Here’s a good fifty minute summary of how pointless the 2006 American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was:

Remember, just because instability in the developing world can pose a problem for American security doesn’t mean that American intervention in unstable parts of the developing world will actually make things better.

Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, is not particularly popular since his government is viewed as corrupt and incompetent. His big advantage, however, is that there’s no well-organized and reasonably unified opposition to him. It was thought, however, that Gul Agha Shirzai, governor of Nangarhar province, would probably be the strongest challenger. And Matthew Rosenberg reports that “on Friday [Shirzai] secured the support of Afghanistan’s vice president, Ahmad Zia Masood, said the governor’s long-time advisor and spokesman, Khalid Pashtoon.”

But then, as Spencer Ackerman observes, the story gets funny as Shirzai mysteriously chooses to drop out:

The governor didn’t explain his decision to drop out Saturday, even to his closest associates. He also said he was stepping down as governor, but the president refused to accept his resignation.

“Even his own brothers were cursing him last night,” Mr. Pashtoon said Sunday, saying he would no longer work with Mr. Shirzai. “This was the stupidest act I have ever seen. It’s like you were just throwing a chunk of barbecue from your mouth when you were very hungry.”

Mmm… barbecue:

I wonder how long Pashtoon is goigng to last as an adviser?

The Afghan food I’ve had is more grilling than barbecue, but I suppose it’s not worth quibbling with a spokesman capable of giving pungent quotes in multiple languages.

Jack Kemp is dead, as you’ve probably read elsewhere. The most interesting part of Kemp’s legacy was his failed effort to get the Republican Party to make a serious effor to court African-American voters. To be the Party of Lincoln rather than the Part of Nixon. In retrospect, this looks quixotic. But to understand its appeal, recall that through the 1920s African-American voters strongly supported the GOP. This is sometimes glossed as a merely historic loyalty to the party of emancipation. But in fact civil rights issues were on the agenda during that period. It was under Woodrow Wilson that rights for America’s black citizens reached their nadir, and Warren Harding made an active, though ultimately failed, effort to secure an anti-lynching bill. The New Deal brought northern blacks into the Democratic Party coalition, and southern blacks generally couldn’t vote.

But in the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower made meaningful efforts to court black voters and the distribution of black votes in 1952 and 1956 was not nearly as lopsided as it is today. Nixon and Kennedy, like Ike and Stevenson before them, both made efforts to simultaneously court southern whites and northrn blacks. And when Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act through congress, there were more “no” votes from Democratic members of congress than from Republicans. But by the time of Kemp’s prominence, the conservative movement had settled on a strategy of realigning conservative whites and indifference to the concerns of African-Americans, so Kemp’s ideas went nowhere.

On tax cuts, however, Kemp’s ideas went very far.

And looking back on the Reagan Era, during which Kemp had the most influence, it’s worth distinguishing between three different claims:

ONE: Extremely high marginal income tax rates are economically destruction because they encourage tons of tax-avoiding behavior.

TWO: The path to prosperity is an equilibrium of low taxes and low levels of government spending.

THREE: Tax cuts do so much to boost growth that they pay for themselves.

Of these three claims—all of which Kemp was associated with—the first is true, the second false, and the third ridiculous. And while they all kind of ran together to some extent in the context of the late-1970s, it’s worth noting that there’s actually considerable tension between these ideas. The first idea really does imply that something like a 70 percent top marginal tax rate should not be thought of as a sound scheme for generating revenues. On the other hand, it also does imply that raising taxes on the wealthy by curbing their deductions could raise significant revenues at little-to-no economic cost. But if you believe in (2) — that policymakers should be trying to make revenue as low as possible — then you’ll be unmoved by these considerations.

And if you believe in (3), which is nuts, then you’ll get what post-Kemp conservative rule has, in practice, brought us—namely large structural budget deficits.

If Arlen Specter was trying to think of things he could say on Meet The Press this morning that would get progressives across the country read to urge Joe Sestak to mount a primary challenge, he seems to me to have done a good job.

GREGORY: It was reported this week that when you met with the president, you said, “I will be a loyal democrat. I support your agenda.” Let me test that on probably one of the most important areas of his agenda, and that’s health care. Would you support health care reform that puts up a government run public plan to compete with a private plan issued by a private insurance company?

SPECTER: No. And you misquote me, David. I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat. I did not say that. And last week, after I said I was changing parties, I voted against the budget because the budget has a way to pass health care with 51 votes, which undermines a basic Senate institution to require 60 votes to impose closure on key issues. …I did not say I am a loyal Democrat.

Ben Armbruster observes that Specter went on to join Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) is expressing opposition to a public health care plan.

Progressives are often unhappy with Nelson. But at the same time, I think it’s widely understood that Nebraska is a very conservative state so if you can have a Senator from Nebraska who backs progressive positions even once in a blue moon you’d consider yourself lucky. Pennsylvania, by contrast, last voted for a Republican president when Michael Dukakis was on the ballot and there’s every reason to believe that an orthodox Democrat would beat Pat Toomey in a general election.

Given his general proclivities, I’m not shocked to learn that Ben Nelson opposes Barack Obama’s health care plan. But the precise terms in which he frames his opposition are a bit surprising to me:

Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”

Note two things here. One, the reason to oppose a public plan is that it would work too well and take business away from insurance companies. But second, defending the interests of insurance companies is so overwhelmingly important to Nelson that it’s a “deal breaker” for him.

This second part is important. Health care reform is an enormous, complicated undertaking. Nobody’s going to be thrilled with every provision of a bill. So it’s important to know where one’s deal-breakers lie. Nelson says his deal-breaker is that health reform needs to protect the interests of insurance companies. It’s good to know.

One reason not to nationalize insolvent banks, or so I’m told, is that it might lead to the politicization of finance. You’d have politicians making business decisions rather than doing things the American way and letting businessmen make the political decisions: “US regulators will delay the release of stress test results for the country’s 19 biggest banks until next Thursday, after some lenders, including Citigroup and Bank of America, objected to government demands that they needed to raise billions in fresh capital.”

Because of course it’s never regulators’ job to do things that the managers of regulated firms don’t like!

The fact that Jane Harman wound up on a wiretap was always a bit, shall we say, odd and disturbing. And Laura Rozen paints a picture wherein it definitely looks abusive—Porter Goss screwing around perhaps in order to protect his corrupt subordinates.

Whatever the case may ultimately prove to be, I think this demonstrates what should long have been obvious, namely that broad surveillance powers are incredibly likely to be used for abusive domestic political purposes. Obviously, there are potential tactical national security gains to be made by letting the NSA and FBI just do whatever they want. But in a strategic sense, what happens when you allow secret unrestrained surveillance power is that harmful abuses wind up swamping legitimate uses of the authority. Unfortunately, back when debates where taking place about illegal surveillance, it was only the hippie bloggers making this point. All Republicans and all “responsible” Democrats like Jane Harman understood that anyone worrying about abuse needs to put a tinfoil hat on.

Now that it looks like Harman has been the target of abuse, I’m hoping she’ll lead a campaign for the sort of broad reforms that can help ensure this doesn’t happen again. But I fear she’ll lead a narrow campaign aimed at simply sending the message “don’t f**k with Jane Harman.”