Well it looks like the honeymoon for Barack Obama may be coming to an end. The Economist Magazine, it is lead this week, said:

If the opinion polls are to be believed, Barack Obama is now, six months into his presidency, no more popular than George Bush or Richard Nixon were at the same stage in theirs. His ratings are sagging particularly badly with electorally vital independent voters: two-thirds of them think he wants to spend too much of their money. Two of the most specific pledges he made to the electorate—to reform health care and to produce a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse-gas emissions—are in trouble. And an impression is being formed in Washington of a presidency that is far too ready to hand over the direction of domestic policy to Congress; that is drifting either deliberately or lethargically leftwards; and that is more comfortable with lofty visions than details.

Of course this doesn’t mean anything. All politicians and parties go through a honeymoon period where they can do no wrong. This period inevitably end when suddenly the electorate (and the media) realise that the politician is actually only a normal human being and they have to deal with emerging issues in the normal, human, frail way.

But for Obama, the issue is not whether the media have declared his honeymoon over, it is whether he can deliver on the reforms his presidency set out to do. And despite setbacks and compromises there are bills now on the congress floor to implement a greenhouse gas emission trading scheme and reforms to healthcare to extend insurance. If he can get these through to the presidential signing then he really will have achieved something.

Of course there will be sniping and complaining the the bills do not do enough, they do not punish the coal producers enough, they cost too much, not enough people get insurance, they don’t control health cost enough. Many of these criticisms are true, but politics, of all places is where, as Voltaire said, the perfect is the enemy of the the good. Ultimately achieving something is better than achieving nothing, and these issues are long term issues, we will be debating and regulating greenhouse gas emissions for the next hundred years, the regulations can be improved over time.

Obama is pushing forward with an ambitious policy agenda in a political system with so many ‘checks and balances’ that getting anything done is almost a miracle itself. He is doing fine.

Interesting post at The Wonk Room :

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.” [...]”

I suppose it’s fitting, if disturbingly ironic, that techniques adopted wholesale from methods intended to extract false confessions were used in an attempt to generate evidence of a non-existent Al Qaeda-Saddam operational relationship.

It was in many respects also a self fulfilling process. The encouragement of torture to get evidence of terrorist links to Iraq created a torture culture in parts of the US military/intelligence complex. This lead to the Abu Ghraib scandals. In reading about the war in Iraq it is clear that at least some of the insurgency were motivated by these and other travesties inflicted by the US military.The ultimate effect of using torture to ‘prove’ terrorism in Iraq lead to terrorism in Iraq.

The news today reported on the rescue of an American merchant seaman who was being held by Somali pirates (see for example, this Washington Post article).

The interesting dimension in the Somali pirate story is that it is still occurring at this time after so many resources have been directed to the issue. Somali pirates have been operating of the coast of Somalia for some time, this is a prime location as there is a large traffic of cargo ships travelling past Somalia as they exit from the Suez Channel and relating ports around the Gulf.

Countries from around the world, developed and developing, have sent naval ships to the ocean off of Somali to counter the pirates, and while we will see occasional stories of triumph overall this naval surge does not appear to be that successful. It is not difficult to see why. The sea area around Somalia is vast, dotted with merchant ships travelling too and fro and also seething with Somali fishing vessels, some of which may contain pirates.

Arrayed against this are relatively few large industrial strength warships, primarily designed for high-intensity modern naval warfare. Some are armed with enough cruise missiles to level a Somali town, but perfectly useless for catching pirates.

And it has always been this way. When the United States had problems with Barbary pirates from North Africa capturing United States ships in the Mediterranean at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries they launched two wars against the Barbary nations, landing and fighting in Tripoli and other North African ports (1801-1815).

The way to defeat pirates is to remove the safe havens they have on land, not to try and intercept them in the endless oceans.

The implications of this however, for the Somali situation are too terrible for many to contemplate. Somalia is a “failed state”, and one in which the United States intervened for humanitarian reasons, only to have the soldiers killed by warlords in desperate gun battles in the narrow streets of Mogidishu (see Black Hawk Down). Bill Clinton rapidly removed the American forces, and I doubt any President is likely to wish to go down that road again.

With the most effective response closed off, it will be interesting to see how affected nations adapt to the Somali pirate threat and if their military forces, and in particular their navies, are able to come up with a strategy the uses all their high-tech equipment to defeat a low tech opponent for which the were never designed to.

Mother Jones, a US magazine, has an article about life in America at $195 a week. This is the income earned by a staff member at Wal-Mart $10.50 an hour:

Edick’s monthly take-home pay—about $800 at the time I visited—doesn’t go far either. She lives in a tiny apartment with a broken stove and mostly empty fridge that barely works. Rent and utilities run about $450 a month; when it’s cold outside, she often sets the thermostat to 50 degrees to lower her bill. Gas and car insurance cost another $160 or so, depending on prices at the pump. And then there are the doctor visits, covered only after a $1,000 deductible—plus medicines for a thyroid problem, chronic anxiety, and osteoporosis.

To balance the budget, Edick often skimps on food, some weeks spending little more than $10 on groceries, about one-quarter what the federal food stamp program calculates is needed for three “thrifty meals” a day. She patronizes the grimy discount stores whose prices run even lower than Wal-Mart’s, and can tick off their notable sales going back for months.

Poverty can occur in any country, any society, and it one of the great tragedies of America that it is so wide spread there. Edick is not the lowest paid American, the US Bureau of Labour Statistics produces a report on the lowest pad workers in America, the top five by occupation are:

2,602,950 food preparation and serving workers paid $8.03 an hour
575,510 fast food cooks paid $8.11 an hour
509,550 dishwashers paid 8.20
541,370 counter attendants, cafeteria and coffee shop workers at $8.57 an hour
401,070 Dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers $8.36 an hour

Source: Employment and wages for the 10 lowest paying occupation in the United States, May 2007

Poverty is a largely hidden tragedy in societies. It is largely addressable by governments and this is why it is a affliction that American could have cured. This is a society that has just spent $800b on conducted a completely unnecessary war in Iraq (and more on a largely unnecessary war in Afghanistan).

What should a country like America do? There are number of policies that would improve income distribution without much impact on the economy as a whole:

1. universal health care provided regardless of ability to pay
2. a progressive tax system include negative taxes for low income earners (ie a payment to low income earners)
3. a higher minimum wage (there is lots of debate in the economics field on the effect on minimum wages. A simple model of markets would suggest that raising the minimum wage will create unemployment, however the empirical evidence is quite mixed and there a strong arguments why it would not impact greatly on employment)

That wouldn’t solve poverty, but would go a long way.

I followed the US election campaign quite closely with my hopes pinned on the election of Barack Obama.

Now that he has won I find myself somewhat disinterested in the US political scene. This may be because not much is happening beyond back room meetings on selection of political appointees, the politics of which is not very interesting.

Maybe, in an election campaign that was so long, I have already intellectually and emotionally processed all the policies and promises of President-Elect Obama and in my mind they have already been implemented.

More likely I have not had any great expectations for any specific policy outcome from Obama, rather it is the ‘tone’ of Obama that was so attractive.

The election outcome didn’t lead to cries of jubilation from me or excitement about ‘change you can believe in’, instead I have just released one almighty long sigh of relief. The US Government has returned to a level of normalcy experienced in most of the rest of the developed world.

No longer will the US Government use fear as a key policy lever. No longer will climate change be viewed through ideological rather than scientific filters, no longer will the military occupation of a minor middle eastern country be viewed as core American policy. The republican war of science will be muted and the right-wing echo chamber will no longer reverberate in the corridors of power.

The US has returned to a reality based, deliberative government. This in reinforced by the appointments Obama has made so far in his transition. According to Kevin Drum:

So far, then, Obama’s cabinet looks like this:

State: Hillary Clinton
Treasury: Tim Geithner
Defense: Robert Gates (maybe)
Attorney General: Eric Holder
Health & Human Services: Tom Daschle
Homeland Security: Janet Napolitano

Whatever else you can say about this crew, there’s not much question that Obama is assembling an extremely experienced and competent set of advisors. This is a team that can definitely hit the ground running.

A smart, deliberative president with good policies and an experienced and competent team to implement those policies. I can now think of a word to express how I am feeling: satisfied.

An imaginary conversations between a US citizen and a Cuban citizen:

American citizen (AC): Cuba is an despotic country that locks up dissidents.

Cuban citizen (CC): Yes but it does not lock up very many.

AC: it still has over 200 dissidents imprisoned in Cuba.

CC: Well yes, but America has over 270 detainees locked up in Guantanamo Bay.

AC: Yes but they are unlawful combatants, maybe even terrorists.

CC: What about the rest of the prison system, America has 2.5m people incarcerated, one per hundred adults.

AC: Yes but they are criminals.

CC: So we have 270 dissidents locked up, but you have one in every hundred adults locked up, either you unfairly lock them up, or your capitalist system has generated a massive underclass of criminals. It is bad either way.

From this I am not attempting to draw a complete moral equivalence between the US and Cuba. However I am trying to demonstrate that the moral stance of an individual can be, and usually is, influenced by the culture in which it occurs.

Some elements of the Right in the US have been distressed by the neutral point of view of Wikipedia that they have created a new wiki: Conservapedia.

in the description of Conservapedia it is described as

Conservapedia is a clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth. We do not allow liberal bias to deceive and distort here. Founded initially in November 2006 as a way to educate advanced, college-bound homeschoolers…The starting point for increasing your knowledge, your faith and the well-being of you and those around you is to understand concepts better…No other encyclopedic resource on the internet is free of corruption by liberal untruths.

In How Conservapedia Differs from Wikipedia, they identify some of the key differences:

We do not attempt to be neutral to all points of view. We are neutral to the facts. If a group is a terrorist group, then we use the label “terrorist” but Wikipedia will use the “neutral” term “militant”.
We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts. Wikipedia editors who are far more liberal than the American public frequently censor factual information. Conservapedia does not censor any facts that comport with the basic rules.

This makes for a sometime bizarre website that can at times be hilarious as their entire view of the world is shifted rightward. There are lots of pages to see this, for example the page on Evolution, which manages to have pictures of not only Charles Darwin, but also Lysenko, Stalin and Hitler.

To give an example of Conservapedia I thought it might be worth having a look at the Barack Obama page to see what they say.

The first problem is in the first paragraph:

In 2007, Obama was the most liberal Senator.

This was certainly the conclusion of one magazine, there of course have been counter arguments to this claim, but to Conservapedia, because it fits their ideological view it is now a fact. In contrast Wikipedia reports this “fact” thus:

the National Journal ranked him as the “most liberal” senator based on an assessment of selected votes during 2007.

IT goes downhill from there:

Obama has declared himself to be a Christian, yet he never replaced his Arabic name with a non-Arabic one as many do casting doubt on his politically self-serving claim.

The implication here is that anyone who does not Anglicise their name is suspect in conservapedia’s view.

Obama downplays his Islamic background by claiming that his Kenyan Muslim father was a “confirmed atheist” before Obama was born, but in fact less than 1% of Kenyans are atheists, agnostics or non-religious.

This is an attempt to make Obama’s claim suspect, but of course there are 32.5m Kenyans, so there are 325,000 atheists in Kenya, it is not so unlikely his father was one of those.

Obama wore an American flag lapel pin after 9/11, but later stopped wearing it without adequate explanation.

We are now descending into quite clear distortions of the truth, for Obama did provide an explanation for not wearing a lapel pin:

You know, the truth is that right after 9/11 I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest, instead I’m gonna’ try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.

It is only Conservapedia which has somehow classified this an not “adequate”. Certainly, this type of editorialising is not within the rules of Wikipedia, which is why it is biased against conservative “facts”.

And of course the article goes on in a similar vein. In many ways it is funny, but also quite disturbing.

The ABC’s Foreign Correspondent recently had an article about the McCain Campaign in the United States. One republican described the two candidates thus:

McCain in a centerist and Obama is from the far left.

It was seemed such a surprising thing to say, but was said in such a matter of fact way. It is probably a sincerely held belief and tells us so much about aspects of the US political belief system.

From an Australian perspective, Barack Obama is a moderate centerist. His policies are entirely moderate and sensible and certainly within the mainstream of the centre-left, and the centre-right in Australia.

This was evident when Barack did his recent world tour and he got on famously with such right-wing representatives as David Cameron in the UK and Nicolas Sarkozy in France.

There are real debates within the US on developing a national health care system, something that exists as a given in other developed countries.

The US ‘left’ with the likes of Barack Obama are in the mainstream of world politics, both of the centre-left and the centre-right. It would appear that on a global scale that the right in the US is on the far right of global politics. With a militarist approach of declaring a ‘war on terrorism’, invading multiple countries (and talk of invading another – Iran), ignoring the Geneva Convention with Guantanamo Bay, cutting social spending (‘reforming social security’), opposing gay rights, women’s right to choose, opposition to environmental protection, their policies would place them in the ‘loony right in other countries’.

So the Arizonian supporter of McCain had it wrong, he should have said ‘Obama is a centerist and McCain is from the far right’.

Note: Google and the Apple Dictionary tell me that the correct spelling is ‘centrist’, but I find that awkward, and will stick with ‘centerist’ which seems more sensible to me (the funny spelling seems to do with its origination from the French ‘centriste’, so not only did the French give us the political Right and Left, they gave us the Centre as well!

I found the photo at the front of this page to quite enticing. I don’t quite know why.

It has been a while since 9/11, and being outside the United States it can be e bit hard to kind of consider how the events of that day must have impacted on the American Psych. A “comic” started on around that time, Get Your War On, always struck me as capturing the impact of the moment. I don’t know anything about the author, other than he or she apparently used clip art to compose the comics. They an expression anger combined with a kind of ironic horror of those very same forces.

Here are just a couple to give you a sense:

The news has been reporting recently about the shortages of food occurring in certain locations around the world as the price increases. Most of the reporting has been on the impact in developing countries, but it has been interesting to note some of the reactions in the US. This blog post reports:

People are stockpiling rice — perhaps on the advice of the Wall Street Journal — in sufficient quantities that Costco and Sam’s Club are limiting purchases. I sure hope this panic over staple foods among heartland citizens is unjustified.

Maybe I am reading too much into it But it seems kind telling that the focus in some parts of the US is the impact (probably non-existant) on their own consumption, rather than the more serious issue for other countries.

I have been following the US elections with a reasonably keen eye, in the democratic primaries my hopes are on Barack Obama winning. Why Obama? It is not just the intoxicating idea of a black US President and all that would say, both to America and to the world, but also the uplifting demeanor he brings to the campaign. A rational and measured person as President is very appealing. Why not Hilary Clinton? She has always struck me as a competent and capable person, but with little passion and personality. More fundamentally she comes across as a semi-supporter of the Iraq war, and as candidate her high negatives (the proportion of people in polls who have a negative opinion of her) make her a hard case to sell in an election campaign. I think Mathew Yglesias sums it up well:

Let me just fall back to what I’ve said before: I don’t envision core domestic policy issues unfolding incredibly differently in a Clinton or in an Obama administration. I think Barack Obama has given us more indication, both in his record and his proposals, that he’ll pursue the kind of foreign policy we need to get the country on track. I’ll buy that Obama doesn’t have a ton of experience, but the reality is that Clinton doesn’t have a ton either. And while Hillary Clinton can probably win in the general election, I think that the bulk of the evidence supports the idea that Obama would have an easier time — in particular would have an easier time of generating the sort of big win that would be necessary to pass ambitious legislation. Ultimately, that’s what the campaign is about. I won’t even pretend to be appalled by Clinton’s cynicism — the disenfranchisementgambit and all the rest — because, frankly, the idea that Clinton would use dishonest political tactics to beat the GOP is, in my view, probably the most appealing thing about her. At the end of the day, though, while I think she’d be okay it’s always seemed to me that with other viable options in the field it’s made more sense to go with “other options” and now that it’s a clear two-person race, I think Obama is clearly the better option.

Two great bloggers in the US are Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat who are both staff writers for the Atlantic Monthly Magazine (a magazine I recommend that you read, you can get it at most good newsagents, the only problem is the cost. I would subscribe, but am already over budget on magazine subscriptions). Matt is the nominal lefty and Ross the nominal Righty. They both recently participated in a roundtable at the Atlantic, and I cannot decide which one looks more professional, attractive and.or authoritative. What do you think?

I wanted to report on this before it fades away with the now imminent departure of the US forces from Iraq sorry that was a joke).

The Friedman Unit is a beautiful neologism based on the writing of the US reporter Thomas Friedman. Wikipedia reports the Friedman Unit as a period of six months into the future. This is how long Thomas Friedman has continually predicted the end of violence was away in Iraq. He has repeated written that the US only needs to be in Iraq another six months before everything improves, only to repeat the claim six months later.

According to the Centre for American Progress Iraq Timeline the first mention that Friedman made was Dec 03.

WinterSpeak puts forward a (limited) defence of supply-siders.

“supply-side economics” is a economic/political theory that suggest that economic growth is best spurred through tax cuts and the like, in its current manifestation in the the US involves saying that tax cuts pay for themselves because it promotes growth (and thus higher tax revenues).

I think that any economist would agree that the income tax rate might have some impact on incentives to undertake additional work (and would be influenced by total tax structures, workplace arrangements etc), but it is highly unlikely that it would have in any way balance out the actual tax cut itself. So much so that really anyone advancing supply-side positions would practically, by definition, be a nutter.

Anyway, WinterSpeak is not per se defending supply-siders as such, but rather putting forward a Gedankenexperiment on the supply effects of a tax cut:

(more…)

I must admit that I have found the argument around the US governments sanction of “torture” to be a bit, well, tortuous. At least to me it has never been quite clear what was considered in and what was considered out (helped by the fact that the US government would not state what was in and out). But the discussions in the blogoshere recently have lead me to a more refined conception of the torture debate. We now know the rough outlines of the issue. We know just interviewing someone is not torture. And we know the physical cutting, damaging and physically harming a person is torture. But this seems to leave a whole pile of activities in the middle. For example:

– Water-boarding. Placing a cloth over a persons head and poring water over you so that it feels as if you are drowning.
– Sleep depravation.
– Extremes of temperature.
– Prolonged exposure to loud noises.
– Threats of violence against you or your family (which the interrogator does not actually intend to commit, but appears as if they would).

One blogger provides a useful overview of some of these techniques here. Commenting on this I think Matthew Yglesias gets it right when he says:

“Count me as standing with Djerejian in the view that if you can read accounts of the KGB using the technique that clearly paint it as torture, that it’s probably torture when the CIA does it, too.”

The defining feature of torture is using pain and suffering to extract confessions, it surely does not matter how the pain and suffering is inflicted, or whether it leaves any permanent marks or damage.

I think PZ Myers says it pretty well:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/06/restricting_abortion_is_just_a.php

Video blogging is starting to produce some interesting work. I have for a long time been a fan of Bloggingheads.tv, which now has a list of around fifty different journalists, wonks, academics and commentators who discuss policy and politics. See, for example, this “diavlog” between Robert Wright and Gershom Gorenberg on the recent battles between Hams and Fatah in the Gaza strip (Gershom is a Israeli journalist).

Another example of vlogs is Julian Sanchez, who has produced an interesting vlog on the republican television debates, here.

With the debate over the Iraq Funding Bill in the US, it is becoming ever more clearer the distinction between the Republican and the Democratic positions on the war in Iraq. The democrats think it is lost, the republicans don’t.

You would have thought that this was a reasonably clear issue to sort out, you either win wars or you don’t, you are either advancing or you are not. Of course most wars we know about are in the past, and history has evaluated the wars and come down clearly on one side as the winner: when you are in the middle of one, things can look a whole lot murkier. We know that this war has been going on for a long time, a lot of people have died, but are we getting closer to a resolution?

You cannot start to evaluate whether you are winning a war without understanding your objectives for the war. With the Iraq war the purported objective of the war: to ensure that Saddam Hussein did not develop WMDs, was achieved fairly rapidly after the initial invasion. Obviously this is not now the objective of the war (and assumably was never really the objective of the war in the first place).

Now the objective seems to be about, well, a number of things. Certainly there are public statements about bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq. There is also the fight against “global terrorism”. And probably the most relevant objective, at least at the beginning of the war, was the neocon objective of destabilising the Middle East and providing a stable military base for further actions in the region.

On any of these objectives, it is difficult to say that the war is being won. Freedom and democracy are fragile things in Iraq, constantly rattled by suicide bombers and in serious threat of collapse if the US forces leave. The argument that fighting in Iraq was an important part of the ‘war on terrorism’ was only ever a rhetorical gesture. On the last objective, I think it is surprising how little the middle east has changed despite have a large US military presence for five years. If anything, it would seem that the war in Iraq has weakened the US ability to influence the middle east (the one thing they could do to really impact on the middle east – help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – has been ignored since the war began).

The other side of the equation that must be factored in is the cost, both human and financial. The war in iraq has cost of 3000 US dead and hundreds of thousand of Iraqi deaths, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure.

Even if the objectives above were being meet is this cost worthwhile? In this sense the democrats appear to see the war as lost, while the republicans seem to see some chance and/or benefit from success.

The republicans seem to be fighting a war that appear to be a long and costly one, a war that will kill thousand of americans and cost a trillion dollars, a war for the heart and soal of the middle east. (Although in this case, why did this seem to be stumbled into it?).

Phil Carter refers to an interesting article by a US military Officer who aregues that there has been a failure of civilian and military leadership in this war, and in particular, a failure of the generals to tell the civialian leadership and the public the true cost of the war, and the resources that really would have been required to win it.

McSweeney’s reports on this “Oversimplified List of Options for Iraq”, quoted in full:

AN OVERSIMPLIFIED LIST OF OPTIONS IN IRAQ.

Cut and run.

Stay the course for a while. Then cut and run.

Truly, I think they have got it wrong. This list is not overly simplified. If anything it is too complex. Are there any more options? Can you think of any?