Tuesday, June 30, 2009
With Franken seated, there is a chance for a better health care bill -- and also a much better chance to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, aimed at making it easier for workers to join some unions.
More generally, Franken’s victory will create pressure on Democrats to deliver. They will now have 60 Senate votes. They can, in theory at least, stop a filibuster all by themselves. Of course, some moderate Democrats may still vote with the Republicans on certain measures. But such Democrats will now have to calculate more carefully, since their party will be more accountable than ever for failure.
On a personal note: I have written before about knowing Franken for a long time and liking him. He will surprise you. People will have to get used to the idea that someone can have a brilliant sense of humor and be fiercely substantive at the same time. And, Lord knows, no other senator will have fought harder to get there. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/06/live_from_st_paul_its.html#more
Perhaps fed by those reports, a new CNN poll found that “nearly three-quarters of all Americans support the plan to withdraw most U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities and towns, even though most believe that the troop movements will lead to an increase in violence in that country."
More than six years after the US invasion, Iraq is shattered. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead -- far more, incidentally, than even the largest estimates of the number of Iraqis who died during 35 years of Saddam Hussein's rule -- its social fabric is utterly destroyed, its economy is in ruins, and its dominant political faction is in hock to neighboring Iran.
And now what?
As we pull back, we're leaving Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in charge. Increasingly, Maliki is taking on the trappings of a dictator. He's established a network of security agencies that report directly to him. He's built a countrywide patronage system to bribe and pay off tribal allies, in anticipation of 2010 elections. He's shown no compunction against using the army, the police, and the secret agencies he controls to eliminate rivals. He's used divide-and-conquer tactics to outflank the Sunni-led sahwa movement, known as the Awakening or the Sons of Iraq, driving some of them back into armed resistance and others into sullen resentment or fear for their lives.
And Maliki, despite his protestations that he is a born-again "nationalist," has close ties to Iran. With Iran now revealed as a fundamentalist-run, naked military dictatorship, I expect Iran to act ruthlessly vis-a-vis Iraq, and if he wants to stay in power Maliki will pretty much have to go along.
A prominent Sunni activist from northern Iraq told me yesterday that anyone who thinks about opposing Maliki in Iraq has to fear for his or her life. The fact remains that despite the resurgence of secular nationalism in Iraq, as evidenced by the results of provincial elections last February, Maliki sits atop a conspiratorial little party called Al Dawa, a fundamentalist Islamist grouping, and he is reliant on a small, secretive clique that surrounds him. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/447282/little_to_celebrate_in_iraq?rel=emailNation
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. emerged as a canny strategist at the Supreme Court this term, laying the groundwork for bold changes that could take the court to the right even as the recent elections moved the nation to the left.
The court took mainly incremental steps in major cases concerning voting rights, employment discrimination, criminal procedure and campaign finance. But the chief justice’s fingerprints were on all of them, and he left clues that the court is only one decision away from fundamental change in many areas of the law.
Whether he will succeed depends on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s swing vote. And there is reason to think that the chief justice has found a reliable ally when it counts.
“In the important cases, Kennedy ends up on the right,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, a student of the court and the founder of Scotusblog, which has compiled comprehensive statistics on the current term. The two justices agreed 86 percent of the time.
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed by the Senate, she will succeed Justice David H. Souter, a liberal who spent almost two decades on the court. Her record on the federal appeals court in New York suggests that her views are largely in sync with those of Justice Souter, though there is some evidence that she will turn out to be more conservative in criminal cases.
The arrival of a neophyte justice coupled with Chief Justice Roberts’s increasing mastery of the judicial machinery foreshadow a widening gap between the Democratic-led political branches and the Supreme Court. Indeed, the court appears poised to move to the right in the Obama era. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/us/01scotus.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
…The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased."
…Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital . . . bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and irrationality are greater.http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/06/matt-taibbi-the-rolling-stone-contributing-editor-whoin-march-wrotea-brilliant-and-searing-piece-on-the-collapse-of-insura.html
No, we are not jeopardizing any "victory" by withdrawing prematurely. Put such Kool-Aidish thoughts aside-they feel like today's version of the 2003 "mission accomplished" banner.
Repeat after me:
There is not going to be any victory, no matter how long we stay or how soon we leave. Iraq is probably going to be violent for many years to come, and likely will be a closer ally of Iran than of the United States-nice job, W! For President Obama, the question from day one has been how can the U.S. government best mitigate the damage done in Iraq over the last eight years by the Bush-Cheney administration? The original mistake was invading a country pre-emptively on false premises. Everything we do is tainted by that sin. Even so, Professor Feaver, I wind up on your side, not for your reasons, but because I think the best way to undo the Bush-era damage might not be to bug out quickly.
For what it's worth, which isn't much, John Hannah, Dick Cheney's national security advisor from 2005 to 2009, offers a similar argument in today's Los Angeles Times. Not really worth reading, but fun for its multiple references to all the mistakes the Bush administration made in Iraq. I wonder where he was when that happened? Basically, Hannah is setting up to blame Obama if Iraq doesn't become a stable, democratic ally of the United States. As if. http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/29/an_aside_to_prof_peter_d_feaver
