A few thoughts for a long weekend (posted by DT)

Some things rattling around in my brain:

Illegal Immigration
One thing I don't see mentioned in the debates about the Arizona illegal immigration law is the role of resources and money. I hear supporters of the crackdown on illegals constantly say that "the federal government won't do anything, so we have to step in". But what exactly do they want the feds to do?

It seems to me that they're demanding better enforcement of our porous Mexico border, but these are the same people screaming about high taxes and big deficits. How do they expect to pay for increased border patrols?

It seems kind of simple to me. If we wanted to, we could probably put into place an Israeli-type patroling system that would lock up the border really well, as Israel does around the Gaza Strip and West Bank and its international borders. But the cost would be astronomical! It's a really long, really remote border. You can't just put up a fence and go away, because central Americans aren't stupid and know how to cut through or climb over a fence. If you want the feds to "do something" you have to be prepared to spend billions of dollars every year to patrol the border much more intensively with boots on the ground. Is that worth it if you also want to lower deficits and lower taxes? To stop unskilled laborers to come to the states? Over a border that has never been shown to be the entry point for a single terrorist?


Gulf Oil Spill
I really hope that BP pays for every dollar of economic destruction that this spill is causing. That includes not just cleanup, but beach cleanup and reimbursement of shrimping and tourism industries, etc. Now I'm not sure this is going to happen- they probably have pretty good lawyers- but if we believe in capitalism, and we believe that companies will regulate themselves because they don't want to risk such catastrophes, then we should want BP to pay dearly, if only to scare them and others into improving their safety standards.

This brings home to me that disconnect between conservative bromides about tort reform at the same time they push for lowering regulations and red tape on industry. If you don't regulate carefully, you have to at least make sure that a company that destroys something is forced to pay for what it's done, even if it is bankrupted in the process. If you oppose holding companies responsible, and at the same time oppose regulating them to force responsible behavior, then you're not really concerned with keeping government out of our lives so much as concerned about protecting corporate profits at the expense of everyone else.

The same argument applies to financial reform. We have to regulate strongly, or we have to find ways to hold these companies responsible for their bets. If we do neither, we're just stuck in an endless cycle of bailouts.


Don't Ask Don't Tell
So now the military is fine with ending DADT, an overwhelming majority of Americans are comfortable with it, we have a liberal congress and president, and it's still going to be a battle in Congress. The Republican party looks likely to attempt to filibuster repeal of the law, even though all of their justifications have gone up in smoke.

The list of civil rights issues opposed by conservatives is long and storied: conservatives opposed integration of the military, voting rights for Blacks in the South, integration of schools throughout the country, and now gay marriage and integration of gays into the military. In 20 years they'll be running away from these positions too. Luckily the Good Guys keep winning these fights.

I think Memorial Day would be a great time to repeal DADT. Lots of veterans served as closeted gays, and it's a scandal.

Election Day Takeaways (posted by DT)

This week there were a number of interesting elections around the country. What do they all mean?
Different things in different elections. To run them down:

• Pennsylvania Senate primary: Arlen Specter lost to Joe Sestak, a more traditional liberal winning the Democratic primary against the party-switching moderate. This is being spun in Republican circles as a setback for Obama, but I don't see it. The President accepted Specter's party switch as a vote he needed at the time, and Obama followed through on a promise by endorsing Specter for re-election as a Democrat. That doesn't mean he needs Specter to win re-election. If Sestak wins in November we end up with a more reliable vote for the Democratic agenda. And Sestak probably has a better shot than Specter, as he doesn't have the party switching baggage. Specter is the big loser here- the guy is 80 years old and should have retired with some dignity. How ridiculous does it look when he votes for virtually every filibuster when he's a Republican, but then switches parties and votes against every single filibuster. The guy appears to have no conscience at all and deserves to be finished.
• Pennsylvania special congressional election: replacing the recently deceased John Murtha, Mark Critz, a Democrat, won a very competitive district that went for John McCain in 2008. This is great news for Democrats, a glimmer of hope for November.
• Rand Paul, a true Tea Party guy, won the Republican primary in Kentucky against a more "establishment" candidate. Tough call on what to think for this liberal. Kentucky should be an easy Republican win anyway, but elected a pretty nutty guy makes it possible for Dems to win. On the other hand, Paul is a nut and it's not good to have nuts in the Senate. On the other other hand, even mainstream Republicans have been completely obstructionist lately (hello John McCain), walking back from any moderate positions they ever held, so maybe it doesn't matter. With all the Tea Party types, I'm left wondering whether they're really crazy like many of their minions, or whether they're just cynically exploiting them. Seeing how the act in office is sort of a scary way to find out.
• In Arkansas Blanche Lincoln has to go through another runoff and may not win the Democratic primary. She is a centrist being challenged from the Left. I generally root for the Left as my readers know. There's room for centrist Dems, but if they don't vote for anything on the Democratic agenda than I'd just as soon have them go down- they're not doing us any good. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are in this category for me. Blanche Lincoln isn't quite in that category, so I hope that electing someone friendlier to labor doesn't swing a winnable election to the Republicans.

So hope is blooming for me all in all. Jobs mean everything heading into November.

Torture and the NYC Car Bomb Attempt (posted by DT)

It's amazing to hear, after the successful capture of the New York City car bomber from Pakistan and now this week's capture of accomplices, pro-torture people claim that this shows why we need to keep treating terrorists like we're in the Middle Ages.



Yes it's true that these guys are potentially dangerous and want to kill us, and I get tired of hearing people preach that as if I don't understand it. It's just that this incident and outcome are evidence of the positive efficacy of old fashioned law enforcement techniques for terror cases. Without apparently torturing this suspect and even when reading him his Miranda rights, it appears that authorities have gleaned lots of good information from him. As an added bonus, we can actually prosecute him in a court of law! Where's the downside?



People have to stop watching "24" and start looking at evidence of what works. I like vigilante movies too, but grownups should be setting policies in these areas.

Elena Kagan & the Supremes (posted by DT)

President Obama has announced his nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy, and we get another demonstration of the idiocy that grips Washington and the beltway press.

The Supreme Court wars have gotten so contentious that presidents have discovered the best way to get their nominees through is to nominate "stealth candidates", lawyers with little paper trail to dissect. Because the other side is guaranteed to raise a loud cry about "judicial activism" or some such, no matter who the candidate is, the goal is to give them as little ammo as possible. So Kagan, who has never been a judge, never written a controversial legal article, and apparently never talked politics with any of her friends, is now the nominee... and the Right will start tearing apart every off-hand comment she made in a law school lecture to prove she's a radical.

Now that part is completely symmetrical; the Left tried to do the same with Roberts and Alito, who were so un-forthcoming in their hearings that it was impossible to know how they would act on the court. What's not symmetrical is the Obama administration's strategy: they've nominated a woman who is (as far as we can tell) a moderate. No fire-breathing liberal to balance out Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts.

So the Republicans seem to understand the game: since your opposition is going to paint your nominee as a wild-eyed radical no matter whom you nominate, you might as well nominate a wild-eyed radical! Thus we have a conservative block on the court that is as straight down the line on the right as you could possibly imagine. I'd like to see Democrats nominate a Larry Tribe or similar thinker- liberals are fighting anyway, why not fight for someone we can get excited about?

But of course there is one explanation for Obama's nomination of the moderate Elena Kagan: Obama just isn't that liberal. In spite of his portrayal, he campaigned as a moderate and he's acting like a moderate. And to this liberal the most frustrating part is that the common wisdom in the media is that the Democrats "need to move to the center", when that's where Obama has always been. I wish he'd started on the Left so he could really move there.

Stimulus and Jobs (posted by DT)

Really good report on job gains in the economy yesterday:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/05/07/private-sector-jobs/

A few points about job growth and the Democratic Stimulus package from last year

• Conservatives blasted the stimulus at the time, saying that it would destroy the economy and would only lead to government jobs. Clearly there has been growth in private sector jobs; according to the report over 500,000 new private sector jobs have been created this year. I guess maybe Keynes was right, though that's not a surprise to most economists- just to the nut-jobs employed by the right-wing echo-chamber.
• In my correspondence a while back with a conservative friend, he asked me "what would it take to prove to you that deficit spending and economic stimulus does not work?" It was a fair question, since we both agreed that the economy was going to come back one way or another from the bottom, making it tough to prove the effectiveness of stimulus spending. My response at the time was that in Europe there was relatively less stimulus spending, so if Europe recovered more effectively than the US that would be a (bad) data point for me. Well, it seems that Europe isn't doing too well. Now obviously there are lots of factors in this, but it's pretty clear that US stimulus spending has helped the recovery.

Unfortunately, the economy isn't recovering as quickly as the Democrats need it to, and it looks like the Democrats are going to lose tons of seats in November. I'm still struggling with what this means. The economy still stinks overall and the incumbent party is always punished when that happens. Also, Democrats won pretty much everything in 2008, and now hold lots of traditional Republican seats, so with the disaster of Republican rule fading in peoples' memories one would expect to lose some seats. Still, it looks like lots of seats are at risk, and one wonders if more aggressive stimulus measures in 2008 might have yielded a faster recovery and saved the House for the Democrats. While part of me wants to whine about the unfairness of holding the Democrats accountable for an economy wrecked by their opponents, another part of me feels that Democrats would be doing better if they had better party discipline and displayed the courage of their convictions.

Cape Wind (posted by DT)

Thank goodness the feds have finally approved Cape Wind, allowing a complex of windmills in Nantucket Sound even while allegedly despoiling the view from Nantucket and Hyannisport.

If liberals/ environmentalists really want to be taken seriously, we have to support renewable energy in our backyards. Ted Kennedy's work to block Cape Wind was an outrageous shande, and here's to hoping it's really the end of the delays.