Bloomberg reports that the first female deans of the Harvard and Stanford law schools — Elena Kagan and Kathleen Sullivan — “are the top candidates to serve” as Barack Obama’s Solicitor General. No woman has ever served in that position on a permanent basis. Kagan “became a top candidate for solicitor general after being passed over for deputy attorney general, a slot set to go to Washington lawyer David Ogden.” The Solicitor General is charged with litigating on behalf of the government before the Supreme Court and determining whether lower court decisions should be appealed.
Parallel
Michael Cohen writes:
If Israel dismantled all its settlements tomorrow, Hamas would not turn around and renounce violence; but if Hamas were to recognize Israel the path to reconciliation would be far easier to achieve.
This is totally true. But consider this proposition:
If Hamas were to recognize Israel tomorrow tomorrow, Israel would not turn around and renounce settlements; but if Israel were to dismantle all settlements the path to reconciliation would be far easier to achieve.
That’s also true. But by arbitrarily shifting the standard, so that Israeli actions are judged according to whether or not they would magically cause the other side to become reasonable, whereas Palestinians are merely asked whether or not making unilateral concessions would in some sense make reconciliation easier to achieve, Cohen has managed to put a heavily pro-Israel spin on the banal observation that both sides could do more to improve the situation but that achieving real peace requires steps on both sides.
Meanwhile, of course, there’s still such a thing as ethics and so forth. Vaguely pointing rockets at civilian areas and hoping they kill as many people as possible is wrong, completely independently of whether or not Israel is also doing things that are wrong. I think that’s a point that’s pretty well-appreciated in the American conversation on this. But by the same token, Israeli actions that are wrong are wrong independent of whether or not Hamas is launching rockets.
Reps. Markey and Boucher may swap gavels on key Energy and Commerce subcommittees.
CQ Politics reports today that Reps. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) may “swap gavels in the 111th Congress,” giving Markey, the current chairman of the House Select Committee on Global Warming, control of a key energy subcommittee:
Since 2007, Rick Boucher of Virginia, the Energy and Commerce Committee’s fourth-ranking Democrat, has led the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, which has taken the lead role in crafting legislation to address global warming.
But Boucher said in an interview Tuesday that he expects Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, No. 3 among committee Democrats in seniority, to bid for the subcommittee chairmanship. Boucher said he would “respect that decision” and stake his own claim for chairmanship of Markey’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
Matt Yglesias explains the implications of such a swap, writing, “Boucher’s a coal guy from West Virginia, but he’s solid on internet stuff, so I think this switch would be a win-win.”
A Swap?
Apparently there’s some thought that Reps. Boucher and Markey might switch subcommittees on the new Energy and Commerce Committee, with Boucher giving up his control of the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee:
But Boucher said in an interview Tuesday that he expects Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, No. 3 among committee Democrats in seniority, to bid for the subcommittee chairmanship. Boucher said he would “respect that decision” and stake his own claim for chairmanship of Markey’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
“I’m awaiting his decision,” Boucher said. Markey has not yet made up his mind, a spokesman said.
Boucher’s a coal guy from West Virginia, but he’s solid on internet stuff, so I think this switch would be a win-win. It would also make sense for Boucher since in light of the results of the Waxman-Dingell fight, the political winds are clearly blowing in a not-so-Boucher direction on climate and energy within the House Democratic caucus at least.
Bob Rodriguez
Kevin Drum reads The Wall Street Journal and is prepared to hail fund manager Bob Rodriguez as “pretty spectacularly prescient”:
He saw storm clouds gathering in 2005 when newly minted pools of supposedly high-quality “Alt-A” mortgages began acting oddly….He quickly dumped the holdings, reckoning that by the time he figured out what was actually going on, whatever disaster the odd behavior foreshadowed would have already occurred.
….He stopped buying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt and took giant insurer American International Group Inc. off the list of approved commercial-paper investments. He refused to invest in financial-services companies because of what he saw as “a pandemic collapse” in the rules by which lenders approved mortgages.
As of 2004, he began moving his fund to more than 45% cash, even as one big shareholder yanked out $300 million because of his bearish stance.
To me, the most troubling thing about this story is that while I’m sure Rodriguez is a prosperous man, and I’m well-aware that a lot of other titans of finance have lost a lot of money in 2008, I’ve seen no indication that Rodriguez analyzing the situation accurately and making the moves that ex post were the correct moves to make has actually gone and made him the wealthiest fund manager in America. You’d like to be able to say that, looking back on things, it would have been smarter for more people to follow Rodriguez’s lead. But things like shifting your fund to a cash-heavy position while some major shareholders pull out vast sums because they don’t like your bearish stance would have been a bad career move for most folks.
Ever since the crash, there’s been a lot of self-serving talk from people in the business about how nobody could have foreseen this. That’s wrong. What would be more accurate — and more disturbing — is that it’s not clear that it actually would have been smart for people in the business to have behaved in a radically different manner even if they had understood the situation well. There are a lot of fields of endeavor where it’s more important to be in tune with the CW than it is to actually be correct, and this seems to me to mostly be one of them.
Department of Good Ideas
Back before Christmas, The Washington Post had a story about how the “Obama Administration May Tie Improved Nutrition to Food Assistance Programs.” In other words, instead of just ensuring that people have food (i.e., calories) they’d be trying to give people assistance in acquiring healthy food.
That would definitely be a good thing to do. Fortunately, the contemporary United States doesn’t have a substantial starvation problem. But unfortunately, we do have substantial problems around malnutrition and obesity. Our food assistance programs were designed in an earlier era when that balance of considerations was different, and were conceived in large part as a bailout of sorts for food producers rather than designed to best serve the interests of the programs’ clients. Reforming the system to help target people’s genuine food-related needs for better nutrition rather than more calories could do a great deal of good.
Congratulations to the Aardvark
Foreign Policy magazine is going to be bolstering its web presence with a new group blog that apparently will feature Daniel Drezner and Marc Lynch along with other similar sorts whose identities I don’t yet know. This seems like a great project. I’m especially excited about Lynch. Drezner is a sharp thinker and a good blogger, but I think the kind of point-of-view he has is already pretty well-reflected in the US media.
Lynch, on the other hand, like Juan Cole comes out of the weirdly neglected corner of academia that specializes in knowing things about the Middle East. You would have thought that 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would bring a lot more prominence to people working in this field. But instead, the mainstream views represented in this field weren’t — and aren’t — what the political powers that be wanted to hear so somehow the conclusion came about that Bernard Lewis was the only Middle East expert worth listening to about anything. After all, he was willing to tell people what they wanted to hear!
One of the things the blogosphere has done, however, has been to open up some space in which a more diverse set of voices can be heard. I’ve been a reader of Lynch’s blog for years, going back to before he had tenure and it was a pseudonymous site. Back then, the about page asserted that the unnamed author was an expert on Arab media and political reform, and at one point I realized that I wanted to quote something this fellow had said for a print article. But whereas on the blog it was fine to attribute something to Abu Aardvark, that wasn’t going to fly in print so I had to uncover the writer’s secret identity and I was certainly glad when it turned out to be a real expert. Meanwhile, besides Middle East issues Lynch also has considerable expertise in the field of comic books which I hope FP will consider an important area.
The Right and the News
I don’t agree with much in this Michael Goldfarb item but the last bit is worth quoting:
Still, for online partisan reporting, TPM set the bar pretty high this election. Republicans have no equivalent outlet. Any strategy to revive the party’s fortunes will require developing the kind of online infrastructure the Democrats now have in place, but you can’t do that without a bunch of right-wing Greg Sargents.
The issue, though, isn’t that the right doesn’t have an outlet equivalent to TPM or other progressive sites. There are tons and tons of conservative media outlets, most of them with a web presence, and the web presences of places like Goldfarb’s Weekly Standard blog would be higher if they were breaking interesting news the way ThinkProgress, HuffingtonPost, TPM, Washington Independent, etc. do. What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories. As Goldfard indicates, there’s just no independent capability. But it’s not a lack of outlets that’s the problem.
Santorum On Employee Free Choice: ‘Vito Corleone’s Famous Line Again Comes To Mind’
Today, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) ran an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer claiming that passage of the Employee Free Choice Act would enable unions to act like mafioso from Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” forcing American workers to face an offer they can’t refuse:
It is called card check because all union organizers would have to do to certify a union at any workplace is get a majority of employees to sign a card authorizing a union. The legislation even allows union organizers to visit an employee’s house up to four times to “persuade” him or her to sign the card. Vito Corleone’s famous line again comes to mind.
Santorum is not alone with these sentiments. In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Kimberley Strassel claimed today that the Employee Free Choice Act “would allow [unions] to intimidate more workers into joining.”
These assertions are complete bunk. The Employee Free Choice Act merely puts the decision of whether or not to unionize back into the hands of workers, instead of leaving it up to their employers. Under current law, when faced with a union organizing drive 25 percent of employers fire at least one pro-union worker; 51 percent threaten to close a worksite if the union prevails; and, 91 percent force employees to attend one-on-one anti-union meetings with their supervisors. But Santorum doesn’t seem too worried about this variety of strong-arming.
Of course, Santorum may have more behind his views than a genuine desire to keep the pro-employer status quo. During his Senate days, he was considerably aided by Americans for Job Security (AJS), a “faux group of secret corporate dollars” whose top concern right now is derailing the Free Choice Act.
Though the organization refuses to disclose its membership, according to Source Watch it spent millions on advertising to support Santorum in his failed 2006 reelection bid. Back in 2005, the Philadelphia Daily News noted that “Santorum doesn’t seem too concerned about who is behind Americans for Job Security, a Virginia-based anti-tax group that refuses to identify contributors. He declined to tell one of our reporters whether his financial backers should step out of the shadows.”
For its part, AJS is currently trying to discredit the Free Choice Act by running ads calling it a “union boss bailout.” Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) — who is named in one of the ads — called them “sleazy and intentionally confusing advertisements,” and “unfair to those who deserve an honest, fact-based debate.”
So in the end, it seems, it was Santorum who found an offer he couldn’t refuse: siding with a “sham front group that would be better called Corporations Influencing Elections.”
The Snub
Andrew Golis lists ten young progressive intellectuals who make him hopeful. But who cares about that? The real issue is those of us who didn’t make the cut:
I probably would have included Jessica Valenti and Josh Marshall if not for the painfully obvious conflicts of interest (fiancee and boss). I might also have included a few more bloggers (Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Atrios) but for a desire to not overwhelm things with whiteboysblogging.
I’m going to have to start leaning harder on my Hispanic credentials so I can make it onto more prestigious lists. Admittedly, my skin is pretty pale. But look at Bill Richardson! And I’ve got an actual Spanish name which is more than he can say.
