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Bumiller: Powell And McCain Haven’t Spoken To Each Other In Months

By Matt Corley on Apr 13, 2008 at 11:47 am

On Thursday, the New York Times’s Elizabeth Bumiller and Larry Rother reported that “the so-called pragmatists” of the conservative foreign policy establishment are “expressing concern” that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is “coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush’s first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.”

According to the Times, one of the concerned pragmatists is former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

The worry about Mr. McCain is centered among a group of foreign policy realists who have long been close to him and who lost out to the hawks in the intense ideological battles of the first term of the current White House. The group includes former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush.

On the Chris Matthews Show this morning, Bumiller expanded on Powell’s relationship with McCain, saying that they have not spoken to each other in months and implying that the lack of communication is indicative of Powell’s concerns. Watch it:

Though Powell donated $2,300 to McCain’s campaign in August 2007, he has refused to endorse the senator. In an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America last week, at the same time Powell said he is “looking at all three candidates,” he endorsed a position on Iraq that clashes with McCain’s preference for an open-ended commitment.

“The United States Armed Forces are very, very stretched,” said Powell, adding that the next president “will have to continue to draw down at some pace.”

Update

Over at the Wonk Room, Matt Duss examines McCain’s relationship to neoconservative thinking here and here.

Politics

‘I don’t even know who Petraeus and Crocker are.’

By Faiz Shakir on Apr 13, 2008 at 9:49 am

The Washington Post writes that “few Iraqis paid much attention” to the testimonies of Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker:

test1.jpg“The Americans have hundreds of meetings and testimonies like this, and what has it done for the Iraqi people? Nothing,” said Allah Sadiq, 49, a carpenter in the capital’s Karrada district. “So why do we care? We just want all the foreigners to leave and stop causing disasters for our country.”

“I don’t even know who Petraeus and Crocker are,” said 31-year old shop owner Yasser Kadhoum al-Khafaji. “I think these sorts of things are more important for Americans than they are for Iraqis.” Most Iraqis interviewed “were more concerned about a day-long curfew” that shut down much of Baghdad. Among other grievances cited: “blocked sewage drains, militias attacking residents in the street, a dysfunctional government and frequent electricity outages.”

Update

Meanwhile, the AP reports, “A roadside bomb killed an American soldier in Baghdad on Saturday, capping the bloodiest week for U.S. troops in Iraq this year.”

Yglesias

The Jobless

By ThinkProgress on Apr 13, 2008 at 9:49 am

jobless.png

Via Paul Krugman, a chart and article by Floyd Norris contrasting the long-term trend in the unemployment rate (up and down) with the long-term trend in the proportion of prime-age men who don’t have jobs (up and up). Naturally, this raises the question of what everyone’s doing. One assumes that some portion of this is men taking on traditionally female roles as the personal primarily responsible for family care tasks. It also is my impression that there are more over-25 students than there used to be (certainly I know more than one person who was or is in law school at age 26 or higher). And the average age of retirement has tended to drop over time, so that must mean more men in their early fifties retiring.

On the other hand, for an older person the line between retirement and unemployment can be a fine one — there are doubtless various retired people out there who would, in fact, be willing to work if there were more appealing job opportunities out there. But those kinds of thing aside, maybe there’s been an increase in the number of people doing black market work at least part time? One trouble with official statistics is that trends are always ambiguous between whether or not something is actually not happening, or whether it’s just not getting counted. Even during the very tight labor market of the 1990s, the jobless rate was way higher than it was in 1960 and it’s a bit hard to believe that all those people were just doing nothing, and while the run-up since then very plausibly represents deteriorating labor market conditions, the job market was extremely strong back then.

Climate Progress

Breaking News: The Great Ice Age of 2008 is finally over — next stop Venus!

By Joe Romm on Apr 13, 2008 at 9:24 am

A top NASA scientist just emailed me the breaking news: “The ice age expired!”

Even more shocking — the rate of warming this year has been just about unprecedented in the historical record — even faster than Climate Progress had predicted just last month based on the NASA data from February (see here).

Just look at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies dataset (here). While January’s land-ocean global temperature was a mere +0.12°C above the the 1951-1980 average and the February anomaly was +0.26°C — the March anomaly was a staggering +0.67°C.

[Warning -- the following chart is not suitable for children or those who believe in global cooling. Please cover their eyes since the 2008 data, plotted in red below, might give them nightmares.]

nasa-ice-age.jpg

This leading NASA scientist was himself stunned by the “temperature derivative” — geek speak for the rate of change. At this rate I’m afraid, we have only a couple of decades before the Earth becomes another Venus.

My advice to you: Hug your children, make love to your spouse, sell your beachfront property, and then spend your entire life savings as quickly as possible — assuming, of course, that three months of data can be used for climate projections. And, heck, if one month’s data is good enough to get stories on climate cooling from leading journalists at the Wall Street Journal (“Little Ice Age? Cold Snap Sparks Cooling Debate“) and New York Times (“Climate Skeptics Seize on Cold Spell“), three months ought to be enough for front page stories that change your entire life.

OUR CHANGING WEATHER CLIMATE

When we first reported this story (here), the Earth was in the death grip of an Ice Age that had lasted an unprecedented 4 or 5 weeks, nearly one-millionth the duration of recent Ice Ages. Earlier this year, websites were trumpeting bleak headlines like “Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age“) or “Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.” Or, for those who prefer geek-talk over bleak-talk, it was time for an “Update on Falsification of Climate Predictions,” as Roger Pielke, Jr. put it.

Read more

Yglesias

Can’t Tell the Players WIthout a Field Manual

By ThinkProgress on Apr 13, 2008 at 8:08 am

Robert Farley reports on a visit to an Army training facility at Fort Knox and observes, “one thing that I found particularly interesting is that in this discussion of transformation and training revision NO ONE mentioned FM 3-24; indeed, while the captains we spoke to later in the afternoon knew about it, none we spoke to had read it.”

FM 3-24 is, of course, the famous counterinsurgency field manual written by General David Petraeus before he was posted to Iraq, a document that’s been much chewed-over by national security reporters and pundits. Of course, I suppose it’s possible that the manual is having a large impact on training through second-order effects even though it doesn’t seem to be widely read, but this does call into question how much has really changed since its completion.

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