Category: Politics

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[kremlinology]

It’s a very long way to the next presidential election, or even the first primaries, so I haven’t been blogging a lot about the various bumps and ruffles in the polls. But TPM Café points to an interesting Gallup poll that shows Obama and Clinton in a dead heat, both when paired directly and when put in the pack with all the other candidates1.

This goes against every poll we’ve seen so far, all of which have put Hillary in the lead, and I see it as a hopeful sign. I am not a Clinton hater — I respect her work in the Senate — but I have a variety of reasons to think she’s the least compelling of the leading Dems. She’s the most conservative, for one thing, with a history of DLC-style triangulation, and I think that was a great strategy back in the early nineties. With the Bush disaster, though, I think we have a real opening for a new progressivism in America, and I would hate to see that frittered away on compromise and caution. I am also uncomfortable with the big-money aspect of her campaign and her ties to all the people who have kept Democrats losing for years. Her refusal to admit she was wrong on her Iraq vote is disheartening, and her political hedging around the issue is depressing to watch. And I am simply bothered by the idea of having two families rule America for 28 years, which is what we’d get if Hillary were to win in ’08 and ’12.

That said, any of the Democratic front-runners, including non-candidate Gore, would be just fine with me as president. I appreciate that Edwards has apologized for his vote on the war and called the War on Terror a nonsensical idea, I like that his talk on healthcare is serious, and I appreciate his emphasis on poverty issues. Obama is impressive in his whole political approach, he made his name as an anti-poverty activist, and he had the good sense to be against the war from the start — plus he has the advantage of beating every GOP candidate in early polls. Hillary is bright, capable, immensely knowledgeable about healthcare, and a sophisticated political fighter. And Al Gore has been right about so many things for so long that I wish we could just install him as president and beg him to fix everything that’s broken.

So if Hillary wins the nomination, I can live with that. But I want this to be a race. This is an extraordinarily rich Democratic field, and I would hate to see it go to the default candidate without a struggle. I certainly don’t want to see the party tear itself apart, but a vigorous debate and real passion on the ground would be great.
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1.The matchups that include all the declared Dem candidates also include Al Gore, so an interesting question is where Gore’s support goes if he doesn’t run. Recent polls gave Hillary a 7-point bump and Barack getting just 4 points from a Gorectomy. But then, that poll also gives Clinton a 12-point lead.

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[our wiccan defenders]

I’m not nearly as much of a follower of Wiccan culture and news as I was back when I was dating T, but I’m still pleased to learn that the Wiccan pentacle has been added to the list of approved symbols for government-issue tombstones for fallen soldiers. Religious freedom is a founding principle of our nation, and our soldiers who give their lives in defense of that principle deserve to have it recognized when they are laid to rest. (Via BoingBoing.)

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[the truth]

Nations and individuals do not grow weaker by confronting the truth. They grow weaker by avoiding it and coming to believe their own evasions.

So concludes Jacob Weisberg in a Slate article on The Four Unspeakable Truths about Iraq. It’s a good article about the politics of the Iraq war, and it’s good advice generally — advice I’m trying to take in my own life.

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[how black is obama?]

I’m still not sure, but in his answer to that question in Selma, Alabama, he demonstrates just how impressive he can be in winning people over by showing how fates and destinies and political ideals that seem separate or even opposed are actually intertwined.

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[taxing]

Look at the picture to the left. This image appears at the top of the Internal Revenue Service’s page for individual taxpayers, and I find it completely baffling. It’s apparently some kind of fiendishly happy interracial picnic, but what’s especially creepy is that these people appear to have been ripped from reality and forced to hover over fake grass and a fake sky that look like they were designed to be Windows 98 backgrounds.

What this has to do with individual tax-paying is unclear, except perhaps to imply that all happiness is, in the eyes of the IRS, artificial, inscrutable and untrustworthy.

I bring this up because it looks like I’m about to have a much more intimate relationship with the IRS — as if I were their token black friend, feeling uncomfortable at the creepy space picnic.

It turns out that a lot of citizens and green-card holders who work for foreign governments in the US haven’t been filing their taxes, or have been filing them incorrectly, and suddenly the IRS has decided to fuck with all of us. For some of my colleagues who have simply never filed, this will be a major financial disaster; for those who filed but did it incorrectly, it will merely hurt a lot. (I will not go into detail about myself; I am seeing a lawyer this afternoon.)

What really pisses me off about all of this is that the IRS clearly has the ability to communicate with all the foreign missions in the US — everyone seems to have gotten the news about this extension of the settlement initiative deadline — but chose to wait until this point to bother. They could’ve made some effort to inform mission staff, as we were hired and registered with the State Department, of what our rather unusual tax obligations are (according to these materials, we’re supposed to list our pay as wages but also pay the self-employment tax). They could’ve made some effort to publicize the settlement initiative when they came up with it. They could’ve designed the settlement initiative such that it would only impose the change moving forward. But no, the IRS stalks like a mugger, and I feel like I’ve been mugged by my own government.

I’m conflicted about that. I believe in taxes for services, and I think Jenny and I make enough that we should be taxed pretty substantially. On the other hand, I loathe the complexity of our tax system and the arbitrary neglect and nastiness with which it’s enforced, I hate the big tax cuts for the wealthy in recent years, and I don’t at all like what the government is spending the money on these days. (When our guys kidnap Iranian diplomats in Erbil and hold them hostage without any legal process, it’s my taxes that help pay the salaries of the kidnappers. Does that make me guilty of financing terrorism? I wonder if there’s any criminal liability there.) Still, this is helping me to understand how terrifying, financially damaging run-ins with regulatory agencies managed to turn many Americans against liberal big-government programs.

Once this is all settled, I will almost certainly have less money. Will the Korean government help us out? I sincerely doubt it, given their own budget troubles. Do I make a lot less money than I thought I did? Yeah, pretty much. Does it suck? Some, but we’ll get by. (To put it in perspective, a friend of ours recently got walloped by a $140,000 medical bill, with no one but himself to pay it. Which leads me to our desperate need for health care reform, but that’s another rant.)

There’s also a certain martyr’s masochistic pleasure in knowing that I too have been personally screwed by the Bush adminitration — not just obliquely, by having my nation’s reputation destroyed, its treasure wasted, its morals compromised, its infrastructure neglected, and so forth, but directly, like Katrina victims and National Guardsmen (only less so). It’s like Bush wants to make sure he’s crapped on absolutely everybody’s lawn before he leaves office. Lucky for him, he can check mine off the list.

And I don’t even have a lawn. Thanks to Team Dubya, it’ll be a few more years until I can afford one.

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[whaddaya know?]

So the early report is that a deal has been reached with North Korea: energy aid in exchange for steps toward disarmament.

It’s very preliminary still, and this whole thing could collapse over a North Korean demand for more energy than the other five powers are willing to give, or, more likely, over shifting North Korean positions on what disarmament steps they will take and when.

It will be interesting to see, as the details emerge, where exactly this leaves the Bush administration in terms of its North Korea policy. Did the hard line work? Were the Bushies right all along to toss the Agreed Framework over North Korea’s dabbling with uranium? Were they right to insist on talking only through the six-party framework rather than one on one?

The last question is the easiest to answer: No. The North Koreans have proved far more willing to compromise since Chris Hill, our lead negotiator, started talking one-on-one with the North Koreans (albeit in a format that the Bush administration, never sticklers for reality, continue to insist doesn’t qualify as one on one). As for the rest of it, let’s keep in mind that we’re now asking North Korea to roll back its plutonium-bomb developments, which wouldn’t exist if not for the collapse of the Agreed Framework.

There is no indication that the central problem of a poor, hostile, dictatorial, aggressively criminal North Korea has been solved. Still, if we’re all stepping back from the brink of nuclear war, that’s good.

For more on North Korea, check out Richard Bernstein in the New York Review, who notes that back in the early Clinton years, conventional wisdom had it that the communist regime in North Korea would wither and collapse like so many others had in Central and Eastern Europe. At this point, I think a more realistic model is that of China and Vietnam, where the Communist Party has maintained control while transforming into something new and pro-capitalist. And the road to such a transformation is through engagement, not isolation.

The Kim dynasty seems unlikely to collapse through internal decay, though one never knows. And even if it did, that would hardly be the end of our troubles: a headless state full of fanatical militants with no food is not a pretty prospect for any of its neighbors. Only engagement has any chance of creating a North Korea that can join with South Korea to become a prosperous, peaceful Korea.

Update: It turns out that South Korea’s lead negotiator is Chun Yung-woo, with whom I had the pleasure of working closely on a number of occasions when he was Deputy Permanent Representative at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. In my experience, he was extremely intelligent, incisive, charismatic and tough-minded — ideal for his current role, really. Should an accord be signed, I will have to send him a note of congratulations.


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[the terrible power of blinkies]

So have you heard about the bizarre panic over a guerrilla marketing campaign for Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF)? Looks like they hired a couple of guys to scatter around Boston blinkies depicting one of the Mooninites flipping the bird, and this led to a major bomb scare.

After the two artists were arraigned, they gave a hilarious press conference at which, on national television, they insisted on talking about hairstyles from the seventies.

I do recognize that these ads were genuinely scary to a lot of people and that the city of Boston spent a lot of money making sure they weren’t bombs (Ted Turner has promised to cover the expense). How do we know that terrorists won’t use some goofy design as cover for their deadly devices?

On the other hand, this incident points out the absurdity of living in constant fear of terrorist attacks that happen only rarely, and typically in ways that are meant to elude detection until it’s too late. While Boston’s finest spent the day cleaning up glorified Lite-Brites that were intended to sell a TV show, how many containers came through our ports without any oversight at all? How many illegal guns crossed state lines?

And more importantly, how many terrorist attacks have actually been thwarted by people reporting the glaringly obvious? I know that if I see something, I’m supposed to say something, but is that helping? The only case I can think of is that of Richard Reed, who tried to light his foot on fire in an airplane full of people.

In the meantime, this is probably a good moment for my friends who make blinkies and throwies to lay low. Of course, knowing these particular folks, they’re probably already working out schemes to send New York into utter panic over little flashing doohickeys.

And it should be noted that the Boston response is not the only one possible. In Seattle, the incident failed to cause panic. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“To us, they’re so obviously not suspicious,” said King County sheriff’s spokesman John Urquhart. “They’re not suspicious devices or packages. We don’t consider them dangerous.”

Duh.

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[in the pooper]

From a Newsweek poll:

The president’s approval ratings are at their lowest point in the poll’s history — 30 percent — and more than half the country (58 percent) say they wish the Bush presidency were simply over, a sentiment that is almost unanimous among Democrats (86 percent), and is shared by a clear majority (59 percent) of independents and even one in five (21 percent) Republicans. Half (49 percent) of all registered voters would rather see a Democrat elected president in 2008, compared to just 28 percent who’d prefer the GOP to remain in the White House.

The deep numbers paint a similarly grim picture.

Can’t we just be done already? Can’t Bush and Cheney acknowledge their failure, step aside and let President Pelosi handle things until 2009?