Having let Republican filibusters stymie a frighteningly large proportion of the Democrats congressional agenda, Harry Reid’s finally had enough and is going to try to curb abuse of the process . . . to try to stop Chris Dodd from blocking bad FISA legislation.
Reid’s office is organizing some kind of progressive media event on Monday and I imagine he’ll hear a thing or two about this.
In yesterday’s press briefing, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino about the tie between the current U.S. economy and the Iraq war. Perino quickly dismissed the reporter’s question, insisting that the U.S. economy has been “very strong” and adding that the money was necessary to “take the fight to the enemy” after 9/11. Watch it:
Oil prices are at approximately $88 a barrel, although they have dropped from the record high of $100 earlier this month. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently noted in Vanity Fair, “The soaring price of oil is clearly related to the Iraq war. The issue is not whether to blame the war for this but simply how much to blame it.”
Before the war, economists were predicting that oil prices at just $75 a barrel could potentially send the U.S. economy into a recession. Therefore, the current economic situation should not come as a complete shock to the Bush administration. A look at economists’ pre-war predictions:
“A war against Iraq could cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, play havoc with an already depressed domestic economy and tip the world into recession because of the adverse effect on oil prices, inflation and interest rates, an academic study [by William Nordhaus, Sterling professor of economics at Yale University] has warned.” [Independent, 11/16/02]
“If war with Iraq drags on longer than the few weeks or months most are predicting, corporate revenues will be flat for the coming year and will put the U.S. economy at risk of recession, according to a poll of chief financial officers.” [CBS MarketWatch, 3/20/03]
“If the conflict wears on or, worse, spreads, the economic consequences become very serious. Late last year, George Perry at the Brookings Institution ran some simulations and found that after taking into account a reasonable use of oil reserves, a cut in world oil production of just 6.5 percent a year would send the United States and the world into recession.” [Robert Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, 10/2/02]
“Gerd H¤usler, the IMF’s director of international capital markets, said that ‘purely from a financial markets perspective, a serious conflict with Iraq would not be a very healthy development.’ … H¤usler said there could be a repeat of what happened in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when there was a sharp rise in oil prices.” [World Bank, 9/02]
MoveOn has a petition here to tell Congress to “quickly pass a stimulus package” that helps mitigate this “Iraq recession.”
UPDATE: Martin at Scholars and Rogues has more.
Transcript: Read more
Looks like the government of Saudi Arabia is poised to start letting women drive. I think it’s safe to say that the case here is pretty unassailable, though I suppose there’s some reason to believe that the public safety gains from a ban on male drivers would be large.
Via Jessica Valenti.
One obvious question surrounding the new policy in Iraq of paying groups of former Sunni Arab insurgents to start calling themselves Concerned Local Citizens and helping us fight al-Qaeda in Iraq is how do we know that the people they’re fighting are really AQI? After all, the main thing the CLCs give us is information not firepower, but if we depend on them for our information then we have no way of knowing that it’s good. Or maybe we do. Spencer Ackerman asked MNF-Iraq spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith about this and revealed that MNF-Iraq needs to come up with some better spin:
“The sense is, as we partner with tribal chiefs, the chief knows who’s working for him,” Smith said when I asked him about the reliability of these bands on a blogger conference call this morning. “You’ve got to put some trust and confidence in these people.” That trust, he said, isn’t built overnight, and the U.S. will have a “relationship” with a tribal leader before committing resources to him or including him in a program.
But is that all it amounts to? Trust?
“It boils down to trust,” Smith confirmed. “And over time, you can earn it or lose it.” In response to a follow-up from Cogitamus’s Nicholas Beaudrot, Smith reminded that in Diyala Province, Colonel David Sutherland, commander of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, had to fire and even arrest some CLC members. (Sutherland confirmed that to me in an October conference call.) He meant that as a defense of the U.S. military’s vetting process, but it also gives a sense of the trustworthiness of these so-called allies.
But look: If you can’t trust the militiaman who was shooting at you a year ago until you started bribing him, then who can you trust? Honestly, it’s almost enough to make me nostalgic for the days when we were using The Arab Mind as a guide to understanding Iraq. Sometimes people lie!
Matt Stoller points out that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could be using their platforms to highlight the legislative fight over FISA issues in a way that would likely be very effective. But time and again they’ve declined to do so and there’s little indication they’ll change their minds now.
The Better World Campaign asks what do you think the next president should do on his or her first day in office. Putting my “let’s think about this overly literally” hat for a moment, what you probably want to do on day one is focus on a bunch of below-the-radar executive order type stuff that it’ll be easy to make sure gets buried in the news because you also made a few important personnel announcements that the papers are obligated to cover.
Closer to the spirit of the question, I’d like to see an announcement disavowing the preventive war doctrine outlined by the Bush administration coupled with a statement outlining a vision for re-invigorating the global non-proliferation regime.
I’ve been poking around in our newly liberated archives for interesting things to link to, and it’s just such an incredibly rich source. The December 1866 issue had, for example, a Frederick Douglass essay setting forth his view of what was needed to make Reconstruction successful:
The plain, common-sense way of doing this work is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike. This great measure is sought as earnestly by loyal white men as by loyal blacks, and is needed alike by both. Let sound political prescience but take the place of an unreasoning prejudice, and this will be done.
Needless to say, it didn’t happen.
Remember the de-Baathification law the Iraqi government passed that kinda sorta seemed like maybe it did the reverse of what the Bush administration said it did? Turns out it does the reverse of what the Bush administration said it did: “More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation.”
Amit Paley and Joshua Partlow have put together an admirably straightforward and well-reported article for The Washington Post so I won’t get too upset that they write “the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation” rather than “the opposite of Bush administration claims for the legislation.” Still, it’s noteworthy that not only has this gone awry, but the Bush administration just spent last week telling us it hadn’t gone awry.
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