This Is Not News

According to Arianna Huffington at her web site, Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania is expressing a desire to explicitly block President Bush from spending money to increase the number of troops serving in Iraq. Given that Bush doesn’t appear ready to listen to advice and/or political pressure, the purse strings may be the only way to exercise any control over the situation in Iraq over the next two years.

For some reason I am viewing this as mixed news. I haven’t seen anyone offer a credible case for why escalating the conflict in Iraq is a good idea, so anything that stops more troops from being exposed to danger over there is a Good Thing. But I think I have an irrational fear that in a year or so, someone is going to say, “We wanted to send more troops, but those Democrats wouldn’t let us. Now look how bad things are.� The empiricist in me wants the current administration and its tactics thoroughly discredited, and wonders if partial victories now might make a complete victory later more difficult to achieve.

Then I say to myself, if the last three years haven’t discredited this administration’s approach to national security, nothing that happens in the next two years is going to make a difference. So take the victories where you can get them. Besides, winning partial victories right now increases the chances that voters will see the Congressional Democrats as being able to get something done, which is a key point going forward.

The Marines have announced that they need to fill 1200 roles in the “global war on terror,” and they don’t have enough volunteers to do the job. So they are recalling inactive Marines who are part of the Individual Ready Reserve. The Reuters article I linked to explains a few key points.

1. No one can say exactly what the global war on terror is, or how long it’s going to last, or exactly who it is we’re going to beat and how we’re supposed to do it. Now that seems to be the kind of fuzzy mandate that can eat up your volunteer pool and then some. Which leads to
2. Some people call these callups a “back door draft.” Now, these Marines agreed to be available for recall as part of their contract. So this is part of what they signed up for. But it’s worth noting that the Marines look for volunteers from this pool of inactive Marines, and they couldn’t meet their needs. Which says something about how attractive service in the military seems right now, which brings us to
3. Outside of the fact that being involved in a couple of difficult occupation/nation-building exercises is a bit of a turn-off, maybe this says something about our social priorities. I keep meanign to research and write a separate Policy essay on this, but my shorthand feeling is that if your job description is to possibly get shot and/or run into a burning building to save or protect my life, you really ought to be paid damn well for it. For a nation that believes in supply and demand, we don’t appear to be showing much demand for people to fill these vital but dangerous roles.

For some anecdotal evidence that we 1) need to find some alternate sources of energy and 2) might want to continue being cautious about the whole idea of drilling in ANWR, check out this article on BP and the Prudhoe Bay pipeline. Apparently BP had not been particularly diligent in its upkeep of the pipeline, failing to regularly perform a procedure known as “pgging” (check out the article for a fuller explanation) in favor of cheaper means of checking on the pipeline. Federal regulators finally forced BP to do the more thorough check after they had a spill elsewhere that left hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil on the tundra. They discovered that there was significant corrosion i nthe line – in two places, the steel was only seven hundredths of an inch thick.

That’s a big reason to be concerned about the push for more drilling. You have to take the possibility – maybe even the probability – of an accident into account. One solution might be to have stricter environmental regulations and a rigorous inspection scheme as a safeguard – but then, most of the folks arguing for more drilling are the ones arguing against tougher regulations and enforcement. Doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

I noticed that the first sentence of the Reuters story on the potential terrorist plot revealed in the UK today is:

British police foiled a plot by would-be suicide bombers to simultaneously blow up several planes flying to the United States, arresting 24 people days before they could attack, officials said on Thursday.

British police foiled a terrorist plot, eh? I can’t help but recall that a certain vice president said a few years ago that

an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement . . . approach has been tried before and proved entirely inadequate to protect the American people from the terrorists who are quite certain they’re at war with us.

I discussed this in a Policy piece a few years ago, but it definitely looks like there’s another piece of support for the potential effectiveness of intelligence and law enforcement.

As Josh Marshall said at Talking Points Memo today:

President Bush just said the events in London are “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.”

Also a pretty stark reminder that President Bush’s War on Terror, the way he’s chosen to fight it, is at best irrelevant to combatting this sort of danger. These are homegrown Brits apparently trying to blow up planes over the Atlantic. Good thing we’ve got a 150,000 or so troops in Iraq to take the fight to them.

I would say that Joe Lieberman is making an ass of himself one day into his run as an independent candidate for the Senate, but then again, the reason Lieberman has to run as an independent is that he wasn’t enough of an ass in the first place.

(As in donkey. As in Democrat. As in, yes, I’ve been working on that joke all day.)

Now, after seeing Lieberman talk the last 24 hours, I’m more sure than ever that I want Ned Lamont to win this Senate seat. And I’m more sure than ever that Lieberman is failing as a leader of the Democratic Party by making this run. One thing that is interesting to me is how this story is intersecting with two other stories that are big in the news this week to highlight something I hadn’t really thought a lot about before, the idea of “sore loser� laws – laws that prohibit a loser in a primary from running for the office on another ticket in the general election. Connecticut doesn’t have one, but other states do.

In Ohio, Congressman Bob Ney says he’s abandoning his re-election campaign. The idea was for the Republican committee to appoint Joy Padgett to replace him. But Padgett ran for lt. governor in the primary, and Ohio has a law that prohibits people who ran for an office in the primary from running in the general. There’s some speculation about whether this disqualifies Padgett from running for a different office in the general. (And there’s a second Ohio law that prohibits anyone from running for a state office and a federal office in the same year.)

In Texas, courts have ruled that the state Republican Party can not declare Tom DeLay ineligible to run for Congress based on his declared change of residency (because the only residency requirement applies to the day of the election and there’s no conclusive evidence that DeLay won’t be eligible that day). DeLay can withdraw, but if he does, the Republican line on the ballot will stay blank. DeLay has said he will withdraw anyway so that the Republicans can back a write-in candidate. But the write-in candidate can’t be anyone who ran in the primary for the seat.

I’m trying to figure out if I think these laws are a good idea. There’s something that doesn’t seem right about getting to take a second bite at the apple. On the other hand, if a candidate is able to get enough signatures for an independent run, or mobilize support for a write-in bid, why shouldn’t that option be presented to the total electorate in the general election? In a primary, all you’re running for is the right to represent the party, to have their ballot line and access to their resources. Just because the party voters say they want to give those resources to someone else, I don’t think that makes a loser ineligible for office.

Now, most of the time, if you try to run in the general, that shows a disloyalty to your party. And I certainly think party officials and voters should try to punish the sore losers in those cases. But the Ohio and Texas cases demonstrate how sore loser laws can actually prevent a party from picking a candidate it may want to pick. You gotta love the irony.

The National Journal has a really good article summing up the context and current state of the debate over net neutrality. The article did a particularly good job of explaining how it was the words of a telecom executive that really set things off, implying that AT&T and other companies wanted to be able to charge content providers like Yahoo to transmit data over the Internet, beyond the normal charges for bandwidth.

And as Jon Stewart points out, when Congress gets involved in this kind of thing, it’s not always pretty.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about requiring photo IDs in order to vote. It’s one of those things that sounds like it’s a good idea, but at the same time made me somewhat nervous for some reason. Spencer Overton at MyDD puts that cause for nervousness into words. In a nutshell, a significant number of people do not have photo IDs. So requiring one creates an additional burden to voting. And there’s no guarantee that the requirement would actually do anything to cut down on voter fraud, especially since it leaves absentee ballots – which are increasingly used – untouched.

I don’t have much to add to this post, but Matt Yglesias’ use of Green Lantern to illustrate certain conservative visions of foreign policy deserves a read.

The emphasis on willpower is especially dangerous, I think, because it’s one of the things that leads to any criticism of the government or the military policy being seen as something that makes the country, the military, and the men and women actually doing the fighting all weaker.

I decided to take a break from my CD listening project to check out the growing arena of political podcasting. It’s an interesting medium, although I’m not sure it really clicks with me. I’m not great at getting information purely from speech – I need the visual engagement that comes from seeing and exchanging gestures, expressions, and so on. And when it’s something heavy like a policy issue, it’s that much harder to keep the focus going. That said, if you’re more of a sound person than I am, these podcasts can be a good chance to see what ideas are percolating behind the major news coverage. Today I listened to:

• John Edwards at his One America Committee site, discussing his proposal that America set a Project-Apollo-like goal to eradicate poverty within America in the next 30 years. I like that Edwards is talking about the importance of the big idea, I like his hammering on the economic obstacles that help exacerbate so many of our other problems, and I like that he really seems to have committed himself to this theme over the last two or three years. You can see a brief video message that Edwards recorded for members of his online community, you can hear the speech he gave to the National Press Club, and you can read the prepared version of the speech. One thing I found remarkable is that in the video message, Edwards seemed almost unprepared – a lot of pauses and “um”s. Then, if you listen to the speech and follow along with the prepared text, you can see how he keeps to the structure but occasionally reshuffles lines on the fly or makes the text more conversational, and barely misses a beat when doing so.
• Wesley Clark at his Securing America site discussing global warming in the first of a series of podcasts on the topic. I found it interesting the way that Clark brought global warming out of its normal environmental context and urged that we think of it as a national security issue. It’s not really surprising, since Clark is trying to establish himself as one of the Democratic leaders on national security, but I do find it encouraging that he’s not thinking of “national security” in the narrow way it’s often portrayed. And Clark has a good point – if global warming does have the kind of environmental impact that a lot of scientists think it could, then there’s going to be a lot of upheaval that’s going to pose challenges for any country trying to be a world leader.

It’s probably no coincidence that both Edwards and Clark are at least thinking of making a run for the 2008 presidential nomination. And y’know, if the way that they want to do so is by carving out solid niches on vital issues and mobilizing voters to take action on them, more power to ’em. Once the midterm elections are over, 2007 is going to be an interesting year in national politics.

So the Senate has once again attempted to pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to pass a law against burning the American flag, and this time it came up one vote short. I will repost the following excerpt from the linked article without comment:

“Is this the most important thing the Senate could be doing at this time? I can tell you: You’re darned right it is,” said Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), the measure’s sponsor.

More generally, I think this issue matters more in symbolic terms than practical terms. But symbols have their effect, and I personally don’t like the symbol of elevating the flag (a symbol itself) above the principle of the right to free speech. I’m glad this failed, I hope it fails the next time it comes up, and I hope it fails by a wider margin.