having a good time looking at FiveThirtyEight -- subtitle is "Electoral Projections Done Right," and they look pretty right to me.

Big news here in Wichita is the GAO report which apparently puts Boeing back in running for the Great Tanker Scam. Goes to show that intense lobbying still works in Washington.

Tony Karon: America's great mistake was to make too much of al Qa'eda. Certainly true. As Gilles Kepel has shown, before 9/11 Al Qaeda had lost its battle for a political constituency in the Muslim world. The 9/11 attacks might have faded into a brief Warhol moment of notoriety (and most likely self-destruction, like the Luxor tourist attacks in Egypt had backfired against Zawahiri's group) had Bush not chosen to open up Afghanistan and Iraq in his war of retribution and conquest. Even so, Al Qaeda remains marginal, an irritant exaggerated into a menace by our own incomprehension, a mirroring of Bush and Bin Laden egos. Alternate version of essay here.

Andrew Leonard: Gas prices and offshore drilling. Steps through the basic logic of the offshore/arctic drilling proposal Bush and McCain pushed out today, finding the real nub of contention over the question whether we recognize or still deny that we face a finite resources crunch over oil supplies. Until we recognize the need to fundamentally change our energy economy, adding marginal capacity is little more than a stall tactic. I full well expect that sooner or later we'll wind up sucking every recoverable drop from those sources (at more or less cost to the environment). Maybe it would make sense to start planning how to do that, but not if it's just going to be burned up willy nilly, which is what would happen under the current regime.

Phillipe Sands: It Was Top Down, Stupid. A lot of pieces lately on the torture chambers and their prisons from Guantanamo to Bagram and points unspecified. Sands, a stickler for points of international law, points to the top of the order chain.

Chris Floyd: Torturegate: Truth but No Consequences. Another useful review of the torture testimony, with more on where it's going, or not. Doesn't include today's FISA vote, where House Democrats caved in (or to use their preferred technical term, "compromised").

Andrew J Bacevich: Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld's Pentagon. A review of two recent books on how other people screwed up the Iraq War -- Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's Special Plans guy, and Ricardo Sanchez, the first military commander of the occupation forces:

Apart from the finger-pointing and score-settling, these two accounts do agree at least implicitly on a single issue: taken as a whole, the national security apparatus is irredeemably broken. [ . . . ] From quite different vantage points, Feith and Sanchez affirm that the principal product generated by the interagency process is disharmony, dishonesty, and dysfunction.

Michael Lind: Relax, Liberals. You've Already Won. Subtitle isn't very relaxing: "No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long counterrevolution is over." The text doesn't assume that McCain is making a break from the conservative movement. Rather, Lind argues that conservative political ideas are so widely viewed as bankrupt that even if McCain were elected he could do little damage with them. That's more optimism than I think is warranted. (He goes so far as to argue that a couple of McCain Supreme Court appointments still wouldn't be able to revoke Roe v Wade.) At least in my part of the country, the credulity for conservative rhetoric seems bottomless, even if many people are cautiously inching away from the thing. Some conservative shibboleths have no traction at all, but other memes are still very much with us, especially on the most critical matters of war and terrorism. And there's another thing to worry about: knee-jerk anger. We're in for a whole lot of it no matter who wins in November, and the right is built on the right to throw bloody tantrums.

Lind's status as an ex-conservative gives the article an appealing distance from the liberals he addresses. He styles himself as some kind of radical centrist -- his main specialty is foreign relations, where he tries to combine pragmatic nationalism with liberal ideals (still defending the US in Vietnam, but not in Iraq). I don't regard him as very trustworthy, although his 2004 book on GW Bush, Made in Texas, was one of the best on the subject, and his 1996 book, Up From Conservatism, looks to have been ahead of the learning curve.

Andrew Leonard: Oil Price Conspiracy Theorists: Rev Your Engines. More details on how speculation has driven up the price of oil (somewhat). Main thing to note here is that Asian countries like India have started to cut back on energy subsidies, which will sooner or later work to reduce demand, which will at least temporarily bring prices down (a bit). When prices drop, it will be similar to our recent experiences with asset bubbles collapsing, leading to the conclusion that the price rise was just a bad case of irrational exuberance (if not downright fraud). People who have a hard time learning will continue to have a hard time learning. The price of oil is still mostly a function of demand exceeding supply.

Euan Mearns: Why oil costs over $130 per barrel: the decline of North Sea Oil. This is a good case example on how peak oil works. The North Sea oil fields started development in the mid-1970s when Europe and the US were being rocked by price spikes from the Middle East. They are expensive offshore developments. The companies naturally wanted to get their money back as quickly as possible, so they built and pumped as fast as they could. The countries never joined OPEC, never trying to limit production. The find were big enough they had a significant negative impact on world prices in the mid-late 1980s. It's clear now that they peaked in 1999-2001 and have declined ever since. Whereas large fields were discovered in quick succession in the 1970s, new finds have been scarce and smaller ever since -- a pattern that holds true anywhere else you care to look. The UK has already returned to its previous status as a net oil importer.

It's easy to get confused trying to look at worldwide oil figures, but when you look at individual fields and regions this same pattern recurrs consistently. Matthew Simmons' Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy provides just this sort of detailed analysis for Saudi Arabia -- although the Saudi case remains a bit muddier because the government restricts so much detailed information on its oil resources. As someone points out in one of the numerous useful comments here, the big West Texas oil fields fit the North Sea case even closer, in large part because in both cases private interests were able to maximize exhaustion of the fields.

Saw a piece in the Wichita Eagle this morning with all sorts of current arguments about how to fix the high price of gasoline: open the Alaskan arctic up to drilling, drain the strategic oil reserve, regulate commodity futures markets, raise interest rates to boost the dollar, not sure what else. They all strike me as marginal, or worse. If supply can't increase, demand will have to reduce, and the most efficient way to do that is to let high prices damper our enthusiasm for the product. Obama has proposed a windfall profits tax, and that makes sense: while high prices are the right thing now, the decision who gets those profits is political, and there's plenty of reason to think the oil industry should be cut out of as much as possible. (Just take a look at where the oil barons have made their political investments.)

PS: My own pet tax scheme is to make corporate income taxes progressive, so that big companies with big profits pay more. The oil companies are the obvious cases right now, with patent-monopoly pharmaceuticals close behind -- both of those cases involve politically secured windfalls. But progressive corporate taxes would also provide a damper against excessive aggregation, and would help smaller companies compete against larger companies' scale advantages (e.g., WalMart). It might even help break up large companies into more competitive units, as well as inspire new competitive enterprises.

PPS: Initially posted this without the Leonard piece. Put it up front in the update because it makes more sense there.

Was so stuck in my book browsing last week-plus that I wasn't able to write about anything else. Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton dithered menacingly for a few days, then made what most people seem to regard as a graceful concession and endorsement speech. (McCain, however, vowed to continue Clinton's struggle.) All three showed up to kiss the feet of AIPAC -- they were so supplicant that it'll be real hard to deny the Israel lobby's power. Not a big surprise, but Obama gave us a real quick taste of buyer's remorse -- he's since backpedalled a bit on points like the indivisibility of Jerusalem as the Jewish State's capital, a point that many Israelis no longer insist on, and that only became US policy under Bush. It's easy to hand wave some of the things politicians have to say to play the game, but eventually they have to act in the real world. It is very important, for the long-term interests of Americans as well as for those more directly involved, that the US work to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that provides all sides with full and equal rights, and that will not happen if AIPAC has anything to do with it. Obama previously talked about wanting to change the mindset that got us into war. He still has a ways to go within his own mind.

Helena Cobban: Obama and Israel. Straightforward reporting on Obama's AIPAC speech, from an Obama supporter who knows better but hopes for the best.

WarInContext: Obama Pays Homage to AIPAC. Extracts from three articles, starting with Al Jazeera's report (quotes PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat saying, "This is the worst thing to happen to us since 1967 . . . he has given ammunition to extremists across the region"). Paul Woodward comments: "Yesterday was the day the 'change' bubble burst. Obama's performance at AIPAC shows that his grasp of Middle East politics has yet to rise to the level of George Bush's!" That's a low blow given that there's never been any proof that Bush's various statements in support of a Palestinian state will ever amount to anything. The last article in the group was about McCain's AIPAC speech, which left a lot of leeway for lesser evilism.

WarInContext: "Undivided" Means Open Access. Further qualifications on Obama's AIPAC speech.

Fred Kaplan: Is Barack Obama Too Naive to Be President? Obama's gotten a lot of flack over saying he's willing to talk with Iran, both from Clinton and from McCain, and that's the source of this "too naive" charge. Kaplan defends Obama, partly because he sees it as the only way the US can recover prestige and influence wasted away under Bush.

David Warsh: Voices in the Air. On Obama's economics advisers, like Austan Goolsbee, treading lightly on whether Obama will actually take their advice. Examines one key Goolsbee paper, arguing against even the most technically limited form of the Laffer Curve (the rationale behind Reagan's "supply side" tax cuts; Bush's tax cuts were too dishonest to support a rationale, not that anyone still believed Laffer). Recommends a 1994 book as framing most of this year's key political-economic issues: Victor Fuchs, ed: Individual and Social Responsibility: Child Care, Education, Medical Care and Long Term Care. (Looks like the book is out of print.)

John Cassidy: Economics: Which Way for Obama? A book review of Richard H Thaler/Cass R Sunstein: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008, Yale University Press), associated with Obama by virtue of various Chicago connections, including adviser Austan Goolsbee. Thaler and Sunstein argue for what they call "libertarian paternalism" -- policies that manipulate people in favored directions while leaving the impression that they're making free choices. For a politician, that offers the best of several worlds, but it wouldn't take much corruption to steer the process awry. One thing Obama does get out of this approach is that it frees him from most of the other orthodoxies with all their problems.

It's getting harder for me to retain my ignorance of Obama's policy agenda. Still, one thing that contributes to this is his own studied ambiguities. Presumably, he does this not just because the campaign season is a minefield -- often an irrational, downright stupid one. It may also be because he suspects that he'll need more than answers once he wins: he'll need options. There's no evidence that he knows that about Israel/Palestine, but it does seem to be his general modus operandi. He sells hope, asking us to trust his instincts and his inclusive sense of community. It's not much to go on, but when is it ever?

I've been expecting the rich to feel pinched regardless of how much they appreciate the Bush tax breaks. The New York Times published some anecdotal evidence Sunday, in a piece by Christine Haughney titled "It's Not So Easy Being Less Rich." Some scattered quotes:

One of her clients recently confessed that his net worth had decreased to $8 million from more than $20 million, and he thinks that his wife will leave him. He has hidden their fall in fortune by taking on debt to pay for her extravagant clothes and vacations. [ . . . ]

Interviews with the people who actually see the bank statements, like divorce lawyers and lenders, say their clients are definitely living on less than they did a year ago, regardless of how expansive the definition of "less" may be. Hair stylists and private jet rental companies say the wealthy are cutting back on luxuries like $350 highlights and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals. Even nutritionists and personal trainers notice a problem. The wealthy are eating more and gaining weight because of the stress. [ . . . ]

Other wealthy clients are cutting luxuries that they think their friends and relatives won't notice, according to Mr. Del Gatto of Circa. At Circa's midtown offices, he said, the seven consultation rooms have been busy with customers selling their precious gems. Some older couples, he said, are selling estate jewelry to help support their children who have lost Wall Street jobs. Bankers are paring down their collections of Patek Philippe watches. Wives from Greenwich and Scarsdale are selling 2-carat to 35-carat single-stone diamond rings. One recent client explained to Mr. Del Gatto that she was selling $2 million in diamonds she rarely wore, because her friends wouldn't notice that they were gone. [ . . . ]

The drop in wealth has also exposed other personal problems, like bad marriages. Money -- which bought jewelry or extravagang vacations -- helped smooth over many of these difficulties, said Kenneth Mueller, a psychotherapist in the East Village who works with many Wall Street bankers and real estate developers. Now, he said, his clients "catastrophize" smaller bonuses or shriveling stock portfolios. "You have to remind them that there's something that has always been there," he said. "All the money helped mask the anxiety."

Not sure which way this breaks politically. It seems to me that as long as the US economy was growing at a substantial clip, as it was up to around 1970, most of the rich were content with their split of the expanding pie. However, when things started to contract in the 1970s, the rich got more aggressive, taking their cut at the expense of everyone else. The sort of inequity that has ballooned so under the Republicans is proving hard to sustain, not least because so much of it turns out to have been smoke and mirrors. So one way the rich may react is to try to turn the screws on everyone else even harder. Problem is, those screws are getting pretty tight, and we're going to see more and more pushback. Won't be pretty.

Dee Davis: Why don't those hillbillies like Obama? Another meditation and/or sermon on West Virginia. The argument that Democrats can't win the presidency without winning the marginal rural states doesn't convince me, although it should be noted that the New Deal coalition was largely built on Roosevelt's initiatives including rural electrification. It is true that Democrats have taken their eye off of rural America -- partly because it keeps shrinking, and partly because in trying to hang on while the Republicans were winning they had to chase the money. It's good to see rural poverty back in the headlines, not because it's critical but because it's one piece in the bigger puzzle. And in the end it's likely to help Obama, because the first step toward dealing effectively with any problem is recognition. Also because the Republicans don't have any answers: all they ever do is poke a problem with a stick and hope the anger and spite lashes out at the other side. Whether Obama will come up with anything that convinces rural white not-so-well-off voters remains to be seen, but at least he won't be surprised by the problem.

I spent a few days with relatives in northern Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma on my way back from Detroit. The Republicans are pretty quiet these days, and the Democrats are pretty noisy. The latter all voted for Clinton, and some may not follow Obama -- I heard the usual canards about flags and Islam -- but most will. It seems to me that a stronger argument could convince more. One case example: a second cousin, his wife active in local Republican politics. They bought a big, expensive new house, planning a lot of renovation on it, before they got stuck unable to sell their old house. They both have good middle class jobs, but they're way overextended on the houses. He's developed a severe back problem; good thing he has a secure government job that's been able to maintain his insurance and work around his disability, even though most Republicans frown on such jobs. She's been laid off twice in the last year, but thus far has managed to find new jobs. To make ends meet they've had to borrow from parents, including my antiwar first cousin who grew up in the Depression and remembers why her family became Democrats. (This part of Arkansas was traditionally Republican, going back to when my great-great-grandfather arrived carpetbagging from Ohio, where he was a Captain in the Union Army.) The Republican Party appeals to hard working middle class folks who think bad things only happen to other [weak, shiftless] people and can't/won't happen to upstanding folk like themselves. This family still has their heads above water, but just barely.

Not a scientific study. Several military families, but they're more quiet than they were a couple of years ago. No blacks, but no rabid racists either. No Baptists, for whatever that's worth. Northern and especially northwestern Arkansas strikes me as much more prosperous than it was when I was growing up, and it's not surprising that the Clintons get a lot of credit for that. Can't say the same about Oklahoma, which may be the most politically retrograde state in the country.

Eyal Press: Is the Party Over? The Republican Party, that is. The piece moves around a bit, mostly ducking and weaving around various theories of various Republican pundits about why people don't buy their wares any more. The simpler explanation is that the vaunted Republican "ideas" just don't work. End quote:

As historian Rick Perlstein puts it, "Conservatives have always been able to say, 'just wait until we get control of the government -- then you'll see the wonderful things we can do.' Well, the dog finally caught the car it was chasing, and most of the country thinks the result has been nothing but ruin."

How the elections turn out will depend less on how skillfully the Republicans manage to spin bullshit than on how many Americans get to the point where they won't believe anything the Party is selling.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Hillary's Gift to Women. Quote:

Surely no one will ever dare argue that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a racially tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn't just break through the "glass floor," she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have gotten within arm's reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama's face. [ . . . ]

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way--by demonstrating female moral inferiority.

Looks like Clinton has beat Obama by about 240,000 votes in Kentucky, 65% to 30%. Notably, exit polls are showing that only 33% of Clinton's supporters would be willing to vote for Obama against McCain. I expect that by November those numbers will move a bit, but I wonder how much of that is directly attributable to the polarizing campaign. To be fair, her Arkansas supporters I talked to focused approvingly on her stature as a fighter, and none dignified race with any role in their decision. (They also knew very little about Obama, and much of what they thought they knew was wrong.) On the other hand, one of the basic impressions I have of her came from a radio interview back when her health plan was tanking in 1993-94, where she revealed herself as anything but a fighter: when asked for her reaction if she lost the battle, all she could muster was that she'd feel sad for America. Remember that we're talking about the most important political issue in a generation, the signature issue of Clinton's mandate, an issue she maneuvered to take personal charge of, and that's all the emotion she can bring to bear: sad?

Clinton's worked real hard on acting tough since then, and a lot of folks buy the act. I don't buy it, not because I doubt that she can follow through resolutely but because I find her mostly in tune with kneejerk reactions. That may play well to the crowds, but it's rarely the smart way to handle real problems.

Charles Blow: Skirting Appalachia. More data, but actually I want to quote from Paul Woodward's comment:

Having lived on the Blue Ridge for the last six years, I’ve learned a bit about how the mountaineers think.

Two days after Obama’s big loss in West Virginia and a day after his big win with the Edwards endorsement, I got the chance to take the political pulse locally when I went to renew my driver’s license.

One of the privileges of rural life is the pleasure of being able to go to a DMV office, find no line, and get helped by a government official who’s more interested in talking politics than getting stuck in a bureaucratic rut. This mountaineer was exactly the kind of voter that Obama should have his eye on: a loyal Edwards supporter who wants a president who looks out for the working folk and will help restore the respect that America has lost around the world. She wasn’t sure if Obama would be on the side of the workers. She’d never heard that he was a community organizer. She didn’t know he’d passed up the opportunity for a lucrative career on Wall Street. She simply didn’t know enough about the candidate.

Listen to the pundits and you’d conclude that the single most important thing to know about Appalachia is that it’s mostly white, but I’d say the key issue here is respect. Skirting Appalachia is no better than saying, you people don’t matter.

Jonathan Tilove: Obama's Is an Appalachia Problem, Not a Whites Problem. Actually, Tilove blames/credits it to the Scots-Irish, whom James Webb lionized in his pre-Senate book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. But as a person who puts more stock in history and culture than genes, I'd say Appalachia's isolated economy and culture -- which significantly in America includes long isolation from black people -- have more to do with it. The bottom line is that it was Clinton, rather than Obama, who captured the Lynndie [Abu Ghraib] England vote. Big fucking deal.

West Virginia was part of the pre-Civil War anti-slavery south. I remember long ago reading about a prominent southern anti-slavery polemicist, Hinton Helper, whose critique of slavery was fundamentally racist: the institution of slavery brought black people to America, so opposing slavery was a way to attack black people. Counting Helper as an abolitionist is a lot like taking Charles Lindbergh as a WWII pacifist. Appalachia isn't as principled as Helper, and as such it isn't as racist -- although they didn't give Sen. Robert Byrd any sweat back when he was in the KKK.

Didn't expect to make a post today. I'm in a motel in Terre Haute, IN, but they have wireless internet and my new Dell Inpsiron laptop with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed picked up their network painlessly. First time I ever had a computer working on wireless, so I'm thrilled. But don't have time to natter on -- was thinking about my possibly Scots-Irish paternal descent (which we never discussed, and certainly didn't bestow me or my father with any fighting genes) and my Ozark (virtual Appalachia) maternal descent. Maybe later. As it happens, I'm driving to the Arkansas Ozarks today. Gotta get going.