Virginia Governor Kaine

There's a whole lot of talk that Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia is on a VERY short list of names to be Sen. Obama's running mate. UVA political scientist of oft-seen talking head Larry Sabato has a great analysis of Kaine's pluses and minuses.

Uganda

Powerful stories abound about the civil war that has taken place in Uganda, and the use of child soldiers in the fight.

Documentary that has really raised awareness: Invisible Children. Official movie site.

The Washington Post has a two-day article series on the aftermath of the war and the return of former soldiers to their old lives. Great videos and website tag-along.

Wealth

Interesting article from the WSJ:

In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data.
Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years. The group's share of the tax burden has risen, though not as quickly as its share of income.

Obama stuff

When you see Bob "The Prince of Darkness" Novak driving down the streets of DC in his drop-top black Corvette, get the hell out of the way! But when you see his column in the paper, read it! This column is particularly interesting: for all of Obama's overseas hype and his strong campaign abilities, he really isn't blowing McCain away. And that may be all McCain needs to back into the White House.
From the Washington Post.

Interesting article on Obama's efforts to increase the black vote. I applaud the effort, but I hope he doesn't spend too many valuable resources trying to win southern states. He should definitely shoot for Virginia, but going after the Deep South may be a pipe dream. Best to leave the long term efforts, me thinks, to Dean and the 50 state strategy.

WP blog entry: 30% increase of black vote NOT enough for Obama to win the South.

Daydream Believers

Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power by Fred Kaplan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Daydream Believers, by Kaplan, was a FANTASTIC book. Interesting, well written, and important, Kaplan offers much more than the title led me to believe. Of course, it is another book on the mistakes of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, particularly regarding Iraq, but the book is grander than that. The best parts: 1) fascinating overview of about a half century of US military strategy (this is what makes the book so strong); 2) necessary look at the totality of the Bush foreign policy, rather than just a focus on Iraq; 3) interesting look at America’s efforts to build a missile defense system; 4) the mistakes of the Democratic Party in failing to offer a realistic alternative to the current Administration’s foreign policy; 5) and a fine statement on the need for a foreign policy that properly balances realism/national interests, with the legitimate pursuit of high minded goals for the world.
If I have to find a bad part, I guess some of the information contained here is a bit redundant after all that has been said by those critiquing the Bush mistakes, particularly on Iraq. But those mistakes need repeating. Not that the repetition will prevent their repeat: we already had Vietnam. Still, it doesn’t hurt to tread over the topic.



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Three good news sources regarding Iraq

From the US Defense Department:

An Iraqi organization tasked with consolidating and coordinating that country’s counterterrorism effort is now capable of conducting unilateral missions, a U.S. military official said yesterday.

“[The Iraqi National Counterterrorism Force’s] primary mission is to synchronize and focus all elements of Iraqi national power to defeat terrorism here in Iraq,” U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Simeon Trombitas, director of the Iraqi National Counterterrorism Force Transition Team, told online journalist and bloggers.

The Iraqi unit was formed in 2003 and has since been trained by U.S. Special Forces soldiers, Trombitas said.

While U.S. forces still train with the specialized Iraqi force and conduct missions with the Iraqis, they’re now capable of running their own missions with limited U.S. help, he said.

“They’re comfortable, at this point in time, doing unilateral operations, even without some of our enablers,” Trombitas explained. “I think that they’re well on the road to conducting the majority of their operations.”

From the New York Times:

An American agency monitoring reconstruction in Iraq said Friday that oil exports through Iraq’s northern pipeline rose more than tenfold over the past year, citing a sharp drop in attacks on the pipeline and new infrastructure built to protect it.

The agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said in a report for release on Saturday that there had been no insurgent attacks on the pipeline, which exports crude oil from northern Iraq to Turkey, since the American infrastructure project began last July.

As a result, crude oil exports from Iraq’s north rose from an average of 1 million barrels a month to more than 13 million, the report said. Nearly all of the Iraqi government’s revenue comes from oil exports, so the increased flow has direct implications for people here. The increased exports were worth $8 billion, the report said.

To protect the pipeline, berms, fences and guardhouses were built, and American soldiers patrol its 60-mile length. Iraqi guards monitor its perimeter; Iraq’s government has promised to commit almost 800 Iraqi soldiers to take over for the American patrols.

Ginger M. Cruz, the deputy inspector general, said the overall decline in violence in Iraq had helped account for the $34 million project’s success. The rise in oil exports marked a sharp turnaround from earlier years, when Sunni Arab insurgents staged relentless attacks on the pipeline, often stopping the flow of oil.

The supply of crude oil has been flowing to the key northern Baiji refinery, which has helped increase the production of electricity, the report said.

One final positive piece of news from AP:

The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

American Revolution

The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 by Robert Middlekauff

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Thorough. Fine one-book overview of theories and events of the American Revolution. There are much better books that focus on specific events and theories, but this covers most of the basics well. It's supposedly a re-release of an older book, but there isn't too much new scholarship included in it. Perhaps a shame as there have been some great books published over the past 10+ years on the Revolution.


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Charles in Charge

Great comment by Charles Blow with the NYTimes:

Can you hear that? I can. It’s the sound of political action committees and party extremists sharpening their wedge issues and setting the timers on their bombshells. The fall’s battle is looming. It’s going to get ugly.

Once again they’ll cast the opposition as binary caricatures to rally their bases, swing the independents and capture the defectors.

The left will be reduced to fist-bumping blacks and intellectual elites with gun aversions and gay agendas. An amoral, tail-tucking lot that coddles criminals, raises taxes and has gone Chicken Little over global warming.

The right will be lambasted as ultra-conservative cretins who want to conflate the Constitution and the Bible, are pro-life before birth and pro-death after trial and blindly follow war-hungry fear-mongers who obsess over “terrorists” like a Tootsie Roll commercial.

And, never the twain shall meet. Left or right? That narrow view is just wrong. Americans are much more complex. Sadly, battle cries drown out nuance in campaigns.

So, in these relative calm days of summer, with Barack Obama on his way back from a rock-star tour of the other side of the pond and John McCain shadowboxing the media stateside, let’s pause and recognize that Americans overwhelmingly agree on many of the big issues and are changing their minds on others. It’s just that those shifting views, when taken as a whole, don’t neatly line up with either party’s platform.

Here are a few examples, according to Gallup polls taken over the last eight years:

• Six in 10 Americans believe that conservation should be emphasized to solve the energy problem, 7 in 10 favor the death penalty for murder and don’t want to ban the sale of handguns, and 8 in 10 believe in God but also believe that abortion should be legal, at least under certain circumstances.

• Nearly half now believe that we are unlikely to win the war in Iraq and that the war has made us less safe from terrorism.

• An increasing number of people believe that religion as a whole is losing its influence on American life and an increasing number want it to have less influence.

• While more bemoan the worsening state of moral values in the country, we are increasingly shifting our opinion on what is morally acceptable. Now most believe that getting divorced, engaging in premarital sex and having babies outside of marriage are morally acceptable. Nearly half also say that gay relationships are morally acceptable.

Remember this when the attack ads start up and the divisive rhetoric starts to bore into our brains. Remember that campaigns are not just about the people on the placards but about parties and power, and that the wizards behind the curtains specialize in amplifying differences that stoke our fears. Remember, and resist.

Smoking rates continue to decline

From Gallup: The percentage of U.S. adults saying they smoked cigarettes in the past week, now 21%, is similar to what Gallup found in 2007. However, it represents a decline from earlier this decade, when between 22% and 28% said they smoked, and is among the lowest figures Gallup has recorded in more than six decades of polling on tobacco use in America.

The American Voter Revisited

One of the true classics of political science, the American Voter, has gotten a face-lift. One of the authors, William Jacoby, was a professor of mine back in the day. From the Washington Post:

So a bunch of academics decides to revisit one of the defining books of modern American politics, a 1960 tome on the electorate. They spend years comparing interviews with voting-age Americans from 2000 and 2004 to what Americans said during elections in the 1950s. The academics' question: How much has the American voter changed over the past 50 years?

Their conclusion -- that the voter is pretty much the same dismally ill-informed creature he was back then -- continues a decades-long debate about whether Americans are as clueless as they sound.

Reader, before you send that outraged e-mail, consider that you may be an exception. You, of course, are endlessly fascinated by the debate over domestic wiretapping, but it's possible your neighbors think FISA is a hybrid vehicle. In fact, it's quite possible your neighbors are Republicans only because that's what their parents were, and ditto for the Democrats across the street. They couldn't even mumble a passable definition of "liberal" or "conservative."

"You could get depressed," says the University of Iowa's Michael Lewis-Beck, one of the political scientists who wrote "The American Voter Revisited," released last month and inspired by 1960's "The American Voter."

The OTHER War

Regarding Afghanistan, from the CS Monitor:

The success of the surge of American troops in Iraq is putting pressure anew on the Pentagon to build a surge plan to counter a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. But experts warn that it will take more than just additional troops to turn things around there.

US military officials are scrambling to devise a plan to send as many as three brigades to Afghanistan by next year, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates saying last week that he would send more forces "sooner rather than later." Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain have in the past week voiced support for an Afghanistan surge, with Senator Obama, who just visited the country, calling the requirements there "precarious and urgent."

But a surge for Afghanistan, analysts say, must also recognize that the insurgency there – as well as the NATO command structure – is not like that in Iraq. And without a new strategy, the deployment of more forces won't mean much, they say.

"Afghanistan is not Iraq, and you cannot just template Iraq's solutions onto Afghanistan's problems," says Fred Kagan, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who played a direct role in shaping President Bush's surge strategy for Iraq in late 2006. The surge for Afghanistan, like the one implemented for Iraq last year, must not only mean more forces but also a proper counterinsurgency strategy that defeats the insurgency by isolating insurgents from the population, Mr. Kagan says.

The NATO-led mission in Afghanistan had in many ways failed to recognize that the violence amounted to an insurgency, and it has struggled to get its arms around the fight. Now, recognition is increasing that the violence must be countered with a proper counterinsurgency strategy, but there are no simple solutions. Mounting such a strategy will be challenging in Afghanistan, where the NATO-led mission has a labyrinthine command structure made up of 40 countries with divergent political and military views. In Iraq, one top American commander essentially calls the shots.

Novak

If Obama wanted any sign that he did great on his trip to the Middle East, he need look no further than Robert Novak:

The Afghanistan-Iraq segment of Sen. Barack Obama's foreign trip was an unqualified success. He committed no blunder as Republicans had hoped he would, and had the good luck to play into the Iraqi government's negotiations for a U.S. treaty—making it seem as though the Iraqis endorsed his withdrawal plans. The visit increased Republican defeatism and Democratic triumphalism.

Kaplan on Obama and McCain on Iraq

Great critique of both Obama and McCain and their speeches on Iraq and Afghanistan.
From Slate.

Obama

I read the New Yorker article. It is interesting (and long). The focus is on Obama's Chicago days, which is an important time for him - and America. The changing dynamics of campaigning in inner-cities is worth reading about (pinstripe patronage).

The New Yorker cover is crazy funny, in a "let's make a joke out of something that everyone who doesn't read the New Yorker (99.998% of America) will not realize is a joke" kind of way. And, really, those are the best kinds of jokes, right? RIGHT?!?

Another interesting article comes from Newsweek, and it's about Obama's religious views. Spoiler alert: he's not a radical Muslim!

Mandela

Fantastic article about an extraordinary man.
Nelson Mandela turns 90.
READ IT!

Rush

Americans find themselves in three groups regarding Rush Limbaugh.
1) Love him.
2) Hate him.
3) Find him irrelevant to their day to day existences. (The largest group by far.)
However, for those in the first and second groups, here's an interesting and lengthy article on El Rushbo from the NYTimes Magazine.
And here's an interesting response on the problems of access.

How Turks view the US

Having spent two wonderful weeks in the beautiful Republic of Turkey, I sure hope these numbers improve in time.
From Gallup:

Motives behind the attack on the U.S. consulate Wednesday in Istanbul, Turkey, are still unknown, but the terrorist act, allegedly carried out by several Turkish nationals, emphasizes the negative image U.S. leadership has in Turkey and elsewhere around the globe.
Turks' low approval rating of U.S. leadership provides evidence of the strain the Iraq war and U.S. reluctance to assist Turkey's fight against Kurdish rebels have placed on relations between the two longtime allies. Further reflecting the situation at the time of the survey, majorities of Turks also say they dislike President Bush and perceive the United States as hostile to their country.

Nixon

Richard M. Nixon: The American Presidents Series: The 37th President, 1969-1974 by Elizabeth Drew

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Great, short book on Tricky Dick. He was a nut. A brilliant nut. But a nut nonetheless.


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