Still Hating America.

[Tables R Us]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
No matter how hard you close your eyes and tell yourself that you want this war to succeed, it's not going to happen. There is no happy ending. There are only different unhappy endings.

Given Slave's talent with the ladies, he can only imagine happy endings.

[LessinSF]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
In the interest of bipartisanship, let me defend Trent Lott. In part, anyway. To the extent that this all has opened his eyes to the ways that insurance companies screw their policyholders -- big and small, consumer and business -- and that he doing something about it, good for him.

I have advised all my clients to not issue policies in Mississippi.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
They're trying to ratchet up the political pressure to get Bush to change course. I think they recognize that they can't force the issue, politically or constitutionally.

Change to what though? That question has never been answered.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Change to what though? That question has never been answered.

Or different people answer it differently. E.g., Biden has his own answer, but how many people are on board with it? There are different answers in Congress, and it will be the executive branch's decision anyway.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
No matter how hard you close your eyes and tell yourself that you want this war to succeed, it's not going to happen. There is no happy ending. There are only different unhappy endings.

It seems to me to be almost surely true that we will leave Iraq having acccomplished nothing close to what we envisoned when we invaded, and having created a host of new problems.

I think that at this point we're engaged in efforts at damage control.

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Mr. President . . . . that's a . . . um . . . a washcloth.

S_A_M

[Tyrone Slothrop]

At the risk of getting busted for linking to blog posts, this post and this one seem to raise particularly good questions with the proposals to give principals more power to fire teachers.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tables R Us
A major barrier in the US to free trade is barriers to trade in services. There is a Global Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The European Union, and foreign countries, want to modify GATS to remove many barriers to trade in services.

For example, 1. eliminating state insurance chartering; 2. lifting rules regulating legal and medical practice; 3. removing certain regulatory requirements for foreign banks and other financial services companies to operate in the US; 4. providing the right to provide cross-border services (for instance, online mutual funds); 5. providing the right to send service workers into the United States to perform a service contract made with a foreign company; 6. providing the right to sell services to U.S. citizens abroad; 7. preventing all levels of government from discriminating against vendors of services to governmental entities, based on whether the vendor or its workers are foreign.

Doing these things would help China, India, and so on take the high value service jobs that free-trade advocates claim are the great hope for US workers and their children.

I didn't know about this GAT (as opposed to the other GATT, general agreement on trade and tariffs, which preceded the WTO). I don't think NAFTA, CAFTA, or the attempt at an AFTA addresses services (or if they do it is really minor). I know the Doha round doesn't address services, I think they were saving that for the next round.

Aren't these people getting ahead of themselves? I think step one is to get rid of barriers on agriculsture and products, and then deal with services, because that gets really complicated. I have never been asked to lobby for or support even a bilateral service deal.

When was this enacted, and is anyone in the United States really that interested in pushing a new GAT through?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
At the risk of getting busted for linking to blog posts, this post and this one seem to raise particularly good questions with the proposals to give principals more power to fire teachers.

The only time I would support principles being able to fire teachers if the princples could somehow be held accountable if their school is underperforming.

But unless you can determine objectively whether or not a principle is running their school well, they should not be given the power to fire teachers, because they have no incentive to fire bad ones. Then it would just be up to their whim.

Without annual testing there is just no way to know which teachers are doing their jobs and which ones are not. If you have annual testing, and teachers are compared to other teachers then you can get some knowledge. But then I think the call should be made by some panel, or a board and not the principle.

However, if there was some way that you could determine if a principle was running a school well (in that the kids were learning something) and he or she could get fired if his or her school does not perform, then you have to give him or her the power to fix the problem. Part of that power would be the ability to get rid of teachers that were not doing the job. If you could do that, then I like the idea of teachers being trasferred three times before being fired. But absent that sort of system, there is no reason to give principles the right to fire teachers.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Explanation here.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Or different people answer it differently. E.g., Biden has his own answer, but how many people are on board with it? There are different answers in Congress, and it will be the executive branch's decision anyway.

Understood, but if you are saying that the DEMs are taking this position in order to get the Exec to change course, I think it's encumbant on them to have an alternative. Otherwise, it looks as though it's entirely political, and I think that is the main problem the right has with it. I'd be willing to listen to other rational alternatives, but in my mind, pulling out is not one of them, regardless of how you feel about the decision to be there in the first place.

Biden's plan is essentially to pull back to the outskirts, is that right?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Understood, but if you are saying that the DEMs are taking this position in order to get the Exec to change course, I think it's encumbant on them to have an alternative. Otherwise, it looks as though it's entirely political, and I think that is the main problem the right has with it. I'd be willing to listen to other rational alternatives, but in my mind, pulling out is not one of them, regardless of how you feel about the decision to be there in the first place.

Biden's plan is essentially to pull back to the outskirts, is that right?

They have many alternatives. What they don't have is agreement on one.

I thought Biden's plan was to split the country up into thirds -- a Sunni part, a Shi'ite part, and a Kurdish part, with Baghdad as sort of a federal capital.

I increasingly feel that pulling out is the only sane option, since it appears to me that the Shi'ites are using us to fight the Sunnis for us, but that there is no prospect of a non-Shi'ite dominated state -- meaning that the Sunnis will keep fighting and the Kurds will keep their distance -- or of any other sort of political reconciliation. There are no government troops -- there are only Shi'ite and Kurdish militias, some of which wear government uniforms. Under these circumstances, I don't see what our staying achieves.

And just to be clear, I have not made up my mind on this. But I have no faith that Bush will start managing things well.

[Spanky]

Seems that the econonmist agrees with me that more testing is a good idea and that the teacher's Unions exert a damaging influence on the Democrat party. From this weeks leader....


"Education is the area where progress is likely soonest. One of Mr Bush's domestic successes, the No Child Left Behind Act, requires schools to test pupils more and publish the results. It has helped improve basic literacy and numeracy a bit, but would work better if it were more rigorous. Republicans want to tighten up the testing part, but not to spend much more money. The Democrats, enslaved to the teachers' unions, want the precise opposite. A swift compromise, involving better tests and a bit more money, will not solve the problem of America's schools, but it is considerably better than nothing."

[Spanky]

Missile defence

Europe's space wars
Feb 23rd 2007
From The Economist print edition

Europe should not let Russia's threats deter it from deploying a defence against rogue states with rockets

SINCE the end of the cold war, few of the people of Europe, east or west, have worried much about missiles. In 1987 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty eliminating the medium-range nuclear-tipped ones, such as the Pershings and SS-20s, that had convulsed Europe's politics for much of the 1980s. The angry British women who had set up “peace camps” outside the missile base at Greenham Common eventually rolled up their sleeping bags and went home.

This week the missile wars returned—on two fronts. General Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of Russia's strategic forces, warned Poland and the Czech Republic that if they went ahead with plans to allow the rockets and radars of an American anti-missile system to be installed on their territory, Russian forces would be “capable of having these installations as their targets”. Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, called that “an extremely unfortunate comment”. The Czech foreign minister accused Russia bluntly of “blackmail”.

Where has this sudden squall blown in from? As Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, surely knows, the anti-missile radar the Czechs are receiving, and the battery of anti-missile missiles that may end up in Poland, are not aimed at Russia. They are parts of a defensive shield that NATO has concluded could help defend both America and its European allies from a different threat altogether: the growing danger of long-range missiles, potentially even nuclear-armed ones, from countries such as Iran and North Korea. And the anti-missile missiles may not even in the end be based in Poland.

The Economist has learned that Britain has also made a bid to become the European base for them (see article). This, however, highlights the second front—the battle for domestic public opinion. With the row over the Iraq war still reverberating, this offer will come as a red rag to Britain's vocal anti-everything-Bush-stands-for lobby. Just the sort of poodlish behaviour from Tony Blair's government that we have come to expect, many will fume. Why make Britain more of a target?

For Britain's Labour government, this is already round two of the missile-defence debate. At America's request, it agreed in 2003 to upgrade an early-warning radar system at Fylingdales; that radar is already a working component of America's still developing anti-missile plans. If the Fylingdales decision was controversial, offering to host the interceptors that might shoot down missiles bound for America or Europe as they travel through space is sure to be more so. Yet, as it did last time, the Blair government should welcome a robust debate.

A false alarm
During the cold war, when the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction helped to keep the peace, a case could be made that building defences against incoming missiles would be destabilising. So it was not just the usual anti-American crowd that was alarmed when George Bush insisted, soon after becoming president—and eventually Russia accepted—that their long-standing Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty be scrapped. By preventing either side from building an effective anti-missile shield, the rules meant neither side had been tempted to strike the other in the belief that it was safe from a counter-attack. Surely scrapping such limits on defences was a mistake? Wasn't Mr Bush planning to bolster America's security at everyone else's expense? And won't extending his anti-missile shield a bit farther over Europe enrage the Russians anew and just end up making everyone less secure?

In fact, scrapping the ABM treaty, far from worsening America-Russia rivalry, left the Russians free to look more realistically to their own defences. And instead of the new arms race that was predicted, America and Russia, no longer enemies, quickly agreed to far deeper cuts in the numbers of strategic warheads they had pointing at each other than either had previously imagined possible.

Mr Putin may not like the Czechs and Poles—former vassals of the old Soviet Union that are now NATO members—volunteering for new missile-defence duty. But putting ten interceptors in Poland, or Britain, or anywhere else in Europe for that matter, will do nothing to blunt Russia's vast nuclear deterrent. America should do more to reassure Mr Putin of that. Indeed, it would reduce tension if the Americans responded to Russia's request to negotiate further arms-control treaties. But the only real damage to Russia from this episode will be self-inflicted: Mr Putin and his generals have reminded the Czechs and the Poles, and others queueing outside the door, why they wanted to join NATO in the first place.

And a real threat
Other governments have come to accept that their security is genuinely at risk from those more limited, but less predictable, threats. Japan and Australia have been co-operating with America to help fend off the danger from North Korea's missiles. Iran's tests of increasingly far-flying rockets, and its repeated refusal to heed UN Security Council deadlines (another passed this week) to end nuclear work that could be abused for bomb-making, have convinced even NATO's sceptics that limited defences can bolster security in Europe too.

Yet it is worth keeping in mind just how limited a role such limited defences can play. Even if the missiles America is still testing can be made to work properly, technology is seldom flawless. At best, therefore, the extra defences can offer a little bit of extra insurance in a crisis, by helping to persuade an aggressor that an attack, or a threatened one in an attempt at nuclear blackmail, might well fail and invite retribution instead.

Might. So the best way of avoiding getting to crisis-point is still to uphold and strengthen the rules against nuclear proliferation. Only far more robust diplomacy than has been tried so far seems likely to discourage Iran from pressing ahead with its nuclear ambitions. And there Russia is key. Mr Putin worked hard to ensure that the first sanctions resolution on Iran, passed in December, was as feeble as he could make it. What folly. A nuclear-armed Iran would bring instability to Russia's borders in a way neither NATO nor the modest American missile defences in Europe ever will.