— Stick to Christian side hugs.

— The suburbanization and reurbanization of Mt Vernon Square in DC.

— Sarah Palin parking lot.

— Earth heading for six degrees of warming.

— The walking paths of Brasilia.

— I think it probably is too late to pull the plug on Ben Bernanke’s renomination but it’s not at all too late for Senators to give him a hard time about why the Fed isn’t doing more to bring unemployment down.

— Will India be the world’s largest economy by 2109.

I don’t know what made Girls think it would be a good idea to poach the title “Lust for Life” from Iggy Pop but it’s a good song.

The US will announce a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions before next month’s UN climate summit, according to a White House official.

The target is expected to be in line with figures contained in legislation before the Senate – a reduction of about 17-20% from 2005 levels by 2020.

This is a reminder of two sobering realities about climate change. One is that this kind of target is, by most accounts, pretty grossly inadequate. The other is that by all accounts it will be extremely difficult to get the United States Senate to agree to even doing this much.

This meant that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity?

For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.

I think this is all pretty much right. And as Douthat goes on to argue, there are a number of right-of-center policy wonks who’ve tried to articulate some kind of meaningful response to the nation’s problems, only to be ignored. But is he right that “there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism?” I’d like to think he is. But it also seems to me that going all the way back to the rise of George W. Bush in 1999 we’ve seen the conservative movement tending to fetishize stupidity and put forward the notion that there’s something actually un-American about being thoughtful, having respect for scholarship, or incorporating any kind of nuance into your discussion.

9/11 served to intensify this and for a while turned it into a mainstream attitude. The idea that the country was just kind of screwed to have a dim bulb in office amidst a national crisis was too much to handle, so instead The New York Times started running articles saying “many Democrats who once dismissed Mr. Bush as too naive and too dependent on advisers to steer the United States through an international crisis are now praising his and his advisers’ performance. Some are even privately expressing satisfaction that Mr. Gore, who tried to make his foreign affairs experience an issue in the campaign, did not win.” That moment has, fortunately, waned somewhat in the mainstream. But not, I think, in the conservative movement.

Back in October, David Obey floated the radical idea that war spending in Afghanistan should be put in a “normal” budgetary context and put in the same fiscal constraints as health reform. Today he’s taken that idea one step further and said an escalation in Afghanistan should be paid for via a “war surtax” on high-income households.

It’ll be interesting to see how far he goes with this. Does he put together a bloc of progressive legislators who say they’ll only back a tax-financed version of the war? Would any Blue Dog budget balancers join such a group?

American troops watch President Barack Obama in South Korea (White House photo)

James Fallows has a very interesting five-part series of posts (one, two, three, four, five) making the case that the U.S. media has been unfair in its portrayals of Barack Obama’s trip to China and that things actually went considerably better than the chatterers in DC would have you know.

He makes a strong case, but it’s difficult to get around the point that it’s hard to see why the President would fly to China unless the U.S. and Chinese foreign ministries already had some serious agreements ready to sign. There wasn’t a major multilateral conference in China that Obama had to attend. China’s not a longstanding American ally that gets a courtesy call just to say “hi.” If China and the United States weren’t prepared to announce major breakthroughs on major issues, that’s fine, but then why not save the trip for some future date when the breakthroughs are ready? There are worse things than a big trip that doesn’t end up with any key takeaways—the Bush administration appeared to have reached a one-sided nuclear deal with India a few years ago merely because they didn’t want to leave a presidential trip to India empty-handed—but it’s bound to leave people puzzled. At the end of the day, being president is a very busy job . . . what’s the need for superfluous trips?  

In case you had any doubts about the need to reform college football’s post-season, note that the BCS has hired Ari Fleischer to help make the case against change:

Ari Fleischer Communications, a sports public relations firm headed by the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, has been hired by BCS officials to help remodel the tattered image of college football’s postseason system.

BCS executive director Bill Hancock, promoted to the newly recreated position early this week, announced the hiring of Fleischer’s company Saturday.

Hancock said in a statement the goal of the hiring was to help highlight the positive aspects of the BCS, which he called the best way to match college football’s top two teams, while preserving the bowl system.

People with a strong case to make don’t hire a guy who’s primarily known for being a huge liar.

Barack Obama came into office promising reform of the system but there’s been no action. The American people are getting tired of this dithering and demand action. Surely the Fleischer hiring should spur the White House’s competitive instincts.

This morning at the gym I listened to an excellent Planet Money podcast about why getting an MRI scan costs so much more in the United States than it does in Japan. It turns out to be a bit hard to say. This is clearly related to the fact that we have more of the very fanciest MRI machines, but it doesn’t seem to be all that tightly related and it’s not entirely clear in what direction the causation runs.

This is important because the biggest reason American health care is more expensive than what you see in other OECD countries is that we pay higher prices for basically the same stuff. In some pockets of health care, this gives us a clear edge in the availability of certain kinds of advanced treatments. The high prices we pay both helps fund R&D efforts and also means that if you’re going to rush something new to one market, you want it to be our market. But it doesn’t, as a whole, seem to have any obvious benefit in terms of health outcomes in part because the most valuable health care interventions (give antibiotics to kids with infections instead of letting them die) aren’t especially expensive or high tech.

Sarah Palin recently explained that Israel’s illegal settlements should be expanded “because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” In my own critique of that statement I focused on the weird theory that population growth requires territorial expansion (almost every country’s population is growing, after all) but she also seemed to articulate the view that Jewish immigration to Israel is about to accelerate. I wrote that off as possibly poor wording, but Jeffrey Goldberg had some questions:

“More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel”? Who, exactly? Is this her analysis of Jewish demography? Is there a sudden upsurge in Zionist sentiment among American Jews, the only sizable Jewish community left outside of Israel? Or is this an indication that Palin buys into creepy End-Times thinking, in which the ingathering of the Jews, and their mass death, presage the return of Christ? Inquiring minds want to know.

This story about Palin’s meeting with Billy and Franklin Graham tends to bolster the End-Times possibility:

The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate told Billy Graham about how she came to faith in God as a girl in Bible camp.

She quizzed him on the presidents he’s known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but given the tendency of U.S. politicians to avowedly claim religious grounding for their political beliefs I do think somewhat more scrutiny needs to be given to the issue of the extent to which evangelical figures are letting their policy views be driven by apocalyptic scenarios. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, for example, supports preventive military strikes on Iran that he believes will lead to Israel’s destruction at the hands of a Russo-Arab alliance.

At any rate, Franklin Graham’s views on the subject are clear and disturbing:

In case there was any doubt left about evangelical views of Islam, Billy Graham’s son, the Rev Franklin Graham, stated that Islam “is a very evil and wicked religion.” […]

Yet the millennialist Christian beliefs and goals differ not only from those of mainstream Israelis, they also differ starkly from the goals of even the most militant Israeli expansionists. Fundamentalist Christians believe that the Jews will either convert to Christianity or perish in the end times. Hence the Middle East peace plan suggested by Rev Franklin Graham, Billy’s son: Muslims and Jews alike should try “surrendering their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ and having their hearts changed by the Holy Spirit.”

Unfortunately, the government of Israel seems intent on pursuing a path that’s bound to over time alienate the liberal majority among diaspora Jews and instead leave it more dependent on these kind of people.

For a while now I’ve been saying that the fastest way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to to ask General McChrystal’s staff to produce a plan to make it deficit neutral and find sixty votes in the senate for his financing plan. Today, Spencer Ackerman points out that an excellent LA Times piece by Christi Parsons and Julian E. Barnes that digs into the issue of how much going bigger in Afghanistan would cost seems to indicate that the Pentagon agrees with me. Thus, they’re fudging the numbers to make their preferred policies look cheaper than they really are:

The Pentagon cost includes higher combat wages, extra aircraft hours and other operations and maintenance costs, but omits such items as new weapons purchases — one-time costs that vary by year — and support equipment like spy satellites and anti-roadside-bomb technology.

The Pentagon also does not try to estimate costs of new bases for additional soldiers.

But in a memo early this month, obtained by The Times’ Washington bureau, the Pentagon’s own comptroller produced an estimate that broke with the customary Defense formula and did include construction and equipment.

Estimating weapons and equipment costs is clearly going to be difficult. But it’s equally clear that $0 is the wrong estimate. And as we see, the DOD has some way of doing this for internal consumption.

Meanwhile, I’d like to see Paul Krugman or other advocates of more stimulus weigh-in on whether debt-financed escalation of military effort would have a beneficial impact on the labor market situation. I think it’s deplorable that U.S. political culture tends to regard military-related appropriations as exempt from normal budgetary considerations, but it’s possible that that’s a loophole worth taking advantage of in this case. All those new weapons purchases the Pentagon doesn’t want to estimate are manufacturing jobs for someone, right? Obviously this shouldn’t the primary consideration in dictating military strategy, but I do think a comprehensive look at the macroeconomic impact of defense policy choices—both the costs and benefits of hugely expensively military undertakings—is a necessary element of the strategic consideration.

(cc photo by I See Modern Britain)

For all the talk about how the current economic crisis started in the housing market, taken on its own terms the ups-and-downs of the real estate industry are pretty straightforward. New households are formed at a certain rate. And homes become obsolete at a certain rate. When you have a prolonged period of time when homes are being built faster than they’re needed you get a crash in prices and construction activity. But after a fallow period of construction, the excess supply should eventually get bought and people will want to buy homes again. Thus it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to see the National Association of Realtors reporting that inventories are shrinking on rising sales. It’ll be a while until there’s a lot of new demand for residential construction, but the arrival of that day is fairly inevitable—the population is growing.

The problem, however, is that we’ve got much bigger economic problems now than the decline in employment in the construction industry. In particular, we’re facing the prospect of an extended period in which widespread joblessness leads to a general lack of demand for goods and services, which itself leads to joblessness and low levels of investment, leading to more joblessness.

NAFC photo

It’s not a coincidence that states with elected officials who are dubious about health reform tend to have the largest number of uninsured people. The same political culture that produces high uninsurance rates at the state level normally also produces federal officials who are hostile to measures to broaden access. But as long as the spotlight’s on Arkansas:

According to the Arkansas Department of Health, around 450 thousand Arkansans lack health insurance. More than a thousand of those uninsured made their way to Little Rock’s Statehouse Convention Center on Saturday for the National Association of Free Clinics “C.A.R.E.” event. [...] According to the NAFC, more than 90 percent of those who came on Saturday had three or more life-threatening conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, cardio-vascular, and pulmonary disease. Dr. Kimberly Garner, who works for the Veteran’s Administration in North Little Rock and was one of the volunteer physicians at the clinic, says those kinds of numbers illustrate the need for change.

As of 2008, 19.2 percent of non-elderly Arkansans were uninsured (Arkansas seniors, of course, avail themselves of government-run health insurance), a bit higher than the national average. Many of those people would be made much better off by the health reform bill that passed the House or by the somewhat different one that passed the Senate. But Blanche Lincoln says that unless Democrats agree to kill the idea of introducing a public option into the mix, she’ll vote against a bill that would otherwise help many of her constituents.

Talk of environmental problems in recent years has tended to focus on climate change, but an excellent Charles Duhig piece in The New York Times reminds us that thanks to inadequate capacity at the nation’s sewage treatment plants many cities still find themselves dumping raw sewage into rivers when heavy rain falls.

Part of the problem is the spread of the ever-villainous vast surface parking lot, whose non-permeable surface (in contrast to, say, grass or trees) creates extra water flow. But the largest issue is simply that upgraded the capacity of sewage treatment plants is the kind of infrastructure project we’ve been neglecting for decades. That, in turn, should be a reminder that it shouldn’t reall be all that hard to come up with useful things to do if there’s an interest in additional job creation measures.

I think an underrated success of the Obama administration has been the way he pulled us back from the brink of a pointless Cold War dynamic the Bush administration had landed us in in South America. And he did it pretty easily—basically just resolving to stay out of any wars of words with Hugo Chavez, shake hands, and focus on concrete issues. It turns out that for all the huffing and puffing, there’s really no actual conflict between the United States and Latin America’s leftists.

But this seems to have left Chavez a bit adrift and looking to push the envelope. How else to explain the idea of praising Idi Amin in a speech:

About former Ugandan President Idi Amin, Mr Chavez said: “We thought he was a cannibal… I don’t know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot.”

Idi Amin seized power in 1971. About 300,000 people were killed during his eight-year rule.

That’s really not the kind of statement that bolsters one’s confidence in the man’s commitment to liberalism and democracy. I would link to a Human Rights Watch report on Chavez’s impact on Venezuela’s political institutions but everyone knows that HRW is a non-credible group obsessed with unfair slams on Israel so their criticism of Chavez must somehow be part of their vast conspiracy.

Last night I caught a bit of the Queen’s Speech from the UK on CSPAN. This is an interesting tradition. It’s a bit like the State of the Union, except with more pomp and circumstance. But you’ve got the Queen, who’s a non-partisan figure, sitting up there reading what’s basically a partisan political speech written by the Prime Minister and his staff all about how “my government” is committed to doing this and that.

But one thing that the Queen told me Gordon Brown wanted to do was reform the House of Lords to create a second branch of parliament with “real democratic legitimacy.” Sounds like a bad idea to me. Pretty much the best thing about the House of Lords is that its complete and utter lack of democratic legitimacy has made it possible over the years to strip it of all its legislative powers. Now the U.K. has a de facto unicameral regime and I think it’s working just fine. Bicameralism arises for some understandable historical reasons—the legacy of aristocracy in the U.K., an 18th century political compromise in the U.S.—but in this case it looks a lot like a solution in search of a problem. Maybe Brown should ask Barack Obama about some of the hassles involved in an upper house with actual power. Watch what you wish for!

David Broder has a column in today’s The Washington Post that I find close to incomprehensible.

First he says that the Congressional Budget Office’s substantive, detailed analysis shows that the bill proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will reduce the deficit.

(Note to David: CBO does not give its “blessing” to legislation; all it does is score the bill.)

Second, he says that the CBO scoring that shows the bill reducing the deficit compared to existing law is not as valuable as polls that show that Americans don’t believe it. And he says that the polls are somehow more correct that CBO even though one group actually analyzed the bill while the other got its almost certainly less-than-complete-and accurate information from someone else.

Third, Broder says “every expert I have talked to says that the public has it right. These bills, as they stand, are budget-busters.”

As Collender points out, the CBO director and his staff would seem to count as experts. These economists think the CBO knows what it’s talking about.

A few years back, the NBA cartel established a rule saying that 18 year-olds can’t play in the league. This, combined with the NCAA cartel’s rules, means that in practice if you want to become a professional basketball player you need to spend at least one preparatory year playing professional basketball without being paid for it. And make no mistake—big-time college hoops is a professional endeavor. Everyone except the players gets paid a lot for it. One obvious alternative strategy would be to simply go play professionally in some other league in Europe or China where they don’t have this rule.

Last year, Brandon Jennings became the first guy to blaze that trail, signing with Rome’s team in the Italian league. Now this year he’s in the NBA playing for the Bucks. And playing well! He’s scoring 25.3 points per game on efficient shooting and adding 5.5 assists and 4.3 rebounds.

I’d like to think this shows that not only are their advantages to getting paid to play basketball, but also that playing in Europe against other grown men is probably superior preparation for the NBA than is playing against teenagers in college.

Her specific belief that a public option, if enacted, would eventually receive public funds even if it’s created by a law that prohibits taxpayer subsidies is a little bit hard to understand. Right now there aren’t sixty votes in the Senate for taxpayer subsidies to a public option. Nor is there a majority in the House for taxpayer subsidies to a public option. Nor does the White House support such subsidies. And we’re at something of a high water mark for Democratic victories—how likely is a simultaneous leftward shift by all three branches?

Blanche Lincoln has emerged as one of the pivotal votes in the US Senate debate about health care reform. So an article about her and her role in the debate seems like a smart thing for a newspaper to run. Which makes Spencer Ackerman’s tweet quite apropos: “Hey let’s say that I didn’t pay any attn to HC yesterday. Shouldn’t this piece tell me why Lincoln opposes the bill?”

Exactly. It’s striking to me how little scrutiny the stated views of public option opponents tend to get. Moderates are very rarely asked to explain what it is about an opt-outable level playing field public option that’s so horrible that it becomes suddenly worthwhile to filibuster an otherwise good bill that will put the country on a more sustainable fiscal course will improving millions of Americans’ access to health care.

Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building (cc photo by Cliff1066)

There is simply no avoiding the conclusion that unemployment is a much, much bigger problem than inflation right now, and yet the Fed is unwilling to do anything more about unemployment, seemingly because it is concerned about inflation. What we want is some inflation! Rising prices would mean that the Fed is doing all it can do, counter-cyclically speaking.

An independent central bank is crucial. Political control of monetary policy must inevitably lead to accelerating inflation and long-run economic instability. But at the moment, the American economy could use an increase in expected inflation. And a real threat to Fed independence would almost certainly deliver it, either because markets would anticipate increased political influence on monetary policy ever after, or because the Fed would seek to fend off pressure from Congress by easing further, which amounts to the same thing. But we don’t actually want there to be a real threat to Fed independence, because that way uncontrolled inflation lies.

I’m not ready to abandon central bank independence, which I think has worked well for the United States, but I don’t think we should be dogmatic about it either. The case for central bank independence is that it’s worked well. But if it turns out that an unanticipated negative consequence of central bank independence is systematic deflationary bias in major economy, unduly slow economic growth, and unduly high unemployment then that means it turns out to not work very well. And certainly if you look at the behavior of the Fed, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan that seems to be the situation we’re in. The best thing would be for existing monetary authorities to start doing more to fight unemployment. Then our institutions work and everything’s good. But if our institutions don’t work, then we can’t just cling to them forever—we’d have to start thinking about whether there isn’t some other kind of arrangement that could improve on the current situation.

After all, as John Quiggin has pointed out a big part of the case for central bank independence was that it was supposed to help us avoid exactly the sort of crisis we’re in. Of course, to be worth sticking with our current institutions don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be better than the available alternatives and I don’t have another alternative in mind at the moment. But still, this seems worth thinking about.

The most ridiculous thing about Sarah Palin’s ongoing quest for national office is that she has a really pathetic ability to answer basic questions. Bill O’Reilly wants to know if she thinks she’s qualified to be president:

I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I’m not saying that has to be me.

That’s awful!

How about: I know I don’t have as much experience in office as a lot of other politicians, but this country has never had a tradition of electing long-time Washington hands and I think that in America the strength of ideas matters more than your longevity. Of course that would require her to develop some ideas, but that’s a different problem.

For the record, though, I think we should take the probability of her becoming president at least somewhat seriously. She probably won’t win the GOP nomination (the odds of any particular individual winning are < 0.5) and my guess is that by 2012 the economy will be growing nicely and Obama will be re-elected no matter what. But if she does get the nomination and the economic fundamentals aren’t good then I don’t think anyone should count on her absurd persona bailing the Democrats out. Incumbents win when the economy is improving. When it’s not, they lose.