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Economy

Saving Social Security From Bush And McCain

By Guest Blogger on Mar 25, 2008 at 8:57 pm

mbush.jpg Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, Domestic Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

If you’re in Generation X, don’t give up hope — Social Security is not going bust. That’s news from the annual report from the Social Security and Medicare trustees.

The latest projection is that Social Security will pay full benefits for more than 30 years. After 2041, it will pay only 78 percent of promised benefits. The projection for the long-run shortfall has fallen 10 percent since last year.

The report is an important reminder that the program is not in a crisis. While we need reforms to extend the life of Social Security, we do not need to panic and adopt massive benefit cuts. And the last thing we need is the radical step of privatization — as George Bush and John McCain want -– that would cut benefits and shorten the program’s life.

Instead, we can save Social Security by setting the right priorities. Its deficit projected into the infinite future is 1.1 percent of the economy — about the same size as John McCain’s tax plan. Saving Social Security would be a better use of resources than a $2 trillion tax plan that delivers 58 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of taxpayers.

Politics

Norquist: ‘more people will die’ because Bush raised CAFE standards.

By Brad Johnson on Mar 25, 2008 at 7:15 pm

On the David Strom Show on March 22, Americans for Tax Reform head Grover Norquist attacked the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which President Bush signed into law last December to slowly raise corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards to 35 MPG by 2020. Norquist claimed that raising CAFE standards will kill Americans:

The government itself has calculated that around 2000 people a year are killed because of those CAFÉ standards and our cheerful government has just voted to increase them, to make cars lighter, smaller. And more people will die. I mean 2,000 people a year die because the environmentalists think that you should be in a smaller car because it offends their sensitivities that you’re using gasoline.

The Wonk Room debunks this statement here.

Economy

Missing The Straight Talk In McCain’s Housing Speech

By Guest Blogger on Mar 25, 2008 at 7:04 pm

Our guest blogger is Andrew Jakabovics, Associate Director for the Economic Mobility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

McCain’s much-hyped speech today on the nation’s current economic woes turned out to be much ado about nothing. His largely superficial descriptions of the nature and origins of the housing and credit crises demonstrate that McCain is a straight talker only when he says he knows nothing about economics.

His only proposal to address the current problems homeowners are facing is to get mortgage lenders to pledge to help cash-strapped, but credit-worthy, customers. He must have been out on the campaign trail last August when President Bush announced the Hope Now Alliance, which is a coalition of mortgage lenders and servicers that agreed to do just that. Unfortunately, the Hope Now Alliance’s track record is poor. Participants have not demonstrated the ability (or, some would argue, the willingness) to make widespread, substantive changes to mortgages that would result in sustainable payments for borrowers. McCain is pushing an ineffective policy six months late.

McCain claims he is open to new proposals that provide no bailouts to investors or speculators, but he made no mention of either Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) or Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) proposals to address the current crisis, which meet the universally accepted no bailout criterion. A true straight talker would acknowledge that there are serious legislative vehicles in Congress to address the current crisis and state his position on them either in his current role as Senator from the deeply impacted state of Arizona or in his aspiring role as president.

Yglesias

Sleep-Deprived

By ThinkProgress on Mar 25, 2008 at 6:20 pm

So apparently Hillary Clinton was “sleep-deprived” when she forgot that she’d never dodged sniper fire while running from a plane in Tuzla. All “misspoke” theories of the case seem to me to founder on the fact that the version of the story that got her caught was only the most extreme version of a narrative of danger she’s mentioned repeatedly throughout the campaign. But maybe we have an explanation of her war vote — maybe she was sleep-deprived when she authorized the war? Maybe she’s been staying up all night studying the classified National Intelligence Estimate trying to get to the bottom of things? Well, okay, she wasn’t doing that, but maybe it was something. Presumably her plan is to be well-rested during her freaky 3AM phone calls.

Politics

Perino Spins Renewed Violence In Iraq: ‘The Surge Created New Opportunities’ For Iraqi Security Forces

By Ben Armbruster on Mar 25, 2008 at 6:14 pm

Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) launched a major combat operation in the southern city of Basra today against the Mahdi Army — which is led by anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr – and other Shiite militias.

Violence also erupted in three other Iraqi cities, including Baghdad where “[b]arrages of mortars and rockets pounded the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days” and rival Shiite militias exchanged gunfire in Sadr City, a Mahdi Army stronghold.

But during today’s White House press breifing, press secretary Dana Perino tried to spin the recent hostilites in Iraq as a positive development for the “surge,” saying that having the ISF conduct military operations is “what critics have wanted to see”:

PERINO: This is an Iraqi led and Iraqi initiated operation. And this is what we’ve been wanting to see the Iraqis do is take on more responsibility. […]

The surge created new opportunities and in fact created many more Iraqi Security Forces. […]

So I would characterize it as a bold decision — precisely what the critics have asked to see in Iraq, more movement by the Iraqi Security Forces.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/03/perinoisfbasra.320.240.flv]

But according to reports, the current wave of violence is endangering a recently renewed ceasefire al-Sadr declared last August – which has been widely credited with helping to reduce violence throughout Iraq. Yesterday, al-Sadr called for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign “in response to what his followers say is an unwarranted crackdown” by the Iraqi government. Yet one Iraqi Member of Parliament and al-Sadr supporter said if the ISF “keep targeting us like this, we’ll know how to respond.”

There is no silver lining in the increased violence. Last week, Gen. David Petraeus said the military “progress in Iraq is fragile” and “tenuous.” Perhaps Perino should start listening to the commanders on the ground.

Transcript: Read more

Security

Escalation Architect Fred Kagan Doubles Down On His Claim That Sectarian Cleansing In Baghdad Is A ‘Myth’

By Matt Duss on Mar 25, 2008 at 5:47 pm

In a presentation yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute, escalation architect Frederick Kagan repeated his claim that sectarian cleansing has not affected the drop in violence in Iraq. Kagan called it a “myth”:

The bad news from this perspective is that the sectarian areas of Iraq is still mixed. The good news is that the sectarian areas of Iraq are still mixed. And there is a myth out there that the violence has fallen because all of the cleansing is done. That is absolutely not the case.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/03/KaganCleansingMyth.320.240.flv]

Kagan makes the same claim in his new report, “Iraq: The Way Ahead“:

One of the persistent myths about the reasons for the success of coalition efforts in 2007 is that the killing stopped because the sectarian cleansing was completed. This myth is absolutely false. Baghdad remains a mixed city. The traditionally Sunni neighborhoods of Adhamiya, Mansour, and Rashid remain predominantly Sunni, and Shiite enclaves in East Rashid remain Shiite. Shia have moved into some parts of the Sunni neighborhoods, and many sub-districts within neighborhoods that had been mixed are now much more homogeneous. But the key components of a mixed Baghdad remain.

Kagan’s claim is contested by major news organizations and the U.S. military’s own data. In December 2007, the Washington Post published the maps below, comparing the sectarian make-up of Baghdad’s neighborhoods in April 2006 and November 2007, and revealing the transformation of the city resulting from sectarian cleansing:

baghdad.gif

The Post’s distribution of sectarian enclaves corresponds closely with these graphs, provided by Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), that chart sectarian violence in Baghdad between July 2006 and July 2007, which is the period in which the U.S. military escalation, also known as the Baghdad Security Plan, took place.

The August 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq also rebuts Kagan’s mythmaking. One of the NIE’s judgements was that where some “conflict levels have diminished,” it was due to sectarian “separation.”

Kagan’s view is also challenged by Joe Christoff of the Government Accountability Office, who stated in congressional testimony in October 2007 that sectarian cleansing was “an important consideration in even assessing the overall security situation in Iraq”:

We look at the attack data going down, but it’s not taking into consideration that there might be fewer attacks because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, particularly in the Baghdad area. [...]

It’s produced 2.2. million refugees that have left, it’s produced two million internally displaced persons within the country as well.

In August 2007, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization indicated that “the total number of internally displaced Iraqis [had] more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000″ since the surge started in February. Center for American Progress Iraq analyst Brian Katulis estimated that Baghdad, which once used to be a 65 percent Sunni majority city, “is now 75 percent Shia.”

Kagan’s claim that Baghdad “remains a mixed city,” severely understates both the drastic transformation of the city’s sectarian make-up and the suffering that attended that transformation. It also casually ignores the fact that one of the most intense and violent periods of sectarian cleansing took place under the aegis of the military escalation Kagan now claims credit for.

Climate Progress

Antarctic Ice Shelf Disintegration Underscores a Warming World

By Joe Romm on Mar 25, 2008 at 5:39 pm

That is the breaking news today from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and the British Antarctic Survey:

Satellite imagery from the [NSIDC] reveals that a 13,680 square kilometer (5,282 square mile) ice shelf has begun to collapse because of rapid climate change in a fast-warming region of Antarctica.…

In the past 50 years, the western Antarctic Peninsula has experienced the biggest temperature increase on Earth, rising by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) per decade. NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos, who first spotted the disintegration in March, said, “We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up.”

You can see a video of the ice-shelf post-disintegration taken from an airplane here.

Satellite images indicate that the Wilkins began its collapse on February 28; data revealed that a large iceberg, 41 by 2.5 kilometers (25.5 by 1.5 miles), fell away from the ice shelf’s southwestern front, triggering a runaway disintegration of 405 square kilometers (160 square miles) of the shelf interior (Figure 1 — click to enlarge).

nsidc1.jpg

That is “seven times the size of Manhattan” as Seth Borenstein of the AP helpfully points out. He notes “The rest of the Wilkins ice shelf, which is about the size of Connecticut, is holding on by a narrow beam of thin ice.” The ice shelf is floating, so it won’t add to sea level rise. Such occurrences are “more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system,” said Sarah Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Back to the NSIDC:

The edge of the shelf crumbled into the sky-blue pattern of exposed deep glacial ice that has become characteristic of climate-induced ice shelf break-ups such as the Larsen B in 2002. A narrow beam of intact ice, just 6 kilometers wide (3.7 miles) was protecting the remaining shelf from further breakup as of March 23 (Figure 2 — click to enlarge).

Read more

Culture

Adams‘s Accents

By ThinkProgress on Mar 25, 2008 at 5:32 pm

Kirk Ellis, one of John Adams‘s writers is jumping into TNR‘s exchange on the series, and provides some insight into the provenance of the accents on display in the series:

Steve, you also inquire as to origins of the “hybrid accents” we use in the series. From the beginning, we wanted to emphasize that independence was a battle between British Americans and their brethren in England, not, as so often depicted, a conflict that pitted Crown officers with plumy Oxonian accents against patriots with full-blown American dialects. All our research pointed to the fact that, in written and spoken speech, America was much closer to the mother country than had been acknowledged in past dramatizations.

He says they provided capsule biographies of the different characters to the series’ dialogue coach to help them come up with something appropriate, sometimes based on the insight “that one’s residence in America frequently depended on one’s point of origin in England. Virginia, for instance, was largely settled by residents of East Anglia–in terms of dialect and accent a very distinctive region.”

Ellis’ participation in this, along with some other similar examples, does raise some questions about the changing nature of the critical enterprise in the internet era. My sense is that, traditionally, creators have tended to shy away from direct intervention into critical debates about their work. But something about the seemingly informal nature of internet commentary seems to have subverted that rule, so you’re seeing much more of this kind of intervention. It has, I think, the potential for a distorting impact on our understanding of things since, at the end of the day, it’s really not the creator’s role to offer authoritative accounts of what a given work “really” was or is.

Politics

Former Romney/NRCC aide joins Freedom’s Watch.

By Amanda Terkel on Mar 25, 2008 at 5:29 pm

The Caucus reports:

forti4.jpg The conservative group, Freedom’s Watch, which has endured some prominent staff departures in recent months, announced today the hiring of Carl Forti, who was most recently political director for Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, to run the campaign’s issue advocacy campaign in the fall.

Prior to the Romney campaign, Mr. Forti was communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, where he oversaw the committee’s independent expenditures in 2004 and 2006.

Lowlights of Forti’s history here and here.

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