Obama visits U Street classic Ben’s Chili Bowl. Previous Ben’s coverage here.

It’s also my understanding that Ben’s will make an appearance in the upcoming US film adaptation of the British miniseries State of Play.

News from David Sanger:

President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

Seems like Bush did the right thing by saying no.

Stop reading this blog for a moment and click over here to read/participate in my book salon with Andrew Gelman.

Jacob Weisberg ponders:

The disputed dates and details go to the most interesting larger issues about what went wrong during the Bush years. Did Bush’s own innocence and incompetence drive his missteps? Or was it the people around him, most importantly his vice president, who manipulated him into his major bad choices?

I would say that surrounding yourself with people who advise bad choices of action, and then letting yourself be manipulated into following their advice rather than the different advice being offered by other people is incompetence. What else would incompetence in a modern president look like?

Apparently Hank Paulson doesn’t want to do intervention into the mortgage/foreclosure business because that won’t get “maximum bang for the buck.”

That’s quite possibly true, but I think it’s a confused objection. We’re in a situation where we need a lot of bang. That means a lot of bucks. But only so much buck can be expended in the most bang-for-the-buck possible way. That means you need to do some stuff that isn’t the biggest bang for the buck stuff available.

The pro-Israel resolution passed by congress yesterday emphasized the idea that Israel has a right to self-defense. And certainly Israel does have a right to self-defense, as do all nations. Still, this is a much more problematic concept than its invocations in the context of the Gaza assault imply.

One time when I was riding my bike, someone threw a smallish rock at me from a housing project across the street. As it happens, the kid didn’t hit me and everything was fine. But I suppose if he’d hit me in just the right way I could have been knocked down and injured. And depending on what the cars on the road were doing, it’s conceivable that I could have wound up being run over and terribly injured. Long story short, it was a pretty terrible thing for the thrower to be doing. And this has been a sporadic problem in the city for a while. But obviously it wouldn’t have bene right for me to stop, get off my bike, pull a bazooka out of my bag, and blow the houses from which the rock emanated to smithereens while shouting “self-defense!” and “double-effect!” And had I done so, and killed some innocent people in the course of things, and then I’d tried to say that the real blame for the deaths lay with the rock-thrower who’d started it everyone would look at me like I was crazy. And this is true even though it’s clear that going to the police would have been useless in that case.

I don’t believe in analogies, so don’t read that as one. Rather, it makes the point that the existence of a right to self-defense doesn’t authorize just doing whatever any more than the injustice of occupation justifies deliberately targeting civilians.

Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, incoming CEA Chair and incoming economic adviser to Joe Biden, have released a briefing report on what they think the Obama stimulus proposal will do. In a single graph:

The obvious question looking at this is: Why not try for more? But I’m just a humble blogger. Paul Krugman, however, is both a humble blogger and a Nobel Prize winning economist and he wonders why not try for more?

From a political point of view, there are too things I like about this release. One is that it doesn’t overpromise. One of the biggest risks facing progressive politics at the moment is that we inherit a deteriorating situation, take action that ensures things get “bad” rather than “terrible,” and that get blamed by the public and the right for creating a bad situation. To that end, it’s important not to make unrealistic promises about what you’re proposing. Romer and Bernstein are clearly saying he that even if this works, we’re going to get to a bad place.

The other is the impact of this on congressional politics. Tim Fernholtz says: “one thing I do expect is for Democratic members of congress to look at that graph above, consider their reelection prospects, and wonder if maybe they ought to make the bill just a bit bigger so that unemployment line will drop just a bit lower as voters head to the polls.”

I’d say that’s a good thing and not necessarily something the Obama camp is opposed to. Nothing I’ve heard on the record or off the record from the Transition indicates that they have some kind of dogmatic opposition to a larger stimulus. What they have is a proposal. A proposal made up of a number of component sub-ideas. And they’ve said—repeatedly—that they’re open to additional ideas for more things to do from congress or from outside.

Mickslam wants to know “The size of the stimulus necessary to get us out of the recession and avoid the depression.”

So do I! The answer is that it’s hard to say. Paul Krugman’s post on stimulus arithmetic illustrates the issues. But as a starting point, let’s pull out of the air the estimate that absent stimulus the unemployment rate will wind up at around 9 percent. That’s about 4 percent points over what we now think is the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU).

Now we have to think about Okun’s Law which relates increases in GDP to decreases in unemployment. Since this isn’t a real law, people are a bit fuzzy on the math. But the consensus is that to generate a one percent decrease in unemployment, you need a 2–3 percent increase in GDP. That means $300-$450 billion per percentage point or $1.2–$1.8 trillion in additional GDP.

Next is the issue of the “multiplier effect” which relates how many dollars of additional GDP you get for each additional dollar of stimulus expenditure. These are the estimates all the cool kids are using:

The catch here is that when you’re dealing with giant numbers, these multiplier estimates are going to break down. Food stamps gives you great bang for your buck. But just because $1 billion in increased food stamp spending might generate $1.7 billion in GDP doesn’t mean we could spend $1 trillion in extra food stamps and generate $1.7 trillion in extra GDP—there are only so many poor people and they can only eat so much! Much the same is true with infrastructure spending. The general idea of spending-side stimulus is to put idle assets to work doing things. We have a fair number of idle people. But to build new infrastructure you machines and so forth and we only have so many on hand. And of course you need the right people—the guys who got laid off from Lehman Brothers aren’t the engineers we need to build the Purple Line.

And of course all this is based on slightly fuzzy math about the NAIRU and very fuzzy math about likely employment trajectories. Long story short, whatever topline estimate you could do would be pretty uncertain and would run into trouble when you started thinking about implementing it in a micro sense. To make a long story short, the correct answer is a big number but the real limits probably lie in thick in the weeds rather than up in the clouds in a way that makes calculations very difficult. And then on top of all that you need to consider the international situation—will our stimulus money “leak” out of the economy in the form of a trade deficit? Will giant stimulus make the currency much weaker and alter trade flows? How much stimulus will China offer? Germany? In principle, the big surplus countries—China, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, etc.—should be doing more lifting relative to the size of their economies than should the deficit countries. But I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work in practice.