Mother Jones
The mostly GOP-run states suing to block President Barack Obama’s immigration actions have a shaky legal argument. But politically, their rationale sounds even worse.
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GOP Lawsuit Says Obama’s Immigration Plan Costs States Big Bucks. That’s Wrong.
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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
En route back to Washington at the tail end of his most recent overseas trip, John Kerry, America’s peripatetic secretary of state, stopped off in France “to share a hug with all of Paris.” Whether Paris reciprocated the secretary’s embrace went unrecorded.
Despite the requisite reference to General Pershing (“Lafayette, we are here!”) and flying James Taylor in from the 1960s to assure Parisians that “You’ve Got a Friend,” in the annals of American diplomacy Kerry’s hug will likely rank with President Eisenhower’s award of the Legion of Merit to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” and Jimmy Carter’s acknowledgment of the “admiration and love” said to define the relationship between the Iranian people and their Shah. In short, it was a moment best forgotten.
Alas, this vapid, profoundly silly event is all too emblematic of statecraft in the Obama era. Seldom have well-credentialed and well-meaning people worked so hard to produce so little of substance.
Not one of the signature foreign policy initiatives conceived in Obama’s first term has borne fruit. When it came to making a fresh start with the Islamic world, responsibly ending the “dumb” war in Iraq (while winning the “necessary” one in Afghanistan), “resetting” US-Russian relations, and “pivoting” toward Asia, mark your scorecard 0 for 4.
There’s no doubt that when Kerry arrived at the State Department he brought with him some much-needed energy. That he is giving it his all—the department’s website reports that the secretary has already clocked over 682,000 miles of travel—is doubtless true as well. The problem is the absence of results. Remember when his signature initiative was going to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal? Sadly, that quixotic plan, too, has come to naught.
Yes, Team Obama “got” bin Laden. And, yes, it deserves credit for abandoning a self-evidently counterproductive 50-plus-year-old policy toward Cuba and for signing a promising agreement with China on climate change. That said, the administration’s overall record of accomplishment is beyond thin, starting with that first-day-in-the-Oval-Office symbol that things were truly going to be different: Obama’s order to close Guantanamo. That, of course, remains a work in progress (despite regular reassurances of light glimmering at the end of what has become a very long tunnel).
In fact, taking the president’s record as a whole, noting that on his watch occasional US drone strikes have become routine, the Nobel Committee might want to consider revoking its Peace Prize.
Nor should we expect much in the time that Obama has remaining. Perhaps there is a deal with Iran waiting in the wings (along with the depth charge of ever-fiercer congressionally mandated sanctions), but signs of intellectual exhaustion are distinctly in evidence.
“Where there is no vision,” the Hebrew Bible tells us, “the people perish.” There’s no use pretending: if there’s one thing the Obama administration most definitely has not got and has never had, it’s a foreign policy vision.
In Search of Truly Wise (White) Men—Only Those 84 or Older Need Apply
All of this evokes a sense of unease, even consternation bordering on panic, in circles where members of the foreign policy elite congregate. Absent visionary leadership in Washington, they have persuaded themselves, we’re all going down. So the world’s sole superpower and self-anointed global leader needs to get game—and fast.
Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently weighed in with a proposal for fixing the problem: clean house. Obama has surrounded himself with fumbling incompetents, Gelb charges. Get rid of them and bring in the visionaries.
Writing at the Daily Beast, Gelb urges the president to fire his entire national security team and replace them with “strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience.” Translation: the sort of people who sip sherry and nibble on brie in the august precincts of the Council of Foreign Relations. In addition to offering his own slate of nominees, including several veterans of the storied George W. Bush administration, Gelb suggests that Obama consult regularly with Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and James Baker. These distinguished war-horses range in age from 84 to 91. By implication, only white males born prior to World War II are eligible for induction into the ranks of the Truly Wise Men.
Anyway, Gelb emphasizes, Obama needs to get on with it. With the planet awash in challenges that “imperil our very survival,” there is simply no time to waste.
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Why Does Washington Still Romanticize Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Brzezinksi?
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It’s the worst nightmare of activists opposed to genetically modified crops: An errant GMO seed blows out of a wheat or corn field and breeds with a species in the wild or on a neighboring farm. The modified gene proliferates and spreads through the population, and pretty soon the line between engineered crops and their “natural” counterparts begins to disappear, with unpredictable consequences for ecosystems.
This happened in 2010 in North Dakota, when scientists discovered that genes from genetically engineered canola—grown commercially for its oil across the state—were appearing in nearly every sample of canola taken in the wild. In that case, the “escape” of GMO canola turned out to be no big deal.
But it raised eyebrows with plant scientists about how quickly modified genes can spread. Some warned that plants engineered to be especially hardy—for example, the drought- and heat-tolerant plants that agribusiness giants like Monsanto are pushing as a remedy to climate change—could drive out native breeds, taking with them a precious store of genetic diversity.
Since the late 1970s, when genetically engineered crops began to arrive on US farms, federal and state agencies have applied a smattering of rules and regulations to prevent this from happening. But on Wednesday, a pair of new studies published in Nature offered, for the first time, a protection that comes straight from an organism’s DNA.
After several years of painstaking research, bioengineers at Yale and Harvard have developed a method to ensure organisms with engineered DNA could survive only in designated environments, and not in the wild. Their research was on the bacteria E. coli, but the scientists said the same basic steps could be applied to genetically modified crops, as well as to bacteria used to process dairy products, probiotics for health applications, and even the microorganisms sometimes used to clean up oil spills.
“Endowing safeguards now is important to allow the field of biotechnology to go forward,” said geneticist Farren Isaacs, a co-author of the Yale study.
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The political media world has been in a tizzy these past few days due to the news that Mitt Romney is serious about taking a third stab at a presidential run. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Romney had told a group of Republican fat-cat funders—who else?—that he was pondering a 2016 bid. On Monday, the Washington Post revealed that Romney was trying to get the band back together, calling former aides and donors and informing them he was almost ready to jump in. With Jeb Bush, another GOP prince with a business career open to political attacks, plotting his own 2016 moves, Romney’s actions raised the possibility of a dynasty-versus-dynasty clash that would cause awkward conversations in country clubs and corporate boardrooms across the land, with the two tussling to win the hearts, minds, and mega-dollars of the GOP establishment. Given that the voting base of the Republican Party will likely be motivated by tea party passions, not centrism or concerns about electability, a Romney-Bush primary battle might be akin to a contest to make the best salad at a cannibals’ convention. Nevertheless, it promises to be a bitter and bare-knuckled brawl, as each camp has already begun shooting spitballs at the other.
For Romney, the key question is this: What would he do differently than last time? In 2012, he did manage to win the GOP nomination, but he achieved that within a profoundly weak Republican field. Rick Perry opposed his way into inconsequence. And Romney only had to vanquish Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, and Michele Bachmann—none of them serious contenders. In the general election, he was widely panned—even by Republicans and conservatives—as a less-than-stellar campaigner who could not fully exploit the external factors (a still-sluggish economy, low approval numbers for President Barack Obama) that afforded the Republicans a good chance of seizing the White House. And, of course, there was that 47 percent moment—for which Romney has been offering contradictory and factually-challenged explanations ever since.
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Michael Gerson thinks that Democrats have regressed to the bad old days of 70s liberal excess, when the American public rebelled against lefty craziness and finally installed Ronald Reagan as president to get the country back on track. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats eventually got their party back in power by moving toward the center, but over the past six years that’s all been thrown overboard. “President Obama has now effectively undone everything that Clinton and the New Democrats did in the 1980s and ’90s,” he warns.
Ed Kilgore, who was there, throws up his hands in irritation:
Since Gerson appears to assume that Clinton was strictly about appropriating conservative themes, I guess he cannot come to grips with the fact that the Affordable Care Act was based on the “managed competition” model that a lot of New Democrats preferred to Clinton’s own health care proposal, or that Obama’s “cap-and-trade” proposal was relentlessly and redundantly promoted by the New Democratic think tank the Progressive Policy Institute. Just about everything Obama has proposed on tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and even national security policy has been right out of the Clintonian playbook. Has Gerson noticed that Obama’s not real popular with people on the left wing of the Democratic Party?
There’s a weirdly schizoid nature to Obama’s presidency. If you were to call him the most liberal president since LBJ, you’d be right. There’s really not much question about it.
But that’s not because he’s some kind of wild-eyed lefty. It’s because there have only been two other Democratic presidents in the meantime, and both of them were relatively conservative. It’s easy to forget now, but Jimmy Carter’s strength in the 1976 Democratic primaries was largely based on his appeal to evangelical Christians. This spawned the ABC movement—Anybody But Carter—midway through the primaries, but it was motivated not by Carter’s liberalism, but specifically by a fear among liberal Democrats that Carter was too conservative for the party. And he was. In office, Carter governed mostly from the center left, infamously opening himself up to a crippling primary challenge in 1980 from Ted Kennedy.
Ditto for Bill Clinton, who explicitly ran and governed as a centrist liberal. So is it fair to say that Obama is the most liberal president of the past half century? Sure, in the same way that it’s fair to say that a Honda Civic is faster than a Toyota Corolla or a Chevy Cruze. But that hardly makes the Civic a speed demon.
Still, even with all that said, Obama is, in fact, more liberal than previous Democratic presidents of the past half century. He’s rhetorically more liberal than Clinton, for example, and he’s rarely felt the need to do any Sister Souljah-ing. What’s more, while he may have made occasional noises about entitlements and budget deficits, he’s got nothing like either welfare reform or bank deregulation on his record. Everything he’s done has been pretty much in the mainstream liberal tradition.
Plus there’s one more thing: Obama has been far more effective than either Carter or Clinton. That obviously makes him seem more effectively liberal than his predecessors. But this isn’t really due to either a fervent commitment to radical populism or to shrewd management of the lefty agenda. It’s because Obama enjoyed a huge Democratic majority in Congress for his first two years. When that went away in 2010, so did much of his success.
So two things are true: Obama is the most liberal president since LBJ and he’s also a fairly standard-issue mainstream Democrat. Obamacare, in particular, doesn’t make him a radical. It just makes him lucky to have had a Congress willing to pass it.
After 30 years of ascendant Reaganism, it’s probably normal for conservatives to feel that any kind of liberal agenda is extremist almost by definition. But that’s little more than an unwillingness to accept the normal pendulum swings of American politics. As Kilgore points out, Obama’s tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and national security policy have been to the left of George Bush, but not really much different from anything Bill Clinton would have done if he’d been able to. In the end, Obama is a Honda Civic to Clinton’s Toyota Corolla. A little faster, but still not exactly a thunderbolt.
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Obama Is the Most Liberal President Since LBJ — But That Doesn’t Really Mean Much
Mother Jones
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The “Broken Windows” theory suggests that tolerance of small acts of disorder creates an environment that leads to rising amounts of serious crime. So if police crack down on small offenses—petty vandalism, public lewdness, etc.—crime reductions will follow. George Kelling was one of the originators of the theory, and NYPD police commissioner Bill Bratton is one of its strongest proponents. Here’s what they write about it:
New York City’s experience has suggestively demonstrated the success of Broken Windows over the last 20 years. In 1993, the city’s murder rate was 26.5 per 100,000 people….While the national murder rate per 100,000 people has been cut in half since 1994, the rate in New York has declined by more than six times.
….Broken Windows–style policing was pivotal in achieving these results. Left unchecked, street corners can degenerate into criminogenic environments. The bullies take over. They drink alcohol and take drugs openly, make excessive noise, intimidate and shake down honest citizens….By cracking down on low-level offenders, the police not only made neighborhoods more orderly….In the next four years, annual shootings fell by nearly 3,300 incidents—or about two fewer shootings per day.
….Current crime levels don’t stay down by themselves because of some vaguely defined demographic or economic factor. Crime is actively managed in New York City every day.
So here’s the thing: this is almost certainly wrong. Not even controversial. Just wrong: broken windows policing may well have been helpful in reducing New York’s crime rate, but there’s just flatly no evidence that it’s been pivotal. It’s true that crime in New York is down more than it is nationally, but that’s because crime went up more in big cities vs. small cities during the crime wave of the 60s through the 80s, and it then went down more during the crime decline of the 90s and aughts. Kelling and Bratton can dismiss this as ivory tower nonsense, but they should know better. The statistics are plain enough, after all.
Take a look at the two charts on the right. The top one shows crime declines in six of America’s biggest cities. As you can see, New York did well, but it did no better than Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles, none of which implemented broken windows during the 90s. The bottom chart is a summary of the crime decline in big cities vs. small cities. Again, the trend is clear: crime went up more during the 80s in big cities, but then declined more during the 90s and aughts. The fact that New York beat the national average is a matter of its size, not broken windows.
Now, none of this is evidence that broken windows doesn’t work. The evidence is foggy either way, and we simply don’t know. My own personal view is that it’s probably a net positive, but a fairly modest one.
But this gets us to the core of the issue. Kelling and Bratton write that the “academics who attribute crime drops to economic or demographic factors often work with macro data sets and draw unsubstantiated, far-fetched conclusions about street-level police work, which most have scarcely witnessed.” Why such contempt? Because Kelling, and especially Bratton, want to believe that the things they do affect crime. After all, if crime has declined because of demographics or gasoline lead or the end of the crack epidemic, then all of Bratton’s work—along with that of the cops he manages—is pretty much useless. He’s just been spinning his wheels while huge, impersonal forces have been acting invisibly.
Nobody wants to believe that. What’s more, we don’t want people to believe that. Police officers, like all of us, work better if they think that they’re having an impact. And their bosses, if they want to keep their trust, had damn well better insist that this is the case. When Bratton says that broken windows works, he’s not just saying it because he believes it. He’s saying it because he has to. If he doesn’t, he’d lose the trust of his officers.
Still, the truth is almost certainly more complicated than Bratton says. Crime is down for multiple reasons, and if I had to guess I’d say about 70 percent is due to big, impersonal forces and 30 percent is due to changes in policing, including broken windows. That may not be a very satisfying explanation, but it’s most likely the true one.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, did you know that the link between gasoline lead and crime was the “trendiest crime decline hypothesis in 2014”? I didn’t. But that’s kind of cool. You can, of course, read more about that here.
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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
As we end another year of endless war in Washington, it might be the perfect time to reflect on the War That Started All Wars—or at least the war that started all of Washington’s post-Cold War wars: the invasion of Panama.
Twenty-five years ago this month, early on the morning of December 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause, sending tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of aircraft into Panama to execute a warrant of arrest against its leader, Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking. Those troops quickly secured all important strategic installations, including the main airport in Panama City, various military bases, and ports. Noriega went into hiding before surrendering on January 3rd and was then officially extradited to the United States to stand trial. Soon after, most of the US invaders withdrew from the country.
In and out. Fast and simple. An entrance plan and an exit strategy all wrapped in one. And it worked, making Operation Just Cause one of the most successful military actions in US history. At least in tactical terms.
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How Our 1989 Invasion of Panama Explains the Current US Foreign Policy Mess
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A couple of days ago I wrote a post suggesting that there might not really be much we can do to retaliate against North Korea for the Sony hack. So I was curious to read “A Reply to Kim’s Cyberterrorism,” a Wall Street Journal editorial telling us what options we had. I figured that if anyone could make the best case for action, it was the Journal.
Unfortunately, they mostly just persuaded me that there really is very little we can do. After clearing their throats with a couple of suggestions that even they admit are mostly just symbolic, they get to the meat of things:
Earlier this year Rep. Ed Royce introduced the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which gives Treasury the power it needs to sanction banks facilitating North Korea’s finances. It passed the House easily in July but has since been locked up in Harry Reid’s Senate at the behest of the Obama Administration. Mr. Royce tells us he plans to reintroduce the bill as a first order of business in the new Congress. New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez has introduced similar legislation in the Senate; a bill could be on Mr. Obama’s desk by the second week in January.
So….that’s it. And even this is weaker tea than the Journal suggests. For starters, the bill has a serious structural problem because it puts severe limits on the president’s power, which is why Obama hasn’t supported it in the past. It’s a bad idea in foreign relations for Congress to mandate sanctions that can then be lifted only by Congress. This makes it almost impossible for presidents to negotiate future agreements because they have no carrots to offer in return for good behavior.
But that could be fixed. What can’t be fixed is the fact that North Korea learned a lesson from our previous attempt at tightening economic sanctions in 2007, when we cut off the US links of Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank suspected of doing business with North Korea. This in turn panicked other Macau banks into cutting off their relationships with North Korea, which severely restricted the regime’s access to dollars. As the Journal notes, this genuinely hurt North Korea, and the Bush administration agreed to resolve the BDA issue during the Six-Party nuclear talks later that year.
Unfortunately for us, sanctions like this would hurt North Korea a lot less now than they did back in 2007. Stephan Haggard explains:
Post-BDA, and since the ascent of Kim Jong-un in particular, North Korea has also sought to diversify its trade, investment and financial links. The KPA and its associates have developed relationships with financial entities that are not concerned with access to the U.S. market, both in China and outside it; Russia will be particularly interesting to watch in this regard but there is also the open field of the Middle East….While this legislation might raise the costs of proliferation activities if implemented, it is unlikely to staunch them completely and could simply forge new networks beyond the law’s reach.
Another question is whether the sanctions will have the broader strategic effect of moving the North Koreans toward serious negotiation of its nuclear program….The paradoxical feature of sanctions is that they rarely have the direct effect of forcing the target country to capitulate. The HR 1771 sanctions will have effect only when coupled with strong statements of a willingness to engage if North Korea showed signs of interest in doing so. The legislation provides plenty of sticks; the administration will have to continue to articulate the prospective carrots in a way that is credible. Strong sanctions legislation makes that difficult to do if the legislation places a series of binding constraints on the president’s discretion. Why negotiate with the U.S. if there is no return from doing so?
With changes, Royce’s sanctions bill might be an appropriate response to the Sony hack. However, it’s unlikely to have a severe effect on North Korea. Even worse, past history shows that a single-minded “get tough” attitude toward the DPRK can backfire badly, as it did on George Bush when his refusal to negotiate with Pyongyang in 2002 led in short order to the ejection of UN inspectors and the construction of plutonium bombs from a stockpile that had previously been kept under lock and key.
As the cliche goes, there are no good options here, just bad and less bad. I wouldn’t necessarily oppose a modified version of the sanctions bill, but it’s unlikely to have a major impact. It might even make things worse. If this is the best we can do, it’s pretty much an admission that there’s not really much we can do.
Originally posted here:
No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea
Mother Jones
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Via Atrios, here is America’s-mayor-for-life Rudy Giuliani commenting on the killing of two New York City police officers yesterday by a deranged gunman:
“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”
….The former mayor also criticized President Barack Obama, Holder, and Al Sharpton for addressing the underlining racial tensions behind the failure to indict the white police officers who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island and Mike Brown in Ferguson. “They have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities. For that, they should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.
Fair enough. But I assume this means we can blame Bill O’Reilly for his 28 episodes of invective against “Tiller the Baby Killer” that eventually ended in the murder of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. We can blame conservative talk radio for fueling the anti-government hysteria that led Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. We can blame the relentless xenophobia of Fox News for the bombing of an Islamic Center in Joplin or the massacre of Sikh worshippers by a white supremacist in Wisconsin. We can blame the NRA for the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora. We can blame Republicans for stoking the anti-IRS paranoia that prompted Andrew Joseph Stack to crash a private plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing two people. We can blame the Christian Right for the anti-gay paranoia that led the Westboro Baptist Church to picket the funeral of Matthew Snyder, a US Marine killed in Iraq, with signs that carried their signature “God Hates Fags” slogan. We can blame Sean Hannity for his repeated support of Cliven Bundy’s “range war” against the BLM, which eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff and declaring, “If they’re going to come bring violence to us, well, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.” And, of course, we can blame Rudy Giuliani and the entire conservative movement for their virtually unanimous indifference to the state-sanctioned police killings of black suspects over minor offenses in Ferguson and Staten Island, which apparently motivated the murder of the New York police officers on Saturday.
Or wait. Maybe we can’t do any of those things. Maybe lots of people support lots of things, and we can’t twist that generalized support into blame for maniacs who decide to take up arms for their own demented reasons. Maybe that’s a better idea after all.
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Let’s Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They’re Responsible For
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Former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush is running for president. (Maybe.) But just how much does he have in common with his brother, George W.? His Twitter page might offer a clue. The first human Jeb followed on Twitter was none other than his brother’s former deputy chief of staff—Fox News analyst Karl Rove. So is the Oracle of Ohio going to be back in the fold come 2016? We can only hold our breath. Or perhaps Jeb just likes Rove’s engaging Twitter personality. (Full disclosure: the first person I followed on Twitter was Chuck Grassley.)
Originally posted here –
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