Posting Towards Gomorrah

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
So Bush's invasion accomplished moving the WMDs from a country that didn't threaten us to one that borders, and hates, Israel?

Heckuva job.

Iraq had already lobbed missiles at Israel so I am not sure I see the difference; and

Saddam/Iraq /plotted/attempted to assasinate our ex President GHWBush, whom, I will note for the record I detest, but I still find the actiion take by Iraq offensive and probably threatening.

[Spanky]

Every time I think Lou Dobbs is the biggest idiot on the planet he says something even dumber.

Only CNN could keep such an idiot on the payroll.

[Spanky]

Slow track
Nov 2nd 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

A more Democratic Congress would not help the cause of free trade

WITH George Bush still in the White House, it is easy to exaggerate the economic consequences of a Democratic victory on November 7th. For all the talk of rescinding the Bush tax cuts and doing more to help the middle class, Mr Bush's veto pen will limit how much the Democrats could do even if they were to take over both chambers of Congress.

The stalemate of divided government might well lead to better policy, particularly on the budget. But in one area Democratic control of one, let alone both, parts of the legislature would mark a clear change for the worse. Mr Bush's trade agenda would be stalled. And as the economy slows, the White House might then find it harder to hold off protectionist pressure from Capitol Hill.

The most obvious casualty would be “trade promotion authority” (TPA, or “fast track”), the negotiating licence that the White House uses to conclude trade deals. Mr Bush narrowly won this authority from Congress in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. It runs out in June 2007. Although Charles Rangel, the top Democrat on trade policy in the House of Representatives, has not ruled out extending a revised form of TPA if he is in charge, few on Capitol Hill believe him. Democrats would be in no mood to give Mr Bush any political victories, and TPA extension would be a juicy prize.

For the same reason several bilateral trade deals would look less likely. The Bush team has signed free trade agreements with Peru and Colombia. It is negotiating with others, including South Korea and Malaysia. All would have trouble passing a Congress with more Democrats in it. (To avoid this fate, the White House might try to push the Peru deal through the lame-duck Congress later this month.)

It is tempting to conclude that none of this matters very much. After all, the Doha round of trade talks—for which TPA is needed—lies comatose after five years of fruitless negotiations. The bilateral deals, with the exception of South Korea, are small. With so little at stake, so what if the trade agenda is stalled?

The reason to worry is that Democrats' aversion to trade deals goes beyond thumbing their noses at Mr Bush. Lawmakers in both parties have become more sceptical about trade, but the Democrats are clearly the more protectionist party. A generation ago both the House and Senate contained large bipartisan groups of free-traders. In the House of Representatives, that coalition has long since fallen apart as the ranks of free-trade Democrats have dwindled. Democratic success in the Senate on November 7th may push the chamber in the same direction.

The most vulnerable Republican senators are free-traders. Their challengers range from rabid protectionists to moderate trade sceptics. At one extreme is Sherrod Brown, a congressman from Ohio's rustbelt and one of the most militant foes of free trade on Capitol Hill. He has written an entire book denouncing trade (“Myths of Free Trade”) and wants to renegotiate all America's big trade deals, especially NAFTA. Bob Casey, the Democratic challenger for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, “opposes any trade law that sends American jobs overseas”. Jim Webb, the Democratic challenger in Virginia, wants to impose tariffs on countries that refuse to bring their labour and environmental standards into line with America's.

Some of this may be campaign bluster. The Senate has always had trade sceptics, but some of today's challengers seem of a different hue. As Doug Irwin of Dartmouth College points out, they are not industry-based protectionists—people who want support for specific products, such as textiles or steel. Rather, they sound dubious about free trade on all fronts. Worse, that scepticism is rising in the party's upper ranks. Although Max Baucus, the Democrats' top man on trade in the Senate, is a moderate liberaliser, neither the party's Senate leaders nor those in the House are champions of freer trade.

That bodes ill for new trade deals and increases the risk of backsliding. In the past few years there has been lots of protectionist rhetoric, but little action. Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham, two senators who shouted loudly for huge tariffs if China did not revalue its currency, recently withdrew their bill. But if the economy slows and the number of congressional Democrats rises, it may get harder for Mr Bush to stick up for free trade.

[Spanky]

I have to disagree with the Economist and the Repubs here and side with the Dems (and God forbid, Pelosi) on this one. I think raising the minimum wage is a great way to raise the standard of living for the lowest fifth of Americans.

The minimum wage

A blunt instrument
Oct 26th 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

A higher minimum wage may not kill many jobs, but won't help many poor people


IF THE mid-term elections have one central economic issue, it is higher minimum wages. Nancy Pelosi, the leading Democrat in the House of Representatives, has vowed that if her party wins control of that chamber on November 7th, she will introduce legislation to raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour within her first 100 hours as speaker. In six states, including the swing states of Ohio and Missouri, voters will also decide on whether to raise their state minimum wage. Democrats hope the presence of such initiatives on the ballot will lure their supporters to the polls.

Politically, the strategy makes sense. Americans are hugely in favour of raising minimum wages. In one recent poll 85% of respondents said they supported the idea. Over half said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate if they found out that he supported introducing a rise.

Advocates claim more than politics on their side. They argue that a higher minimum wage also makes economic sense. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-wing think-tank, recently published a letter signed by over 650 economists, including five Nobel prizewinners, which advocated a rise. Since the federal minimum wage was last raised in 1997 its real value has eroded dramatically. It is now less than in 1951 (see chart). Not only would a modest rise have “very little or no effect” on employment, the letter said, it would be an important tool in fighting poverty.

Strong stuff. But, laureates notwithstanding, it does not reflect a consensus among the dismal scientists. Overall, economists have become less worried about the job-destroying effects of a modest hike in the minimum wage. But most still reckon that it is at best a blunt instrument for fighting poverty.

The academic argument—and there has been plenty of it in recent years—has focused on the employment effects. Elementary economics would suggest that if you raise the cost of employing the lowest-skilled workers by increasing the minimum wage, employers will demand fewer of them. This used to be the consensus view. But a series of studies in the 1990s—including a famous analysis of fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania by David Card at Berkeley and Alan Krueger of Princeton University—challenged that consensus, finding evidence that employment in fast-food restaurants actually rose after a minimum-wage hike. Other studies though, particularly those by David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine and William Wascher at the Federal Reserve, consistently found the opposite. Today's consensus, insofar as there is one, seems to be that raising minimum wages has minor negative effects at worst. Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University and signatory of the EPI's letter, agrees that “most reasonably well-done estimates show small negative effects on employment among teenagers”.

So the academic debate has shifted elsewhere, although the division between sceptics and advocates remains much the same. Mr Neumark, perhaps the leading sceptic about the minimum wage, has published several papers arguing that employers spend less on training their workers as their labour costs rise; that more students drop out of school, lured by fatter pay-packets; and that workers in their late twenties earn less if they were exposed to high minimum wages as teenagers. Other studies, however, do not find this.

Where most economists agree is that the higher minimum wage does not do much to relieve poverty. That is partly because many poor people would not gain (since they do not work); partly because some of the costs of higher minimum wages are shifted onto poor consumers; but mainly because many minimum-wage workers are not poor. Only 5% of the workforce—some 6.6m people—will gain directly from a rise in the minimum wage, and 30% of those are teenagers, many from families that are not poor. Supporters of an increase, though, argue that once you include the “spillover” effects on workers who earn just above the minimum wage (but whose wages would rise as a result), the income gains from a hike are concentrated among poor families.

Not surprisingly, studies that try directly to measure the distributional consequences reach divergent conclusions. Several studies of the 1990s find that higher minimum wages helped reduce poverty, albeit modestly. Mr Neumark, unsurprisingly perhaps, finds the opposite result. He claims that increased minimum wages actually increased slightly the number of families in poverty (presumably because these workers disproportionately lost their jobs while well-off teenagers got higher wages).

Either way a better tool exists for helping the working poor: the earned-income tax credit (EITC). This tax subsidy, a “negative income tax” that tops up the earnings of the low-paid, was introduced in the 1970s and has been expanded four times since. Its benefits are currently focused on families with children. Single men get little from the EITC. Some left-leaning economists argue that it is important both to raise the minimum wage and expand the EITC. But a big EITC expansion is politically hard (unlike raising the minimum wage, it involves spending taxpayers' money). So others support a higher minimum wage as a second-best solution. If it were up to the economists though, fatter tax subsidies would be top of the list for helping the working poor.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
Every time I think Lou Dobbs is the biggest idiot on the planet he says something even dumber.

Only CNN could keep such an idiot on the payroll.

Doesn't he own the place? I think he's been there since they were broadcasting out of a closet.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
Slow track
Nov 2nd 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

But if the economy slows and the number of congressional Democrats rises, it may get harder for Mr Bush to stick up for free trade.

Like Bush has devoted any political capital to free trade in the last six years.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

This is fantastic:

In a year in which Republicans are blasting immigrants and trying to exploit xenophobia for political gain, Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) is denouncing the phone bank calls made in support of his campaign by the NRCC because the live callers have such heavy Indian or Hispanic accents.

Souder complained that the only thing he could understand in one of the messages, which was left on his daughter's answering machine, was "Hayhurst," the name of his Democratic opponent.

The NRCC calls were supposed to attack Hayhurst as "bad on immigration" or as a proponent of higher taxes. Here's the immigration call script:

• “The United States now is home to 11 million illegal immigrants, and the number grows every year. But instead of protecting our borders, congressional candidate Tom Hayhurst supports citizenship opportunities for illegal aliens.”

According to the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Souder said "he was especially exasperated that a phone message about immigration was delivered by people with heavy accents."

Now, here's the kicker. Typically, the NRCC would use automated robocalls to deliver this kind of message. But because robocalls are illegal in Indiana and because the Indiana Attorney General has already successfully sued one GOP 527 group, the Economic Freedom Fund, to stop such calls, the NRCC is being forced to use live callers, a task which it has apparently outsourced.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
This is fantastic:

Impressive. It's like a political Mobius strip of unintended consequences, xenophobia, incompetence and hypocrisy.

[Penske_Account]

My condolences to the DNC, its kool-aid addled loyal adherents, the MSM and all of their friends in the Islamofacist defense movement in Weurope on the tough sentence handed out to Saddam. While I certainly think he deserves a sentence of death (notwithstanding my general bias against the death penalty), I can appreciate that it will be hard for y'all to deal with the finality of his sentence and the loss that you will experience of what was and what could have been.

Allahu Akhbar!

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by sgtclub
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/f.../neocons200612

[Damning article where neocons blame Admin incompetence in Iraq. Hard to discern motivation here, but an interesting read]

I think the motivation is reflected here:

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that

In other words -- don't blame this disaster on us.

While I generally agree with the article (big surprise), that is one of several statements I reject. (Another is the notion that "the women who love Bush" are the most powerful people in the Admin. What about Rummy? Cheney?)

I don't know if the neo-cons made the actual decision about how many troops we'd need, how easy this would be, etc. But their arguments, their vaunted ideas, were behind those decisions. It was the neocons who sold the view that Iraqis would welcome the US as liberators. Yes, some did. Far too many did not. And that sort of optimism, divorced from reality or hard thought, was a major cause behind the failure of planning, failure of foresight, failure of preparation.

Perle can blame Bush all he wants -- and Bush deserves the blame. But Bush, Cheney, Rummy, et al were listening to Perle (and to Wolfie, and to their intellectual cohorts).

[baltassoc]

I happened to catch This American Life this weekend on NPR (I know, I know). While much of the first part examins a study attempting to estimate Iraqi dead, the really, really interesting part was the portion on Marc Garlasco, the former chief of high-value targeting at the Pentagon, and his travels to Iraq post-invasion to see the results of his handiwork (lest one think it's an anti-war hackjob, on balance he finds that he did a pretty damn good job - the results of bombing a convention center filled with soldiers across the street from a hospital are simply incredible).

Anyway, it should be up as a podcast for a week on Monday. I recommend listening. The section with the army captain talking about trying to regain confidence of local Iraqis after an errant bomb is also very interesting (they were supposed to bomb a field as a show of force, but missed and hit the house his men were about to take down, killing 12 Iraqis and injuring several of his men - the presentation is that the incident was nothing but an extremely unfortunate accident).

http://www.thislife.org/

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by baltassoc

http://www.thislife.org/

My IT security is raising a red flag when I click this link.....it is porn, yes?

[Penske_Account]

said....

"The Democrats appear to be content with losing,"

in honour of our time together that will be the new board motto when I win the 5K.

If you don't know, now you know.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Like Bush has devoted any political capital to free trade in the last six years.

CAFTA? He busted his derriere to see that pass. Most important trade legislation since the WTO and NAFTA.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by sgtclub
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/f.../neocons200612

[Damning article where neocons blame Admin incompetence in Iraq. Hard to discern motivation here, but an interesting read]

What a bunch of spinelss cowards.

However this article did reconfirm my belief in neoconservatism as it was defined

"the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"

What better foreign policy goal is there?