Journey Through the Mind of a Phan: Phaltering, or Phaithful?

That was... epic.

I missed the comeback--or rather, I was watching Battlestar Galactica and taping it for Annie, and kept flipping back during breaks. I'd seen the last out of the Reds 8th, keeping the score at 10-6 Cincinnati right before the show started, saw "Rollins, Lofton, Utley" due, and thought... well, maybe. Sure the Reds had scored nine unanswered runs to wipe away a 6-1 Phils lead and inject a serious bummer element into my evening; yes, I'd increasingly switched away from the worsening game to watch West Side Story (TCN) and The Usual Suspects (AMC) through the 9pm hour. But it was just four runs, top of the lineup due, and...

Nah. Not again. Twice in a week? Uh-uh.

Against the Reds, who dashed our hopes two hours ago, knocked us out of the playoffs 29 years ago, and started the spiral toward eternal infamy for a Phils team 41 years ago? No. The lefty Kent Mercker will do the job on us, cementing Wade's lifelong impetus to possess him. He'll probably strike out Ryan Howard to end it, and then this winter they'll be traded for each other.

Show comes back on, the VCR is running, I'm trying to put it out of my mind. It's a really, really good show, Battlestar; tonight was the season finale, and might have been the best episode they've ever aired. I think to myself, I have to let the Phils go.

Commercial break and I flip back to ESPN to check. It's now 10-9. There are two outs. Nobody on base. Howard vs. Mercker.

No. Frackin'. Way.

Count goes to 2-0. I'm flipping back and forth between every pitch, in part to make sure I'm not missing the show, in part because each pitch is a ball and thus whatever I'm doing seems to be working. It's obvious by 2-0 that Mercker won't give Howard any meat, and the kid is too disciplined to go fishing ahead in the count, down by a run and nobody on base. Ball four.

Commercial break's ending. Bell comes to the plate. I figure: No. I know how this one ends. I'm not doing it to myself. I turn back to SciFi.

(Though the thought also crosses my mind that, if they come back to win this game and then go on to... well, you know... if all that happens, then THIS is the moment that might live forever. Could I live with missing that?)

So be it. They scored the three runs with my not watching; the last scoring I'd seen had been the Reds' 9th. I'm letting it go.

15 minutes or so later, Battlestar breaks again. I flip back to ESPN; the ballgame is over, college football is on, and there's no ticker at the bottom of the screen. ESPN2 is on a commercial break, and is also showing college football in any event. Back to SciFi. If only I knew the past tense of "que sera, sera."

The show breaks one more time--this is the last one till January, rich in hints and cliffhangers and complications, even closing holes left by earlier episodes this season--and then I switch to ESPN2 watching the ticker. There's the final: Phillies 11, Reds 10. S: Billy Wagner (35)

So be it. But what had happened? I get online, go to PhilliesPhans.com, read through the entire game thread, smiling and cringing through 9-6, not sure how the Reds scored that 10th run but recognizing the "resigned, but not leaving" tone of late game threads when the team is behind. Then an Utley 3-run bomb, his second of the game, just as we'd all given up on his for this year as exhausted and spent... wow, but I figured someone had probably done that since I'd seen two outs, none on, one run down in "real time."

An Abreu strikeout and his ejection, along with Cholly Manuel... gut punch. The best player on the team, obviously injured, already having endured a bad game--this was his fourth strikeout of the night. Then he's tossed. Burrell follows with a bad AB, not that much of a surprise. Howard's walk, which I'd seen.

And then David Bell continues down redemption road with a two-run bomb; a ten-page orgasm on PhilliesPhans, with Scott Graham's home run call audio. By now, my wife is home; I call her in for the repeat playing.

I'm not sure whether my "letting go" was rewarded by the win, or whether my lack of faith was punished by my missing such a moment. Either way, I feel much in the grip of larger forces at work.

Quite an evening.

Big Dog on the Hunt
Bill Clinton evidently returned to politics over the weekend. I didn't see his appearances on "Meet the Press" or other shows, but he set the blogworld abuzz--check out these observations (two very different variations on a common theme) by Bull Moose and The Rude Pundit.

This was enough to send me to the transcript, where I found the following brilliant little frame:

...just think what would happen if the Chinese--we're pressing the Chinese now, a country not nearly rich as America per capita, to keep loaning us money with low interest to cover my tax cut, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Katrina and at the same time to raise the value of their currency so their imports into our country will become more expensive, and our exports to them will become less expensive. And by the way, we don't want to let them buy any oil companies or anything like that.

So what if they just got tired of buying our debt? What if the Japanese got tired of doing it? Japan's economy is beginning to grow again. Suppose they decided they wanted to keep some of their money at home and invest it in Japan, because they're starting to grow?

We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong.

This was in response to a question George Stephanopoulos asked Clinton about what the Democrats should do in response to the White House refusing to back down on tax cuts to pay for disaster relief. Clinton effortlessly ties this into a larger narrative that hits on the illogic of our policy toward China; the risk we incur thereby; and the larger unfairness of Bush's economic approach ("my tax cut," which he'd referenced earlier).

The guy is unbelievable. It's nice to see him back in the game.

On a housekeeping note, I proudly announce two additions to my blogroll on the left side of this page:

• The Smiling Nihilist: newly launched blog by my itinerant college roommate Greg D--fixer of flailing tech companies, gluttonous consumer of high and low entertainment, lover of many women, fighter of real and virtual evil (in video game action at least), and, um, a smiling nihilist.


• 826NYC: a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group that helps school-age kids with their creative and expository writing skills. It's modeled after 826 Valencia, the San Francisco-based center founded by Dave Eggers among other s. I'm tutoring there this fall one day a week and excited to be working with kids again. The center is nestled in the back of the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, a great place to browse if you ever find yourself on Fifth Avenue of a sunny afternoon.

True Confessions of a Right-Wing Toady
I'm obviously a fan of what's sometimes known as the "progressive blogosphere." Look at the links to the left of these words, and you'll see a handful of sites that have a distinct and consistent take on the issues of the day. Even better, the proliferation of community sites with a strong liberal perspective has allowed wave after wave of new, heretofore totally unknown writers to find audiences, informing and inspiring and entertaining as they go. It's good for progressives, and I think it's even good for democracy.

Unfortunately, the echo-chamber tendencies of these sites have some less pleasant side effects too. One, which I wrote about a lot in the wake of the catastrophic defeat last November, is that we as participants leave ourselves open to delusion. There's a clear selection bias at work, and we tend to, as the old song goes, accentuate the positive and eliminate--or at least rationalize away--the negative. Another is the enforcement, or attempted enforcement, of a rigid ideological conformity that's often expressed in very ugly ways.

So it was when I wrote a diary entry on Daily Kos last week titled "Why I'm supporting Bloomberg." As the New York City mayoral primary was just concluded, and already my e-mail box was filling up with requests from the likes of John Kerry himself to send money and support to newly minted Democratic nominee Freddy Ferrer (unofficial motto: "It Takes a Hack"), and the front-page proprietors of dKos were similarly throwing brickbats at "so-called Democrats" who were lining up behind Mike Bloomberg, I figured I'd at least try to set out my arguments, with a little history and background thrown in. I don't want to recap the whole piece here--I thought it was pretty good, and the link is just a few lines up--but basically my points were: I voted and volunteered for Mark Green four years ago, I was really bummed when Bloomberg won, but I think he's done a very good job on balance and I like that he's free of the usual cronyism and political debts that dominate urban politics; and Ferrer, based on his history, his allies, and his campaign to date, IMO would likely be a failure in City Hall.

Here's the first comment I got in response:

Bloomberg Is A Traitor (3.16 / 6)

Therefore so are his supporters.
He is a Republican now.
Furthermore he detained American citizens en masse unlawfully (against court rulings issued in advance) for the Republican convention.

A vote for Bloomberg is a vote for Republican hegemony, and as a fellow New Yorker, I detest you.
I can't say you have no right, but I can say you are a rightwing toady, period, end of story.
Ferrer is competent, you have no excuse.

And it kind of went on from there. Someone else declaimed that I was betraying my country. More recently on dKos, having rejoined this argument in another thread, I was told I should re-register as a Republican. There was very, very little substance offered on behalf of Ferrer.

Most of the complaints follow two themes: "Bloomberg equals Bush," and "Bloomberg mistreated the RNC protesters last summer." (There's also, as the comment I cited above implies, a bit of irrational "thou hast betrayed me" scorn for Bloomberg's apostasy in running as a Republican; to me that's not worth engaging with, for the simple reason that "there's no Democratic or Republican way to fix a pothole"; at the local level, party label doesn't matter very much.) The second, I guess, has some validity. But frankly, I don't think any mayor, of either party, would have done much different; four years earlier in Philadelphia, Ed Rendell (a Democrat) was similarly criticized.

And to be even more blunt--because we're on my turf now--I suspect a lot of the protesters were looking for the outcome they earned. The cops might have been dicks, but I doubt many of them wanted the extra paperwork and general effort of arresting a bunch of mouthy white kids.

Should they have been treated so harshly? No. Should they have been given a Central Park permit? Yes. But in the grand scheme of things, I fail to see how this is all that big of a deal.

Then there's the Bush charge. It's based on, one, Bloomberg's campaign giving to Bush and the Republicans; and two, that the city hosted the RNC last year. That he contributed to Bush certainly bothers me; I gave a lot of time, money and effort to beat that prick, and it rankles me that my mayor worked against me. In the full context of Bloomberg's philanthropy and a lifetime of political giving, however, the theme of his 2004-cycle contributions is pretty clear: it's "DON'T FUCK OVER NEW YORK CITY." Given the deep bias against our claiming a fair share of state and federal budgets prevalent in Albany and DC, I understand it even if I don't condone it.

As for the RNC, though I myself protested their presence (and--I remember--wrote repeatedly here and elsewhere about how much it bothered me to have them exploiting our tragedy, given their policies), I'm also glad they dropped however many millions into our local economy. If these self-righteous "liberal" jerkasses want to pick up all the schoolteacher, sanitation worker and cop salaries paid for by Republican delegate spending last year, then I'm happy to talk with them. Otherwise, they've got no beef.

Not to mention that Bloomberg, like any smart mayor, wanted *both* political conventions in the city last year. Terry McAuliffe and Ted Kennedy put the kibosh on that one, I think it's fairly safe to say to the detriment of our results last November. Remember, the Democrats had their convention first, as the "out" party; if they'd held it here, they could have made any number of powerful political points: how everyday Republican policies hurt the city they'd come to exploit; how Bush used the tragedy of 9/11 to push a terribly divisive partisan agenda and a war waged under false pretenses against an "enemy" that hadn't been involved with the attacks; even how (as Bloomberg noted in his address to the RNC) the Republican thugocracy distributed homeland security money based on political calculations rather than an honest assessment of risk.

But that gets me pretty far from the thread. And the thread is that these "Better Dead than Republican Red" arguments leave us arguably as badly off, in terms of supporting the public interest, as those on the other side. That so many of those bloviating the loudest don't actually live here--and clearly know nothing about Ferrer, or the deeply corrupt borough-based Democratic machines--just adds another layer of insult.

Politicizing 9/11
It's a beautiful day here in Brookyn. The NFL season is well underway; Annie's best friend gave birth yesterday in Dublin, with mother and child both well; we've gotten tons of things done today; the Phillies are whomping the Marlins down in South Philadelphia.

Four years ago, on another beautiful day, the course of American history changed. The government somehow managed to turn unprecedented tragedy and signal failure into a political triumph; it then took the fruits of that triumph to plunge our country into perpetual deficit, interminable war and, as these facts became apparent to some, bitter polarization.

Having won the election last November, George W. Bush and his band of supporters and enablers saw all their policies and practices justified. The privileging of loyalty over competence, ideology over results, and self-advancement over public service all went effectively unpunished by the electorate. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is only the most glaring, and viscerally painful, evidence of the costs of this approach to governance. There will be others.

But even if you take it as given that the administration couldn't, and shouldn't, have better defended the country on 9/11--a view that's tough to sustain given what Richard Clarke and so many others have told us--let's consider the poison and ineptitude of the response to that attack.

We never got the perpetrator. In fact, he sneers at us from the covers of magazines.

For a group of people so supposedly bound up with honor and martial pride, so praiseful of war and violence, doesn't it seem odd that more right-wingers aren't rabid with fury over the fact that Osama bin Laden remains at learge? That the substitute in terms of militaristic self-gratification has gone so badly awry is almost like injury added to insult. Michael Tomasky issues a reminder in the American Prospect:

[E]ven the disaster Bush has created in Iraq takes a back seat to one overwhelming fact: By the time night falls on September 11, Osama bin Laden will have been at large for 1,461 days.

America vanquished world fascism in less time: We obtained Germany’s surrender in 1,243 days, Japan’s in 1,365. Even the third Punic War, in which Carthage was burned to the ground and emptied of citizens who were taken en masse into Roman slavery, lasted around 1,100 days (and troops needed a little longer to get into position back in 149 B.C.).
...
Just imagine bin Laden having been at large this long in President Al Gore’s administration. In fact, it’s impossible to imagine, because President Gore, under such circumstances, wouldn’t have lasted this long. You probably didn’t know, until you read this column, the number of days bin Laden has been at large. But I assure you that if Gore had been president, you and every American would have known, because the right would have seen to it that you knew, asking every day, “Where’s Osama?” If Gore hadn’t been impeached, it’s doubtful he’d have survived a re-election campaign, with Americans aghast at how weak and immoral a president had to be to permit those 2,700 deaths to go unavenged this long.

It was briefly a matter of debate in last year's presidential campaign whether or not the Bush administration "let bin Laden get away" in December 2001. General Tommy Franks said no; others, including the Pentagon's own investigators, say yes.

"We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp." It was not until this spring that the Pentagon, after a Freedom of Information Act request, released a document to The Associated Press that says Pentagon investigators believed that bin Laden was at Tora Bora and that he escaped.

The administration's defenders and apologists have lately become very sensitive about "playing politics" in a time of national tragedy; getting absolutely nailed for transparent ineptitude perhaps has something to do with this change of heart. These were the same people who sold (and bought) photos of Bush on the plane, in his moment of pants-crapping cowardice, the Republican National Committee offered as gifts for generous donors.

As Tomasky implies, had history gone differently and a Democrat sat in the White House on September 11, 2001, it still would have been the Republican Party exploiting 9/11. They just would have been much more justified in doing so.

Katrina as Warm-Up Act?
Last week a friend of mine e-mailed to note that this hurricane came quickly on the heels of last summer's series of big storms in Florida, as well as the tsunami in the south Pacific that struck over the winter. We agreed it didn't seem like a coincidence; and as I noted in a previous post, to me one of the lessons of Katrina is that we can no longer view homeland security, fuel dependence and global warming as separate phenomena: they're inter-related, and so must be an approach to address and mitigate their effects.

This article from Fortune suggests that we'd do well to find some answers sooner rather than later, as storms of this magnitude are becoming increasingly common:

[L]ess than a month before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Kerry Emanuel published a portentous paper in the journal Nature that illustrated how hurricanes' destructive potential has risen dramatically over the past few decades, in tandem with global warming. And a few weeks before Emanuel's paper, the Association of British Insurers issued an equally ominous report on the growing financial risks posed by extreme weather events due to global warming. It predicted that the U.S. may suffer insured losses from single hurricanes of up to $150 billion in 2004 dollars. (To put that in perspective, Hurricane Andrew racked up insured losses of about $20 billion, in 2004 dollars, when it slammed Florida and Louisiana in 1992.)

While the great majority of climate researchers believe that global warming is real (and also that it is partly caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels), no one says Katrina sprang directly from the warming—that would be like arguing that a particular stock's plunge last Tuesday was caused by the onset of a bear market a year ago. But Emanuel and other experts have warned for over a decade that global warming may be creating an environment prone to more violent storms, droughts and other weather extremes, just as a bear market can pave the way for an outsized drop in a particular company's stock price.

Global warming is certainly controversial—while some researchers see evidence that it's contributing to the recent uptick in extreme storms, others argue that the number of bad hurricanes in recent years merely reflects a natural weather variation. But the science of how warmer weather induces violent storms isn't. Hurricanes suck energy from warm waters to drive their winds. So as sea-surface temperatures rise, the storms absorb more energy that gets pumped out in the form of high-speed winds.

To be sure, most of the escalating property losses from hurricanes in recent years stem from the fact that more and more people are putting their homes in harm's way. From 1980 to 2003, the U.S. coastal population grew by 33 million, and is expected to swell by a further 12 million by 2015, according to the British insurers' report.
...
The British insurance association report, titled "Financial Risks of Climate Change," was similarly cautious: Rising losses from extreme weather are mainly due to the rising number and value of property in harm's way, it states, though the "trends to date (in devastating weather) are consistent with what we might expect as climate change intensifies." But the report's survey of recent weather extremes is anything but reassuring. Among other things, the study found that:

* Each year since 1990, there have been at least 20 weather events categorized as significant natural catastrophes. There were only three years that bad among the 20 years preceding 1990.
* Four hurricanes that hit the U.S. last year racked up a record $56 billion in total losses over a period of just a few weeks, setting an annual record for such losses.
* Last year 10 typhoons hit Japan, four more than the previous record, making it the costliest year ever for typhoon damage there.
* In 2003, Europe suffered the hottest summer of the past 500 years, causing 22,000 premature heat-related deaths. Accompanying wildfires caused $15 billion of losses. Changes in the weather appear to have already doubled the chance of such hot summers.
* The number of severe winter storms in Britain has doubled over the last 50 years.

The report also notes disturbing recent data indicating that Atlantic hurricane activity is on the rise. The data aren't clear cut—hurricane activity goes up and down in decades-long cycles related to changes in ocean currents, potentially masking a long-term rise due to global warming. Still, the average number of hurricanes in the current "up" cycle, which began in the mid-1990s, is higher than during the previous upswing—a indication that global warming is boosting the effects of the longstanding, natural variation in hurricane activity.

There's no political screed buried in here: yes, the Bush administration has totally ignored global warming, but the Democrats haven't been all that much better, and Bill Clinton always seemed to have more energy for voter-friendly "micro-initiatives"--a school dress code here, a V-chip there--than for pushing the sacrifice and change that a robust policy response would have required. The lesson, I guess, again points to our national disinclination toward planning ahead. The likely costs of this tendency are, to say the least, pretty daunting.

A Chilling Vision of Things to Come?
One common reaction to hard-to-comprehend events like the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina is to say, "It really makes you think." The elemental struggle of people to survive can, and should, make one feel pretty silly about getting worked up over a car that cuts you off, or a stain on a favorite shirt, or your favorite baseball team losing a game. But there's another sense in which an event like this one, with its different set of consequences and revelations about our world, should probably raise: how vulnerable are the core material truths of our life that we almost never stop to consider.

Today I woke up in downtown Philadelphia, at my dad's home. He drove Annie and me out to the northern suburbs, where we met my mom and uncle for breakfast, and then went to his office, probably spending some 45 minutes behind the wheel. After we ate, my mother drove us up to Trenton, from where we caught a train into Manhattan and then a subway home to Brooklyn. We took a nap in our air-conditioned bedroom. I went to the gym, also air-conditioned, where I enjoyed my iPod while exercising on the elliptical machine and stationary bike. Then I bought some frozen and refrigerated goods at the market, went home and watched TV, turned on lights, went online, microwaved some red sauce, etc.

This banal list is offered not to make some point about my life, but rather to indicate how much we take the easy and inexpensive availability of fuel and energy for granted. Gasoline still feels affordable enough for my parents to drive out of their way getting my wife and me around the Philadelphia area. Energy costs are so low that I'm able to enjoy a lifestyle that depends quite substantially upon audio/visual entertainment or interface. Food is available at any temperature we want, almost instantaneously.

It's all so fucking easy. And we've come to take the means of that ease as an immutable fact of existence, like gravity. There's a moral conclusion to be drawn here, having to do with the complacency and unthinking entitlement many believe characterize the United States vis-a-vis the developing world. But there's also a practical conclusion: that if the cheap and easy energy goes away, we are truly screwed.

James Kunstler is a writer and keeper of the Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle. I'd seen this referenced in passing many times on one left-leaning site or another, and if I clicked through I don't remember it (and, after reading the below, I think I would have made a mental note). He stated the following in a speech earlier this year. The whole thing is a fascinating read; what I've excerpted here only sets up Kunstler's musings on a range of subjects from the coming ruination of Wal-Mart and other mega-retail chains to how our patterns of housing development, public education and "sense of place" will change as a result of what he calls "The Long Emergency": transformation to a world without cheap oil.

The world - and of course the US - now faces an epochal predicament: the global oil production peak and the arc of depletion that follows. We are unprepared for this crisis of industrial civilization. We are sleepwalking into the future.

The global peak oil production event will change everything about how we live. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It will compel us to do things differently - whether we like it or not.
...
[S]ome of the most knowledgeable geologists in the world believe we have reached the global oil production peak. Unlike the US oil industry, the foreign producers do not give out their production data so transparently We may never actually see any reliable figures. The global production peak may only show up in the strange behavior of the markets.

The global peak is liable to manifest as a "bumpy plateau." Prices will wobble. Markets will wobble - as the oil markets have been doing the past year. International friction will increase, especially around the places where the oil is - and two-thirds of the world's remaining oil is in the states around the Persian Gulf where, every week, a half dozen US soldiers and many more Iraqis are getting blown up, beheaded, or shot.

The "bumpy plateau" is where all kind of market signals and political signals are telling you that "something is happening, Mr. Jones, but you don't know what it is." We'll only know in the rear-view mirror.
...
The meaning of the oil peak and its enormous implications are generally misunderstood even by those who have heard about it - and this includes the mainstream corporate media and the Americans who make plans or policy. [For an example of major media coverage of the peak oil question,see this New York Times Sunday Magazine article from August. While the reporting seems fine, it gives little sense of just how fundamental the changes will be when the peak oil moment comes.--DJF]

The world does not have to run out of oil or natural gas for severe instabilities, network breakdowns, and systems failures to occur. All that is necessary is for world production capacity to reach its absolute limit - a point at which no increased production is possible and the long arc of depletion commences, with oil production then falling by a few percentages steadily every year thereafter. That's the global oil peak: the end of absolute increased production and beginning of absolute declining production.

And, of course, as global oil production begins to steadily decline, year after year, the world population is only going to keep growing - at least for a while - and demand for oil will remain very robust. The demand line of the graph will pass the production line, and in doing so will set in motion all kinds of problems in the systems we rely on for daily life.

One huge implication of the oil peak is that industrial societies will never again enjoy the 2 to 7 percent annual economic growth that has been considered healthy for over 100 years. This amounts to the industrialized nations of the world finding themselves in a permanent depression.

Long before the oil actually depletes we will endure world-shaking political disturbances and economic disruptions. We will see globalism-in-reverse. Globalism was never an 'ism,' by the way. It was not a belief system. It was a manifestation of the 20-year-final-blowout of cheap oil. Like all economic distortions, it produced economic perversions. It allowed gigantic, predatory organisms like WalMart to spawn and reproduce at the expense of more cellular fine-grained economic communities.
...
[W]e [can't] replace the current car fleet with electric cars or natural gas cars. We're just going to use cars a lot less. Fewer trips. Cars will be a diminished presence in our lives.

Not to mention the political problem that kicks in when car ownership and driving becomes incrementally a more elite activity. The mass motoring society worked because it was so profoundly democratic. Practically anybody in America could participate, from the lowliest shlub mopping the floor at Pizza Hut to Bill Gates. What happens when it is no longer so democratic? And what is the tipping point at which it becomes a matter of political resentment: 12 percent? 23 percent? 38 percent?
...
No combination of alternative fuel systems currently known will allow us to run what we are running, the way we're running it, or even a substantial fraction of it.

The future is therefore telling us very loudly that we will have to change the way we live in this country. The implications are clear: we will have to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do.
...
The implication of this is enormous. Successful human ecologies in the near future will have to be supported by intensively farmed agricultural hinterlands. Places that can't do this will fail. Say goodbye to Phoenix and Las Vegas.

I'm not optimistic about most of our big cities. They are going to have to contract severely. They achieved their current scale during the most exuberant years of the cheap oil fiesta, and they will have enormous problems remaining viable afterward.
...
All indications are that American life will have to be reconstituted along the lines of traditional towns, villages, and cities much reduced in their current scale. These will be the most successful places once we are gripped by the profound challenge of a permanent reduced energy supply.
...
We are entering a period of economic hardship and declining incomes. The increment of new development will be very small, probably the individual building lot.

The suburbs as are going to tank spectacularly. We are going to see an unprecedented loss of equity value and, of course, basic usefulness. We are going to see an amazing distress sale of properties, with few buyers. We're going to see a fight over the table scraps of the 20th century. We'll be lucky if the immense failure of suburbia doesn't result in an extreme political orgy of grievance and scapegoating.

The action in the years ahead will be in renovating existing towns and villages, and connecting them with regions of productive agriculture. Where the big cities are concerned, there is simply no historical precedent for the downscaling they will require. The possibilities for social and political distress ought to be obvious, though. The process is liable to be painful and disorderly.
...
Some regions of the country will do better than others. The sunbelt will suffer in exact proportion to the degree that it prospered artificially during the cheap oil blowout of the late 20th century. I predict that the Southwest will become substantially depopulated, since they will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. I'm not optimistic about the Southeast either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and combine with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism.

All regions of the nation will be affected by the vicissitudes of this Long Emergency, but I think New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy, or despotism, and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

There is a fair chance that the nation will disaggregate into autonomous regions before the 21st century is over, as a practical matter if not officially. Life will be very local.

These challenges are immense. We will have to rebuild local networks of economic and social relations that we allowed to be systematically dismantled over the past fifty years. In the process, our communities may be able to reconstitute themselves.

The economy of the mid 21st century may center on agriculture. Not information. Not the digital manipulation of pictures, not services like selling cheeseburgers and entertaining tourists. Farming. Food production. The transition to this will be traumatic, given the destructive land-use practices of our time, and the staggering loss of knowledge. We will be lucky if we can feed ourselves.

I'm sure counter-arguments can be made for many of Kunstler's predictions. And there are whole other realms of surmise--how the end of cheap energy will interact with the telecommunications revolution, or popular culture, or evolving gender roles. But through his assertions, he's asking important questions. Unfortunately, the Katrina disaster illustrates, yet again, our indisposition as a people to plan ahead effectively. Sleepwalking into the future, indeed.

A Theory of Everything
Maureen Dowd in Saturday's Times skewers the Bush administration:

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

The fact that they were all on vacation is bad politics, but the truth is that this is what rich people do the week before Labor Day; I'd bet that between Bush, Cheney and Card, they haven't worked a month's worth combined over the last week of August in their entire lives. (Rice probably had to work until around when she got that oil tanker named after her.) It's not what they've done this week; it's what they've done for the last five years. I don't know what Michael Brown did to merit consideration for his job, but I'm pretty much mortally certain it had nothing to do with emergency preparedness or disaster management, and a lot to do with political dependability and personal ties to some Bush or other.

To a greater or lesser extent, the same could be said of pretty much everyone in the second-term administration. The somewhat independent-minded folks--Colin Powell, Paul O'Neill--are gone. For that matter, so are those who might have their own political ambitions, like Mitch Daniels (now governor of Indiana) and John Ashcroft, who still probably sees a future president in the bathroom mirror, which hypothetically could have moved them to counter the administration. Only the loyalists are left. Their agenda is Bush's agenda; that's it.

What this means is that there will no voice inside the administration to say what must be said: that three issues of crucial importance to the nation--global warming, homeland security, and energy dependence--are now and henceforth will be inextricably bound together. We're failing to solve any of them, and their combined impact probably represents the greatest threat our country has ever faced.

I haven't seen anything in the news or the blogs connecting climate change to the various water-borne disasters of the last year: the tsunami, flooding in South Asia, Hurricane Katrina. I assume this will come with time, as scientists tend to approach these loaded questions with greater prudence and care than do pundits. What's not in question is that the damage done to the Gulf Coast has sparked an oil shock in the country, on the eve of one of the heaviest driving weekends of the year no less. In the current Atlantic Monthly, obviously written before the hurricane struck, a writer blasts the recently passed energy bill:

Somewhere in the vast spaces of the Energy Policy Act, you might think, room could have been found for actions that actually addressed the two main energy-policy challenges of the next decade: global warming and the national-security implications of dependence on imported oil. But no, the authors of this purportedly comprehensive law mostly chose to concentrate on... urgent battles to win on subsidies and tax breaks for their respective energy-producing constituencies.

The cost of fuel has been rising fairly steadily for the last several years. I don't know (though I've wondered often enough) at what point, if any, it will get high enough to really trigger behavioral change on the part of commuters and corporations; what I do think is likely is that the cascading effect of higher prices, on everything from produce to plane tickets, will make itself felt in our consumption-driven economy. A responsible government would get out in front of this change, encouraging conservation and the pursuit of alternatives; they also would have anticipated the easily predictable problem we're currently facing. (Given the nature of the world fuel supply, the only surprise here is that it was domestic production that was disrupted.) Those who view government as a means of enrichment, on the other hand, will do as they in fact did, larding the bill with giveaways.

I don't pretend to know what the answer is. History suggests that there are no problems we can't solve; from slavery to fascism, we have always--eventually--found an answer and made ourselves stronger. What really frightens me is the notion that the venality and indifference to real suffering that characterize the Bush administration and Republican-led congress--which has announced that it will go ahead next week with measures to repeal the Estate Tax--somehow reflects a rot within the American character that has spread beyond the point where it can be contained. Any criticism of the administration's response to the hurricane will be shrugged away as "politicizing the tragedy"... by the same people who somehow turned their tragic failure on 9/11 into greater opportunity to gorge at the public trough.

From calling on the best in Americans, our political leadership now seems to exist only to exonerate our worst, most selfish natures. While this is the case, how can we rise to the occasion as a people?

Why Government Matters

Update: Red Cross--Donate to aid relief efforts

I'm having trouble thinking about, much less reading, what's going on in New Orleans right now. The pictures--aerial shots of multi-story buildings mostly submerged--seem unreal, doctored, a trick of editing like a photo-surrealism calendar someone once gave me. My mind shies away from thinking about what the death count ultimately will be; I think about those thousands left in the Superdome--mostly non-white, pretty much all poor--with a deep sense of shame.

But the human tragedy, the fundamental disaster that has befallen that community, is just one of the stories here. Another is why it's important to vote, to speak out, to make sure that public stewardship is in the hands of those who will use it responsibly. This New Orleans disaster didn't have to be as bad as it is; the two levees that broke tonight evidently went unfinished.

They weren't finished, in part, because the public funds that were to go toward finishing them were diverted to the Iraq war effort. The Philadelphia Daily News blog Attytood has the details:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

The specifics are extraordinarily damning. After last year's hurricane season, New Orleans officials well understood the danger they were facing and wanted to speed up the work of SELA. But the money, and the commitment, simply wasn't there.

The 2004 hurricane season, as you probably recall, was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:

The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.

But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach.

What self-proclaimed "small government conservatives" always fail to understand is that THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DO THESE SORTS OF THINGS than government action. Projects like this are the whole fucking reason we *have* government: to protect lives and property. And not only should they get top priority, their successful completion really depends upon those in charge fully understanding that this has to be the priority.

Instead, we have a bunch of armchair war fetishists and crony capitalists who generally have never faced disaster at the hands of impersonal forces--whether natural, like the hurricane, or systemic, like job loss caused by macroeconomic change. Their lack of foresight, their lack of care, their lack of felt responsibility shouldn't surprise us. But it should make us reconsider just what it is we look for in leadership, and remember what a sacred trust it is.

Department of Self-Promotion
My NFC East preview package is now online at nfl.com. The frustrating thing about doing these is that events can always render considered prognostication almost immediately obsolete: if Eli Manning's elbow is really damaged, the Giants are probably closer to 5-11 than the 8-8 I foresee for them. Hopefully the football gods won't conspire to make me look like a total idiot.

If you don't feel like reading through, here's my predicted order of finish: Eagles, Cowboys, Giants, Redskins. Assuming Manning's okay, Cowboys/Giants might actually be a tossup: Dallas could struggle switching to the 3-4 defense, and I think Drew Bledsoe will get to know the Texas Stadium sod more intimately than he'd probably like.

Hopefully I'll be writing a few more columns for nfl.com over the course of the football season. I'm obviously going to need something to keep my attention through the pending Battlestar Galactica hiatus.

For the more serious-minded, here's a link to the Mayoral Policybook the Center for an Urban Future put together in partnership with the Center for NYC Affairs at The New School and Regional Plan Association. I edited this, and wrote chunks of the Intro and workforce development sections. It's pretty hefty stuff, and hopefully will offer some substance in a mayoral campaign that, like the quintessentially New York show "Seinfeld," so far seems to be largely about nothing.

Better Luck Next Time?
It might seem strange to be thinking about February 2008 while in the midst of a sweltering August 2005, but that's what Democratic speechwriter/pundit Kenneth Baer is doing in this New Republic article on changes to the party's nominating process. A party commission, co-chaired by former Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman and Congressman David Price, is meeting with groups around the country to consider alterations to the timetable, sequencing and guidelines for the nomination race.

As usual, the biggest focus is on whether Iowa and New Hampshire should maintain their all-but-decisive importance in the contest. Critics charge, justifiably, that "[t]hese states don't have enough minorities; they lack a large concentration of union members; they are without a major city." But despite their evident lack of general-election predictive power (in 2000, George W. Bush lost the New Hampshire primary, but won the state over Al Gore that November; last year, John Kerry memorably won Iowa but lost it, narrowly, to Bush in the general election) and the significant differences between small-state and national voters, Iowa and New Hampshire are almost determinative as far as who gets the nod. You have to go back to 1992, when home-state/region favorites Tom Harkin and Paul Tsongas won Iowa and New Hampshire respectively, to find a nominee of either party who didn't win in those first two states.

Baer makes a strong case against the argument that the "retail politics" candidates must practice in Iowa and New Hampshire serves as some kind of proving ground:

Conventional wisdom, which like a good student of American politics I once faithfully subscribed to, has held that the longer nominating process the better, as it allows a candidate to meet more voters, emerge to challenge an established favorite, and be vetted over a long and perhaps bruising process. Think Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Gary Hart in 1984. But in the past 20 years the ways in which campaigns are funded, run, and covered by the media have changed to such a degree that the extended primary season of today is now as out of date as the smoke-filled rooms of the '40s and '50s.

The current president offers perhaps the best example of this paradigm shift. When Granite State voters had months of close-up exposure to George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000, it clearly didn't do the Texas governor much good: John McCain, a master of retail campaigning who enjoyed the up-close contact and back-and-forth with voters as obviously as the super-scripted Bush detested it, won a resounding 19-point victory. Bush reversed his fortunes in the race before the next primary in South Carolina, burying McCain under an avalanche of money and slander; the media never really punished him for his clear deficiencies in "connecting with the voters" on issues of substance.

Thus for Iowa and New Hampshire. Baer goes on to make a positive case for what the Price-Herman Commission should do: further front-load the process, in effect using the primary contest as a dress rehearsal for November.

[W]hat the Commission and DNC do have power over is the "window," the time in which states must select their delegates to the nominating convention. And by closing the window earlier and opening it later--that is, shortening the nominating season from four months to one, and moving it later in the year from early February to the middle of March--the DNC can create a nominating system that increases rank-and-file participation and produces a candidate and campaign team that has been tested in conditions most resembling the general election.

By compacting the calendar into a four-week window in March, press coverage and voter interest would intensify--and not just in Iowa and New Hampshire. Candidates would have more of an incentive to campaign--not just fundraise--in voter-rich states such as New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California. In addition, they would have a huge incentive to begin using new ways to reach voters--such as niche cable stations like Outdoor Life Network or Bravo, ethnic media such as Univision, the Internet, and peer-to-peer organizing--which, as seen in the 2004 general election, Democrats have yet to master.

By approximating the pace and scope of a general election campaign, a month-long sprint of primaries would be a much more effective dry run for a candidate and his staff--weeding out the candidates and consultants who lack the imagination and appeal to reach beyond core Democratic constituencies in select states. Of course, any candidate who made it to the starting line would have already passed a high bar--the scrutiny not of the "boys on the bus," but the bloggers on bandwidth. The invisible primary is hardly invisible; it is, in fact, when most campaigning takes place. And with a 24-hour political press, along with hundreds of political bloggers, the scrutiny during this period in 2008 will be as intense as any month during the old system. A longer "official" primary system is unnecessary.

There's something about this move that might not sit well with Democratic primary voters. The appeal of small-group conversations with concerned citizens, dozens and dozens of "Town Hall" meetings and house parties in which contenders painstakingly build credibility in tiny New England hamlets and corn-belt towns, is real and in a sense legitimate. But if Democrats are going to craft a process that gives their nominee the best real chance to win the White House, maybe it's time we stop considering politics as we'd like it to be, and start thinking about it as is.

It Takes a Weirdo
I don't know if this is for real (I'm thinking not), but I can report that in the not quite four years I've known my wife, I've never seen her this excited about anything. Iowa, here we come!

Meanwhile, in the realm of "this should be a bad joke, but is all too sadly real," the theocrats convened again in Tennessee yesterday. Ed Kilgore at New Donkey drops the hammer (no pun intended) on this foul bunch of hypocrites and seekers after power, who show their true "moral values" by celebrating Tom DeLay, and are as unprincipled as the basest Tammany ward heeler:

[A]side from all the paranoiac (and very un-Christ-like) whining, the big underlying message from Nashville was that reshaping the Supreme Court is necessary to stop the alleged baby-killing, sodomizing, and paganizing that characterizes contemporary America. And there is zero, zero doubt that each and every one of the speakers at Justice Sunday II would completely reverse themselves on every issue related to the Constitution, activist judges, and all the other stuff they blathered about, if the shoe was on the other foot and the judiciary was promoting their own ideology.

Suppose, as a thought experiment, that a future Supreme Court embraced the implicit interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause embedded in the Human Life Amendment (still supported in the last Republican platform): that unborn children are endowed with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Was there a single speaker in Nashville who would not hail such a decision as vindication of a Higher Law that binds all people and all times? I think not.

In all their talk about legislative and democratic prereogatives, and the horrific arrogance of unelected judges, the Justice Sunday crowd is painfully reminiscent of the southern segregations who relied for many decades on Supreme Court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson (the infamous "separate but equal" validation of Jim Crow), and then suddenly re-discovered a populist hostility to the federal judiciary the moment the constitutional winds started blowing in a different direction.
...
I don't accuse today's Cultural Right of a unique political heresy, but I do accuse them of a great and notable streak of dishonesty. They don't give a damn about any of the constitutional and procedural issues they talked about in Nashville; they care about a particular policy outcome. They want to criminalize abortion, criminalize homosexual behavior, and sanction public displays of particular religious traditions. They will pursue those policies through any means available, and they ought to be pushed to the wall to admit it.

Why Grover Can't Govern
There's a sense in which it's hard to blame people for voting Republican. In effect, irresponsible candidates tell voters that "it's your money," and promise to cut taxes without imposing any pain as far as reductions in government services. Granted, you'd think that this has all happened enough times for a "fool me once, shame on you; fool me (many times), shame on me" to have taken hold... but the idea of paying less in taxes while getting more in services certainly has its appeal.

Except that when you have to balance budgets, as many governors and local officials do, the free ride can't last. And the battle between ideologues and public officials eventually is joined:

There are circles in which the ultimate Colorado icon is neither Snowmass Mountain nor Coors beer, but a set of fiscal handcuffs called the Taxpayers' Bill of Rights.

That constitutional cap on state and local spending, imposed in 1992, has been so effective in curbing government growth that tax opponents are making it the centerpiece of a national campaign. Similar measures are headed for the ballot this fall in California and perhaps Ohio, and parallel efforts are under way in more than a dozen other states.

For some, the long-term targets include Washington, where many on the right are troubled by the rivers of red ink that have continued to flow despite Republican rule. "It's the ultimate goal of what we're trying to do," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. "We want constitutional limits on the size of government."

But even as the Colorado measure galvanizes antispending groups elsewhere, it is dividing them at home, prompting a right-on-right fight that is luring outside combatants and drawing blood.

On one side is Gov. Bill Owens, the two-term Republican once promoted by National Review as a conservative of presidential timber. Arguing that the strict provision has forced a fiscal crisis, Mr. Owens is championing a ballot measure that would suspend the limit for five years, allowing the state to spend an additional $3.7 billion. Otherwise, he warns, the cap may be repealed.

On the other side are former allies who call the governor a tax-raising apostate discrediting the law he claims to protect. In addition to Mr. Norquist, they include the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and the former House majority leader, Dick Armey, a leader of an antitax group called FreedomWorks.
...
The stricter Colorado cap does three things: it imposes firm spending caps (which grow only to reflect population and inflation), returns any excess revenues to taxpayers and allows only voters, not legislators, to override the caps.

Both sides agree that the measure reined in the budget. The growth in per capita spending fell to 31 percent in the decade after the cap from 72 percent in the decade before, according to the Independence Institute, a Colorado group that favors it.

Supporters say the cap ignited the subsequent economic boom, with low taxes luring businesses. They also say it kept the state from overspending when flush only to face painful cuts later. "Tabor saved Colorado's fiscal fanny," said Jon Caldara, the institute's president.

But the Bell Policy Center in Denver, an opponent of the law, found sharp reductions in immunizations, mental health services and inspections of day care centers, along with an increase in substandard roads and uninsured children. The center also blamed the cap for reducing access to higher education. "We're taking away the opportunity for people to better their lives," said Wade Buchanan, the center's president.

The Bell Center was the Colorado grantee for the Working Poor Families Project, as the Center for an Urban Future was in New York. They released their report before we did, and much of it focused on the damage TABOR had wreaked on state policies in fields like education and childcare. A state of haves and have-nots, Colorado was at risk of pulling up many of its ladders to self-sufficiency.

I can't remember if the report named Grover Norquist as the intellectual godfather of TABOR, but I'm certainly not surprised that he's taken center stage in this debate. The fact that he's willing to sacrifice Bill Owens, a strong Republican presidential contender before this dustup, shows just how deep he and the activists have gotten. Again and again, when Republican ideologues make it into executive authority they find that the Norquistian solutions--ever-smaller taxation and ever-smaller government--lead to both bad policy and bad politics.

Norquist has never faced a voter, has never had to deal with the difficulties of balancing a budget much less meeting public demand for services in an increasingly complex world. He offers no solutions to the dilemmas that Owens, or Rick Perry in Texas, or Mitch Daniels in Indiana have to deal with--he just calls them names when they don't go his way.

Actually, that's not entirely fair. He does offer a solution: cut services. As he's said many times, Grover's whole goal is to shrink government to the size where one can "drown it in a bathtub". That's what TABOR has forced Colorado officials to do.

But while most voters dislike government in theory, they love it in practice. Much of the south and southwest--the seat of Republican electoral dominance these last 25 years--was built with public investment during the Cold War decades. And even most Republicans don't seem eager to dismantle the social safety net, much less de-fund public schools or do any of the other things on Norquist's wish list. Bill Owens, caught between the ideology and the demands of office, has backed away from

Supply-side dogma is a fundamentally unserious way to go about the public's business. But it makes good politics. Norquist is a great organizer and a great propagandist; it's to the deep misfortune of the country that he puts these skills to use in the service of ruinous ideas.  

And it could get worse:

Conservative frustration with government growth increased with President Bush's first term, which added more than $1 trillion to the national debt. Conservatives once talked of electing their own; they now talk of electing their own and tying their hands.

Stop us before we spend again? "Yes, that's really it," said Mr. Armey, who argues that the pressures to spend, reinforced by lobbyists and contributors, can overwhelm even the firmest conservatives.
...
Another major fight is under way in California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has pushed an antispending provision onto the fall ballot, albeit one seemingly less strict than that of Colorado.

In Maine, a veteran tax opponent, Mary Adams, is gathering signatures to put a spending cap on the ballot next year. And last year, the leader of the Wisconsin Senate, Mary Panzer, a moderate Republican, delayed convening a special session to consider a spending cap. That drew a primary challenge from a conservative rival, Glenn Grothman, who defeated her in what Mr. Norquist calls a watershed moment.

"It's one thing when policy analysts are supporting something," Mr. Norquist said. "It's another when it becomes the kind of thing politicians lose seats over."

Other states where advocates are pushing caps include Arizona, Kansas, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia... his opponents say a defeat for Mr. Owens will send a signal nationwide that voters like spending caps.

Colorado, of course, elected a Democratic Senator and gave the party majorities in both houses of the state legislature last year. While people might "like spending caps," they seem to prefer problem-solving to ideology. The Times article concludes by quoting Gov. Owens as saying, "Their job is to build memberships, keep the base active and convince members that the bad guys are always out to get them. In this case they're wrong." Sounds to me like a man who's more interested in political survival than playing nice with the pressure-group crowd.

Careful What You Wish For
As I've noted here a few times before, I am not a huge Hillary Clinton fan. I don't trust her integrity and I substantially disagree with her politics. I voted for her in her 2000 Senate race because, one, I couldn't stand Rick Lazio and two, I liked the idea of the right-wingers who really hate Hillary waking up with stomach pain for the following six years thinking of her in high office. And I hope she's returned to the Senate for another term next year--and that she serves it out. My stance in the 2008 Democratic primary contest might well be Anyone But Hillary.

For that matter, I'm still hoping she won't run for the top job at all. The ideal outcome in 2006 would be a Hillary victory, but a close one--under 55 percent, running weak outside New York City in a strong Democratic year overall. Today's somewhat surprising development, that Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro will oppose Clinton next year, probably raises the likelihood of this scenario coming to pass--and Pirro is focusing on the Senator's vulnerability:

In an interview, Ms. Pirro made it clear that she would elevate the Senate race into a national political event, as she criticized Mrs. Clinton's rumored presidential ambitions as much as her Senate record for the last four and a half years.

"Hillary Clinton is not running to serve the people of New York," Ms. Pirro said. "We are just a way station in her run for the presidency."

She added: "I think voters will choose the only woman who really wants the job. My full-time is a whole lot better than her part-time."

What I'm not sure about is whether New Yorkers really mind that one of their representatives is considering higher office. Nelson Rockefeller and Mario Cuomo did just fine, despite opponents who raised some of those same questions; in fact, Cuomo only lost after it became clear he'd never run for the White House. Other state pols, like Robert F. Kennedy and John Lindsay, made presidential runs that were popular at home. There's certainly an art to finessing the question, and my political fantasy is that Hillary will somehow screw it up and only be able to save herself by pledging to serve out her term. But Clintons generally do okay finessing questions, and they'll be able to raise a host of other issues to deter the press from focusing exclusively on 2008: Pirro's tax-cheat husband, Bush's job performance, homeland security, Iraq.

I'm also not certain just how Pirro will differentiate herself from Clinton. Both, at this point, are social moderates with hawkish tendencies. That's how any New York pol has to play it, from Schumer to Pataki, which raises the question of what change Pirro can offer. The argument that Hillary has "moved to the center" to position herself for future campaigns might be true (I think it is, though I'd suggest that one can't abandon principles never really held), but it's also of much more interest to pundits than voters--as Bill Clinton himself spectacularly demonstrated. Republicans feared, with much justification, that he was "stealing their issues," but they weren't able to exact a political price for his doing so.

There are a lot of shoes left to drop. And part of me will always want to see Republicans just destroyed for their rotten policies and delusional tactical thinking: the notion that Bill Clinton's old transgressions, in a state where he's still overwhelmingly popular, somehow cancels out Albert Pirro's sleazy doings is wishful thinking and then some. Even so, if Pirro runs hard and loses, but does some damage to Hillary's presidential ambitions, both the state and the country will be better off for it.

"T.O." in "Team"?
I was at the gym late yesterday afternoon and looked up at the TV monitor to see the show with the two blowhards from the Washington Post on ESPN. They spent a long chunk of time talking about the Eagles and the drama around refusenik wideout Terrell Owens. Rich Hoffman, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist who's one of the city's better sports scribblers, had one incredible line that almost knocked me off the elliptical machine: "In Philadelphia, we're not good at championships, but we're great at circuses." He predicted that Owens would get more cheers than boos in the first open-to-the-public practice to be held this morning.

Apparently he was right--and T.O. played it like a champ.

[M]any fans booed the disgruntled All-Pro receiver and some taunted Owens during Wednesday morning's practice at Lehigh University.

But it took just a simple smile and a little interaction for Owens to win them over again.

"This ain't San Francisco," one fan yelled as Owens knelt along the sidelines, listening to the derisive jeers. "You ain't bigger than this team. Shut up and play."

They took their best shots, and scolded Owens for hiring agent Drew Rosenhaus.

Finally, Owens stood up, turned to the crowd, cracked a smile and pumped his left arm up, urging them to make more noise.

The fans suddenly erupted in cheers and the same guy who was riding Owens the loudest started chanting the "T.O." song. Owens flashed a wider grin, nodded his head in approval and walked back toward the field.

It was the first time this summer fans could see Owens practice, and some of the Philly die-hards started lining up at 4 a.m. just to get a glimpse of him running patterns with the NFC champions.

If his play is as good as his showmanship--and it always has been--T.O. should be just fine.

What's Really Happening in Iraq?
Most of the discussions or arguments I've gotten into on the question of Iraq fall into one of two categories: the wisdom of intervening there in the first place, or the success of American counterinsurgency/reconstruction efforts thus far, including how we're doing on the crucial subject of "winning Iraqi hearts and minds." But even accounting for the probably inevitable ethnocentrism of focusing on these things, I'm starting to think we're all really missing the point: what are the long-term prospects for a stable, unified, peaceful and pluralistic Iraq?

The answer, according to this devastating New York Review of Books piece: Not good. The two most likely options might be all-out civil war, or an Iranian puppet state.

Peter Galbraith's article starts off by essentially dismissing the Sunni-led insurgency, the problem Americans most commonly worry about. His conclusion is that just by demographics, the insurgents can't win--there simply aren't enough of them. But neither can they be defeated militarily: facing a somewhat similar resistance from Iraq's Shi'ites, Saddam Hussein couldn't crush them despite a much larger military and a willingness to resort to far more brutal tactics than those we are using.

The core problem (and this should hardly come as a revelation) might be that there's simply no Iraqi national identity. Imagine if we had insisted on Yugoslavia staying together after the fall of Tito. Iraq is Yugoslavia with oil and religious fanatics. They can't even sustain an army.

Building national security institutions is a challenge in a country that does not have a shared national identity. Saddam's army consisted of Sunni Arab officers (with a few exceptions) and Shiite and (until 1991) Kurdish conscripts. Today, the Iraqi military and security services are a mixture of Kurdish peshmerga, rehabilitated Sunni Arab officers from Saddam's army, and Shiite and Sunni Arab recruits. What is little known is that virtually all of the effective fighting units in the new Iraqi military are in fact former Kurdish peshmerga. These units owe no loyalty to Iraq, and, if recalled by the Kurdistan government, they will all go north to fight for Kurdistan.

The Shiites, naturally, want a Shiite military that will be loyal to the new Shiite-dominated government. They have encouraged the Shiite militias— and notably the Badr Brigade—to take over security in the Shiite south, and to integrate themselves into the national military. Neither the Shiites nor the Kurds want the Sunni Arabs to have a significant part in the new Iraqi military or security services. They suspect— with good reason in many cases—that the Sunni Arabs in the military are in fact cooperating with the insurgency. No Kurdish minister in the national government uses Iraqi forces for his personal security, nor will any of them inform the Iraqi authorities of their movements. Instead, they entrust their lives to specially trained peshmerga brought to Baghdad. Many Shiite ministers use the Shiite militias in the same way.

A few months after the Iraqi elections, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad to warn the new Shiite-led government not to purge Sunni Arabs from the police and military. He got a promise, but the government has no intention of keeping on people associated with Saddam's regime. Too many of them have the blood of Shiites or Kurds on their hands, and neither group is in a forgiving mood.

National identity can't be willed into existence. Galbraith's article is replete with anecdotes of Kurds and Shi'ites casually dismissing American-written pledges of fealty to the larger nation-state in favor of more narrowly drawn loyalties.

Then there is the factor of Iranian influence, which has both a geostrategic and religious component. The two dominant Shi'ite political parties are Islamist and enjoy significant support from Iran. In return, they've formally apologized for Iraq's initiation of the 1980-88 war between the two countries and have proposed paying billions in reparations, as well as construction of an oil pipeline between Basra and an Iranian city. The defense ministers of the two nations have also signed an agreement for Iran to train the Iraqi military.

This is presumably driving the Bush administration crazy, but the explanation should be transparent to a bunch of Christians consumed with "sins of the father":

[S]hould the President want to understand why the Shiites have shown so little receptivity to his version of democracy, he need only go back to his father's presidency. On February 15, 1991, the first President Bush called on the Iraqi people and military to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Shiites made the mistake of believing he meant it. Three days after the first Gulf War ended, on March 2, 1991, a Shiite rebellion began in Basra and quickly spread to the southern reaches of Baghdad. Then Saddam counterattacked with great ferocity. Three hundred thousand Shiites ultimately died. Not only did the elder President Bush not help, his administration refused even to hear the pleas of the more and more desperate Shiites. While the elder Bush's behavior may have many explanations, no Shiite I know of sees it as anything other than a calculated plan to have them slaughtered. By contrast, Iran, which backed [the political parties] SCIRI and Dawa and equipped the Badr Brigade, has long been seen as a reliable friend.

Galbraith finishes his dismal assessment by considering the fraught process of writing an Iraqi constitution. Again, the sectarian and ethnic differences play a huge role: austere Shi'ites and tolerant Kurds are not likely to accept each other's worldviews, and the way Americans set the process in motion, each holds effective veto power. While recent news coverage in the U.S. has emphasized the efforts made to engage Sunni Iraqis in the process, the enormous differences between the two parties already at the table suggest that the August 15 deadline for coming up with a draft is highly unrealistic.

In the coming constitutional battle, Kurdistan leaders—and many secular Arab Iraqis—will be drawing the line on three principles: secularism, the rights of women, and federalism. They fear that President Bush will be more interested in meeting the August 15 deadline for a constitution than in its content, and that they will be under pressure to make concessions to the Shiite majority. It may be the ultimate irony that the United States, which, among other reasons, invaded Iraq to help bring liberal democracy to the Middle East, will play a decisive role in establishing its second Shiite Islamic state.

When we went into Iraq, I couldn't totally condemn the thinking: Saddam was a brutal tyrant, one whom America had helped take and hold power in the cynical belief that trading the lives and freedoms of countless Iraqis for stability and Cold War positioning was a smart move for the U.S. Removing him from power, and helping the Iraqis toward peace, self-rule, tolerance and prosperity, would help right the historical balance. My problems were, one, the hypocrisy of an approach that targeted Iraq but not so many other repressive former or current U.S. clients; and two, the sharp fear that the Bush administration would screw up the implementation of the policy as they had most everything else, failing to accomplish the mission while imposing terrible human and economic costs on both countries.

This fear has largely been realized, and the result is starting to look like a disaster of historical significance. Perhaps the best option now is to break up Iraq, allying with Kurdistan while hoping to neutralize Shi'ite Iraq and pacify the Sunni Triangle. Will that have been worth 2,000 dead Americans, who knows how many dead Iraqis, and a cost in the hundreds of billions?

Someone Else's Army
What I think must be unprecedented about the war in Iraq is how disconnected from it most Americans seem to be. While the problems--both political and military--of the conscript army the United States fielded through the Vietnam War are well known and not to be dismissed, I think that this current conflict, the first sustained military deployment since the shift, is bringing to light a whole new set of difficulties. These issues don't pertain to the performance of the armed forces so much as the relationship of the military to society.

So I was glad to see Stanford professor David Kennedy's op-ed in Monday's New York Times, just as an indication that somebody else is thinking about this:

...the United States today has a military force that is extraordinarily lean and lethal, even while it is increasingly separated from the civil society on whose behalf it fights. This is worrisome - for reasons that go well beyond unmet recruiting targets.

One troubling aspect is obvious. By some reckonings, the Pentagon's budget is greater than the military expenditures of all other nations combined. It buys an arsenal of precision weapons for highly trained troops who can lay down a coercive footprint in the world larger and more intimidating than anything history has known. Our leaders tell us that our armed forces seek only just goals, and at the end of the day will be understood as exerting a benign influence. Yet that perspective may not come so easily to those on the receiving end of that supposedly beneficent violence.

But the modern military's disjunction from American society is even more disturbing. Since the time of the ancient Greeks through the American Revolutionary War and well into the 20th century, the obligation to bear arms and the privileges of citizenship have been intimately linked. It was for the sake of that link between service and a full place in society that the founders were so invested in militias and so worried about standing armies, which Samuel Adams warned were "always dangerous to the liberties of the people."
...
...thanks to something that policymakers and academic experts grandly call the "revolution in military affairs," which has wedded the newest electronic and information technologies to the destructive purposes of the second-oldest profession, we now have an active-duty military establishment that is, proportionate to population, about 4 percent of the size of the force that won World War II. And today's military budget is about 4 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to nearly 40 percent during World War II.

The implications are deeply unsettling: history's most potent military force can now be put into the field by a society that scarcely breaks a sweat when it does so. We can now wage war while putting at risk very few of our sons and daughters, none of whom is obliged to serve.

I have a few friends with siblings in the military. None, to my knowledge, have yet been called to serve in Iraq. A few kids I grew up with did pursue careers in the armed forces; I guess one or more of them might have gone or are still there. But what I know about the war, I know from news and second- or third-hand accounts, and it usually all comes with an agenda.

I guess it's possible that the remove from which we perceive the war has contributed to the positive development on the left of opposing the policy but not those charged with carrying it out. No returnee from Iraq is likely to be ostracized or demonized as some Vietnam veterans were. But the isolation of the military community--the veterans and their families--from the larger body politic poses all manner of problems that nobody is yet grappling with. Kennedy nails arguably the biggest when he writes that a wholly professionalized military is "a standing invitation to the kind of military adventurism that the founders correctly feared was the greatest danger of standing armies."

Related to this notion is the fact that, without any generalized call for service or sacrifice, the American public now looks at decisions of war and peace as abstractions more similar to low-income housing or agriculture subsidy policy, directly important to a small chunk of the population but not immediately salient for the rest of us. The immorality of engaging in combat without risk--a different kind of "asymmetrical warfare," in which one civilian population, like Iraq's, risks death and disruption every day while the other grouses about high gas prices--is Kennedy's final point, as he rightly deplores a political state of affairs in which "civilian society's deep and durable consent to the resort to arms" is no longer needed:

[I]t cannot be wise for a democracy to let such an important function grow so far removed from popular participation and accountability. It makes some supremely important things too easy - like dealing out death and destruction to others, and seeking military solutions on the assumption they will be swifter and more cheaply bought than what could be accomplished by the more vexatious business of diplomacy.

The life of a robust democratic society should be strenuous; it should make demands on its citizens when they are asked to engage with issues of life and death. The "revolution in military affairs" has made obsolete the kind of huge army that fought World War II, but a universal duty to service - perhaps in the form of a lottery, or of compulsory national service with military duty as one option among several - would at least ensure that the civilian and military sectors do not become dangerously separate spheres. War is too important to be left either to the generals or the politicians. It must be the people's business.

Does This Mean What I Think It Means?
While everybody is breathlessly poring over what Matt Cooper has to say in this week's Time, I'm thinking that the other newsweekly has the real story of signicance hitting the newstands Monday--and not for what it says, but for what it is.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek is the very well-known, very mainstream journalist who wrote this piece. He's always been, to my memory, as "straight down the middle" as they come in that business. (A Google search revealed accusations of conservative bias, if anything; no less than Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online praised him to the Columbia Journalism Review.) He's not William Safire; he's not Bob Herbert. And he's certainly not "Jeff Gannon" or Sidney Blumenthal (who was a transparently, at times almost embarrassingly liberal while working as a journalist, and was known as such).

But the story he's written, at least to my reading, reads with barely concealed contempt and outrage at Karl Rove... and indeed at the whole m.o. of the Bush administration.

Some prominent administration officials scurried for cover. Traveling in Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had long harbored doubts, disowned the "sixteen words" about Niger that had ended up in Bush's prewar State of the Union speech. So did CIA Director George Tenet, who said they shouldn't have been in the text. But Cheney—who tended never to give an inch on any topic—held firm. And so, therefore, did Rove, who sometimes referred to the vice president as "Leadership." Rove took foreign-policy cues from the pro-war coterie that surrounded the vice president, and was personally and operationally close to Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby.
...
In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam. You are loyal to a fault to your friends, merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details, and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves. You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political—and everyone is fair game.
...
It's unlikely that any White House officials considered that they were doing anything illegal in going after Joe Wilson. [b]Indeed, the line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration[/b]. In the months after 9/11, the Republican National Committee, a part of Rove's empire, had sent out a fund-raising letter that showed the president aboard Air Force One in the hours after the attack. Democrats howled, but that was the Bush Rove was selling in the re-election campaign: commander in chief. Now Wilson was getting in the way of that glorious story, essentially accusing the administration of having blundered or lied the country into war.

... Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was sent out to trash the Wilson op-ed. "Zero, nada, nothing new here," he said. Then, on a long Bush trip to Africa, Fleischer and Bartlett prompted clusters of reporters to look into the bureaucratic origins of the Wilson trip. How did the spin doctors know to cast that lure? One possible explanation: some aides may have read the State Department intel memo, which Powell had brought with him aboard Air Force One.

Meanwhile, in transatlantic secure phone calls, the message machinery focused on a crucial topic: who should carry the freight on the following Sunday's talk shows? The message: protect Cheney by explaining that he had had nothing to do with sending Wilson to Niger, and dismiss the yellowcake issue. Powell was ruled out. He wasn't a team player, as he had proved by his dismissive comments about the "sixteen words."Donald Rumsfeld was pressed into duty, as was Condi Rice, the ultimate good soldier. She was on the Africa trip with the president, though, and wouldn't be getting back until Saturday night. To allow her to prepare on the long flight home to D.C., White House officials assembled a briefing book, which they faxed to the Bush entourage in Africa. The book was primarily prepared by her National Security Council staff. It contained classified information—perhaps including all or part of the memo from State. The entire binder was labeled TOP SECRET.

All emphases mine.

The whole thing is remarkable. He's exposing things the White House badly wants kept quiet--most notably, the culture John DiIulio talked about when he told Ron Susskind:

What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. [They] consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."

This was by the White House Director for Faith-based Initiatives, mind you, not some left-winger blogger or Democratic operative. (He later recanted; the theory is that Rove left a figurative--or not--horse's head in his bed. Susskind's next Bush administration collaborator, ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, told much the same story in his memoir.)

Remember--I'm not talking about me here. I'm not even saying that everything Fineman writes here is true. (How would I know?) I'm saying that the fact Fineman would write such a piece suggests to me one of two things:

1) His own personal outrage at Rove, or anger at the treatment of his journalistic colleagues, has led him to a potentially career-ending mistake. If Rove survives--hell, maybe just if Bush survives (which I'm sure he will)--Fineman will never get a phone call to a Republican returned for the rest of his career. That he did this under the Newsweek aegis, no less, makes it quite possible that the magazine will force him out to ease potential White House retaliation.

2) Fineman is fairly sure that what looks like spleen on his part today will in fact be conventional wisdom tomorrow--and he wants to be the Woodward of this story, the prescient and dogged scribbler who told the world the truth.

Another piece of speculation: given the detail of what he's been told--the briefing book for Rice, the conclusion that the pushback against Wilson came from Cheney--he pretty much has to have a very inside source. The discussion of who would go on the talk shows is not something they did in front of the press corps.

Either way, this is a turning point.

Party over Country
I haven't written here yet about the Plame/Rove imbroglio, except indirectly through the entry about Judith Miller last week. Trust me, it's not for lack of thinking about it or reading about it. I've gone from wild hope to despair to a kind of numb passivity. At this point, I've been disappointed too many times by scandals that should have brought down the whole Bush house of cards, but haven't: Enron and Halliburton, fixed intelligence around the Iraq War, missing WMD, coercive tactics and administration lies around the Medicare prescription benefit, propaganda, bribed columnists and "Jeff Gannon"... it goes on and on.

The outing of Valerie Plame, coming as it did in response to the exposure of the Niger/yellowcake lie used to justify the Iraq War, always struck me as the worst one, the one that even Republicans couldn't really spin away. Obviously, I was wrong about this just as I've been wrong every time I thought the American people would finally say "No more." There are no universally accepted facts and explanations any longer; there's no shame on the part of the right wingers, and the harder they're pushed--Cheney, DeLay, Norquist and Rove, four of the five architects of the modern Republican Party (Dobson is #5; he's just a bigot), are now under ethical clouds of differing shades and sizes--the more viciously and desperately they'll fight back. Sadly, their followers put narrow party interests ahead of the national interest almost every time.

My favorite of all the attack lines tried out by the RNC and spokespeople this week was that this investigation is "a partisan issue." To them, it is; others might see things differently.

Following the September 11 attacks, Democratic leaders, and the large bulk of Democratic voters, stood staunchly behind a president most of them believed wasn't even legitimate. When Bush made his speech to the nation on Sept. 20, 2001, the Democratic leadership for the first time ever declined to use their airtime afterward. Al Gore, who had won a plurality of votes ten months earlier, went public to salute Bush as "my president." One lone Democratic House member, out of about 210, voted against authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan. Every Democratic Senator, if my memory holds, supported the use of force against the Taliban. The PATRIOT Act was also passed on near-unanimous votes, with only the principled, partially process-based dissent of Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). (Later, of course, significant numbers from both parties would sound a different tune about passing complex legislation hugely expanding government powers, that most hadn't even read.)

Even in the Iraq debate some 16 months later, I think most of the Democrats who supported the use of force ultimately were saying: We trust the President to provide for the national defense. Some felt differently, to be sure; they'd seen how triple amputee and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland had been slimed and smeared in his Georgia Senate race, and read with dismay statements like Andy Card's explicitly comparing the selling of the war to marketing efforts for new product rollout. But many--including right-wing bugaboos Kerry and Clinton--authorized force with the explicit rationale that they trusted the President to use it prudently.

Now imagine that Al Gore had been awarded the presidency, had ignored all the warning signs--including the memo dated 36 days before the attack, titled "bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."--and had suffered the catastrophe. Further suppose that he'd sat in that classroom, seemingly dazed, for long minutes after getting word, and that he'd flown around the country, delegating on the ground authority to Vice-President Lieberman, and projected a general attitude of uncertainty on the terrible day.

How long would it have taken for Tom DeLay to call for impeaching President Gore? Would Rush Limbaugh have said "We stand with our president," or would he have fulminated in rage against the Gore Administration's disgraceful dereliction of its sworn duty to protect the country? Would FOX News--and its star commentators Hannity and O'Reilly--have pledged support for the president, or joined DeLay in calling for his scalp?

What would Karl Rove have advised his Republican clients to do?

I don't consider myself a hyper-partisan. I really believe there are "good Republicans"--and I positively know there are "bad Democrats." No side has a monopoly on good intentions or even good ideas.

But it's clear to me that one party constantly puts the pursuit, retention and usage of power ahead of every other consideration, up to and including national security and the public interest. And it's not the one I'm registered with.