by Ryan Avent

Who knows whether Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is blowing smoke in predicting that the Senate will defeat the stimulus bill — I don’t know where the vote counting stands at the moment — but it’s certainly possible that the bill could go down. Democrats, recall, need to keep their caucus together and get a defection or two from the GOP to get past a filibuster.

Typically, it’s assumed that Republican Senators are less nutty than their House counterparts, and will presumably be more alive to the economic threat we’re facing. There are other reasons to suspect that a party-line vote will be difficult to achieve for the GOP. A handful of key Senators have already announced their retirement and needn’t worry about their long-term position in the party. Others may realize that with output tumbling and a nasty unemployment number about to make headlines this Friday, opposition to the stimulus bill may not be nearly as popular as was opposition to the Wall Street bail-out passed last fall.

But Democrats are ready to assume the worst and play ball with Republicans according to a story in today’s New York Times, despite the fact that the GOP is pretty adament that only major changes, including more tax cuts and reduced spending, could earn their support. All of which points to a scenario eerily similar to that in the House — Democrats water down the stimulus with sops to the GOP, only to find themselves with little to no Republican support when it comes time to vote.

Nobody wants to play chicken with the fate of the economy hanging in the balance, but it may be time to call the opposition’s bluff. An actual defeat for the stimulus would cause havoc on Wall Street that would make the market’s plunge in the wake of the bail-out’s initial defeat look pleasant. A scare like that might shatter GOP solidarity once and for all. The alternative, in any case, is an empowered GOP minority, that will kill or maim legislation for the rest of the Congressional term.

By Brian Beutler

Jon Chait thinks he’s figured out why, to be consistent, American liberals need to support a “tough” (or is it morally serious?) foreign policy. Quoting my fellow guest poster Kay Steiger, Jon writes:

It’s kind of funny how, when it comes to domestic politics, many liberals employ assumptions about human nature that are wildly at odds with the assumptions they use about human nature when it comes to foreign policy. When you read the liberal blogs on domestic politics, concessions to the enemy are always counterproductive, will must be met with will, etc. When you read them on foreign policy, all those asumptions are flipped on their head. I’m not saying that these two sets of assumptions are completely impossible to reconcile, but it is pretty odd how easily they sit together.

For reasons I don’t understand, but which can’t possibly have anything to do with its seriousness, Kevin Drum calls it the “Quote of the Day”. “Discuss,” he says. Well, OK!

From La Tierra Sin Internet, Matt anticipates my own response:

The difference, obviously, is that nobody is proposing that Barack Obama KILL the GOP leadership, much less try to kill them while attempting to starve their civilian population base into submission. Conversely, nobody is denying that Israel (or whomever) has the right to use non-lethal hardball bargaining tactics.In general, liberals would like to see progressive politicians assert themselves more vigorously within the limits of the law and we would also like to see countries with strong militaries restrain their conduct so as to bring it into conformity with international law.

Exactly. I’d go further, though. To me, this reveals something extremely significant about the way American Israel hawks, and foreign policy hawks in general, conceive of the people on the other side of Israeli or American military aggression. Here in the United States liberals launch major political offensives against a variety nemeses all the time. Maybe we win some and maybe we lose some, but either way, the people on the other side–conservatives, say, or corporate interest groups–feel some sort of political heat. Usually, that’s about all there is to it. Occasionally things get out of hand, and someone slanders someone else. Maybe extremely rarely things get uglier still. To my knowledge, though, no anti-abortion activist in the United States has ever seen his house destroyed by a fighter plane.

That’s not simply because political violence is illegal in this country, but also because liberals (and, I think, most Americans) think that sort of behavior is unacceptable and counterproductive.

But if you’re a domestically liberal foreign policy hawk, and the issue isn’t abortion, say, but rather putting an end to rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli territory, then for some reason things are dramatically different. Suddenly political tactics become feckless, and military tactics the tools of first resort–particularly those at the most violent and ineffectual end of what’s feasible, laws be damned. The lives of Gazans? Worthy of less consideration, apparently, than are the reputations of the conservatives with whom you’ve forged an alliance of convenience.

Meanwhile, my sense is that if Nancy Keenan amassed a small army and started hunting down John Hagee and other prominent members of the Christian right, Jon Chait and various other writers at The New Republic would call for a return to civility. Does that make them morally unserious?

By Kay Steiger

Emily Brazelon has an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about women who are single, middle-class, and mothers. It is, she says, the return of Murphy Brown. She cites some statistics that show that single motherhood among the non-impoverished is rising, “the birthrate for unmarried college-educated women has climbed 145 percent since 1980, compared with a 60 percent increase in the birthrate for non-college-educated unmarried women.” But here is where the discussion of non-college-educated single mothers ends.

Typically, when single mothers come up in the public debate, what people mean is mothers of a low socioeconomic class that are typically women of color. They can’t afford child care, or get work that might allow them to afford it. They’re more likely to live in poverty and their children struggle to succeed in school. Instead, writes about middle-class women that — gasp — choose not to have husbands. These women struggle with dating, not paying the rent on an hourly wage. It seems silly to accuse the Sunday magazine of publishing a story about the rather elite, but they’ve done it again.

by Ryan Avent

Most stories on economic conditions in China will note, at some point or another, that a growth rate between 6% and 8% annually is necessary to provide enough employment growth to prevent civil unrest. It’s never clear just where this figure has came from, but there’s certainly truth to it. The IMF has reduced its forecast for Chinese growth this year to between 6% and 7% (and further downward revisions are likely), putting China well within the zone in which government officials begin to get nervous.

Yves Smith, in considering the latest dust-up over China’s currency policy, writes:

Japan has played up its basket case status, when it has in fact (until recently) had a robust export sector. Why? If the rest of the world thinks Japan is in terrible shape, no one will bust their chops for keeping the yen weak, which worked until carry trade unwinding drove it from the 115-125 level versus the greenback to its recent high of 86 and change. [Premier Wen Jiabao] should instead be stressing how bad things are.

He should, except that unlike Japan, which is a mature Democracy, China has to rely on the confidence of its people to prevent a state crisis. China wants to preserve its trade advantages, but it can’t afford to play poker with the west by underselling the strength of its economy, because there are hundreds of millions of Chinese workers counting on strong employment growth. Read more