Dave Weigel finds one member of congress who’s happy to admit that he gets his policy ideas from a crackpot:

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), who gives his departing interns copies of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” told me today that the response to President Obama’s economic policies reminded him of what happened in the 51-year-old novel.

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

Just think what kind of nightmare scenario we might be inflicted with if the titans of finance who’ve made up such a large proportion of high earners in recent years were to pull back on their efforts! I shudder. Meanwhile, I haven’t actually read the book but my understanding is that in Atlas Shrugged they’re actually building a high-speed rail link from Las Vegas to Disneyland.

You understand why politics might get up to dumb gimmicks. They’re trying to get press, they’re trying to get elected, whatever. But even though lots of people do it, I genuinely don’t understand why someone would go into political journalism despite a total lack of interest in trying to actually inform the public. If you want to operate with a reckless disregard for the consequences of your actions, there’s a lot more money to be had in banking. At any rate, Maureen Dowd loves John McCain’s Twitter feed:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. …

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” …

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

The tattoo removal anti-crime program has already been dealt with in some detail. But it’s worth dwelling on this for a bit. The cost per-prisoner of incarcerating someone for a year is enormous. If this program generates as little as ten person-years less of imprisonment that’s a net fiscal benefit to the government even if you ignore the benefits of reducing crime which, obviously, would be absurd. In other words, the marginal benefit of preventing a serious violent crime is extremely high—much higher than might be apparent if you didn’t bother to consider the issue at all. Which is exactly how McCain proceeds.

As Jon Chait says:

And McCain’s method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anything that sounds silly. He’s clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. [...] I don’t know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it’s a boondoggle. I don’t know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there’s a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I’m just a blogger, not a U.S. Senator or a powerful newspaper columnist with access to a research assistant, but it’s not so difficult to make some inquiries into this sort of thing. What’s the deal with Mormon crickets? Well “Mormon crickets become pests very sporadically (about once or twice in a decade) when populations build to high levels and they migrate over large areas. If an alfalfa field is in the path of a migration, Mormon crickets can cause severe damage by devouring the plants.” Are Mormon crickets a problem this year? It seems they are. Now that bit of Googling is hardly the last word on this, but we’re at least getting somewhere. Dowd and McCain both have a lot of resources at their disposal and big megaphones—maybe they should try to figure this stuff out and help people distinguish the worthy programs from the wasteful ones instead of just making jokes.

Ana Marie Cox does a webchat for The Washington Post:

Singapore: Obama likes comics; can he learn anything from Watchmen?

Ana Marie Cox: We can all learn something from the Watchmen. Personally, I hope he repeals the law against costumed vigilantes soon.

More seriously (tho not totally so), I think Cheney and Bush modeled their presidency on Ozymandias.

I like the idea of the Ozymandias reference, but I’m not sure that I actually get it. By contrast, though you shouldn’t click the links unless you want an implicit Watchmen spoler, Ronald Reagan actually did attempt to base his second-term approach to US-Soviet relations in part on a hypothetical version of the Ozymandias strategy. And though the argument was kind of odd, it actually went hand-in-hand with a brave and correct policy stance that helped contribute to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War.

Spencer Ackerman writes:

From a White House press release:

Vice President Biden will travel to Brussels, Belgium next week to meet with the North Atlantic Council, the principal forum for NATO’s 26 member states. The purpose of his trip is to consult with allies on Afghanistan and Pakistan and to ensure that their views help inform the strategic review ordered by President Obama. The Vice President also will meet with NATO’s Secretary General, with senior leaders of the European Union and with officials of the Belgian government.

Whether NATO countries believe, like Canadian PM Stephen Harper, that Afghanistan is an American preoccupation and not a core NATO interest is something Joe Biden will literally find out.

I think this misconstrues the nature of NATO skepticism about recent U.S. requests. The skepticism from the NATO allies is, like the skepticism from the progressive community in the United States, driven not be a lack of belief that “Afghanistan” is a core interest but by a lack of clarity over what “Afghanistan” is. For reasons that are 100 percent the fault of George Bush and 0 percent the fault of Barack Obama, the new administration finds itself taking over a situation in Afghanistan that bears little resemblance to the one prevailing when our initial war aims were framed. Consequently, it’s become unclear what the American and NATO missions in Afghanistan really are. Hence the ongoing strategy review process. But unfortunately, in some respects Obama seems to be putting the cart before the horse in terms of making commitments of American resources and requests for NATO resources before getting clear about what we’re trying to do. What I think Biden will find it, is that insofar as the Obama administration wants to get substantial cooperation from allied nations he’s going to need to persuade them that he has achievable goals and not just a domestic political imperative.