You never know what's going on in Iraq

There was more grim news out of Iraq on Sunday:

[A] standoff began at dusk Sunday when militants wearing suicide vests and armed with grenades attacked the nearby Iraqi stock exchange and then entered the nearby Our Lady of Deliverance church — one of Baghdad's main Catholic places of worship — taking about 120 Christians hostage.

And things didn't end all that well:

Iraqi forces stormed the church after a tense hours-long standoff, freeing the hostages...Fifty-two hostages and police were killed...It was not immediately clear whether the hostages died at the hands of the attackers or during the rescue.

Below is an ITV report on this story:



Here is the problem -- as this story unfolded yesterday, Iraqi officials were trying desperately to distort the casualty figure. At first there were no reports of any deaths. Later on there were rumours of only a handful of deaths. The article explains:

The casualty information came from police and officials at hospitals where the dead and wounded were taken. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Moreover, there is conflicting information even with regards to the number of attackers:

There were conflicting accounts about the number of attackers involved in the assault, with Baghdad military spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi saying Sunday night that security forces killed eight, while the U.S. military said between five and seven died.
Two police officers on the scene, however, say only three attackers were killed and another seven arrested afterwards.

Iraqi officials have a vested interest in covering up their mistakes. The country is still largely unstable, and those in power wish to maintain their authority at any cost. This has been the key problem to the war all along -- you simply cannot impose a system of values onto a society that has few internal resources to maintain them.

The situation in Iraq is a mess right now -- after the controversial parliamentary elections in March, a government has yet to be formed. Incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refuses to give up power even though his party came in second place in terms of total seats.

The American government enjoys playing up the idea that the Iraq War is "over", but the reality is far different. Yet as the media its attention elsewhere, few may notice if the country's "democratic" infrastructure crumbles.

The Texas Rangers decide that they don't need any blue-state fans

If you haven't been following the World Series, the Texas Rangers hosted game 4 on Sunday night down 2-1 to the underdog San Francisco Giants, with the weakest pitcher in their order starting on the mound. The pressure was on. So what could the folks running the franchise possibly do to make things more tense for their players? Well, watch and find out:



Never mind the fact that the sight of the World's Biggest American Flag covering the field, with a slightly smaller flag of Texas in behind it, was a touch overly-patriotic, even for the U.S. Did the team really think that it was a good idea to let the most divisive President in modern American history drive all over the field in a golf cart, with his father in tow?

Yes, yes, George W. Bush used to co-own the Rangers, so he has ties with the team. And Texas is the Bush family's beloved adopted home state. But making such a big show of his presence automatically politicized the festivities. Think of what the Fox News crowd would say if the Giants invited Barack Obama to throw out the first pitch should the series return to their hometown. Now think of how the players felt coming out after such a bizarre scene.

Oh yes, the Rangers dropped the game 4-0, and are now one game away from elimination. Let's hope for their sake that Ross Perot isn't scheduled to make an appearance tomorrow.

The dysfunctionality of Washington, summed up in two sentences

As the AP reported on Sunday, one of the big-ticket issues that post-midterm Washington will have to deal with is the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, which is set to happen at the start of 2011 if no action is taken. For both political parties, this is a problem -- Barack Obama famously promised that he would not increase taxes on households making less than $250,000 in annual income, while Republicans insist that all cuts should be made permanent.

This whole debate is really a bit nonsensical, as The Economist reported in September:

The irony in this drama is that the money at stake is, in the larger scheme, trivial. Raising taxes on the top 2% of households, as Mr Obama proposes, would bring in $34 billion next year: enough to cover nine days’ worth of the deficit. Indeed, the problem with the tax debate is not that Democrats and Republicans disagree, but that they mostly agree. Democrats think 98% of Americans should not pay higher taxes; the Republicans say 100% should not.

Having said that, there is a certain symbolic weight to all of this. A full Republican victory would set a precedent of keeping taxes low, thereby forcing the government to try and cut back spending in order to tame the deficit (more on that in a minute). A compromise deal which allowed for taxes to go back up for, say, households making more than $500,000/year, might make future taxation policy more flexible.

An important issue, then. So how do Washington insiders see this playing out? From the AP article:

"The most likely outcome is a one-year extension of everything," said Democratic lobbyist Steve Elmendorf. "The second most likely outcome is nothing happens."

So either the issue is put off, or no deal is reached. This is the reality of politics in Washington, and it's quite sad. At a time when strong leadership of any kind - Democrat, Republican, whatever - is so sorely needed, Congress and the President have failed in successfully and comprehensively tackling any important issue of the day, and seem intent on going on in this way.

This is why there is so much anger directed at Washington. It may often be misguided, hyperbolic, and cruel, but the anger is there for a reason.

But it won't be long before everyone will be forced to step up and take action. From The Economist:

Around 2015, spending will start a multi-year climb. To attribute that entirely to Mr Obama would be disingenuous. His health-care plan does contribute to it, but rising interest on the national debt and built-in health and demographic pressures are more important.

In other words, despite Republican promises to roll back spending to pre-recession levels, the deficit will almost surely rise because of issues that are beyond their control.  If they dig their heels in on tax cuts now, they are ensuring that future measures to cut back the deficit will have to be much more extreme.

But Democrats have to shoulder a fair share of the blame for this fiscal mess.  Obama's signature health-care plan was such a disappointment on so many fronts, and it will eventually become a serious financial burden, as the article goes on to explain:

Mr Obama took an American approach to health care, dismissing both a Canadian single-payer option and a broad federal safety-net plan to win support. One result is that 7% of Americans will remain uninsured, still the third-highest percentage in the OECD, after Mexico and Turkey. “This is way to the right of what [Richard] Nixon proposed,” says Jonathan Gruber, a health expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. American resistance to Canadian-style rationing is also why the reform provides so few serious cost controls. A recent study by the actuary of the federal agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid found that the reform will do little to slow the growth in public and private health spending.

So much political capital spent on a bill that does not achieve any of its stated goals, and a deficit that will continue to climb even if the economy improves (this expectation is built into the projections). There will come a time when Washington will no longer be able to kick its problems down the road.

Sarah Palin, starring as Sarah Palin

The Sarah Palin most of us see is a carefully-crafted character. Her and her handlers work hard to present us with a person that mainstream America can identify with. There have been missteps, but the fact that she is still one of the strongest voices coming from the right shows that their efforts are largely paying off.

The Sarah Palin most of us don't see is the one that shows up at Tea Party rallies and speaks directly to an audience that already identifies with her. It is at such rallies that the "God & guns" Sarah Palin can speak without fear.

Yet the story is not quite so simple. Ms. Palin is not officially a Tea Partier. In fact, if she tried to label herself as a Tea Partier, she would likely receive a cold reception. The Tea Party people make a big deal about their grassroots origins, and Ms. Palin was already a careerist politician when the movement began.

On Saturday, Ms. Palin dropped by a Tea Party Express rally in Wheeling, West Virginia. The only media coverage on the scene were Tea Party folks themselves. As such, we get to see Ms. Palin in action on friendly turf, but not necessarily on home turf. It is very worthwhile to watch this footage to see how she operates under these intriguing circumstances:



Here we see both Ms. Palin's gifts and shortcomings as a speaker. At first she sounds extremely awkward and cloying. But once she gets going, her performance is rather riveting. Most of what she says is the usual empty rhetoric about "putting our government back on the side of We the People". But she is a master improviser, in contrast to Barack Obama. While the President can deliver an inspirational speech to a big crowd, Ms. Palin can capture a smaller audience by speaking at their level. Note how she starts rambling on about coal mining after someone in the audience shouts something to her. She changes tack to focus on a topic of her audience's choosing without missing a beat.

Ms. Palin is also doing something else here. Note how she places herself at a distance from the Tea Party movement. She refers to them constantly in the second person. She casts them as the grassroots revolutionaries that they believe themselves to be without ever placing herself among their ranks. This was a point made a month ago in a Washington Post blog post:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) appears to be making a purposeful play in recent days to be the face of the "tea party" movement, a strategy that suggests what sort of candidacy she would run if she enters the 2012 presidential contest.

Palin has largely demurred when asked about her 2012 ambitions (or lack thereof) -- choosing to steer the conversation to the importance of electing Republicans this fall.

But, in a speech to the Iowa Republican Party on Friday night and then again in a Web video released by her political action committee today, she seems to be sending clear hints about a national bid -- and laying claim to the mantle of the tea party candidate if she does run.

In the video -- titled "Tea Party" -- Palin praises the movement as a "ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they are doing business," adding, "It is so inspiring to see real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals, come out and stand up and speak out for commonsense conservative principles."

Indeed, Ms. Palin seems to be continuing on this course. But at some point she's going to have to steer the ship slightly. She is going to have to make her political ambitions clearer. We will have to see what happens to her relationship with the Tea Party movement at that point.

(Note -- you might have noticed that very odd commercial at the end of that video clip. Yeah, I don't know what to make of it either.)

Paul Krugman throws a fit, prophesizes doom

Paul Krugman's op-ed piece in Friday's New York Times quickly spread through the Web and attracted much derision from right-wing pundits. The piece is essentially a long, manic rant about the terrible world to come if the Republicans take control of the House (and possibly the Senate), nicely sprinkled with apocalyptic prophecies such as the following:

This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

Also:

So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Economist, which recently published a decidedly balanced column about America's Tea Party movement, jumped all over Krugman's rant, making the following observation:

Mr Krugman offers no reason to believe that if Republicans fail to capture the House, Democrats will deliver the policies he thinks we need to avoid "years of political chaos and economic weakness". It's a little sad, isn't it, when even our most eminent public intellectuals waste so much of their time, and ours, on baseless partisan freakouts?

Ouch. But Democrats and their supporters, facing up to the reality of what seems likely to be a disastrous election night next Tuesday, have started making a rather crude argument -- yes, they've made mistakes, they say, but if the Republicans win they'll be even worse.

Why are Democrats making this argument? Well, even though the Tea Party crowd brands Obama as a radical leftist, the truth is that the President has been a huge disappointment for the liberal left. He has failed to enact credible policy changes in any area that matters to the voters that put him in office. The health care bill is weak, the climate change bill died in the Senate, and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has yet to be repealed.

This is why Obama went on The Daily Show and made the now infamous remark, "Yes we can, but..." -- the point being that he is still supposedly committed to great change, but that more time is needed.

Mr. Krugman makes a similar appeal with the following remarks:

Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.

But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.

But here's the problem -- the Democrats have had two years of utter domination in Washington in which they could have enacted the agenda Mr. Krugman is demanding. And the fact is that they have failed miserably. When you're in office and you fail so badly, you don't really deserve to stay in office, do you? The "we're less worse" argument doesn't wash -- at the very least, it's not the sort of message that's going to get the base to go out and vote.

Mr. Krugman also blunders badly with the following argument:

We might add that should any Republicans in Congress find themselves considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next spring.

The Tea Party movement certainly has its mean, hateful side. It also has terribly unrealistic expectations. But are we to automatically assume that every Republican elected to office is going to behave boorishly in office? Is it too much to assume that at least some of them will act in a "statesmanlike" manner, or at least as statesmanlike as any other member of Congress? Every politician who goes to Washington has to make compromises. Why should we automatically assume that the Tea Party candidates will be no different?

Don't get me wrong here -- a Republican House will make things very difficult in Washington. The party has yet to indicate how it is going to try and enact legislation with a Democratic President holding the veto pen. The economic situation is still dire. There are many reasons to "be very afraid" -- but the Democrats have had their chance to assuage our fears. And they haven't.