Via Joseph Romm, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri of the International Panel on Climate Change says:

The world will have to reduce emissions more drastically than has been widely predicted, essentially ending the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world’s climate. [...] President-elect Obama’s goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.

Steven Chu was pretty much a progressive dream pick for Secretary of Energy. You couldn’t imagine a better-qualified guy, or one with sounder views. But if you look at the testimony at his confirmation hearings, you’ll see that good personnel doesn’t repeal the mechanics of the political system and so there he was walking back earlier remarks he’d made about the evils of coal and the virtues of high gasoline prices.

Long story short, my best guess is that Obama’s climate proposals are too ambitious to be enacted and too timid to avert catastrophe.

Will Saletan writes on “How to Close the Gaza Tunnels”. But as Blake Hounshell explains, “It’s really terrible advice — almost a parody of the worst sort of technocentric thinking that military reformers like H.R. McMaster have been fighting against for decades.” Blake recommends this piece from Michael Slackman on the Gaza smuggling issue.

Common sense works here, too. It’s just clearly not the case that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is primarily a technical problem related to the difficulty of preventing smuggling. Implementation of a political solution would entail technical aspects, but the idea that a political solution needs to wait for a complete and total resolution of all the technical aspects of Israel’s security problems just ensures that neither the politicsl nor the security issues will ever be addressed.

Via Kevin Drum, this from Eric Posner sounds very plausible:

One can easily imagine the defense strategy, which will start by calling to the stand various Democratic senators and representatives who had been informed of the interrogation tactics and did not publicly object to them at the time. The testimony would surely be entertaining, as the politicians would be put in the impossible position of either admitting their moral complicity, which would make the entire trial look like a political show trial designed to punish Republicans but not Democrats, or looking like cowards who knew that the government was breaking the law but despite their oath to the Constitution were unwilling to do anything about it. Do Obama and Holder really want to put leaders of their own party in Congress in this position?

That’s a good question and it seems like the answer is “no.” Of course another question is whether or not desire to spare some congressional Democrats political embarrassment is a good reason to let people get away with breaking the law.

A related issue has to do with why the congressional investigations into pre-war intelligence malfeasance were so pathetic. I’ve longed maintained that a big part of the reason is simply that there’s no way to understand the extent of the Bush administration’s misdeeds that doesn’t also make a lot of congressional Democrats look ridiculous. At the time this was being investigated, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee was Jay Rockefeller whose own statements about Iraq and WMD in October 2002 were every bit as misleading as Bush’s. And Rockefeller was on the intelligence committee when he gave that speech. Some congressional Democrats—Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, Carl Levin—were doing their jobs during that period, but a lot of intel committee folks were simply failing to do oversight.

But to say that many Democrats, including Barack Obama, have good political reasons for wanting to drop these subjects isn’t the same as saying that they have good reasons for wanting to drop these subjects.

Fred Barnes explains the glories of George W. Bush:

President Bush had strong nerves. President Clinton, who passed up a chance to eliminate Osama bin Laden, did not.

Once again, from reading this homages to the genius of Bush-era counterterrorism you would never know that an order of magnitude more Americans were killed by transnational Islamist terrorists under George W. Bush’s watch than under all previous presidents combined. Barnes here seems to think that Bush’s nerves of steel are what allowed to him finally nail Osama bin Laden, but the missing part of the picture here is when Bush let bin Laden get away and he’s still at large years later with no real prospects for the U.S. killing or capturing him. It’s a disgrace.

Daniel wants to know about my preference for parliamentary systems to US-style presidential ones. My official position on this comes from the work of political scientists such as Arend Lijphart and Juan Linz. One of their main points is that parliamentary systems are less likely to result in “crisis” and breakdown. At the same time, a lot of work has come from different angles to problematize the precision of the presidential/parliamentary dichotomy. Most recently, someone sent me an article by John Carey making the case that the distinction is tending to blur in a lot of Latin American countries due to some institutional changes. So there’s that.

But beyond this political science argument, one of my big complaints with the American system of government is simply that there’s a ton of uncertainty clinging around it. For months now, everywhere you go you see articles speculating about what Barack Obama will do once he’s in office. And speculating about the consequences of Obama’s policies, but speculating about their content. And of course along with not knowing what Obama will propose, we don’t know what he’ll get through congress. This all coming at a time right after an election when you might think would be exactly the time when we would know what the political system had in store for us.

Parliamentary government offers basically two alternatives to the mysterian nature of the American system. One thing you might have is parliamentary government with a tradition of strong majorities such as you see in the United Kingdom. Here a party is expected to draw up some key policy proposals during the campaign, release them as a manifesto and a set of white papers, and then if they win the election they’re expected to go implement those ideas. While in opposition, you appoint a shadow cabinet with the expectation that if you win the shadow cabinet will take over and govern. If David Cameron becomes the next Prime Minister of the U.K., people will have a pretty clear sense on Election Day of what the Tories are putting on the table and what major policy shifts can be expected from them. That’s an idealization, of course, but the reality is much closer to the idealization than it is to the American system where everything is shrouded in mystery. Another frequent parliamentary mode is one where you have lots of coalition governments. This produces a similar aura of mystery to what you see in the United States where it’s difficult to draw a straight line from policy proposals to election outcomes to policy initiatives. But it does a much better job of ensuring a basically “centrist” policy orientation than does the United States. Formal coalition-building encourages the creation of something like consensus, followed by decisive action if consensus can be reached. The US system is more like tectonic plates along a fault a fault line—in general, you can’t do anything, but then sometimes there are huge disruptive lurches.

This doesn’t prove anything, per se, but I do think it’s telling that the conventional wisdom in the United States is basically that the process written down on paper for legislating doesn’t work for tackling major problems. Nobody thinks, for example, that a stimulus bill written by the White House and Treasury will be improved by horse-trading in congress. And everyone believes that if we have to change Social Security at some point we’ll need to do it via an independent commission. But at the same time, congress is hugely ineffectual at curtailing genuine executive branch abuses of power. Where separation of legislative and executive functions seems desirable, it doesn’t work. And where it does work, it’s not very desirable. I don’t expect us to throw the constitution out the window, but I do think it’s worth keeping in mind whenever smaller-scale institutional changes do become feasible.

This article from Bruce Bartlett about the case for an Investment Tax Credit is pretty interesting. But this is a pet peeve of mine:

Historically, government-directed investment has been very inefficient. That’s why Amtrak and the Post Office don’t work very well and why there was a privatization movement in the 1980s and 1990s, which led governments everywhere to sell their state-owned enterprises.

As for Amtrak, if you compare passenger rail in the US to passenger rail in Europe and Japan it’s pretty clear that the difference isn’t that government-directed investment doesn’t work, it’s that Europe and Japan have decided to invest a lot in passenger rail and we haven’t. As for the US Postal Service, at the end of the day it does a pretty darn good job. Want to send a letter somewhere? Put it in an envelop and stick it in a box, and it’ll go where you wanted it to go. They’ll pick the letter up from your house if you want it, and hand-deliver it to the destination. For not much money! Anywhere in the country!What you can say about the Postal Service is that in the modern day it’s not clearly necessary to have a public agency guaranteeing the availability of this service in the way that it was before phones and email. But for quite a long time this was a really mission-critical element in our communications infrastructure and it still works just fine.

The political and policy logic of Ken Blackwell that Ali Frick flags here is too convoluted to make sense of. But it probably is true that the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes in 2010 and 2012 are strongly tied to whether or not the economy rebounds. Under the circumstances, blocking an effective stimulus program could be a political winner for the opposition party. It’s possible of course that the blockers rather than the blocked would wind up getting the blame, but history suggests otherwise.

When Bill Clinton failed to deliver on his promise of health care reform, this was taken as a sign that his presidency was “failing” not that congressional opposition was blocking needed measures.