Now Comes the Hard Part by Jonathan Cohn

Article on Elizabeth Warren.

She will not comment on whether she might head the [consumer protection] agency, for the same reason administration officials will not. "What we’re trying to do is build an institution that’s over and above any individual," Ms. Farrell said.

Ms. Warren does say that if she and the administration lose on the agency’s passage, she’d like them to lose big -- to force lawmakers, as she puts it, to leave "lots of blood and teeth" on the floor.

If that happens, Ms. Warren will still have her own platform, starting with her nearly constant stream of television appearances. Hosts and cameramen love her: she has the friendly face of a teacher, the pedigree of a top law professor, the moral force of a preacher and the plain-spoken twang of an Oklahoman.

"This is America’s middle class," she recently said on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." "We’ve hacked at it and pulled at it and chipped at it for 30 years now, and now there’s no more to do. We fix this problem going forward, or the game really is over."

"When you say it like that and you look at me like that, I know your husband is backstage, I still want to make out with you," Mr. Stewart responded.

If no agency or government post materializes, Ms. Warren says she will happily return to Harvard. Others expect her to do more, including Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who has come to know her through their shared interest in consumer advocacy.

"Plan B is to become Ralph Nader," he said.

I [heart] Joe Biden.

Turning Japanese

GISM was a Japanese mid-paced hardcore punk band (with heavy metal influence) formed in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. Even though the guitar style resembled heavy metal style riffs and solos, GISM were one of the first Japanese hardcore bands, while at the same time drawing influence from the early industrial/avant-garde music scene; something extremely uncommon in punk bands at that time.

The acronym GISM had many different variations; they include: God In the Schizoid Mind, Guerrilla Incendiary Sabotage Mutineer, General Imperialism Social Murder, Genocide Infanticide Suicide Menticide* & Gnostic Idiosyncrasy Sonic Militant.

GISM has attained a cult status in the international punk scene, duly for their unique blend of heavy metal and hardcore punk. Several Japanese punk bands have emulated the low-pitched vocal style of Sakevi Yokoyama.

...

In Lady Gaga's video for the song "Telephone," released in March of 2010, the performer wears a spiked leather jacket featuring a GISM back patch. Whether Lady Gaga is actually a fan of the band is unclear. However, the director of the music video, Jonas Akerlund, is former member of the Swedish metal band Bathory and could very well be the reason for the jacket's appearance in the video. The jacket also features patches for the UK crust bands Icons of Filth and Doom.

Krugman blogging about stagflation versus hyperinflation and the 1970s:

The kind of inflation we had in the 1970s, the famous era of stagflation -- high inflation combined with high unemployment -- was quite different. Deficits weren’t the issue -- actually, US deficits were much smaller in the inflationary 70s than in the disinflationary 80s. Instead, what you had was a combination of excessively expansionary monetary policies, based on an unrealistic view of how low the unemployment rate could be pushed without causing accelerating inflation (the NAIRU), plus oil shocks that pushed up inflation across the board thanks to widespread cost-of-living clauses in contracts. There was never any risk of hyperinflation; the only question was whether and when we’d be willing to pay the price in high unemployment of bringing inflation back down.

Kinsley seems to be confusing the logic of the natural rate argument, which says that expected inflation gets built into price-setting, so you need an accelerating inflation rate to keep unemployment below the NAIRU, with the very different logic of hyperinflation, which is about people fleeing money.

Meanwhile, for those predicting hyperinflation, my question would be: what is it about the United States now that looks different to you from Japan in say, 2000? Big budget deficits and high debt? Check. Huge expansion in the monetary base? Check. And yet Japan’s GDP deflator has fallen 9 percent since 2000.

 (Lady Gaga: "Prepare to be assimilated.  We will add your 
biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.  You 
will adapt to service us.  Resistance is futile.")

--------------------------
* "the systematic effort to undermine and destroy a person's values and beliefs, as by the use of prolonged interrogation, drugs, torture, etc., and to induce radically different ideas."

Kurdish people total population: 23-36 million


Palestinian people: c. 12 million


Armenians: 7.3-7.4 million


Circassians: c. 4 million

Circassian beauties is a term used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northern Caucasus. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines. This reputation dates back to the Ottoman Empire when Circassian women living in the Sultan's Imperial Harem started to build their reputation as extremely beautiful and genteel, and then became a common trope in Western Orientalism.

As a result of this reputation, in Europe and America Circassians were regularly characterised as the ideal of feminine beauty in poetry, novels and art. Cosmetic products were advertised, from the 18th century on, using the word "Circassian" in the title, or claiming that the product was based on substances used by the women of Circassia.

In the 1860s the showman P. T. Barnum exhibited women who he claimed were Circassian beauties. They wore a distinctive Afro-like hair style, which had no precedent in earlier portrayals of Circassians, but which was soon copied by other female performers, who became known as "moss haired girls". These were typically presented as victims of sexual enslavement among the Turks, who had escaped from the harem to achieve freedom in America. 

... 

The legend of Circassian women was also repeated by legal theorist Gustav Hugo, who wrote that "Even beauty is more likely to be found in a Circassian slave girl than in a beggar girl", referring to the fact that even a slave has some security and safety, but a "free" beggar has none. Hugo's comment was later condemned by Karl Marx in The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law (1842) on the grounds that it excused slavery.

----

WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly on Thursday to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that seemed sure to offend Turkey and jeopardize delicate efforts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. 

The vote on the nonbinding resolution, a perennial point of friction addressing a dark, century-old chapter of Turkish history, was 23 to 22. A similar resolution passed by a slightly wider margin in 2007, but the Bush administration, fearful of losing Turkish cooperation over Iraq, lobbied forcefully to keep it from reaching the House floor. Whether this resolution will reach a floor vote remains unclear.  

In Ankara, the capital, the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately issued a sharp rebuke. “We condemn this bill that denounces the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed,” the statement said. Ambassador Namik Tan, who had only weeks ago taken up his post in Washington, has been recalled to Ankara for consultations, according to the statement.  

Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died amid the chaos and unrest surrounding World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies, however, that this was a planned genocide, and had mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign against the resolution.

----

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s foreign minister said Friday that the vote by a Congressional committee in Washington condemning the mass killing of Armenians early in the last century as genocide would damage ties with the Obama administration and set back reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Armenia. 

... 

In recent years, Turkey has sought to play a bigger regional role, re-establishing ties with nearby Arab countries and reaching out to Armenia, whose border with Turkey has been closed since the 1990s, when Armenia was at war with its neighbor Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally. In 2008, Turkey’s president paid the first visit by a Turkish leader to Armenia in the two nations’ history. 

----
Interesting fact from a New York Times piece about China's trade policies:

I.M.F. policies call for it to disclose documents and information on a timely basis, with the deletion only of market-moving information. But under the rules a member country may decide to withhold a report, an organization official said.

China allowed the release of its reports until the monetary fund’s executive board decided in June 2007 that reports should pay more attention to currency policies. China has quietly blocked release of reports on its policies ever since, without providing its specific reasons to the I.M.F.

A person who has seen copies of the most recent report last summer said that the monetary fund staff concluded the renminbi was “substantially undervalued.”

The monetary fund regards a currency as substantially undervalued if it is more than 20 percent below its fair market value.

More than four-fifths of the I.M.F.’s members allow publication of the agency’s annual staff reports on their economies. Countries blocking release are mostly tightly controlled places like Myanmar, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia, although Brazil has also not released its reports.

IMF/World Bank support of military dictatorships chart

---- Jonathan Chait quotes a Ha'aretz editorial:

There is one reason for the crisis: Netanyahu's persistence in continuing construction in East Jerusalem, in placing Jews in Arab neighborhoods and evicting Palestinians from their homes in the city. This is not a matter of timing but substance. Despite repeated warnings and bitter experiences, he stokes the flames over the conflict's most sensitive issue and is bound to get himself in trouble. Netanyahu has made it clear by his actions that American support for Israel, especially essential now in light of the Iranian threat, is less important to him than the chance to put another few Jews in the Sheikh Jarrah or Ramat Shlomo neighborhoods.

Isn't this just ethnic cleansing? Why don't people call it by its rightful name?

Metamorphosis / "why is a raven like a writing desk?"

I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and thought it was good. Anne Hathaway is very beautiful as the White Queen and the actress playing Alice is very good, as is Depp's Mad Hatter, Stephen Fry's Cheshire Cat, Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen and the others.

What was interesting to me was how Alan Rickman's Caterpillar said good-bye to Alice as he finished making his cocoon in preparation of turning into a butterfly. It had a finality as if the Caterpillar would lose his memory after his radical transformation.

This article in the New York Times reports a person's genome can be decoded for $50,000.

Besides identifying disease genes, one team, in Seattle, was able to make the first direct estimate of the number of mutations, or changes in DNA, that are passed on from parent to child. They calculate that of the three billion units in the human genome, 60 per generation are changed by random mutation -- considerably less than previously thought.

So presumably, a child receives 120 mutated genes along with 2,999,999,880 duplicate genes from her parents. Alice certainly received the genes for imagination from her father. I like how she had all of those random thoughts while dancing with her suitor.

Solace in Excess

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . ."And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" 

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about," he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

No Credit: Timothy Geithner’s financial plan is working--and making him very unpopular. 
by John Cassidy

The hardest part of his job, Geithner often says, is getting people to comprehend the inner logic of a financial-rescue operation, and the unpopular actions it entails. In fact, his problem may be not economic illiteracy but its opposite: Americans understand all too well what has happened. Financial crises have a way of revealing aspects of our economic system that otherwise remain obscured, such as the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington, the hidden subsidies that financial firms sometimes receive from the Fed and other government agencies, and the fact that the vast profits that firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman generate depend in part on an implicit guarantee from the taxpayer. When ordinary Americans are confronted with these realities, they get angry. "People just don’t get how these institutions got bailed out and their people are still making big bonuses," Mark Zandi noted. "It just does not compute. No matter what you say, you can’t persuade them it’s right."

Godzilla Haikus

(via Ezra Klein)

 

The Repo Man

Via John Cassidy, "Memo to Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Ric Mishkin and all other economists who still argue it is impossible to discern a speculative bubble while it is inflating. (This chart is from p. 27 of this year’s Economic Report of the President, which the White House Council of Economic Advisers released yesterday.)

"How Paul Krugman Found Politics" by Larissa MacFarquhar

Via Greg Mankiw, via Mark Thoma, Gary Gorton on the Financial Crisis. It was a bank run.

• As traditional banking became unprofitable in the 1980s, due to competition from, most importantly, money market mutual funds and junk bonds, securitization developed. Regulation Q that limited the interest rate on bank deposits was lifted, as well. Bank funding became much more expensive. Banks could no longer afford to hold passive cash flows on their balance sheets. Securitization is an efficient, cheaper, way to fund the traditional banking system. Securitization became sizable.
• The amount of money under management by institutional investors has grown enormously. These investors and non‐financial firms have a need for a short‐term, safe, interest‐earning, transaction account like demand deposits: repo. Repo also grew enormously, and came to use securitization as an important source of collateral.
• Repo is money. It was counted in M3 by the Federal Reserve System, until M3 was discontinued in 2006. But, like other privately‐created bank money, it is vulnerable to a shock, which may cause depositors to rationally withdraw en masse, an event which the banking system -- in this case the shadow banking system -- cannot withstand alone. Forced by the withdrawals to sell assets, bond prices plummeted and firms failed or were bailed out with government money.
• In a bank panic, banks are forced to sell assets, which causes prices to go down, reflecting the large amounts being dumped on the market. Fire sales cause losses. The fundamentals of subprime were not bad enough by themselves to have created trillions in losses globally. The mechanism of the panic triggers the fire sales. As a matter of policy, such firm failures should not be caused by fire sales.
• The crisis was not a one‐time, unique, event. The problem is structural. The explanation for the crisis lies in the structure of private transaction securities that are created by banks. This structure, while very important for the economy, is subject to periodic panics if there are shocks that cause concerns about counterparty default. There have been banking panics throughout U.S. history, with private bank notes, with demand deposits, and now with repo. The economy needs banks and banking. But bank liabilities have a vulnerability.

Joseph Stiglitz in San Francisco

Kaus and McCardle don't believe health care reform will happen.

As Senate Majority Shifts, So Does View of a Procedural Power Play by Jackie Calmes

WASHINGTON -- It is tempting to think that the authors of the 1974 federal budget law were feeling mischievously ironic when they chose "reconciliation" as the name for a particularly arcane process the bill established. ...

But even as they fulminate about the unfairness, Republicans carry a long record of having employed reconciliation themselves on big and controversial legislative packages.

Sixteen of the 22 "reconciliation bills" that have made it through Congress were passed in the Senate when Republicans had majorities. Among them were the signature tax cuts of President George W. Bush, the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage insurance policies and the Cobra program allowing people who leave a job to pay to keep the health coverage their employer provided (the "R" and "A" in Cobra stand for "reconciliation act").  

... In 1980 a Democratic majority used it for the first time to reduce that year’s deficit. Months later, however, it was the new administration and a new Republican Senate majority that pioneered using reconciliation to enact major legislation: a package of spending cuts to offset President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts.

Republicans turned to reconciliation again the next year, 1982, but to pass a controversial measure rolling back some of the tax cuts and cutting spending to pare a growing deficit.

For years, reconciliation mainly was used to shrink deficits. But in 1999 and 2000, with budgets running rare surpluses, Congressional Republicans sent tax cut bills to President Clinton. He vetoed them, citing his vow to "save Social Security first."

Once Mr. Bush took office in 2001, however, Republicans successfully used the tactic to enact the much bigger tax cuts he had campaigned on. With the Senate bill lacking 60 votes, reconciliation was "the way it will have to be done in order to get it done at all," Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said at the time.

Obama is going to take health care reform through reconciliation if need be, which is what he said he'd do last June.

Via Yglesias, Newsweek summarizes Hank Paulson's new book:

Meetings with Senate Republicans were "a complete waste of time for us, when time was more precious than anything" (page 275). Ideas that Republicans do add are "unformed," like Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor’s plan to replace TARP with an insurance program. In a rare moment of sarcasm, Paulson goes off on the minority Whip: "I got a better idea. I’m going to go with Eric Cantor’s insurance program. That’s the idea to save the day" (page 285).

Eric Cantor is the Republican's number two man in the House, which is scary.

Daniel Gross writes about Paulson's book also:

Paulson love-bombs Barney Frank as "scary-smart, ready with a quip, and usually a pleasure to work with," praises Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and notes that then-Sen. Barack Obama was "always well informed, well briefed, and self-confident."

But while Bush ("admirably stalwart") comes in for similar praise, Paulson has little positive to say about other Republicans. Sarah Palin annoyed him from the get-go. When he spoke to House Republicans about efforts to help Fannie and Freddie, he was chagrined that many responded with speeches about ACORN, the low-income housing activist group. House Minority Leader John Boehner was ineffectual. John McCain comes off worst of all: impulsive, ill-informed, and counterproductive. "This was crazy," Paulson writes of McCain's decision to suspend his campaign in late September 2008 and demand a White House meeting on the bailout. At the climactic meeting in the Cabinet room, Obama spoke for the Democrats, delivering a "thoughtful, well-prepared presentation." But McCain? "When it came right down to it, he had little to say in the forum he himself had called."

Abu Dhabi tightens grip on debt-stricken Dubai

Senior Hamas official assassinated in Dubai, probably by Israel.


Israeli officials declined to comment.

Assassinations are rare in Dubai, a polyglot business hub on the Persian Gulf where deposed foreign leaders sometimes sought shelter. But that began to change last year after a former Chechen rebel was shot dead in an underground Dubai parking lot. “The myth that Dubai is the eye of the storm, and no one will touch it because everyone has an interest, is being blown apart,” said Christopher Davidson, the author of two books on the United Arab Emirates, to which Dubai belongs.

A Profligacy of Greed
I've taken Mel Gibson off my Axis of Evil list on the right since his latest movie was good for a bad movie, even though the plot line seemed devised by a conspiracy-minded 9/11 Truther. Plus famous people like Gibson tend to go insane and it's not generous to malign the mentally ill.

In addition to my Axis of Evil list, I have my personal Rogues Gallery, particularly awful human beings I will touch on and discuss from time to time. People such that your heart sinks at the mere mention of their name. So far, I believe I've mentioned George Will, Robert Samuelson, and Mickey Kaus. Let me add that scourge of government debt Peter G. Peterson to the list. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, the stimulus last year was too small, even though it was the largest in history. It was too small because people like Peterson have been spreading propaganda about the deficit for years. And so many more people than need be will be unemployed in the coming years, the economy will be worse off, and hence the Democrats and Obama will suffer at the voting booth.

Let me add this anecdote from Yves Smith:

The one and only time I met Steve Schwarzman was in 1986, when he and Pete Peterson had just started the Blackstone Group. I was a manager (meaning a mid level working oar) at McKinsey. We had teed up a deal and were assisting our foreign client in hiring an investment banker. This transaction was sufficiently sexy that Felix Rohatyn wound up working on it personally.

But what did we get when we presented the idea to Peterson and Schwarzman? We explained why we came to see them. We got 40 minutes (I kid you not, I checked my watch) of name-dropping by Peterson, of all the senior folks he knew in our client’s country. But that wasn’t why our client came to see him; had he bothered to listen, the matter at hand was in the US.

Then he and Schwarzman spent the next 20 minutes talking about Blackstone, and they make it abundantly clear how jealous they were of leveraged buyout king Henry Kravis (at the time, Peterson and Schwarzman were mere advisor types, their looting wealth creating opportunities were far more limited than if they had oddles of investor and bank money to play with).

So in effect, they spent an hour telling us that they really wanted to be doing LBOs, that was SO much better paid than M&A, they wanted to grow up to be Henry Kravis, but since they hadn’t raised the money to do that yet, then yeah, our client’s deal might be worth their while in the interim.

I have never seen a pitch meeting (and this had been arranged at the senior levels of the firm) devolve into such a naked display of personal greed. The two partners who were there with me, neither one of them naifs, were as appalled as I was. As much as I have seen a lot of unprofessional conduct in my life, this still ranks as one of real doozies.

The Rule of Law is Sacrosanct*
(or don't fear the reaper, i.e avoid a bunker mentality**)

Glenn Greenwald is positively overflowing in his praise for Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder has been trying to do what's right and best for America in the face of the usual suspects' demagoguery and bedwetting over terrorism. As Obama has said more than once, "Let's not allow the terrorists to scare us into a bunker mentality." The only thing to fear is fear itself, as FDR put it. Greenwald:

Independently, Rahm Emanuel is the absolute last person who ought to be exerting influence over the Attorney General's decisions regarding where and how to try Terrorist suspects; remember when all Good Democrats agreed that Karl Rove's attempts to influence the DOJ was really bad because prosecutorial decisions are not supposed to be politicized?

Easy Glenn, don't want to praise Obama's AG Holder too much, it might make your never-ending hyperbolic criticism of Obama, that he's no better than Bush, etc., seem incongruent.

Last week there were news stories about a possible ouster of Emanuel after the Massachusetts Senate race loss. I disagreed with those who thought he should go, but after reading this I now wouldn't argue so strongly for keeping him. Emanuel might be right in is his argument that it would be better to get health care reform than try terrorism suspect as civilians and thereby respect international norms and put the Bush administration's lawlessness in the past.

I would say it's better to get health care reform than perform a witch hunt on a previous administration, which is what Greenwald wants. (People who complained about the witch hunts against Bill Clinton seem especially inclined to return the favor. Seems .... hypocritical and double-standardsish.) My hope would be that Obama follows his AG's advice and manages to gets health care reform done. That seems possible - even likely - while I believe they would have to chose between health care reform or partisan witch-hunt. (Besides Obama's whole Presidential campaign theme was bipartisanship, something his critics always seem to forget or ignore.)

According to the New York Times article Greenwald points to, Holder is currently reading "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish mystery-thriller, and Slavery by Another Name, about its unofficial persistence into 20th-century America."

My question to Senator Lindsey Graham - who I've always admired and who Emanuel is trying to placate - is that if we can treat anyone who is not an American in any manner we choose, why can't foreign nations do the same to American citizens? And if they do how can we protest?
--------------------
*sometimes
**As Rorschach says in prison to his fellow inmates - many of whom he put there, "You don't understand, I'm not in here with you, you're in here with me!"

Ezra Klein: 

In related news, Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left.

Left-liberal analysis failure

Maybe I'm just getting older and more compromised, but I was underwhelmed by left-liberals efforts to put Obama's feet to the fire and hold him to his campaign promised this past year. I know, I know, Obama explicitly asked for supporters to keep the pressure on and stay involved - the only recipe for success - but still reading this news reminds me of critics' evidence that the Obama administration would be a failure:

Mr. Tauzin is leaving his $2 million-a-year job as the top lobbyist for the drug industry amid complaints from drug makers that he bargained away their profits too cheaply, spent too much in his $150 million advertising campaign to sell the overhaul and miscalculated in his assessment that the passage of the legislation was all but inevitable.

Other drug industry lobbyists, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said his departure raised questions about whether the drug makers would continue to support the proposed overhaul, which has stalled in Congress.

Several of the lobbyists said Mr. Tauzin was undermined by a rival lobbying powerhouse -- Thomas J. Donohue, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, who had fought the health care proposals from the start and complained to the drug makers that Mr. Tauzin had gone along too easily. A spokesman for Mr. Donohue declined to comment on Mr. Donohue’s behalf and later released a statement from Mr. Donohue praising Mr. Tauzin as "a great friend."

On the other hand many of the left-liberals who pointed to the drug industry deal never supported Obama.

Schism

Hitchens on Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation.

He writes, "In Cromwell’s mind, as he contemplates his antagonist [Thomas] More, Mantel allows us to discern the germinal idea of what we now call the Protestant ethic:

He never sees More--a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod--without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, "Purgatory." Show me where it says "relics, monks, nuns." Show me where it says "Pope.""

Ahmed Rashid on the present-day Taliban.

It's almost as if when the 21st Century "West" (and globalized Japan, China, etc.) looks at the Taliban, we are looking at our past.

From Rashid:

What [Taliban author] Zaeef omits or fudges is significant. He makes no mention of the ISI's financial and material support to the Taliban, and says hardly anything about al-Qaeda or how his hero Mullah Omar became so close to Osama bin Laden. He has nothing to say about the Taliban's repressive attitudes toward women, including the ban on their education, and he makes no mention of the Taliban's harsh punishments, including public stonings. 

By 2001, after UN sanctions restricted the Taliban's international contacts, Zaeef became the only Taliban leader who could meet with US and Western envoys. His relationship with the US embassy in Islamabad was dominated by American demands to hand over Osama bin Laden. In the days after September 11, he frantically tried to stave off the impending US attack on his country by appealing to Western embassies, writing letters to the UN, and trying to enlist support from Islamic countries. He met with Mullah Omar, who was convinced that the Americans would not dare attack. In Omar's mind, Zaeef writes, "there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats and so an attack was unlikely."

Review of Stewart Copeland's new book.

“Strange Things Happen” is just slightly more generous on the Police years than was Sting’s “Broken Music,” which dismissed the band in a single page. Copeland devotes 10 skimpy, highly impressionistic pages to the years between 1976 and 1984, at which time the trio became the biggest band in the world. (The guitarist Andy Summers was more expansive about the glory days in his endearing “One Train Later.”) Almost as much attention is devoted, for no clear reason, to a single show in which he sat in with middling alt- rockers Incubus, or an incomprehensible MTV event for which he accompanied the Foo Fighters. 

Above and beyond the Police, Stewart Copeland has had a pretty wild life. He was raised in the Middle East, the son of a C.I.A. operative. [Miles Copeland] He was something of a pioneer in the pop exploration of “world music,” recording with African musicians well before Paul Simon made his “Graceland” trek. He has worked on various documentary films and is an accomplished polo player. 

In “Strange Things Happen,” though, he glosses through these events at such high speed that at best, we get a wisecrack or a flip observation (“my daddy used to conduct his nefarious manipulation of local potentates with cocktail parties at our modest Ottoman palace”), but no real sense of what any of it means to him. 

 

Tony Blair on Iraq: "No Regrets."

As he says, the views in the Middle East are that the Sunni Saddam Hussein was a check on Shia Iran. But he's right that we shouldn't use one dictatorship to check another. He gave a big speech to that effect in Chicago in 1999.

Blair is the one politician I've changed my mind about. During the 90s, I believed he was a triangulator of the Clinton mold, and he was in a way. After 9/11 he took a lot heat for standing with America, but we are better off for it.