One small but important point related to the Non-Proliferation Treaty discussion below is that, as several readers have pointed out, Israel, India, and Pakistan aren’t signatories to the NPT so they can’t really be said to be violating it. This is true, but it amounts to much the same thing. The NPT allows any member to withdraw from the treaty with no real penalty — all it needs to do is to offer three months’ notice — and in the wake of the Bush administration’s nuclear deal with India none of the non-member countries are paying any meaningful penalty for their non-membership.
Ultimately, I tend to think the Iran crisis has shown the need to create a much more robust non-proliferation regime than the one the NPT provides for. Getting that done would require a lot of things, among them a renewed determination to deal with the status of the non-NPT Three in a meaningful way.
Medicare involved in $50 million “glitch”. Just a drop in the bucket, of course, compared to the overall size of wastage of funds involved in the administration’s reform bill.
When I was first reading Mickey Kaus’ riposte to my argument that universal health care would be more affordable than he thought it seemed to me that we had some yawning disagreement about the nature of health care costs. Upon reflection, though, the disagreement is different. His vision of a universal health care system is one that will be sufficiently generous that even families in, say, the 89th percentile of the income distribution never feel inclined to make private expenditures for additional services on top of what the government provides and that won’t involve any potentially innovation-starving price controls. That, I’m inclined to agree, really would be very expensive.
And if you could really pay for such a system by severely means-testing Social Security benefits I wouldn’t have a particular objection to that. I don’t think that provides a case for pre-emptively slashing Social Security. The way, in practice, that you would get from where we are to where Kaus wants to go is that the politicians proposing the generous health benefit would either lowball the costs or else simply ignore the question of payment (see, e.g., the 2003 Bush Medicare bill) and then when it became necessary to cut something, means-testing Social Security would look like one reasonable approach.
Fundamentally, though, I find this an unlikely path to universal health care. I think it’s much more plausible that we’ll either put something together based primarily around individual- or employer-mandates (which is an idea that I think has a lot of problems but sharply reduces the need for new taxes by financing the system primarily through the de facto tax of the mandates) or else by continuing the upward creep in Medicaid eligibility (this would be my preference) which would lead to a system that’s universal, but not nearly as generous as the one he’s envisioning.
The New York Times picks up Joe Lieberman’s talk radio appearance yesterday.
As the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, new details of the government’s incompetent response are being examined. For instance: who knew that DHS relied on CNN Headline News for its vital intelligence?
Verizon and BellSouth impose new broadband fees in tandem, while FCC proclaims broadband market adequately competitive.
Ignorance is, if not bliss, then at least widespread. One of the things political pundits least appreciate about America is that substantial numbers of people basically have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to politics and that the deeply ignorant are also much more persuadable than the well-informed. Scott Winship has a nice post about some of this.
No stunt left unpulled. Will Bunch has the story of Bush’s “surprise” meeting with a Katrina survivor who happens to be a former GOP candidate for electoral office.
The past week or so has seen some renewed attention to the longstanding hawk-pundit gambit of referring to people as “Islamofascists” since the President, in what I can only understand as a sign of increasing desperation, decided to more-or-less sign on to this agenda by adopting the slightly-less-absurd formulation “Islamic fascists.” The other day, Spencer Ackerman made the fundamental pragmatic argument against this — Muslims everywhere really, really, really don’t appreciate this terminology.
That aside, however, it’s worth calling attention to the function of this rhetoric. “Fascist,” in this context, just roughly means “bad.” Add in the “Islamic” and what you come to is the conclusion that we’re in a war and that the enemy in this war is Muslims who subscribe to bad ideologies. This has the consequence of taking a set of institutionally and ideologically distinct actors — Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Iraq, Iran, Syria, al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army, Iraqi insurgents, etc. — and treating them as a single phenomenon. To do so would be a serious mistake. And to call it a mistake is not to deny the obvious fact that these are groups that are to some degree interrelated. There’s some ideological overlap. Some of these groups are allied with each other at the moment. Some have been allied in the past. Some might ally in the future.
Nevertheless, they are different things. And the essence of sound strategy has long been to look at potentially hostile actors and try to divide them. To decide what your top priority is and focus on it. The “Islamofascism” rhetoric is part of a continuing campaign to do the reverse.
Shocking. Republican politicians warn that intelligence professionals are being insufficiently alarmist about Iran. And rightly so. After all, last time there was a dispute like that, the alarmist politicians were completely vindicated and the skeptics in the intelligence community definitively refuted. You all remember that.
Right? Right?
Come to think of it, neither do I.