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For a whole variety of different reasons, I've decided its time to move my blog from over to Typepad. My initial plan was to wait until Inauguration Day to do it, but I've decided to go ahead and do it today instead. So....

RSS Feed Readers: You don't need to do anything. In a few moments, your feed will include the first post on my new site.

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Some things that deserve attention but not a post of their own...

+ Looks like I've got the filibuster thing all wrong. Invoking cloture (i.e. ending a filibuster) is an affirmative process that requires the majority to show up and deliver 60 votes. The only time the side working to sustain the filibuster needs to show up is if and when that number is reached. Then and only then can they be forced to hold the floor by reading from phone books and such. It's not Sen. Reid's fault; its the rules.

+ If you want to understand why the debate over health care reform will be different this time, read this. And this.

+ Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich thinks long term.

All for today....

Scott Horton interviews Matthew Alexander, "the American Air Force major who, through a series of skillful interrogations, secured the information that allowed the military to pinpoint al Zarqawi's whereabouts and kill him:"

In Iraq, we lived the "ticking time bomb" scenario every day. Numerous Al Qaeda members that we captured and interrogated were directly involved in coordinating suicide bombing attacks. I remember one distinct case of a Sunni imam who was caught just after having blessed suicide bombers to go on a mission. Had we gotten there just an hour earlier, we could have saved lives. Still, we knew that if we resorted to torture the short term gains would be outweighed by the long term losses. I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantánamo Bay. My team of interrogators knew that we would become Al Qaeda's best recruiters if we resorted to torture. Torture is counterproductive to keeping America safe and it doesn't matter if we do it or if we pass it off to another government. The result is the same....

We do ourselves a great disservice by stereotyping our enemies. Al Qaeda is comprised of a variety of individuals each with their own unique motivations for having joined. I can only remember one true ideologue in all the interrogations I conducted or supervised (more than 1,300) and even he started to come around at the end because we treated him with respect. The overwhelming majority of Sunni Iraqis who joined Al Qaeda did so out of need, not want. For some the reason was economic, for others tribal obligations, and for a large number it was for protection from the Shiite militias-the militias that we allowed, after the removal of Saddam, to conduct reprisal killings. When my group of interrogators reached out to these Sunnis and offered them an alternative to fighting against us -fighting with us-they were easily convinced to cooperate and rejected Al Qaeda. Sometimes all it took was an apology from an American for the mistakes we made at the beginning of the war. General David Petraeus proved this point by facilitating the Anbar Awakening. Interrogations are best conducted in the spirit of cooperation and negotiation, not domination and retribution. This is a metaphor for how we should use all of our instruments of power in fighting this war.

Just read Jon Cohn. I wish I was still teaching comparative public policy, because this is one of the best intros to comparative welfare state development that I've ever read.

Here's the lede:

In today's political lexicon, "Detroit" has become synonymous with failure--a shell of a city inhabited by a shell of a once-mighty industry. It is, in various tellings, the product of individual achievement laid low by collectivism run amok, or of innovation smothered by addled corporate managers and sclerotic labor contracts. Libertarians against unions, environmentalists against gas-guzzlers, or car enthusiasts against bad engineering--everybody can find something to loathe.

But, for all of Detroit's mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for bluecollar workers. When the carmakers, pushed by unions, agreed to provide workers with a steady level of purchasing power, comprehensive health benefits lasting into retirement, and various forms of workplace rights, they were promising something that all Americans covet. And, while the financial costs and managerial constraints associated with that effort have helped bring domestic carmakers to the edge of collapse, ultimate responsibility for this situation lies beyond Detroit.

In a more enlightened society, after all, government would have made those promises and extended them to all workers, thereby spreading the burden of financing them to all taxpayers. That's how it's done in Europe and in Japan--which, not coincidentally, is the home of Detroit's most successful competitors. But the U.S. government never took that step. So, instead of a public welfare state, we got a private one, administered for only some workers and paid for by their employers. Sooner or later, this arrangement was bound to fail.

The creation of this privately run welfare state came neither easily nor quickly. It was the result of a decades-long transformation, carried out in two stages: first, when unions took advantage of New Deal legislation to transform life on the factory floor; then, when unions used their bargaining power to secure more generous compensation. And, to appreciate just how dramatic those changes were, it's worth recalling what life as an autoworker was like before this transformation began.

And the conclusion, for those looking for a quick fix:

Fortunately, there is. It's a model for the welfare state that already exists in other parts of the world and that, as it happens, has been getting a lot of international attention in the last few years. It's the Nordic or Scandinavian model, so named for the part of Europe where it's practiced, and its philosophy is simple. In these countries, government guarantees everybody, even blue-collar workers, most of the things Detroit once guaranteed its workforce--like middle-class wages, full health benefits, and subsidized day care. The government also guarantees nearly full incomes for the unemployed. Organized labor is still a big part of the picture; Scandinavia is actually the most heavily unionized part of Europe. But unions there serve a somewhat different function. Instead of trying to restrict hiring and firing--or, for that matter, obstructing trade--they focus on improving labor conditions and training displaced workers to find new work. They have a less adversarial relationship with management, although that has a lot to do with the fact that Scandinavian employers don't constantly attack unions the way American employers do.

Even though it takes high taxes to support such generous government programs, the Scandinavian economies are strong. That's led some center-left economists to suggest that this model for the welfare state represents the best hope for guaranteeing the kind of economic security companies once provided, but no longer can. As it happens, President-elect Obama's agenda includes universal health insurance, more subsidized child care, and better worker retraining--not to mention labor-law reforms. And, while Obama hasn't been talking up Sweden lately, his approach to policy suggests that he, too, believes government must assume the responsibility for providing benefits--and guaranteeing livelihoods--that once belonged to corporate America.

This one is easy. If the Republican Party thinks the best way to attract voters to their cause if to tell jokes that amuse a minority and offend a majority of the voting public, who am I to complain? If they want to take to the ramparts to defend a joke that most people find offensive, why would I want to stop them? They may think this is a winning long-term strategy, but I promise you it is not.

I'm glad I missed the arguments about Rick Warren's appearance at Obama's Inaugural. It allows me to skip the back and forth and head straight for the conclusion.

You can't change hearts and minds if you aren't willing to engage directly and substantively with the people who oppose your views. Not only is Rick Warren the best-selling evangelical author of all time, he is also among a tiny handful of evangelical leaders who are politically independent.

If not him, who? If not now, when?

As the man says, we need to get back to a point where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and where politics is more about substance than symbolism. Obama is, in his own words, "a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans." This doesn't change that at all. And depending on what he does during his term in office, it might even reinforce it.

Andrew Sullivan gets it:

If I cannot pray with Rick Warren, I realize, then I am not worthy of being called a Christian. And if I cannot engage him, then I am not worthy of being called a writer. And if we cannot work with Obama to bridge these divides, none of us will be worthy of the great moral cause that this civil rights movement truly is.

So does Joe Klein:

I have no problem with Barack Obama asking Reverend Rick to deliver a prayer at the Inauguration. It will have zero--repeat, zero--impact on the policies of the Obama Administration. And it may do some good, especially if it gives pause to all those people who think that I--and the crypto-Muslim Barack Obama--are going to hell...If it causes those folks to give the new President just the slightest credit for appreciating their worldview, if it causes them to give him the benefit of the doubt on controversial stuff like talking to the Iranians or universal health insurance, then it's worth it. If it causes evangelicals to say, "Well, he's not demonizing us, maybe we shouldn't demonize him," it's worth it. If it makes Rush Limbaugh's toxic blather about our next President seem even the slightest bit ridiculous and over-the-top to his idiot legion of ditto heads, it's worth it.

The thing is, Obama is trying to change the nature of public discourse from the raw blast it has been for the past 20 years to something more civil and tolerable. You sense that every time he opens his mouth. He's all for opening doors. I don't know how many of ultra-conservative evangelicals will walk through the door he is opening by having one of their most popular leaders join the inaugural celebration, but I appreciate his inclusive intent. Even if I think there is an insurmountable roadblock to heaven--I'd guess it's about like the relationship between a camel and the eye of a needle--for those who make blanket judgments about which of us is going to hell.

So does Publius:

Obama isn't going to cause evangelicals to start loving abortion rights or gay marriage. But what he could maybe accomplish is to help elevate a leader whose primary mission in life isn't defeating and vilifying Democrats. That's all Dobson and Perkins have -- they commodify outrages and liberal hatred, and that's what they sell (at a nice profit). Warren, despite his flaws, devotes more energy to doing good things -- things that secular progressives could even coalition with him on.

Personally, I'd rather see a greater chunk of evangelical money going to fight AIDS than to defeat Democratic candidates. Obama's courtship of Warren could make that happen. Also, if the evangelical leadership shifts, young evangelicals wouldn't grow up hearing how awful Democrats are. Instead, they would grow up hearing how important it is to do good in the world. And without that incessant demonizing, younger evangelicals might eventually drift over to the progressive camp, which is far more consistent with their views on poverty, the environment, etc.

In short, Obama's invitation is extremely ambitious -- FDR or Nixon-level ambitious. He's trying to wedge one of the other side's key coalition groups and assemble a new permanent coalition (or at least one that attracts less incoming fire). With that new coalition in place, the legislative environment for LGBT rights will much more conducive to progress.

And last but certainly not least, could we please get some love for Obama's decision to pair Warren with Rev. Lowery? I mean, c'mon....

UPDATE: See?

Honestly, I don't really have an opinion. The constitution grants the states the right to determine for themselves how vacancies are filled, and some states have chosen to go with gubernatorial appointments. And sure thing, that's not particularly democratic, but that doesn't much offend me. The alternative is to call a special election, and given that voter turnout for those things is extremely low, well...

And then there's this broader point from Yglesias:

...some of the hostility to dynasticism stems from a sort of misguided desire to pretend that electoral outcomes are this incredibly rational process. So if we all point at Caroline Kennedy and say she's only under serious consideration because of her name, then maybe if we all object loudly enough to this it'll turn out that the other 99 Senators are there because they've passed a set of rigorous credentialing examinations or something.

But of course that's not how things work at all. The whole business of electioneering is full of irrationality and tradition all the way from top to bottom. The notion that all members of the Kennedy family are ex officio considered plausible candidates for public office is weird, but it's a particular oddity that exists against background conditions that are also odd.

The entire system of democracy is a mess from top to bottom. But as bad as it is, its better than all of the known alternatives, right?

Bottom line: Don't judge these appointments against some mythical version of democracy that exists only in your head. Judge them against the real world.

Curtis Gans at the Center for the Study of the American Electorate runs the numbers:

In all, 131,257,542 Americans voted for president in 2008, nine million more than cast their ballots in 2004* (against only a 6.5 million increase in eligible population).

The turnout level was 63 percent of eligibles, a 2.4 percentage point increase over 2004 and the highest percentage to turn out since 64.8 percent voted for president in 1960. It was the third highest turnout since women were given the right to vote in 1920.

Overall turnout increased in 37 states and the District of Columbia. The greatest turnout increases occurred in the District of Columbia (13 percentage points), followed by North Carolina (10.3), Georgia (7.6), South Carolina (7.4), Virginia (7.1), Colorado (6.3), Mississippi (5.9), Alabama (5.5) and Indiana (5.2).

Overall turnout records were set in Alabama, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

Democratic turnout, as measured by their share of the aggregate vote for U.S. House of Representatives, increased by 5.4 percentage points to 31.6 percent of the eligible vote, their highest share of the vote since 33.4 percent voted Democratic in 1964 and the largest year-to-year increase in Democratic turnout since women were enfranchised in1920. Democratic turnout increased in 46 states and the District of Columbia and declined in only four.

That damn RSS clippings folder is still full. I'm going to work on clearing it out between now and the end of the weekend. Once that's done, I'm going to get to work next week moving my site over to a new hosting provider. And once that's done, I'll get back to a regular blogging schedule. It won't ever match the pace of this past fall - at least not until 2012, I hope! - but it will be far more regular than its been since Election Day.

Back for real in a day or two.... Until then...

Posts like this one from Jon Henke are why I continue to read The Next Right on a regular basis:

If there is a central problem with journalism, it is the lack of skepticism. Especially as it applies to government. Politicians and political organizations are not held to account for contradictory statements, false predictions and claims.

Why did it take a Washington Post reporter so many years to learn skepticism, and why would he ever discard skepticism?

The Right has convinced itself that the problem is "that liberal media", but that is obstructive rhetoric. Sure, there are a multitude of examples of media bias that favors the Left...but there are also a multitude of examples of media bias that favors the Right. People notice what they expect to see.

This isn't a problem of personal bias; biases are unavoidable and don't fit a left/right matrix, anyway. Ultimately, criticisms of Left/Right bias are tactical attacks against symptoms, not the problem itself. Crying "that liberal media!" delegitimizes our more fundamental criticisms.

The problem isn't a biased media. It is a media that has lost sight of the role of journalism and reporters.

If there is even a question of whether they should be extremely skeptical of political claims, then they aren't really a Fourth Estate at all. They've just become enablers of the Estates to which they are attached.

Addressing this core question of the role of journalism - on a bipartisan basis - should be a goal of the next Right. Government will be healthier and more limited when the media acts as a reality check - a skeptic of power - rather than an enabler of the world's biggest monopoly. That, not "liberal media", is the problem we have to address.

This is exactly precisely right. The perceptions that various media outlets have a "liberal" or "conservative" bias are masking a deeper, much more important truth. Political journalism in the United States is deeply flawed. Its nice to see people on both sides of the aisle beginning to recognize this.

Might as well make it official. I'm out for a few days. See you on the flip!

I know absolutely nothing about the group, but if this is any indication of who they are and what they are about, they suck.

Of all the ways this group could have handled Ygelsias' criticism, this has to be the absolute worst possible choice. Getting his employer to hijack his blog and post a detailed "apology" to the group? Are you kidding me? What is this, high school?

If you want a lesson in what not to do with new media, this is it. Prior to this, I'd never heard of the group. Now I know one thing about them, and its very, very, very not good. The apology post calls them "key leaders in the progressive movement." For the sake of the progressive movement, I hope to god that is not even remotely true.

UPDATE: You really have to read the comments section of the post. Hilarious!

...in Turkey!

The shoe hurled at President George W. Bush has sent sales soaring at the Turkish maker as orders pour in from Iraq, the U.S. and Iran.

The brown, thick-soled "Model 271" may soon be renamed "The Bush Shoe" or "Bye-Bye Bush," Ramazan Baydan, who owns the Istanbul-based producer Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., said in a telephone interview today.

"We've been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy," he said. "We've even hired an agency to look at television advertising."

Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi hurled a pair at Bush at a news conference in Baghdad on Dec. 14. Both shoes missed the president after he ducked. The journalist was jailed and is seeking a pardon from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. The company plans to employ 100 more staff to meet demand, he said.

"Model 271" is exported to markets including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Customers in Iraq ordered 120,000 pairs this week and some Iraqis offered to set up distribution companies for the shoe, Baydan said.

Baydan has received a request for 4,000 pairs from a company called Davidson, based in Maryland. He declined to provide further details.

Still working on that clippings folder. Every day I make progress, every day I add more stories. Meh. After I get through with my end-of-semester duties, I'm going to see if I can't clear this thing out once and for all. Before filling it back up over the holidays, I guess.

More, this time from WaPo:

Echoing remarks by his boss in recent weeks, Cheney said the lack of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, "is a remarkable achievement." But Cheney conceded he is disappointed that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden remains at large. He said intelligence reports indicate that bin Laden is still alive, but he said it was not clear if he is still running al-Qaeda operations.

Let's examine the logic of this.

On February 26, 1993, a group of terrorists with direct connections to al Qaeda and the people who planned 9/11 attacked the World Trade Center in NYC.

From that day until September 11, 2001, there were no al Qaeda attacks on American soil.

By Cheney's own logic, President Clinton responsible for the lack of attacks on U.S. soil.

More importantly, by his own logic, because the attacks of 9/11 took place many months into the Bush Administration, he and President Bush must have been at least partly responsible for them.

Is that really what he and his fellow conservatives mean to tell us? Really?

Yglesias smacks down the nonsense:

The Secretary of State lived in Arkansas for 26 years, including over ten years as First Lady of that state. The Secretary of Defense lived in Texas for seven years, including time spent as president of Texas A&M University. The Press Secretary is from North Carolina. The "climate czar" is from Florida and spent many years working in Florida politics. And the US Trade Representative is from Texas and served as mayor of a major southern city.

But apparently things like "being from the south" or "living in the south" or "working in the south" or "heading major southern institutions" doesn't count as being a southerner. It's Trent Lott or bust!

A few days back, VP Cheney made some odd comments about his understanding of the powers of the president and the oath of office in an interview with the Washington Times. At the time, I pointed out that Cheney seems to have confused the oath of enlistment for the US military with the oath of office for the President and VP. Several of you wrote in to ask whether or not this was merely a slip of the tongue, and I wrote back that although I didn't have any direct proof, I was fairly certain it was not. But now I have proof.

Here's Cehney talking to FoxNews:

WALLACE: This is at the core of the controversies that I want to get to with you in a moment. If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?

CHENEY: General proposition, I'd say yes. You need to be more specific than that. I mean -- but clearly, when you take the oath of office on January 20th of 2001, as we did, you take the oath to support and defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

For the record, here once again is the oath of office taken by the President and Vice President:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And here is the oath of enlistment into the military:

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

Notice that in the VP oath there is no mention whatsoever of enemies, and that as a result the entire duty of both the President and the VP is to the constitution itself. Andrew Sullivan explains why this matters:

How can the suspension of all laws into the power of the executive branch in wartime be seen as a defense or protection of the Constitution? Perhaps for a brief amount of time in a dire emergency, after which there would be a thorough accounting to the Congress and the Courts. But indefinitely? As inherent in the office? And with jurisdiction over the entire United States as well as the world? With "enemy combatants" defined as anyone the president calls an "enemy combatant" and no distinction between citizen ad non-citizen? Including the right to torture? Indefinitely?

What Cheney has advanced is that the president has the right to dissolve the constitution permanently. That he has the right to commit war crimes with impunity. That there is no legal authority to which he is ever required to pay deference in a war that is his and his alone to declare and end. Now when you consider that, in Cheney's view, these war-powers are limitless, and that war is declared not by the Congress but by the president, and can be defined against a broad, amorphous enemy such as "terrorism", and never end, you begin to see what a dangerous man he is, and how much danger we have all been in since he seized control of the government seven years ago.

And lest you think this is an overstatement, here's Cheney again in his own words:

The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.

He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.

The sole source of authority for the President of the United States is the United States Constitution. It is not, as Cheney claims here, "the nature of the world we live in." That is one of the foundational differences between our system of constitutional government and systems based on either monarchical or totalitarian control The power of the presidency is limited by the text of the constitution. Period. The end. Full stop. If the constitution needs to be rewritten because the world has changed, then let's have a debate and rewrite it. But it does not change simply because the world has changed.

The conservative movement has spent decades promoting the idea of original intent and strict constructionist in reading the constitution. They have claimed on innumerable occasions to be outraged by the actions of "out of control," "unaccountable," "activist" judges who go beyond the clear meaning of the text in the constitution to create new powers and new rights. They argue, for example, that although the Fourth Amendment makes reference to "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," it does not mean that citizens have a right to privacy that includes things like the right to use birth control.

But of course those arguments were just a means to an end, and not an end in themselves. They weren't deployed because they actually believed them, but because the arguments helped achieve a desired policy outcome. Cheney's argument here, and the wide support it receive from conservatives, make that absolutely clear. If conservatives refuse to accept that there should even be a debate about the meaning of the Fourth Amendment - and to be absolutely clear here, I do believe that the text of the Fourth, combined with the historical record on its ratification, supports the liberal reading - there is absolutely no way to defend their support of Cheney's claims. Because there is nothing in the text of the constitution nor in the extensive historical record surrounding its ratification that supports the idea that "the nature of the world" changes the power of the presidency. Nothing.

The actions of the President are not by definition legal. That is not how our system works. I don't care if the President is someone I support or someone I oppose. Because my loyalty, first and foremost, is to the Constitution, and not to a particular party, ideology, or individual. And I believe that without ever having bothered to even take an oath.

Mike Duncan is campaigning for a second term as chairman of the Republican Party by promising to make it "an accelerator of change."

Call me crazy, but isn't conservatism all about "standing athwart history, yelling stop!" How can you do that and accelerate change at the same time?

More seriouly, someone inside the party decided to leak what was supposed to be a very private memo to RNC members about the future of the party. Greg Sargent reports:

"Republicans have grown accustomed to having our party recognized as the `Party of Ideas,' but we must acknowledge that many Americans today believe the party is stale and does not deserve that label," reads one of the memo's starker assessments, adding that "we have not used our principles to provide solutions to the kitchen table concerns of middle-class America."

"We must recognize that being the `Party of Ideas' requires daily effort to apply principles to the particular public policy questions of the day," the memo says. "All Republicans have an obligation to develop principled solutions rather than falling back on ideology alone; we must show how our ideology can be applied to solve problems."

I don't expect them to follow his advice, but if they do, their time in the wilderness might not be nearly as long as I've thought. One thing I can say with certainty, however. There is no way that Republicans are going to listen to this from David Frum:

College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats -- but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time. So the question for the GOP is: will it pursue them? To do so will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion.

And it will potentially involve even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social issues. That is a future that leaves little room for Palin -- but it is the only hope for a Republican recovery.

The problem with Frum's argument is that there is already a political party occupying the political space that Frum describes: its the Democrats! Then again, parties that lose their way tend to recover first by becoming a lite version of their opponents, and then eventually by staking out new ground as new issues and fights emerge. Think, for example, of how the useless Democratic Party of the late 1980s morphed into the New Democrats / GOP-lite party of the Clinton years, followed eventually by a Netroots-led rebirth that produced the Obama campaign. It took more than 20 years, but eventually we got there.

Cycles, people. It's all about political cycles.

Yglesias sets the record straight: It didn't happen under Reagan. It happened under Clinton. And it came after a series of historic tax increases, and not after tax cuts.

Like I said before: Facts are stubbornly nonpartisan. What matters is that we get them right, not that they support our particular point of view.

This past week saw a great discussion break out all over the blogosphere about progressive taxation. It all started with this fairly typical column by Robert Samuelson on the "myths" of lobbying. Here are the key grafs:

A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that.

Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they're its servants. The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals -- mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower. Similarly, the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.

After easily dispatching the ludicrous notion that the CBPP is a powerful lobbying group that exists to defend the poor, Ezra Klein got graph happy, posting two important ones tha tI want to reproduce here:

To which he added: "Unless you think politicians change those rates because they like having less federal revenue to play with, than it would seem that the rich have some sway after all."

Also, this:

Adding: "So over the same period of time that the tax rates on the top one percent have fallen dramatically, their share of the national income has skyrocketed. The rich may not be "all powerful," but it's quite a leap to say that they are somehow cowering before the might of Robert Greenstein and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Indeed, over the same period, they managed to (at least temporarily) eliminate the "estate tax," which was a key tax on the rich. And if you don't believe that was the rich flexing their political power, then you haven't read this."

And that sparked a HUGE discussion. After getting seriously wonky here, Ezra took on one of the most often misused facts about taxes: that the richest one percent pay more than 1/4 of all of the nation's taxes. This one deserves a quote in full:

And one more note on how Samuelson presented his data. "The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office," he wrote, as if that meant something. But the question with the top one percent is not simply how much they pay, but how much they make. If they make 50 percent of the national income, paying 28 percent of taxes is paying very little. If they make two percent of the national income, then their tax burden is heavy indeed. What they pay only makes sense if you know what they make. And this is true for historical comparisons too. You often hear conservatives argue that the rich pay a larger percentage of national taxes than they did in the 1970s, and that shows the system's progressivity. But the rich make much more money than they did in the 70s. The question is whether their share of the national income increased faster or slower than their share of the federal tax burden.

In 1979, the top one percent brought home 9.3 percent of the national income -- which is to say, for every $100 paid in wages, $9.30 went to the top one percent -- and paid 15.4 percent of federal taxes. The ratio of tax share to income share was 1.65. Their tax burden was 1.65 times larger than their income share. In 2005, they brought home 18.1 percent of the national income -- it had doubled -- and paid 27.6 percent of federal taxes. The ration was 1.52. In other words, it has gone down. The rich pay less taxes as a share of their income than they did in the 1970s, and they control much more of the nation's wealth.

This is worse than it even looks on first glance (and it looks quite bad). Progressive taxation rests on a simple theory: As you make more money, you can bear to pay a higher rate. That's how it differs from, say, a flat tax. A flat tax advocate would levy a 25 percent tax on Bob, who makes $50,000, and Russell Wordsforth Skotchpuckett III, who makes $500,000. They might even call that progressive. 25 percent of $500,000 is more than 25 percent of $50,000. The progressive taxer would scoff at this. Bob is left with $37,500 to live on. Russell Wordsforth Skotchpuckett III has $375,000. That's not an equal burden, much less a progressive one.

In other words, as the top one percent's share of the national income grew, their ratio of income-to-taxes shouldn't have simply stayed steady. It should have grown. Instead, it shrunk. Not only were they paying a lower share of federal taxes relative to their share of income, but it had gone down even as their ability to pay more had radically increased.

What's always amazed me about this argument is how simple it is to rebut. Or rather, that despite the simplicity of this counter-argument, you almost never actually hear anyone offer it. It isn't enough to know what percent of the total share of taxes they pay. For that number to make any sense, you need to understand what percentage of income they take in, and what percentage of wealth they hold. Once you get the proper context, you begin to understand how this isn't about soaking the rich. It's simply about getting them to pay their fair share.

And nothing makes that point more clearly than this graph - via Kevin Drum - from the NYT:

Kevin comments on that bar to the far right:

The top 400 taxpayers, a group so rich and elite that I'd need scientific notation to properly represent their proportion of the population, have doubled their share of income in the past decade or two but have decreased their tax burden by nearly half. Nice work! As you can see, Warren Buffett wasn't exaggerating when he said his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he does. If she pays more than 18% — not exactly a tough hurdle when you figure that payroll taxes already account for about 8% of that — she probably does.

Yglesias adds:

The fact that the top 0.1 percent control 8 percent of national income is hugely relevant to thinking about how to understanding living standards in the United States. We have a similar per capita income to Finland, but our top 0.1 percent is way better off than Finland's, whereas Finland's child poverty rate is immensely lower than our own. Various countries come out as slightly poorer on average, even though the average resident of those countries actually has a higher income than the average American.

Repeat after me: We aren't trying to "redistribute wealth." We are simply trying to get the people at the top to pay the same percentage as the people in the middle.

Everyone see this?

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take-

RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

They said they were going to take a stand? What do you call what happened in the mountains of Tora Bora? You know, the stand where Bush let Osama bin Laden get away? What, destroying the entire leadership of the group responsible for 9/11 wasn't enough for him? He had to let them go so that they could go on to fight another day?

Do you think he doesn't know, or that he just doesn't know what to say?

I like Matt Yglesias' take on this subject from an unrelated post:

The harsh reality is that this was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it's seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world -- including but by no means limited to the Arab world. But it's impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it's clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it's vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they're seen and understood by people who aren't stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.

What he said.

Here's a great story by New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert on how soon to be Secretary of Energy Chu sees regulation:

This past summer, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who currently heads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory--and who has been tapped to be the next Secretary of Energy--delivered a talk on climate change and how to combat it. Consider, Chu said, the refrigerator.

Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home's electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California--the state Chu now lives in--set about establishing the country's first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn't be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that "the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists." The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.

The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines and solar cells. "I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is," he said.

This is a classic example of how government can use regulation to empower citizens to collective solve problems that they could never tackle on their own. It's also a powerful example of how the scientific claims of industry are often wholly unsubstantiated. They said that the new standards couldn't be met at a price consumers could afford, but once they were imposed, the size of refrigerators grew, their efficiency skyrocketed, and their price fell by half.

Policies that protect the environment and save energy are not either/or propositions. We can save money and energy at the same time. Never ever underestimate the power of the market to innovate if the incentives are correctly aligned.

And while we're on the subject... Obama's weekly radio/YouTube address hits on that very subject today:

Money:

Whether it's the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create twenty-first century jobs - today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology.

I'm a geek at heart - always have been, always will be. It makes me happy beyond words to have a fellow geek in the White House, one who is actually excited to surround himself with physicists, geneticists, biochemists, marine biologists, and ecologists.

Facts aren't just stubborn things, they are also nonpartisan things. Reality is what it is. For the first time in my lifetime, we will have a President of the United States who actually understands that.

Here's the text of Obama's address for those who can't watch the video:

Whether it's the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create twenty-first century jobs--today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It is time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology.

Right now, in labs, classrooms and companies across America, our leading minds are hard at work chasing the next big idea, on the cusp of breakthroughs that could revolutionize our lives. But history tells us that they cannot do it alone. From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.

Because the truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources--it's about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient--especially when it's inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States--and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.

Dr. John Holdren has agreed to serve as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. John is a professor and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, as well as President and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center. A physicist renowned for his work on climate and energy, he's received numerous honors and awards for his contributions and has been one of the most passionate and persistent voices of our time about the growing threat of climate change. I look forward to his wise counsel in the years ahead.

John will also serve as a Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology--or PCAST--as will Dr. Harold Varmus and Dr. Eric Lander. Together, they will work to remake PCAST into a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on the scientific aspects of my policy priorities.

Dr. Varmus is no stranger to this work. He is not just a path-breaking scientist, having won a Nobel Prize for his research on the causes of cancer--he also served as Director of the National Institutes of Health during the Clinton Administration. I am grateful he has answered the call to serve once again.

Dr. Eric Lander is the Founding Director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard and was one of the driving forces behind mapping the human genome--one of the greatest scientific achievements in history. I know he will be a powerful voice in my Administration as we seek to find the causes and cures of our most devastating diseases.

Finally, Dr. Jane Lubchenco has accepted my nomination as the Administrator of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is devoted to conserving our marine and coastal resources and monitoring our weather. An internationally known environmental scientist and ecologist and former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Jane has advised the President and Congress on scientific matters, and I am confident she will provide passionate and dedicated leadership at NOAA.

Working with these leaders, we will seek to draw on the power of science to both meet our challenges across the globe and revitalize our economy here at home. And I'll be speaking more after the New Year about how my Administration will engage leaders in the technology community and harness technology and innovation to create jobs, enhance America's competitiveness and advance our national priorities.

I am confident that if we recommit ourselves to discovery; if we support science education to create the next generation of scientists and engineers right here in America; if we have the vision to believe and invest in things unseen, then we can lead the world into a new future of peace and prosperity.

One of the topics that I haven't weighed in on yet is the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first I assumed that the story was going to be so well covered that I didn't need to write about torture again, and then I got busy. But as Glenn Greenwald chronicles, the story was almost entirely ignored by everyone outside the blogosphere:

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:

The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections. "The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment," the summary said. Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.

The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly -- and unquestionably -- responsible for numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).

A bipartisan report issued without a single dissent explicitly connects senior administration officials and even the president himself to war crimes, and the entire country just shrugs its shoulders and moves on?

Andrew Sullivan:

The Senate's bipartisan report, issued with no dissents, reiterates and adds factual context to what we already know. And there is no equivocation in the report.

The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, the man who gave the green light to the abuses in that prison, is the president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Again: there is no longer any reasonable factual debate about this (hence to near total silence of the Republican right), and the Senate report finally holds the president responsible in bipartisan fashion:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

Those ghastly pctures of naked, hooded prisoners? Bush approved nudity and hooding of prisoners. Hypothermia? Sleep deprivation? Bush signed a memo removing the most baseline protections for all human beings under the Geneva Conventions. Waterboarding? Bush knew full well. As did Rice and Tenet and Powell and that poseur in defense of human rights, Paul Wolfowitz. But even before the memo, before any prisoners were captured, the Bush administration was working on how to torture them:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel's Office had already solicited information on detainee "exploitation" from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

Let's be absolutely clear what this means: When we saw an image of Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner around on a leash, we assumed at the time that she improvised this, or was some kind of "bad apple." This is and was a conscious lie to the Congress, and to the American people, and to the world. The person who authorized the use of nudity and leashes on prisoners was not Lynndie England or any of the other grunts thrown to the wolves.

It gets worse:

The torture and abuse techniques authorized by the president of the United States were drawn from methods designed by the Communist Chinese to extract false confessions from broken human beings (although many of the torture methods - from hypothermia to sleep deprivation - had been pioneered by the Gestapo using George Tenet's precise phrase "enhanced interrogation". The historical proof of this is here - and Americans tried and executed those responsible for the same techniques now used by the president of the United States.)

Of all of the people involved in this, the one's I've always thought should be held least accountable are the enlisted men and women who were put into the middle of this god-awful mess, and yet so far they are the only ones who have been held accountable. This makes less than no sense. The entire premise of the chain of command in the military is that responsibility flows up the chain, not down. When people are issuing orders that might send people to their death, there simply is no other way for things to work. And yet in this instance, things have been deliberately manipulated by the administration, its defenders, and by some of the military brass to make sure that we only look down and not up.

Scott Horton:

The report tells us that when photos and other evidence of abuse first surfaced, the Bush Administration firmly denied any connection between their policies and the abuse, then attempted to scapegoat a group of more than a dozen young recruits (but not, of course, any of their supervising officers, who knew the details of the administration's involvement and would have made things messy if disciplined). The report puts these actions in an unforgiving light:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

One final point before I let this go, and for that I head back to Andrew:

The MSM also made torture possible - especially cable news. Even PBS demanded that guests not use the word torture to decribe torture. The issue was barely present in the last campagn; and Bush has not been asked about his war crimes in any single exit interview so far. The AP and the NYT and the WaPo collude in robbing the English language of its plain meaning. This is not to bely that amazing work that many MSM reporters have done - from Dana Priest and Jane Mayer to Scott Horton and Charlie Savage. But so many of their editors seem unable to tell the truth about this country's war crimes in the past seven years.

The fact that it all this is inconvenient and uncomfortable makes it more important to speak the truth, not less. And yet up and down the line, there's silence.

This country has not always been this way. From the time of George Washington straight through to the Greatest Generation, we were better than this. We did not behave this way. We stood up to fight those who engaged in this sort of behavior. What has changed? Where did it all go so wrong?

Remember this:

While there may be some push-and-pull between the White House and cabinet departments, Mr. Axelrod said the president-elect had emphasized during job interviews his insistence on cohesion. "He encourages debate," Mr. Axelrod said. "He doesn't tolerate factionalism."

I only managed to get about half way through clearing out my folder of saved posts, so I'm going to keep at it today. I've got a major update to my dissertation prospectus due on Monday, and today will be my last day to work on it before the crush of finals grading begins tomorrow.

Odd that I would use writing on my blog as a break from writing on my dissertation, but...

UPDATE: Never mind all that. Gues sit will have to wait for my noon-3pm office hours tomorrow. See you then.

TPMe reports on my least favorite Member of Congress:

It's official: Rep. Virgil Goode, the Virginia Republican best known for denouncing the election of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) as the first Muslim member of Congress, has conceded defeat against Democratic Rep.-Elect Tom Perriello.

Goode asked for a recount after the certified total gave Perriello a 745-vote lead out of over 300,000 votes cast. The chance of turning around that kind of deficit was nearly non-existent, and now that the recount has finished Goode has conceded via press release.

The interesting thing here is that Goode was an absolutely safe occupant of this seat until this cycle -- to most people it didn't even seem possible that he could lose this year until the final week or two of the campaign. One has to wonder if his angry remarks against Ellison made the difference, turning him from a secure incumbent into a cartoon character.

Via ThinkProgress, here's VP Cheney in the Washington Times:

"In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that's what we've done," he said...

"I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11," Mr. Cheney said.

Notice anything weird about what he said? I did.

First, here's the oath of office taken by the President and Vice President of the United States:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Nothing about protecting and defending the country, nor is there anything about "enemies foreign and domestic." That comes from a different oath of office, one that the VP never himself took:

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

That's the oath of enlistment into the US military. It is not the oath that Cheney took when he became Vice President.

The President and Vice President swear to protect and defend the constitution, and not the people of the United States. That's not a minor or insignificant difference.

Andrew Sullivan:

"

I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," George W. Bush. Just as he used torture to defend freedom. And occupied a country in order to liberate it.

Wired's Threat Level:

Dikshit Guilty of Internet Gambling

Bush:

"I still think we're a right-of-center country," the President responded when asked whether the election offered proof that the ideological center of the country had shifted to the left.

I don't understand this whole center-this-and-that thing. Isn't wherever a majority happens to be at any given moment by definition the center? And if this is a democratic republic in which the majority rules under a series of checks and balances, then doesn't it by definition mean that we are in some sense always in the center? Or to put it another way, if we are not in the center, doesn't it mean that our democracy isn't functioning properly?

I understand the whole left/right thing... and I understand and support the idea of narratives, frames, and realignments, and thus that the center in some sense can be moved around... but...

This idea that we are either a "center-right" or "center-left" country just doesn't make any sense to me. How would we define what the center is without making reference to the ideas and beliefs of the citizens? This isn't math, and it's not geography. Right?

Ahem:

"My administration will value science," Obama said, in what sounded like a pointed reference to his predecessor. "We will make decisions based on facts."

Nicholas Beaudrot writes:

Over the past four years, more than 100% of reported earnings has gone into either dividends or stock buybacks. In other words, collectively the companies in the S&P 500 cannot think of a better way to invest money in a way that will produce more money for shareholders than simply giving the money directly to shareholders. This is, I think, a very powerful sign that the U.S. economy hasn't been able to come up with anything to do that is particularly productive. Hopefully a shift in government policy will help change that.

I think that's part of the story, but only part. What happened to the idea of reinvesting money in your employees by, you know, increasing their pay? Who knows, that might even lead them to do some innovating?!?