On previously made promises. Here at the Flophouse, we’re all willing to accept donations. I’ve even got a handy PayPal account if you happen to be feeling especially thankful.

At any rate, I don’t know how many people keep up with Spencer’s blog (I could, I suppose, ask him…) but you should be. This post on James Kurth is great, though I’m not sure I can embrace his burgeoning Vince Young fandom. Just because you live with a Longhorn is no reason to hop on the bandwagon, especially in light of the surprisingly strong performance his alma mater turned in this year.

Honestly, it’s no wonder Chavez-friendly populists keep winning elections in Latin America; the south-of-the-border right seems to be comprised almost entirely of morons. Did they seriously nominate a “banana magnate” who “had promised closer U.S. ties” and happens to have been Ecuador’s richest man? How hard could it have been to paint this dude as an American puppet who would only serve the interests of a narrow elite?

All else being equal, Alcee Hastings isn’t reallly the dovish congressman I want to go to interfactional war with. That said, Josh Marshall’s quick conclusion that “it’s not about Jane Harman. It’s about Alcee Hastings” and “I just think it’s a bad idea to have someone chair the intel committee who has previously been impeached and convicted by Congress for corrupt acts” seems far too simplistic for me.

Let’s just set these things aside. Based on TPM Muckraker roundups, the case against Hastings is that, on the one hand, he “and a friend tried to shake down a defendant facing trial in Hastings’ courtroom for $150,000. In exchange, the two promised a reduced jail sentence and the return of over $800,000 in confiscated property.” What’s more “in 1985, he leaked secret government information that ruined three FBI probes.” Now, the US Senate rejected those leak charges during the Hastings impeachment process, and though Hastings was removed from office over the bribe matter, he was also found not guilty in a criminal trial.

But let’s assume it’s true. Hastings shook some dudes down for $150,000 and ruined three FBI investigations. Jane Harman, by contrast, supported an invasion of Iraq based on bogus intelligence that’s costs hundreds of billions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Who do I have more doubts about? Rush Holt, the new potential compromise figure, seems like a far better choice than either. No bribery allegations and, what’s more, he “voted against the Congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq, primarily because there was no evidence of an Iraq connection to 9/11, because there was no evidence that Saddam posed an immediate threat to us with WMD, and because I believed the President’s new-found enthusiasm for a “preemptive war” doctrine was both unconstitutional and dangerous.”

That sounds like the kind of thing I’m looking for in an Intel Chair. I think people should take the fact that Harman was sitting on that committee and didn’t reach Holt’s conclusion more seriously. What was she doing? What intelligence was she looking at? I was looking in part at the fact that all these Democratic leaders — people like Harman — were for the war, and assumed they wouldn’t be doing so without good reason. But, obviously, they were. So why were they? Why was she?

Great op-ed by Matt Welch on what John McCain actually thinks about the world — roughly, that George W. Bush has been overly disinclined to threaten the use of military force or to actually use it; that in the wake of Iraq, the country needs to become more militaristic in its approach to the world. As Kevin Drum says on this issue, at least, McCain is neither a centrist nor a standard-issue Republican — he’s the single furthest-right figure on the American political scene.

And, yes, he’ll combine his more-hawkish-than-Bush approach to the world with a greater level of frankness and intellectual engagement, but at the end of the day I’m not actually sure how that’s supposed to help.

The more I read about this commission the less I like it. The news that the commission deliberate excluded “extreme” views even though the “extreme” left view has majority support is pretty maddening. The real problem, though, is that as best I can tell the Commission has the wrong mandate. Rather than a group charged with finding an optimal Iraq policy for the United States of America, it’s charged with finding a formula that suits the interests of the American political establishment — of Democrats who backed the war, and of Republicans who’d like to see their political party survive the disaster of George W. Bush. So while they’d like a policy that makes things better, what they need is a policy that can espoused while minimizing embarassment to said establishment. Unfortunately, the latter goal makes the former substantially impossible.

As you may recall, back when George W. Bush was freshly re-elected and fairly popular, backed by Republican majorities in the House and Senate, he wanted to partially privatize Social Security. Well, it didn’t work, and his effort to do so contributed to his current massive unpopularity. In the meantime, the GOP lost control of the House of Representatives and lost control of the US Senate. This, via Brad DeLong, is said by The Economist to lay the groundwork for a “grand bargain” on Social Security since though “Stonewalling is a plausible political tactic when you are in opposition” “It doesn’t work so well if you are actually in charge on Capitol Hill.”

Well, there’s sort of no telling what sort of foolish things the Democrats will agree to, but I say no, no, no to this. For one thing, while stonewalling on administration priorities may work out okay if you’re in opposition, it actually works way better if you’re actually in charge on the Hill. In the minority, you don’t need to agree with administration proposals, but you do need to deal with them on some level. In opposition, administration proposals can simply be dismissed out of hand. And, indeed, any proposal that involves “carve out” private accounts should be rejected out of hand. Such accounts are poor public policy (increasing the riskiness of retirement at a time of generally growing riskiness, increasing inequality at a time of generally growing inequality) and the political proof is in the pudding — opposing them wins elections, proposing them loses elections.

The starting point for a responsible approach to the federal budget is, in the short term, brining the ruinously costly Iraq War to as speedy a conclusion as possible. Next is rescinding the bulk of Bush’s tax cuts. Next would be looking toward some increase in taxes on gasoline or carbon emissions. Reform of the country’s wildly inadequate health care system (implicating, among other things, Medicare and Medicaid) should always be a priority. Minor adjustments to the Social Security tax and payout formula could prove necessary in the future depending on what happens to immigration and productivity, but needn’t be a high-level priority. Carving private accounts out of the system should remain off the table and certainly Democrats have no business collaborating in any such endeavor.