Category Archives: The World

Bloody well right — just ask Her Majesty

Busy as we are on Friday (I’ll probably be here past 10 p.m. again), Mike just gave me a heads-up on this, and being a lover of tradition, I had to pass it on:

An RAF pilot has been ordered to trim his handlebar
moustache by an American General who took offence at its length, but
the British serviceman was not prepared to lose his whiskers without a
fight.

The British airman, who sports a
handlebar moustache in the proud tradition of the RAF, refused to
comply when his superior officer in Afghanistan took offence at his
facial hair.

Showing a bravado akin to that of
Biggles, he fought back, eventually convincing the general that his
generous whiskers were in line with regulations laid down by the Queen
herself…

I guess he told that cheeky Yank, all right… Let’s here it for Flight Leftenant Ball — hip-hip… Huzzah! Hip-hip…

Lieberman-Warner can’t possibly be as good as DeMint makes it sound

5 Replies

Just got a release from Jim DeMint about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Now I’ve gotta tell ya that what with the last week of the legislative session and the last week before the state primaries and other stuff, I haven’t sat down and studied said legislation. If I were going to editorialize about it, I suppose I would, but who’s got time for that?

This leaves me with sort of a vague sense that it must be a pretty good thing, since Joe says it "would substantially cut US greenhouse-gas emissions" and other good stuff, and Joe’s never lied to me as far as I know.

But now Jim DeMint is trying to double my knowledge of this bill with HIS release, and I don’t have time to read to the end of that, either, but I did read the headline, which says "Lieberman-Warner Will Cost SC Jobs, Could Double Gas Prices."

OK, "cost SC jobs" sounds pretty bad, but then he says it "could double gas prices," which sounds like a move in the right direction, in Energy Party terms, and that’s amazing in itself, seeing as how everybody else in Washington seems to be all about encouraging increased consumption with gas tax holidays and tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other demagogic doo-dads.

But surely he’s exaggerating with the "double" bit. Now mind you, if we had doubled the price a couple of years ago with a stiff federal tax — jacking it from $2 to $4 a gallon — we’d be paying the same price we are now, have chilled consumption, encouraged conservation, dealt a likely death blow to some of the worst regimes in the world by dropping the floor out from demand, and the extra money would be OURS, in our federal coffers, rather than in the hands of the sheiks and the thugs abroad.

But we didn’t. And I sincerely doubt we’re going to do so now, no matter how brave Mr. DeMint thinks Joe is…

Our Joe cup overfloweth

13 Replies

Y‘all saw where I bragged on Joe for his fine piece in the WSJ the other day. Well, today we have a counterpoint from Joe in that same publication, so our cup overfloweth.

OK, for those of you too lazy to follow links, I’m talking Lieberman and Biden, respectively. Both of them are good guys. We endorsed the first Joe in his presidential bid in 2004, and might well have endorsed the other this time around if he hadn’t dropped out before the S.C. primary (we went with Obama instead, you’ll recall). Both are blessed with essential Joe-ness, as I’ve explained before.

And although these pieces are set against each other, there is much to love in each of them, infused as they are with Joe-ness. In other words, they are written by rational men who are not entirely enslaved by the idiotic partisan extremes of our times. Joe is much more inclined to support his party’s nominee, but that’s because he hasn’t made the radical break that Joe was forced into. But you still don’t find the kind of polarized claptrap that you usually hear from the party faithful on either side.

OK, I’ll start using last names, although it sounds unfriendly…

Here’s one of the best parts of Mr. Biden’s piece. It repeats a point that I’ve praised him for making in the past, which is that President Bush blew a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lead this nation, and the Western alliance, into a far better place than the sad situation that Joe, I mean Tom, Friedman described the other day. Anyway, here’s the Biden excerpt:

Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush’s reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.
The president had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead – by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan, and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests – Mr. Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

As with Lieberman, though, there are weak spots. In particular, there’s this contradictory passage:

Terrorism is a means, not an end, and very different groups and countries are using it toward very different goals. Messrs. Bush and McCain lump together, as a single threat, extremist groups and states more at odds with each other than with us: Sunnis and Shiites, Persians and Arabs, Iraq and Iran, al Qaeda and Shiite militias. If they can’t identify the enemy or describe the war we’re fighting, it’s difficult to see how we will win.
The results speak for themselves.
On George Bush’s watch, Iran, not freedom, has been on the march: Iran is much closer to the bomb; its influence in Iraq is expanding; its terrorist proxy Hezbollah is ascendant in Lebanon and that country is on the brink of civil war.

The problem is that on the one hand, he feels constrained (since he’s still in the party) to state the party line that terrorism is a means, not an end, or even a coherent enemy — all of which is true, but his litany of all the different contending actors is belied by the truth he later embraces: That through it all, Iran has been on the march, and gaining against us. That would have been an excellent point to make; it’s just too bad he weakened it by making the situation seem less coherent than it is two paragraphs before (this incoherence of the enemy is essential to the modern Democratic ideology that Lieberman abhors — the refusal to clearly see and clearly state the degree to which we face a coherent, albeit complex, enemy).

I refer to another recent Friedman column, which — thanks to the fact that he isn’t carrying anybody‘s political water — states how all of these superficially disparate issues are connected, to our nation’s great disadvantage (largely due to the Bush failures that Biden refers to):

The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president — but this cold war is with Iran.
That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, “In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the U.S.”

Anyway, if the link works for you, I recommend you read this one as well as the last one. Between the two of them, you’ll see an intelligent way to debate foreign policy, as opposed to the idiocy of left and right, Democrat and Republican.

Joe laments loss of the party of FDR, Truman, JFK

51 Replies

This is why I like Joe Lieberman so much — he’s always writing stuff that sounds like I wrote it myself, always giving me cause to think, Thank God I’m not alone here…

Specifically, he wrote in an op-ed piece in today’s WSJ:

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?…

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

He goes on to lament how this unraveled over Vietnam. He writes wistfully of efforts by such Democrats as himself (remember the Third Way?) to pull the party back from a condition in which it blamed America for all its international troubles, as the party became "prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy."

There are flaws in the piece, admittedly. He uses the inaccurate common terminology, referring to this trend toward self-loathing isolationism as a move "to the left" — when I would assert that it is the rejection of the kind of idealistic, internationalist liberalism of FDR, JFK and the rest. Isolationism is, if nothing else, a manifestation of conservatism — and not the better sort of conservatism, either.

But set that aside. He ends strongly, with a quote from "a great Democratic secretary of state," Dean Acheson (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was from Connecticut):

(N)o people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.

Go into Burma with guns blazing

42 Replies

Alternative headline for this post, for those of you who thought that one a bit too lurid:

I’m down with R2P

I refer here to the alleged United Nations principle of "responsibility to protect," which Trudy Rubin wrote about in her column on today’s op-ed page. I say alleged because it’s one of those things the U.N. talks about, but doesn’t do. To help you catch up, here’s an excerpt from the column:

What do you do when the world is lined up to help more than a million desperate people hit by a cyclone, and Myanmar’s hard-line junta blocks that help?
That is the unprecedented situation confronting the United Nations, Western aid agencies and humanitarian organizations. No one has ever seen anything like it….
So should, or can, U.N. member states force the junta to accept the world’s outstretched hand?
Ironically, U.N. members adopted a concept back in fall 2005 that would seem to answer that question. At the urging of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the General Assembly endorsed the following principle: The international community has a “responsibility to protect” civilians when their governments can’t or won’t stop genocide or crimes against humanity — even if this means violating a country’s national sovereignty.
This concept, known variously as “humanitarian intervention” or by the abbreviation “R2P,” has gone nowhere. It has not proved useful in dealing with the quasi-genocide in Darfur. Authoritarian regimes view R2P as a potential cover for Western military efforts at regime change.
But if it ever had any relevance, the concept ought to apply to the horrific situation in Myanmar…

Trudy says that this situation would not involve regime change, but hey — wouldn’t that be a wonderful byproduct?

Unfortunately, instead of using our military proactively to shove thugs and tyrants out of the way so we can help our people, we’re still arguing over whether we should have gone into Iraq. In other words, instead of expanding our capacity to project force — the way China’s doing like gangbusters — we’re arguing about whether to make use of the military we have.

Not only can we not get off the DIME as the world’s one (for the moment) superpower, we can’t even decide to use the "M."

So the dying continues in Darfur. And Myanmar, a.k.a. Burma.

Let’s talk military buildup

21 Replies

There are certain things that worry me, and nobody seems to be talking about them. In fact, our public conversations tend to go off in directions entirely opposed to where the discussion should be going. For instance:

Children’s brains are essentially formed, in terms of their ability to learn for the rest of their lives, by age 3. What do we do about that? I don’t know, but it’s weird that we can’t even make up our minds to fund 4K for all the kids who could benefit from it.
Also on education — we need to bring about serious reforms in public education, from consolidating districts to merit pay to empowering principals. But thanks to our governor and his ilk, we talk about whether we want to support public schools at all.
China is growing and modernizing its military at a pace that matches its economic growth. It won’t be all that long before it achieves parity with our own. But instead of talking about matching that R&D, we can’t make up our minds to commit the resources necessary to fight a low-intensity conflict against relatively weak enemies with low-tech weapons.

Anyway, there was an op-ed piece in the WSJ today about the latter worry:

China has a vast internal market newly unified by modern transport and communications; a rapidly flowering technology; an irritable but highly capable workforce that as long as its standard of living improves is unlikely to push the country into paralyzing unrest; and a wider world, now freely accessible, that will buy anything it can make. China is threatened neither by Japan, Russia, India, nor the Western powers, as it was not that long ago. It has an immense talent for the utilization of capital, and in the free market is as agile as a cat.

Unlike the U.S., which governs itself almost unconsciously, reactively and primarily for the short term, China has plotted a long course, in which with great deliberation it joins economic growth to military power. Thirty years ago, in what may be called the "gift of the Meiji," Deng Xiaoping transformed the Japanese slogan fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong arms) into China’s 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military."

Anyway, discuss amongst yourselves. And if you can, try to get the people running for president to talk about it. We need them to…

We’d KILL a guy for passing intel to Israel?

17 Replies

Somehow I just caught up with this news, and I’ve got to ask, We’re talking about killing a guy for passing intel to the Israelis?

That’s what the NYT reported this morning:

On Wednesday, one day after Mr. Kadish, 84, was charged with slipping secret military documents to the Israeli government during the 1980s, they were trying to square the gruff, kindly man they knew as so honorable as never to cheat at cards with a criminal suspect who could face the death penalty if convicted.

You’re kidding, right?

I mean, look at the sweet old guy (above): So this is James Bond all of a sudden? Or perhaps I should say, Kim Philby (whom we didn’t kill, by the way, even though he was working for the real bad guys)?

For one thing, what secrets do we think we could possibly have that the Mossad didn’t know already?

Second, we’re talking the Israelis here, people! Don’t we tell them stuff anyway? And don’t they tell us stuff? I mean, am I expected to believe that George W. Bush and the boys figured out the whole North Korea-Syria nuke thing all by their lonesome?

Sure, there are certain lines one doesn’t cross (unless invited to) even with your best friends, but come on — this would be like whacking a guy for passing info to the Brits (speaking of Mr. Philby).

And when’s the last time we did that? Major André? Speaking of which — and I hope this isn’t going to get me into a lot of trouble — I recently crossed paths with Major André. Really.

You know that column I had Sunday about my conversation with the Pennsylvania waitress? Immediately Andre
after that conversation, I walked up the street and ran into the historical marker at right (which tells you which diner, if you’re really, really good at central PA geography).

In fact, I took the picture on my phone — and then promptly forgot about it, until I happened to read about Mr. Kadish, and got to thinking about executing spies, and the Israelis, and the British, which led to Major André, which led to "Hey, I think I shot a picture of that."

And now that I think further about it, it occurs to me that the compact device I used to capture that image would probably have been described as a "spy camera" back in the early ’80s, which is when Mr. Kadish was allegedly letting an Israeli "diplomat" take pictures in his basement of stuff he brought home from work. Makes ya think, huh?

Danger is my middle name.

Forget Real ID; Big Brother’s going private

9 Replies

While Gov. Mark Sanford and other opponents of Big Gummint are busily fighting that hyper-scary Threat to All We Hold Sacred, the Real ID program, Big Brother’s turning to the private sector to get the dirty deed done.

The Financial Times reports that, under a program (that’s "programme" to you Brits) run by Homeland Security, air travelers are voluntarily turning their most intimate identifying info over to private contractors:

Until recently the only thing apart from love that money could not
buy was a guaranteed place at the front of an airport security queue.
That is changing, as an additional 500 US air passengers a day agree to
hand over a $100 (£50) annual fee, plus their fingerprints and iris
scans, for the right to become “registered travellers” in private
programmes supervised by the Department of Homeland Security.

Once
the authorities have run an applicant’s background checks to ensure he
or she is not a threat to airline security, the successful RT receives
a credit card-style pass containing biometric information and the
privilege of joining specially designated fast lanes at a growing
number of US airports. The market leader, Verified Identity Pass (VIP),
has received about 100,000 applications, of which 75,000 have been
approved.

I suppose the reader reaction to this news will serve as a sort of litmus test: Libertarians will say, "See? Told you the private sector can get the job done better than gummint!"

Others among us would far rather give up such information only to Uncle Sam, who is constrained by laws written by the representives we elect, than to someone with a profit motive, who might choose to do whatever he pleases with it. Different strokes.

First we outsource warfighting. Now this.

Andy Brack on Queensland

Capt. Smith in the news

3 Replies

A family member gave me a heads-up that a Reuters photographer named Goran Tomasevic has put some photos of Capt. James Smith in Afghanistan.

So I did a Google search and found:

This one on an article from the National Post (Canadian) headlined, "Bush pledges ‘significant’ Afghan troop increase"

This one while out on patrol, outside a Taliban position

This arty silhouette as he walks down the hall of a hospital searching for wounded Taliban

Another one from that same hospital search

This one while out on patrol (and no, I can’t imagine why he’s not wearing his helmet, but at least it makes him easier to identify)

Here’s one of him doing something that I know, from his past dispatches, he finds particularly rewarding — talking to Afghan kids

All of which made me wonder, when will Capt. Smith get to come home, along with the bulk of the 218th? I’ll let you know when I know.

Hear Peter Beattie’s speech

2 Replies

To hear former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie’s speech to the Columbia Rotary Club last Monday — to which I referred in my Sunday column — go to this page, then scroll down to the calendar. Under April 7, you’ll see "Peter Beattie, former Premier of Queensland, Australia."

Under those words, you’ll see three icons. Click on the middle one — the one that features the image of a speaker — to call up an audio recording of the meeting. Let the full audio download, then skip over the preliminaries (including my presentation of "Health and Happiness") and restart the playback roughly in the middle (or to be precise, 38 minutes, 36 seconds in). That’s where Mr. Beattie starts speaking.

This may sound stupid, but one of the things that I enjoyed about talking with Mr. Beattie was listening to his accent. To my unschooled, untraveled ear, it made him sound like a guy who, instead of talking about seizing opportunities to move into a new economy, ought to be out hunting crocodiles, either for educational purposes or for profit. I mean that in a good way.

But I didn’t put it that way in my column Sunday because over the years I’ve picked up on the fact that some Australians consider that sort of accent declasse — sort of the Down Under equivalent of our Southern or "country" modes of speech — and I didn’t wish to insult Mr. Beattie. It could be that it’s a different sort of accent altogether, and I’m not hearing the difference.

But when I hear it, it has no negative associations. I equate it with strength of character — trustworthiness, forthrightness, the sort of personality that shrugs off adversity. In any case, it’s a mode of speech I like to listen to.

Why can’t we be smart like our sister?

17 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THINK OF South Carolina as a restless schoolboy. He doesn’t test well, but he’s got loads of potential; everybody says so. He’s a well-meaning kid, but has an attention-deficit problem. There he sits, as far to the back of the class as he can get away with. As the teacher drones on about science and stuff, he wonders whether he can get away with spending his lunch money on candy again. Then, just as he’s turned to calculating the number of days left until school is out and he can go to the beach (he’s very good at this sort of math), his reverie is rudely interrupted.
The teacher stands over him, her eyes just boring into him over the glasses on the end of her nose. She speaks directly to him, demanding to know, “Why can’t you be smart like your sister?”
The poor kid hears that a lot.
My own rather feckless, aimless mind (I was born here, you know) has been running along these lines all week, as I’ve been repeatedly reminded of how well our smart sister has applied herself. Not my sister, personally, but South Carolina’s. Her name is Queensland, and she’s our sister state in Australia.
Her former premier, Peter Beattie, spoke at my Rotary meeting Monday, although I didn’t realize it at the time because I slipped out of the meeting early (I’m telling you, I am that boy). Mr. Beattie is the one who suggested the whole “sister-state” economic development relationship when he was in office back in the ’90s. He got the idea after a visit here in 1996. He had come to study how our state had taken advantage of the Atlanta Olympics, serving as a training site and hosting the women’s marathon trials. He hoped his state could do the same with the Sydney games.
As things turned out, though, our “sister” would go on to do some things we should emulate. As premier, he pushed a strategy that would lead to Australia’s “Sunshine State” getting a new alias: “The Smart State.”
During a week when the S.C. Senate Finance Committee was reacting to tough fiscal times by cutting back on the endowed chairs program and letting K-12 funding slide backward, I kept getting my nose rubbed in the smartness of our sister despite my best efforts to miss the point. On Wednesday, someone sent me a copy of remarks Mr. Beattie — who has been lecturing at USC’s Walker
Institute of International & Area Studies recently — had prepared for a speech this coming Tuesday to the Global Business Forum in Columbia. I skimmed over what he had written…

Twenty years ago, Queensland was a traditional rocks-and-crops economy where education was not regarded as a priority. But with increasing globalisation, my government knew this was not enough to compete with the new emerging markets of China and India…. We publicly said innovate or stagnate were our choices.
As a result we developed a strategy called Smart State. This involved a major overhaul of our education and training systems… the cutting edge of developments in biotechnology, energy, information and communications…
The result has been… Queensland’s lowest unemployment rate in three decades… budget surpluses and a AAA credit rating. Our economic growth has outperformed the nation’s growth for 10 consecutive years and was done on the back of competitive state taxes. Our focus has been long-term and education reform was central.
Since 1998, the Queensland Government has invested almost $3 billion to boost innovation and R&D infrastructure…

… but I didn’t have time to read it all just then. Being that unfocused boy, I did find time to write a pointless post on my blog about how “For some reason, Queensland keeps coming up a lot this week for me….” That night, I was attending a lecture by Salman Rushdie, who had been brought here by Janette Turner Hospital, the novelist and USC professor, who as it happens grew up in Queensland.
So guess who I ran into at the reception that night for Mr. Rushdie? Yep — Peter Beattie. (The coincidences were starting to get as weird and mystical as something out of a novel by, well, Salman Rushdie.)
Cooperating with the inevitable, I introduced myself, and he told me eagerly about the exciting high-tech opportunities he saw here in South Carolina, what with the endowed chairs and Innovista, and our state’s advantages in the fields of hydrogen power, clean coal technology and biotech.
Biotech, by the way, has been a big one for Queensland, employing 3,200 people, generating $4 billion a year in revenues, and leading to such concrete advances as Ian Fraser’s new human papillomavirus vaccine, which is now protecting 13 million women worldwide from cervical cancer — just so you know it’s not all pie in the sky.
When I asked him about some of the less-than-visionary (in my view, not his) decisions being made by S.C. political leaders as we spoke, he insisted that was not his place: “I’m a guest here,” he said in that wonderful Down Under accent. “Queensland is like South Carolina. Manners are important.”
He spoke instead about the opportunities we had in common, and about the fact that places such as Queensland and South Carolina “have to innovate or be left behind.”
South Carolina, so used to lagging behind the other kids, truly does possess the potential to be a “smart state” like our sister. But too many easily distracted boys over at the State House keep staring out the classroom window…

The mysterious Queensland connection

4 Replies

For some reason, Queensland keeps coming up a lot this week for me.

First, some visitors from there were introduced at my Rotary meeting Monday afternoon (at which I had to do the Health and Happiness presentation). Queensland is South Carolina’s official Australian sister state for economic development purposes, a fact that comes up frequently at Rotary, it seems.
Monday night, I sat in on Janette Turner Hospital‘s lecture on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, then I was the moderator of a panel discussion that followed about religion and culture and politics and how they come together in the whole Rushdie fatwa thing. Why Janette and Gordon Smith asked me, I’m still not clear. Anyway, Janette grew up in Queensland, and went to university there.
Then today, Samuel Tenenbaum, in keeping with his never-ending battle to save the endowed chairs program (a battle that gets tougher every day), sent me an article by Peter Beattie, the former premier of Queensland, who is now teaching at USC Moore School of Business.

Somehow, this series of coincidences seem almost like the sort of mystical stuff you’d find in a Rushdie novel (either that, or like something from "I ♥ Huckabees," depending on how high- or lowbrow your cultural associations may be). Which reminds me… tonight I’m going to Mr. Rushdie’s lecture at USC, and might meet him afterward at a reception. If so, I’ll tell you about it.

Anyway, the article Samuel sent me was about how "Queensland took the view that brain power and the encouragement of innovation are our future," and the resulting "Smart State" program took Queensland from a "traditional rocks and crops economy" to the point that it attracted some of the most sophisticated research facilities in the world, and now has about 90 knowledge-economy firms employing over 1,900 people. The whole "Smart State" thing has really caught on there, leading observers around the world to ask South Carolinians, "Why can’t you be smart like your sister?" OK, I made that last part up, but it’s not an unfair representation of how we are received, which is why folks like Samuel (and I) believe we need to maintain our commitment to endowed chairs.

Samuel wants me to consider the piece for op-ed, and perhaps I shall. If not, I’ll post it here.

Graham tells veterans they’re kicking a**

27 Replies

Thanks to Mike Cakora for pointing out to us this from Politico’s The Crypt blog. It’s from a Vets for Freedom rally outside the Capitol. John McCain stopped by with his buds Joe and Lindsey. An excerpt:

“Do not underestimate the contribution you have made on the political battlefield at home,” Lieberman said. “Do we want al Qaeda and Iran to win a victory in Iraq?”
“No!” the vets screamed.
Graham added, "More than anything else, we need you to win."
“You want to know who wants you to come home more than anybody?” Graham continued. “Al Qaeda because you’re kicking their ass.”

I expect bud, among others, will have some thoughts to share on this subject…

Graham on his road trip with McCain, Lieberman

35 Replies

Kids have Christmas, and Lindsey Graham had his recent road trip with John McCain and Joe Lieberman to Iraq, the Mideast and Europe. To a foreign policy wonk, what could be better? I’d like to have been along myself.

Basically, he got to be at the elbow of the guy who, as he put it, has a 50-50 chance of being president France_mccain_wart
next time he talks to these foreign leaders, only under circumstances without all the formal bull you have to deal with traveling with an actual president.

Anyway, as this clip begins, he is giving his enthusiastic assessment (which now that I look back at the video, sort of stands in contrast to the merely polite description he gave of Gov. Sanford) of Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and goes on from there. This was near the very start of our meeting.

10senators

Why not just let in more Mexicans?

42 Replies

Over the weekend, we had our gazillionth in a series of letters from indignant writers insisting that they are NOT anti-immigration, they are anti-ILLEGAL immigration:

We in the pro-enforcement camp do not oppose legal immigration, and we do not call for discrimination against legal immigrants, no matter their race or ethnicity. All we ask is that our government enforce its immigration laws, secure our borders and deport illegal aliens.
Since when is being in favor of law enforcement on a nondiscriminatory basis racism? Certainly, those who favor illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens have been unfairly labeling us, as they have no legitimate reason for opposing enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws.

And of course, for about the gazillionth time I thought, fine — let’s change our immigration limits and streamline our procedures so that the Mexican labor our economy seems to demand can get in legally. Then, we’ll all be happy. I certainly will, because I don’t like having a shadow, extralegal population either. People in this country from another should be documented. People who are hot about illegal immigration will also be happy. People who just don’t like having a lot of Mexicans around will not be, but you can’t please everybody.

Why not remove the incentive to come in illegally by lowering barriers to legal immigration? I’m not an economist, but it seems fairly obvious that there is a demand for Mexican labor in this country — and a demand for American work in that country — that is greater than the supply we are currently processing legally. Those demands will continue to exist, and those forces will continue to attract vast waves of people to this side of the border, whatever laws we have. So let’s get serious about getting a handle on it.

The people who actually ARE economists disagree with each other on all this, of course. Here’s an interesting, fairly dispassionate piece that was in the NYT Magazine a couple of years back, which examines whether we should let so many unskilled workers into our economy. If you’re looking for an absolute "yes" or "no," you need to look elsewhere, but I found the discussion interesting:

Economists more in the mainstream generally agree that the U.S. should take in more skilled immigrants; it’s the issue of the unskilled that is tricky. Many say that unskilled labor is needed and that the U.S. could better help its native unskilled by other means (like raising the minimum wage or expanding job training) than by building a wall. None believe, however, that the U.S. can get by with no limits….
What the economists can do is frame a subset of the important issues. They remind us, first, that the legislated goal of U.S. policy is curiously disconnected from economics. Indeed, the flow of illegals is the market’s signal that the current legal limits are too low. Immigrants do help the economy; they are fuel for growth cities like Las Vegas and a salve to older cities that have suffered native flight. Borjas’s research strongly suggests that native unskilled workers pay a price: in wages, in their ability to find inviting areas to migrate to and perhaps in employment. But the price is probably a small one.

That last point, of course, is an important one to discuss. And in fact, if these are NOT "jobs Americans don’t want," but merely jobs with conditions and wages depressed by an oversupply of cheap labor from south of the border, then we should reduce the flow northward, and thereby raise wages and conditions for Americans (and the cost of goods and services, but that might be a policy outcome we decide is worth it).

But if, in the aggregate, these millions of Latinos are just a supply meeting a demand without widespread ill effects on the working class, why not let more in legally?

WSJ says the recession is here

8 Replies

For those of you keeping score, The Wall Street Journal reports the following:

The U.S. has finally slid into recession, according to the majority of economists in the latest Wall Street Journal economic-forecasting survey, a view that was reinforced by new data showing a sharp drop in retail sales last month.
The survey, conducted March 7 through 11, marked a precipitous shift to the negative from the previous survey conducted five weeks earlier. For example, the economists now expect nonfarm payrolls to grow by an average of only 9,000 jobs a month for the next 12 months–down from an expected 48,500 in the previous survey. Twenty economists now expect payrolls to shrink outright. And the average forecast for the unemployment rate was raised to 5.5% by December from 4.8% in the previous survey.

Make of that what you will. Economics is (are?) not my forte.

Why can’t we ride trains?

12 Replies

My question about the movie theme music was answered promptly, for which I am grateful. Now, let me ask another question that maybe some of y’all can answer: Why don’t we get the option of train travel in this country?

Yeah, I know there’s Amtrak (which I wrote about not long ago), and if I don’t mind going to the station in the wee hours of the morning, I will have the privilege of going one of a number of places along a corridor that runs along the Eastern seaboard. But I’d better want to go one of the few places the train goes, because outside of a few urban areas far to the north of us, there are no connecting locals to take us anywhere else.

In Europe, train travel is fast replacing airlines as the way to go. They even have supersleek, luxury bullet trains that go 200 miles per hour. Companies that provide service (remember when you got service from airlines) find they can make a competitive go of this, according to the piece in today’s Wall Street Journal headlined "Touring Europe at 200 Miles an Hour":

High-speed rail operators in Europe are ambitiously adding routes and cutting travel times, looking to snatch customers from the short-haul airline market. They are also adding perks, such as DVD and movie rentals and free newspapers. Plush high-speed trains are luring customers weary of the bare-bones service offered on the many discount airlines that have proliferated throughout Europe: Eurostar Group Ltd. trains (which run in the United Kingdom, France and Belgium) have 33 inches of leg room in coach, for example. Discount airline Ryanair has 30 inches of leg room — and the seats don’t recline.
Spain, which is at the forefront of the rail boom, got high-speed service connecting Madrid and Barcelona last month. The journey was slashed by two hours: Now it takes just two hours, 35 minutes. Switzerland in January saw the opening of a $3.5 billion, 22-mile tunnel that passes through the Alps, cutting travel time by 45 to 75 minutes within the country and between Switzerland and Italy.

I’m still wiped out from the trip I took over the weekend — driving all day Friday to central Pennsylvania in the rain, driving to northern New Jersey Saturday, driving back to central PA Sunday, driving back to Columbia on Monday. On Sunday, I did get to ride trains — from Isalen, NJ, on New Jersey Transit, then zipping around Manhattan on the subway. I dig that so much — just go down some steps, step on a train and find yourself in another world in minutes — that I go places I don’t have to go, just to ride the subway: We’ve got an hour! Let’s zip down to Little Italy and back! I’ll get you a cannoli!

Of course, the NJT and the subway are both ancient — I found myself at one point under New York looking at a off-painted girder and wondering just how long it had been holding up the skyscrapers above — and the scenery through the Newark area is even more grittily decayed looking in real life than it is in the opening credits of The Sopranos. But at least I get where I’m going without having to drive.

Several years ago, I would have flown this trip — the part to PA, at least. Nowadays, air travel can take more time, and more hassle, than driving. Literally.

If luxury train travel can be economically competitive over there, why not over here? Is it the regulatory environment, or what?

Harry then and Harry now

3 Replies

A news item this week provided an unusually striking opportunity to trace the descent of the King’s (or potential King’s) English:

First, Shakespeare’s Harry:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:

And then, our own latter-day Harry expressing the same sentiment:

"It’s nice just to be here with all the guys and just mucking in as one of the lads."

Oh, well. The real Henry V might have said it much the same way, the Bard notwithstanding.

Harry

Don’t back down on the 100-year remark!

74 Replies

My least favorite thing John McCain has said in this campaign was that "no new taxes" nonsense. But one of the best things he’s said was the bit about our being in Iraq 100 years.

It was about time somebody said it. Sure, maybe it was a tad hyperbolic (Why’d you say 100, Luke? I thought it was a nice, round number), but the point needed to be made. This is a long-term commitment. We’re not getting out any time soon. Everybody knows that, including the Democratic candidates (although they have to tiptoe around it much of the time). They say no, we won’t be out in 2013, but fortunately no one asks them about beyond that. McCain, like grumpy old Dad, just told us kids to stop asking if we’re there yet — it’s a long trip, so settle back.

It has always seemed obvious to me, from the moment we went in, that our involvement with Iraq would be long, too long to predict the end, if there is an end. If you want to be mad at Bush for committing us this way, be mad. But there’s no changing the fact — we’re committed. No friend could ever again trust us, and no enemy ever be deterred, if we walked away from that.

I don’t know how long we’ll need to have troops there, and neither does McCain. Saying "100 years" moves us off the absurdity of talking about how fast we can skedaddle, and helps us focus on, "Well, we’re here — so what do we do next?" And, not least among the advantages, we no longer encourage terrorists to think, "Just one more car bomb, and they’ll leave!"

It’s also a gift to the antiwar folks. No longer need they moan vaguely about "unending war." Now, their grievance can be specific: "100 years of war!" It clarifies things for everybody.

So you can imagine how distressed I was to see this headline today: "McCain says 100-year remark distorted." No! I thought — don’t take it back!

But he wasn’t. He was just explaining that he meant what I’d always thought he’d meant — we’d have a presence there over the next century in the same way we’ve been in Korea and Germany for over half a century now. He wasn’t talking about fighting that long. In fact, he said, we "will win the war in Iraq and win it fairly soon."

That brings us to the semantic question of when a war ends, which is not as simple as it sounds in this post-Clausewitzian world. Conventional warfare ended a few weeks after we invaded in 2003. Although there have been some good-sized ground actions since then, they have not formed a coherent whole, in the sense that there’s no specific, unified enemy out there to surrender to us — which is how a war normally ends. So we get into movable measurements of relative peace. Is the war over when there are this many casualties in a month? No? How about this many?

Does the mere presence of troops on the ground constitute a state of war? Some would probably say "yes," but I certainly would not — and point, once again, to Germany. We kept our troops there as a stabilizing force, long decades after the shooting stopped. It’s worked beautifully. It’s worked, somewhat less easily, in Korea and Bosnia as well.

The thing is, 100 years from now, we will have troops in a lot of places around the globe. There are Bosnias not yet thought of. That’s assuming we’re still the unipolar power. There are reasons to think we won’t be, and plenty of Americans today think that would be fine. We won’t be if the Chinese have their way, and it’s certainly not the vision of the future that Putin’s peddling. This faces us with a question — is the world a better place with its first and greatest liberal democracy still dominant, or with a KGB or Tiananmen Square sort of regime?

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits