The Chorus and Cassandra
(or Caring is Creepy)

Megan McArdle writes

So the idea that Krugman has somehow won one for the team by predicting something that libertarian/conservative/free-market commentators didn't see coming is either misinformed, or lunatic.

Paul Krugman of course recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

McArdle was responding to Brian Beutler who wrote:

Time passed, and eventually conservative and libertarian writers--who either didn't understand what was happening, or didn't think all that highly of Krugman's liberalism, or both--began to mock him for getting his economic forecast wrong. Now, lo and behold, he wasn't wrong at all.

I've disagreed with Krugman over some things over the years, like Obama versus Hillary Clinton, but Beutler is absolutely correct here.

I've learned a ton from reading Krugman - among others of course - who wrote well in real time about Japan's "lost decade" of the Nineties, the failure of Long Term Capital Management, the Asian Financial Crisis of the Nineties, Enron and accounting fraud, etc., etc., etc.

Those of us, like Beutler, who studied Krugman are much better prepared to understand what's happening now with the global economy, and were much less surprised by the crisis. Also it was conservative and libertarian policy prescriptions which lead to the crisis in the first place, but that's a different argument.

In commenting on this Beutler makes an excellent point:

For literally years, Paul Krugman warned that we'd be in for some serious economic hard times when the housing bubble burst. This wasn't something he did as a game, but rather in the hope that rightly positioned people would address the problem. They didn't.

People of a social democratic persuasion who criticize free market ideology don't do so because they're somehow overly negative or fundamentally cynical, it's because they care.

You Need Us More Than We Need You
(from the New York Times)

Shortly after he became chief executive [of Fannie Mae], Mr. Mudd* traveled to the California offices of Angelo R. Mozilo, the head of Countrywide Financial, then the nation’s largest mortgage lender [before it was bought out by Bank of America]. Fannie had a longstanding and lucrative relationship with Countrywide, which sold more loans to Fannie than anyone else.

But at that meeting, Mr. Mozilo, a butcher’s son who had almost single-handedly built Countrywide into a financial powerhouse, threatened to upend their partnership unless Fannie started buying Countrywide’s riskier loans.

Mr. Mozilo, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, told Mr. Mudd that Countrywide had other options. For example, Wall Street had recently jumped into the market for risky mortgages. Firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs had started bundling home loans and selling them to investors - bypassing Fannie and dealing with Countrywide directly.

"You’re becoming irrelevant," Mr. Mozilo told Mr. Mudd, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential. In the previous year, Fannie had already lost 56 percent of its loan-reselling business to Wall Street and other competitors.

"You need us more than we need you," Mr. Mozilo said, "and if you don’t take these loans, you’ll find you can lose much more."

Then Mr. Mozilo offered everyone a breath mint.

Investors were also pressuring Mr. Mudd to take greater risks.

On one occasion, a hedge fund manager telephoned a senior Fannie executive to complain that the company was not taking enough gambles in chasing profits.

"Are you stupid or blind?" the investor roared, according to someone who heard the call, but requested anonymity. "Your job is to make me money!"

Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie’s affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers.

"When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by a mere one percent per year, Fannie’s mission is of paramount importance," Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, lectured Mr. Mudd at a Congressional hearing in 2006. "In fact, Fannie and Freddie can do more, a lot more."

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*Please don't shed a tear for "My Name is Mudd", his salary was in the millions.

David Foster Wallace* RIP

Writer David Foster Wallace died at the age of 46 last Friday. His wife came home to find him hanging by a noose, an apparent suicide.

In March 2005 I linked to this Atlantic story he did about conservative radio talk show hosts. (It has a cool footnote/sidebar feature which I must figure out how to do.) He could be really, really funny as seen in the talk show piece.

When Mr. Z.'s impassioned, his voice rises and his arms wave around (which obviously only those in the Airmix room can see). He also fidgets, bobs slightly up and down in his executive desk chair, and weaves. Although he must stay seated and can't pace around the room, the host does not have to keep his mouth any set distance from the microphone, since the board op, 'Mondo Hernandez, can adjust his levels on the mixing board's channel 7 so that Mr. Z.'s volume always stays in range and never peaks or fades. 'Mondo, whose price for letting outside parties hang around Airmix is one large bag of cool-ranch Doritos per evening, is an immense twenty-one-year-old man with a ponytail, stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere.

He was really smart too, as show by the great argument he puts forward in this piece. To summarize: we endure thousands of automobile deaths in order that we have the freedom to drive. We should be able to endure inevitable terrorist attacks, without sacrificing our civil liberties or giving government absolute power over its citizenry.

What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer - are they worth it?

We should think of the victims of terrorist attacks as "democratic martyrs" for "the American idea."**

Infinite Jest was of course his big hit. I dated a girl five years or so younger than me, who had gone to Northwestern (and hence a braniac with a work ethic) and her and her friends would quote lines from it. I enjoyed it, especially the conceit about the government commodifying time and selling corporations the right to name certain years,*** so for example year 2017 was known as 2017: Year of the Depends Adult Diaper. His many footnotes were very informative and very funny.

Mark Twain said, he's all there in his work. His piece Consider the Lobster.

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way - hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Slate has some people write up their memories and thoughts. Jordan Ellenberg writes:

But there's a deeper likeness, too. "We live today," he told the Believer in 2003, "in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life." Technical complexity, a turnoff to most, was Wallace's bread and meat. He was never interested in the kind of truths that you could sum up in 10 words - which is why it's so hard to quote Wallace 10 words at a time.

Michiko Kakutani puts him inside the context of other fiction writers:

Like Mr. DeLillo and Salman Rushdie, and like Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and other younger authors, Mr. Wallace transcended Philip Rahv’s famous division of writers into "palefaces" (like Henry James and T. S. Eliot, who specialized in heady, cultivated works rich in symbolism and allegory) and "redskins" (like Whitman and Dreiser, who embraced an earthier, more emotional naturalism). He also transcended Cyril Connolly’s division of writers into "mandarins" (like Proust, who favored ornate, even byzantine prose) and "vernacular" stylists (like Hemingway, who leaned toward more conversational tropes). An ardent magpie, Mr. Wallace tossed together the literary and the colloquial with hyperventilated glee, using an encyclopedia of styles and techniques to try to capture the cacophony of contemporary America.

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* the footnote meister
** in a footnote to "the American idea" Wallace writes "let's just please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes - an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency ... the whole democratic roil."
*** I remember a time when sports stadiums didn't have corporate brands in their names.

Department of Frozen Conflicts

Last week:

King Abdullah II of Jordan flew to Baghdad on Monday, becoming the first Arab leader to visit Iraq since Saddam Hussein fell five years ago.

Jordan relies on Iraq for most of its fuels.

Ibrahim al-Sumadayi, an Iraqi political analyst, said on Baghdad television that the visit would encourage other Arab nations to take similar steps. He also said that Jordan, with its Sunni majority, wished to prevent Iran, a nation of Shiites, from exerting undue influence in Baghdad.

Abdullah had been the one warning of a rising "Shia crescent" extending from the Shia in Lebanon, who are gaining in power, to the newly empowered Shia in Iraq, to the Shia nation of Iran.

The UN should create a department of Frozen Conflicts which alerts the media as one of them thaws or heats up. Kashmir is seeing increasing conflict today, for instance. Cyprus seems to be getting better, as does Shia-Sunni flashpoint of Iraq. (However from what I understand the Shia of Iraq are unlikely to reconcile with their fellow Iraqi Sunnis, which is why Abdullah's diplomacy with Iraq is key.)

Musharraf set to quit and receive immunity

Obama's lead economics advisors Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee employ Delong in their Wall Street Journal Op-Ed today:

Sen. McCain has put forward the most fiscally reckless presidential platform in modern memory. The likely results of his Bush-plus policies are clear. As Berkeley economist Brad Delong has estimated, the McCain plan, as compared to the Obama plan, would lower annual incomes by $300 billion or more in real terms by 2017, costing the typical worker $1,800 or more due to the effect of large deficits on national savings and thus capital formation. Sen. McCain's neglect of critical public investments would further impede economic growth for decades to come.

Ronald D. Asmus writes about the Russian-Georgian conflict.

To be sure, the Georgian government and President Saakashvili himself is responsible for launching its military move on August 7--albeit in response to provocations and heavy shelling by South Ossetian separatists. That move gave Moscow the pretext to invade. Today, Western observers understandably ask why Tbilisi allowed itself to be goaded into what was clearly a Russian trap. President Saakashvili will have to answer that question himself. But I suspect I have a pretty good idea of what he will say. In our recent conversations, it was clear to me that he was concluding that the West was not serious about resolving these conflicts, that he did not believe he would ever have the diplomatic support required, and that the status quo could not go on forever. He watched Russia's creeping annexation of Abkhazia start last spring with almost no Western response. That does not justify what clearly was a terrible strategic mistake by Georgia to act militarily. But it points to the mistakes--both of omission and commission--the West made that contributed to this crisis.

Cathy Young writes about it in Reason.

Russia has pointedly compared South Ossetia's claims to independence to those of Kosovo, whose recognition it strongly opposed. (Russia's own war against secessionist Chechnya, which killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians, goes unmentioned.)

The Russians going on about human rights and genocide is a little bizarre. Young again:

Some liberal Russian commentators, such as EJ.ru's Dmitry Sidorov, argue that Saakashvili walked into Moscow's trap, giving Russia an excuse for an invasion that will fatally destabilize Georgia's political system. Meanwhile, opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov believes it was the Kremlin that let itself be provoked into a military confrontation that will badly hurt Russia's international standing.

Obviously it remains to be seen how this shakes out. It was interesting to see the Presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia in Tbilisi in solidarity. To me a lot depends on the future state of the global financial system and hence the global economy. Will it continue to slide?

Krugman says:

A nasty inflation number today. But remember what the guide says: DON’T PANIC.

Basically, what we’re seeing is pure commodity price inflation, with not a hint of a wage-price spiral. And the commodity boom seems to be over. So inflation will be headed down soon.

I’m sure that Gentle Uncle Ben is under immense pressure to raise rates. But he shouldn’t.

Richard Just's exhaustive, comprehensive piece on Darfur. I guess since it's in the New Republic, Just feels he has to be nasty and so he takes multiple gratuitous shots at Don Cheadle for whatever reason.

Just titles it "The Truth Will Not Set You Free: Everything we know about Darfur, and everything we're not doing about it." He gets almost Zizekian in his paradoxical inversions. Not near enough has happened to stop the genocide because we know too much?

Russia and China won't allow Sudan's sovereignty to be violated and there's no stomach to go outside the UN again like with Kosovo and Iraq. Those are the obstacles, not any shortcomings of those who've tried to do something however small.

Pakistan Coalition Moves to Impeach Musharraf

interview with Ahmed Rashid

Darkness Visible

No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.

The Dark Side and the Dark Knight


The Battle for a Country's Soul by Jane Mayer

Alan Brinkley's review of Mayer's The Dark Side.

At the urging of Cheney - or his surrogate Addington - President Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions and, without publicly stating it, suspended habeas corpus for terror suspects, thus removing two important impediments to torture. Others worked to undermine the 1984 international Convention Against Torture, which, under American leadership, had provided the first explicit definition of what torture was.

Obama better win in November. The unsung heroes:

Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration - conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies. Waxman summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers and Defense Department officials (including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force), all of whom supported the restoration of Geneva Convention protections. Waxman was quickly hauled up before Addington and told that his efforts constituted "an abomination." All of these lawyers, and others, soon left the government after being deceived, bullied, thwarted and marginalized by the Cheney loyalists.

Via Crooks and Liars, conservative pundit Glenn Beck says Bush is Batman:

"This seems to be a movie that extols some of the conservative viewpoints that we are dealing with terrorists, that you can trust people to make the right decision, that sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do, and you have to cross lines that you don’t want to cross, if you’re going to save - if you’re going to save your city, in this case it’s Gotham.

"But Batman goes into another country and with a C130, snatches a guy out, then throws him back here into Gotham. So there’s rendition! At one point, the Morgan Freeman character says to Batman, ‘Wait a minute, hang on... you’re eavesdropping on everyone in Gotham?’ And Batman says, ‘Yes, to stop this terrorist.’ Morgan Freeman says, ‘I can’t be a part of it.’ And yet Morgan Freeman does become a part of it, and they find the Joker. One of the ways they find the Joker is through eavesdropping. I mean the parallels here of what’s going on is to me stunning."

It's a movie, which I enjoyed by the way. Batman wants to retire for various reasons and feels he can because of Harvey Dent. In the real world, he could because there'd be a FBI after the Joker and in the real world Batman's eavesdropping and torture of Eric Robert's mob boss (by dropping him off a building balconey) are illegal. So Bush is doing illegal stuff? Extraordinary rendition is not when you snatch someone and bring them to the US to stand trial. It's when terrorist suspect are handed off to intellegence services of countries like Syria, Egypt, and Jordan where they are tortured.

These conservatives are trying to defend torture on principle. It's the Vic Mackey theory of justice or the ideas embodied by Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men. Damon Root discusses another salient example at Hit and Run:

There's a lot worth thinking about in Justice Antonin Scalia's harsh Boumediene v. Bush dissent, but one passage jumped out right away. After noting that the Bush administration used the naval base at Guantanamo Bay precisely because it believed that enemy combatants would not enjoy habeas corpus and other constitutional rights while being held there, Justice Scalia suggests the following: "Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention." Here's the kicker: "Those facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves."

Given that "allies" such as Egypt and Syria regularly torture their prisoners, I'd certainly agree that things "might well have been worse" elsewhere. But isn't Justice Scalia contradicting President Bush, who famously declared that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." And maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Scalia's words sure sound like an implied threat. You liberals think Guantanamo is bad? Next time you won't even know where the prisoners are held.

Glenn Beck and Scalia are like the police officer the Joker baited in jail. They are like Harvey Dent when - driven mad by fear of losing the one he loves - he's threatening Joker's tied-up flunky with death, until Batman talks him out of it. To paraphrase the Joker, all some conservatives need to become fascist is a little push. These scenes argue against seeing The Dark Knight as propaganda. Plus why would they have a cameo with Patrick Leahy if Glenn Beck was right?

(spoiler) Also, the film has a nice climatic scene of solidarity, when each boatload of passengers refuses to kill the other boatload of strangers in order to save themselves. The mad Joker believes they will succumb to fear, whereas Batman believes they won't.

(top) AnnaSophia Robb with some of the cast of Reno 911 and (bottom) hitting the books.

New Slang

14-year-old actress blogging? At least it's better than catblogging. I got those photos from Robb's website, where she has lists of her favorite things, like movies: "Best in Show, Mighty Wind, Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Napolean Dynamite, Nacho Libre."

Robb played the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde* in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But she caught my attention with last year's movie Bridge to Terabithia, where her performance as Leslie Burke is outstanding.

Time movie critic Richard Schekel said of her performance in the film "Sleepwalking", "There is a wonderful range to Robb's work; she's testy and vulnerable, patient and impatient, hopeful and despairing always fiercely committed to exploring the ambiguities of her still-forming character. This is extraordinarily mature acting from someone this young and she wins our sympathy without once begging for it."

According to Wikipedia, Robb is a Christian from Denver, who had a bit of homeschooling but now attends a private school. Her first gig was for a McDonalds commercial, which makes her the stereotypical American, from the perspective of "Old Europe."

The subtitle of this blog is "Anything To Help Advance the Cause" and once a commenter asked "what is the 'cause' you speak of"? I responded it can be anything you want, from having a good time, to doing the chores, to making the world a better place.

Interstingly, Robb has a section of her website called "Changing the World." Once you click through the link, the heading is "Making the World a Better Place" and the section contains three more links. The top link is on Darfur, and it connects to a good summary of what is happening there: "At the moment, many mission agencies such as; Oxfam International, CARE, International Rescue Committee, Church World Service, Inter Action, Doctors Without Boarders[sic], Save the Children, UNICEF, CRWRC, and lots of others are all involved with humanitarian aid for the displaced Sudanese. Yet only 13,000 aid works[sic]** are in Darfur to help 4 ½ million."

Her analysis is pretty sophisticated, "The UN has many resolutions in debate to put UN troops on the ground in Darfur to protect the people but, a few countries that are profiting from the Khartoum government, China and Russia, openly refuse to admit to what is going on in Sudan. They say that the UN inspectors are misinformed. These governments vote against the resolutions. China and Russia are buying all the oil in Sudan and 80% of the oil money is being used to buy ammunition for the Janjaweed." At the end, Robb gives a numbered list of what people can do now, supplied by and credited to the Genocide Intervention Network.

The second area of interest is the Dalits, or "untouchables" of India. Again, she provides some good information and contact numbers for those wanting to get involved.

The third and final section of "Making the World a Better Place" is the "Environment." There's a note saying it's "(under construction)" which is sort of how I feel about environmental issues. Yeah, of course they're a concern but I don't have much to say about it. Actually I never blog about it. In my mind the needs of those in Darfur, in Zimbabwe, or in Burma, etc. seem more immediate. Not to denigrate those active on environmental issues; I guess those issues could be more consequential in the long run. Perhaps her interest in these various causes are partly a result of her religion? Maybe, but if she is religious she apparently isn't very hardcore because she doesn't bring it up on her website.

The first time I saw Bridge to Terabithia, I took a car ride afterwards and the Shins' song "New Slang" came on the radio. The sweetly melancholic tune seemed a perfect fit for the movie and now whenever I hear it, I think of that magical-realistic, Hallmarky film. (Robb is teaming up again with the director of that film (who according to IMDB also directed an episode of the Simpsons(!)) The song "New Slang" first came to mainstream prominence when Natalie Portman's character in Garden State said "it will change your life." Portman has made a successful transition from child actress to adult actress, and we here at Negative Outlook? will be "praying" that the same happens for Robb if that's what she wants to do. (A little six degrees of Kevin Bacon: Robb has a bit part in Hayden Christensen's new movie Jumper.)

Robb's character in Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie Burke, had a weirdly compelling sincerity. It reminded me of Amy Adams in Enchanted or Junebug or Barack Obama or the positive spin on Ned Flanders in the Simpsons movie (of course it's a generalization and there are differences). Call it the "New Sincerity" for an ironic age (e.g. Mighty Wind, Best in Show, Napolean Dynamite, Nacho Libre) where the national newspaper is the Onion.

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* In the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory, Violet Beauregarde had probably my all-time favorite movie line "WHAT IS THIS, A FREAKOUT?" when they were taking the psychedelic boat-trip down a candy river.
** Yeah there are a couple mistakes the spellchecker couldn't catch, so what? Don't know about most people that age, but I was too busy crashing keg parties and attending Van Halen concerts and such back then to care about politics and tragedies in far off lands. It's pretty impressive.

A Day in the Life

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died.

One story, a short novel, was "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer.
...

Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Mr. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Khrushchev’s policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union’s so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Khrushchev.

On reading the manuscript, Mr. Tvardovsky summoned Mr. Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. "You have written a marvelous thing," he told him. "You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said." He likened the story to Tolstoy’s moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoyevski’s "House of the Dead," which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Mr. Tvardovsky offered Mr. Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher’s annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.

Mr. Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Khrushchev himself to read "A Day in the Life." Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography "Solzhenitsyn" (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: "There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."

How did Solzhenitsyn first end up in the Gulag Archipelago?

In February 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter to a school friend in which he referred to Stalin - disrespectfully, the authorities said - as "the man with the mustache." Though he was a loyal Communist, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp.

more of an 'and' guy than an 'or' guy

Harold Meyerson had a good column on Obama's choice of economic advisors and a meeting he had with them.

Given the range of perspectives and interests represented, such concord was remarkable. The advisers ran the gamut from Clinton administration centrists, such as former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers; to former George W. Bush administration Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and SEC chairman William Donaldson, both presumably still Republicans; to such avowed liberals as former labor secretary (and my American Prospect colleague) Robert Reich, economist Jared Bernstein, and labor leaders John Sweeney (president of the AFL-CIO) and Anna Burger (chair of Change to Win). Also there, for good measure, were former Fed chief Paul Volcker and everyone's favorite mega-rich guy, Warren Buffett.

"There was no dissent over whether there should be a stimulus," says Bernstein, "just over whether it should be $50 billion or a lot bigger. There's real consensus that the economy has structural problems, ranging from people like Reich and me to CEOs who look at the markets and say we really need better rules."

That doesn't mean that differing views weren't voiced in the meeting or that the party has reached a consensus on trade. But, adds Bernstein, Obama is "more of an 'and' guy than an 'or' guy. He's for growth and fairness."

So, he could listen to the theorists and social engineers like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman who call for more education and increasing human capital. Also, Obama hopefully will focus on fairness and not actively make the economic environment so anti-labor. In a an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he did say:

We have drastically increased productivity since 1995, and there was the theory that if you increase productivity enough some of these problems of living standards would solve themselves. But what we've seen is rising productivity, rising corporate profits but flat-lining or even declining wages and incomes for the average family.

What that says is that it's going to be important for us to pay attention to not only growing the pie, which is always critical, but also some attention to how it is sliced. I do not believe that those two things -- fair distribution and robust economic growth -- are mutually exclusive.

The Iceman Cometh

Peter Maass writes about Generation Kill.

The series reminded of a Marine with whom I had corresponded. He had been in Iraq.

Aleksandar Hemon writes about the capture of Radovan Karadzic.

Nymphadora Tonks

New York Times Magazine: How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?

Gore Vidal: I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

Well put. Coincidently I recently saw Jeff Garlin's documentary John Waters: This Filthy World which was hilarious. Waters is a unique guy.

and the singer ... rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon

There's a high you get from the classic 1970s "art-rock" of Yes, Genesis, or King Crimson-- and when it hits, there's nothing like it. I'm not talking about the way other music peaks, like a dance track where the beat kicks in and the crowd goes berzerk, or metal music that gets louder and louder until your skull caves, or gutbucket singers who can make your heart jump out of your chest. With art-rock, there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and funny time signatures, and sometimes there's like 10 or 15 minutes of really boring shit (see: Yes, "Awaken"). But when the "good part" hits? Holy shit-- the band crescendos and the singer, smooth as silk but loud as God, rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon. If I sound like I'm growing a mullet, I've done my job.

Speaking of which, Stereolab has a new album dropping on August 18th, then a tour of the States this fall.

Oops

Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the top civilian commander and the top general in the Air Force over "Atomic errors."

The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nose cone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March - a year and a half after the mistaken shipment.

Mr. Gates made clear that most troubling was that the inquiry showed how little the Air Force had done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure even after it was disclosed last year that a B-52 bomber had flown across the United States without anyone’s realizing that it was carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

Some had said that the bomber flight was consciously done as a warning to Iran. I didn't find that persuasive at the time and especially don't find it persuasive now that NATO-ally Turkey and Iran are coordinating attacks on Kurds in northern Iraq.