A little comment(ary)...

Obama's Faith-Based Reform
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post

Barack Obama keeps trying to end the wars over culture and religion, and good for him. The 1960s are so 40 years ago. But Obama's opponents, as well as some of his friends, won't let him do it.

His latest foray is on a subject dear to my heart: the effort to find constitutional ways to build partnerships between government and faith-based groups doing essential work for the poor and the marginalized.

The outline Obama offered Tuesday suggests that he wants to learn from President Bush's failures in this area, not simply reject an idea because it has Bush's name on it.

And give Obama points for acknowledging how hard it is to find the right balance between avoiding excessive entanglement of government with religion on the one hand and respecting the identity of religious charities on the other. "Some of these questions are difficult," he said in an interview, "and I don't have them all worked out."

The truth is that government and religious groups have long cooperated on social ventures that posed no threat to religious freedom. Students should be able to get government loans whether they go to Fresno State, Notre Dame or Yeshiva. Religious hospitals get Medicare and Medicaid money.

Moreover, the government has had partnerships for many years with Catholic Charities, Lutheran Services, the Jewish Federations and other religious groups. And why not? If the religious charities disappeared, both the poor and the taxpayers would be in a lot of trouble.

Unfortunately, while Bush loved to talk about the "armies of compassion," he did not put much money or muscle behind a domestic compassion agenda. As David Kuo, former deputy director of Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, wrote in 2005: "From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the 'poor people stuff.' "

In suggesting that the faith-based policy be mended but not ended, Obama starts with the right reforms. "There was a lot of political and partisan decision making in the office," he told me. He wants his faith-based agency "working with everybody," and clear measures, applied equally, to guarantee "high standards" in both secular and religious programs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/03/AR2008070302453.html?wpisrc=newsletter

A Man of Seasonal Principles
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post

You'll notice Barack Obama is now wearing a flag pin. Again. During the primary campaign, he refused to, explaining that he'd worn one after Sept. 11 but then stopped because it "became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism." So why is he back to sporting pseudo-patriotism on his chest? Need you ask? The primaries are over. While seducing the hard-core MoveOn Democrats that delivered him the caucuses -- hence, the Democratic nomination -- Obama not only disdained the pin. He disparaged it. Now that he's running in a general election against John McCain, and in dire need of the gun-and-God-clinging working-class votes he could not win against Hillary Clinton, the pin is back. His country 'tis of thee.

In last week's column, I thought I had thoroughly chronicled Obama's brazen reversals of position and abandonment of principles -- on public financing of campaigns, on NAFTA, on telecom immunity for post-Sept. 11 wiretaps, on unconditional talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- as he moved to the center for the general election campaign. I misjudged him. He was just getting started.

Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November -- i.e., the primary season -- statement "inartful." Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary -- "Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial."

Obama's seasonally adjusted principles are beginning to pile up: NAFTA, campaign finance reform, warrantless wiretaps, flag pins, gun control. What's left?

Iraq. The reversal is coming, and soon.

Two weeks ago, I predicted that by Election Day Obama will have erased all meaningful differences with McCain on withdrawal from Iraq. I underestimated Obama's cynicism. He will make the move much sooner. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to finally acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to formally abandon his primary season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/03/AR2008070302451.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Why Were We in Vietnam?
By Harold Meyerson
The Washington Post

Doing business in China is beginning to cost real money. Not that Chinese workers are buying second homes or anything like that: Their average wage is still a little short of a dollar an hour. But so many Chinese have now left their villages for the factories that the once bottomless pool of new young workers is beginning to run dry, and the wages of assembly-line employees are rising 10 percent a year.

Worse yet, new labor laws are making it harder for employers to cheat their workers out of their wages and benefits. Many American businesses that do their manufacturing in China had warned against those laws; the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai had flatly opposed them. But the good old days of Maoist labor discipline, when the government could send tens of millions of skilled workers down to the farms to be toughened up and periodically tortured, are gone. Mao's heirs, though not above a touch of torture here and there just to keep the system humming along, are concerned, as he was not, with achieving social harmony, even if that means compelling employers to sign, and honor, contracts with their employees.

Confronted with such appalling squishiness, what's a good, cost-cutting American business to do? Many are fleeing south of the border -- not our border (Mexico costs way too much) but China's.

They're bound for Vietnam.

According to a report by Keith Bradsher in the New York Times last month, such multinational companies as Canon (the printer and copier maker) and Hanesbrands (the North Carolina-based underwear empire) are expanding or building factories in Hanoi, where they churn out products for Wal-Mart and other American retailers. Foreign direct investment in Vietnam increased 136 percent between 2006 and 2007, while it increased just 14 percent in China.

The reason for the move south is straightforward: Vietnamese factory workers make about a quarter of what their Chinese counterparts earn.

But why Vietnam and not, say, Thailand, where labor is similarly cheap?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/08/AR2008070802462.html?wpisrc=newsletter

A Week of Hunger
By Michael Gerson
The Washington Post

Those of us who dimly remember the gas lines of the 1970s tend to view commodity price spikes as the temporary work of international villains. But anyone still expecting the return of cheap oil is in for a long wait. Rising energy prices are mainly the result of unprecedented global prosperity -- a rising billion in China and India determined to own automobiles and air conditioners. This increased demand for oil, natural gas and coal has almost nothing to do with the policies of America or the designs of OPEC.

Given the strain on household budgets, it is impossible to call this a blessing, even a mixed one. But it might properly be called a mixed curse. During the 1992 campaign, some Democrats proposed a controversial 50-cent-a-gallon increase in the gas tax to reduce domestic consumption and encourage alternatives to oil. Since then, gas prices have risen by more than $3 a gallon, resulting in individual suffering and aggregate benefits. Alternatives to oil and coal -- from wind to solar to nuclear -- are suddenly more economical in comparison. Chevrolet and Toyota are only a couple of years away from offering plug-in hybrids that could average hundreds of miles to the gallon.

But our other demand-driven crisis -- food inflation -- is simply a curse since there is no pleasant alternative to eating. This problem has a variety of causes: the growth of meat-based diets across the world, requiring large amounts of grain for animal feed; the diversion of acreage to the production of ethanol; the rising cost of food transportation and natural gas-based fertilizers; water shortages and climate disruption. Recent prices have dipped a bit, but expensive food now seems to be a fact of life.

On the fringes of subsistence in the developing world, sudden double-digit jumps in the prices of staples have resulted in riots. In America, a rise of about 6 percent in the price of groceries this year has led the poor to adopt a variety of survival strategies, from buying food that is beyond its expiration date to visiting food banks.

The president and Congress cannot be accused of indifference. Funding for nutritional programs at the Agriculture Department has increased by more than 60 percent during the Bush years. In its recent farm bill (while expanding American agricultural subsidies that do staggering harm to farmers in the developing world), Congress helpfully increased funding for American food banks and food stamps. It also renamed the Food Stamp Program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, on the theory that boring bureaucratic names with annoying acronyms (SNAP) bear less stigma for recipients.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/08/AR2008070802461.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Fixing How We Go to War
By David S. Broder
The Washington Post

Just shy of eight years after they squared off in the Florida recount battle, James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher have joined forces to clean up one of the ugly legacies of Vietnam -- the misguided piece of legislation called the War Powers Act.

Passed in 1973, when Congress was mightily frustrated with the undeclared war in Southeast Asia, that statute is proof of the adage that hard cases make bad law. Cases don't come any harder than Vietnam, and the War Powers Act has turned out to be one of the worst bills ever to reach the president's desk and be signed into law.

Its constitutionality is suspect, but no one has ever found a way to test it in court. Now Baker and Christopher, both former secretaries of state before they became lawyers for George W. Bush and Al Gore, respectively, in the 2000 struggle over Florida's decisive electoral votes, have found common cause as co-chairmen of a National War Powers Commission created by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

When I went to see the two men during their visit to Washington this week, I found no lingering sense of the partisan animosities that marked their Florida encounter. Instead, they communicated a shared passion to help the next president and Congress find a way to solve a problem that has vexed the capital since the early days of the republic.

The Founders left a ton of confusion about a pretty important question: Who has the authority to make war? Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right to declare war, but Article II makes the president the commander in chief. Nowhere does it say where the authority of one stops and the other begins.

The War Powers Act tried to resolve the question by putting a time limit on the president's ability to deploy troops into a combat zone, but no president has accepted as legitimate that limitation on his authority, and Congress has never tried to enforce it.

Baker and Christopher told me that as they dug into the issue, they and their fellow commission members quickly concluded that there was no way to nudge the Supreme Court into settling the issue. The court has an aversion to arbitrating a "political question" arising from a conflict between the elected branches.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/09/AR2008070901936.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

Capitalism's Reality Check
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."

The old script is in rewrite. "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, "we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation." This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for "a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers."

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside "the structure and workings of financial markets" because "recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets." Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071002264.html?wpisrc=newsletter

How Hostages, And Nations, Get Liberated
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post

On the day the Colombian military freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other long-held hostages, the Italian Parliament passed yet another resolution demanding her release. Europe had long ago adopted this French-Colombian politician as a cause celebre. France had made her an honorary citizen of Paris, passed numerous resolutions and held many vigils.

Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic. Betancourt languished for six years in cruel captivity until freed in a brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian military, intelligence agencies and special forces -- an operation so well executed that the captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.

This in foreign policy establishment circles is called "hard power." In the Bush years, hard power is terribly out of fashion, seen as a mere obsession of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the sophisticates worship at the altar of "soft power" -- the use of diplomatic and moral resources to achieve one's ends.

Europe luxuriates in soft power, nowhere more than in l'affaire Betancourt in which Europe's repeated gestures of solidarity hovered somewhere between the fatuous and the destructive. Europe had been pressing the Colombian government to negotiate for the hostages. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez offered to mediate.

Of course, we know from documents captured in a daring Colombian army raid into Ecuador in March -- your standard hard-power operation duly denounced by that perfect repository of soft power, the Organization of American States -- that Chávez had been secretly funding and pulling the strings of the FARC. These negotiations would have been Chávez's opportunity to gain recognition and legitimacy for his terrorist client.

Colombia's President Álvaro Uribe, a conservative and close ally of President Bush, went instead for the hard stuff. He has for years. As a result, he has brought to its knees the longest-running and once-strongest guerrilla force on the continent by means of "an intense military campaign [that] weakened the FARC, killing seasoned commanders and prompting 1,500 fighters and urban operatives to desert" ( Washington Post). In the end, it was that campaign -- and its agent, the Colombian military -- that freed Betancourt.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071002262.html?wpisrc=newsletter

The Outlaw Presidency
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

Another major book chronicling the descent into lawlessness of the Bush presidency is out this week. This one is by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, and it's called "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals."

Reviewing the book for The Washington Post, Andrew J. Bacevich writes that Mayer's "achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

"Under the guise of 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in 'making torture the official law of the land in all but name.' Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

"To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony... of military officers, intelligence professionals, 'hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system' and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.

"Above all, the story Mayer tells is one of fear and its exploitation.....

"From Mayer, we learn that in George W. Bush's Washington, the decisions that matter are made in secret by a handful of presidential appointees committed to the proposition that nothing should inhibit the exercise of executive power. The Congress, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the 'interagency process' -- all of these constitute impediments that threaten to constrain the president. In a national security crisis, constraint is intolerable. Much the same applies to the media and, by extension, to the American people: The public's right to know extends no further than whatever the White House wishes to make known."

Frank Rich writes in his New York Times opinion column: "In Ms. Mayer's portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television's '24,' all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html

New Yorker Cover Not So Funny
By Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post

Lots of Internet frenzy this morning over The New Yorker's cover, showing Obama in a turban, his wife armed with an AK-47 and her hair in an Afro, the two of them fist-bumping in the Oval Office with Osama's portrait on the wall and an American flag burning in the fireplace.

As you'd imagine, the Obama campaign has denounced it, as has the McCain campaign. The New Yorker's David Remnick (via Memeorandum) tells Rachel Sklar of HuffPo that it's satire. (The illustration is titled "The Politics of Fear," but you have to turn to the masthead to see the title.) Remnick: "...these imaginings and dark fantasies and misconceptions about Obama exist. And we're putting it all together in one image and holding a mirror up to it and showing it for it for the absurdity that it is." [Remnick tells Howie: "If I started self-censoring myself and my writers and artists because someone might take it askance, I'd publish nothing that wasn't bland and inoffensive...Satire is offensive sometimes, otherwise it's not very effective."]

Anyone with a brain and even a modicum of a sense of humor should be able to tell it's satire. Moreover, everyone knows that The New Yorker is editorially liberal. There's no serious issue here about intent -- any Obama supporter calling this a smear needs to take a deep breath.

It is possible, even in an election year, for this country retain a sense of humor, and its corollary, a willingness to impute to others the best of motives rather than the worst. Obama himself has talked about his desire to end this pattern of demonization of opponents. He's made it clear that he hates the way the national discourse gets side-tracked by minutia and nonsense. And yet this campaign year has been marked by a hypersensitivity to "gaffes," which sometimes are nothing more than an attempt at jocularity.

That said ... there's still a basic problem with The New Yorker cover, which is that it's not funny.

Here's a fundamental rule of humor: It must be funny to work. Another rule: "Almost funny" is invariably just as bad, and often worse, than being extremely unfunny. When something is "almost funny," but not genuinely funny, people can feel insulted, as if you're saying, "This is funny, and I'm laughing, but your sense of humor is so stunted and pathetic that you just don't get the joke."

I'm not even sure this cover is "almost funny" -- because it deals so heavy-handedly with such a sensitive topic. Osama on the wall, the flag burning, the Angela Davis wife -- the natural response is to cringe rather than laugh. Of course, political cartooning by nature deals with caricatures and heavy-handed images, but usually they're leavened by some kind of quip, some verbal wink. In this case there's no punch line.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/


AP

The 28 Percent President
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

At his press conference yesterday, President Bush tried to emphasize the positive about the economy -- and his presidency. The financial system is "basically sound," he said. And he rejected the naysayers who say "aww, man, you're running out of time." But at the end of the day, Bush found himself overridden, ignored and disdained.

We'll start with disdained.

Jon Cohen blogs for The Washington Post: "Another month, another new low for George W. Bush: Just 28 percent in the new Post-ABC poll approve of the way the president is handling his job. This marks a new career low in Post polling, and is the 40th consecutive month his ratings have been under 50 percent.

"His negative rating has also hit a record, with 69 percent saying they disapprove of his job performance. And the percentage holding 'strongly' negative views is up to 56 percent, another new high, and nearly five times the number who 'strongly approve.'

"While most Republicans remain steadfastly behind the president, a third now disapprove, including two in 10 who strongly disapprove. This is the first time so many Republicans have expressed such sharply negative views of Bush's tenure. Strong disapproval among Democrats has also reached a new high in the poll, 81 percent."

Alan Fram writes for the Associated Press: "28 percent said they approve of the job Bush is doing, tying his low in the AP-Ipsos survey set last April. . . .

"Just 63 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of conservatives approved of Bush's handling of his job, strikingly low numbers. . . .

"With soaring fuel prices, ailing financial and housing markets and rising inflation, Bush got his lowest grade for handling the economy. Just 24 percent approved of how he's dealing with it, tying last month's AP-Ipsos low on that issue.

"Only half of Republicans gave Bush good grades on the economy, as did hardly any Democrats or independents."

Terence Hunt writes for the Associated Press: "This is hardly the way he wanted to go out. . . .

"As of Tuesday, Bush had 189 days before he walks out of the Oval Office for the last time. His term is ending with Americans on edge, the mood of the country sour."

A new New York Times/CBS poll shows Bush's approval at -- you guessed it -- 28 percent, with 65 percent disapproving. That's not an all-time low; a CBS poll in June found Bush approval at 25 percent. But approval on his handling of the economy, at 20 percent, does break the record.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/07/16/BL2008071601516.html?wpisrc=newsletter