Category: Barack Obama

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Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

Orwellian Tactics

According to an article in the Guardian, Clive Stafford Smith and his colleague Ahmed Ghappour wrote a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to reconsider the American stance on releasing information related to their client’s detainment at Guantanamo. Smith, who has some level of American security clearance, attached a memo to this letter which included some information which he had gleaned due to his security clearance – and so he submitted the memo to a privilege review team at America’s Department of Defense for clearance. 

 

[T]he memo was redacted to just the title, leaving the president unable to read it. Stafford Smith included the redacted copy of the memo in his letter to illustrate the extent to which it had been censored. He described it as a “bizarre reality”. “You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”

The privilege team argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of “unprofessional conduct”.

 

The Guardian has posted the full letter here (pdf).

If the privilege review team is successful in pressing their complaint, Stafford Smith will be receive a six-month prison sentence. Unfortunately, the privilege review team has not yet identified what rule was supposedly breached.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis Health care The Opinionsphere

The Master Plan Always Has Flaws

Daniel Drezner at Foreign Policy summarizes my feelings about Krugman in almost as complete a way as Evan Thomas did:

The fundamental question is whether Krugman is a brilliant hedgehog, an insecure pain in the ass, or – as frequently is the case – both at the same time. 

One suspects that Krugman is at least part right – and that Obama and his team realize this. Obama’s response to the financial crisis has been significant – and more than any government response in history – but it is dwarfed by the scale of the crisis, as Krugman is fond of pointing out. Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker tries to explain why Obama seems to be ignoring Krugman’s advice so far:

[Obama] has to address the crisis, and he is trying to add enough new controls to the system to prevent a repeat of it, but it looks as if his heart is with the big new programs in his budget and with his foreign-policy initiatives. Bank nationalization would drive the stock market down and increase theagita of people with 401(k) plans. Moderate Democrats in Congress would further soften in their support for the Administration’s legislation. The price of bank nationalization might be Obama’s super-ambitious plans in other realms, which, if history is a guide, are likely to pass only in this first year of his Presidency. If they do pass, he will have generated tax revenues from affluent people for social purposes far beyond those of the House’s tax on A.I.G. bonuses, and he will have significantly eased the distress of people who can’t get good health care or education. That is a lot to put at risk.

At the same time, Obama’s team seems to think that, to quote my post of yesterday:

[I]n the short term, the Geithner plans will work to restart the “old” economy. In this moment before that happens though, pressure from Europe and internal critics as well as a desire to avoid a repeat of this fiasco will enable enough forward-looking, gradualist regulation and legislation to correct the long-term problems with high finance.

E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post explains where the administration’s focus is:

Obama’s top budget officials seem confident that they can deal with this immediate difficulty. His larger challenge is to take on the politics of evasion promoted by those who would indefinitely delay health-care reform, energy conservation and the expansion of educational opportunities. Already, his lieutenants are signaling how he will cast the choice: between “taking on the country’s long-term challenges” or just “lowering our sights and muddling through,” as one senior aide put it.

If Geithner is responsible for fixing the current crisis, Peter Orszag is responsible for the long-term outlook – of balancing Obama’s plans to expand government’s role and stabilizing our deficit spending. As Jodi Kantor in the New York Times explained:

Mr. Orszag embodies the administration’s awkward fiscal policy positioning: big spending now, with a promise to scrub the budget of waste and a bet that economic recovery and changes to health care will gradually reduce the deficit.

A lot of pieces need to fall together for this to work. I have confidence in each piece of this plan – but together, the venture seems a bit bolder than is wise.

Perhaps this is a perfect moment in history for Obama’s plan – and Obama has the insight to see this; perhaps Obama is a master of politics who is able to get all of these items through; but it’s hard for me not to be discomfited by the manner in which everything is coming together.

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Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Financial Markets : Real Economy (Is There a Proper Balance?)

[digg-reddit-me]Simon Johnson’s article in The Atlantic Monthly continues to generate attention and controversy. His thesis is essentially this:

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. [my emphasis]

My only worry about Johnson’s argument is that he portrays the crisis as the result of individuals’ actions. His experience with emerging economies trained him to view the “Masters of the Universe” as oligarchs corrupting politics. But what I think is going on is more insidious. The problem is not that democracy is becoming oligarchy – although this is a danger we are closer to than we realize given the escalating consolidation of wealth – it is a financial sector that has grown out of balance with the real economy. ((With again the caveat that this is not backed up as much with economic analysis but with my sense and knowledge of politics, government, and history.)) Johnson and Paul Krugman both point this out repeatedly in their work – but neither of them identifies this as the problem. They instead see this as a symptom.

They are probably right – but I have a nagging suspicion that the core of this financial crisis – and that of the Great Depression – is at root a similar imbalance between the size of the financial markets and the size of the real economy.

Fundamentally, it seems there must be a limit as to what percentage of an economy can be managed by the financial markets. Just as the centralization of decision-making in the government can lead to inefficiencies, so can the centralization of decision-making in large financial instituions. Many of these factors that Johnson and Krugman talk about – increasing income disparity, asset bubbles, solvency issues, etcetera – can easily be seen as causes and/or effects of this central imbalance.

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Barack Obama Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Is This Downturn a Crisis of Confidence or a Fundamental Error?

Prefacing my thoughts on economics, as always, with the warning that I am not an economist, but only an amateur…

My non-professional observation is that when a disproportionate amount of money is controlled by the financial sector, a crash soon follows. This observation isn’t original. As Paul Krugman observed a few days ago in the New York Times:

After 1980, of course, a very different financial system emerged. In the deregulation-minded Reagan era, old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and dealing on a grand scale. The new system was much bigger than the old regime: On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies — giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America.

Krugman concludes that this structural issue is at the root of the problem – rather than a liquidity issue with the banks:

I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

Simon Johnson, an economist formerly with the IMF, agrees with Krugman in a long piece in The Atlantic Monthly, and he echoes another point I’ve been making:

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail.

Reading both of these men, I find myself hoping they are wrong while sensing that they are at least partially right. Evan Thomas of Newsweek captured this balance nicely in his cover piece from the current issue:

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he’s wrong, and you sense he’s being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking.

At the same time as Establishment defenders such as Robert Samuelson are uneasy about the scope of what Obama is proposing, other members of the Establishment are uneasy that he may not be doing enough. We don’t know who is right.

To some extent we can discount Krugman’s opposition due to his personal fantasy of how his life might work out:

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the “Foundation” series—”It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, ‘See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism’.”

His critique of Obama’s plans seems to follow this model – as his warnings take on more prophetic tones.

But there is real intellectual weight to this theory of the financial crisis as something more than a liquidity or confidence crisis. Krugman outright rejects this explanation:

[T]he banks [are] really, truly messed up: they bet heavily on unrealistic beliefs about housing and consumer debt, and lost those bets. Confidence is low because people have become realistic. [my emphasis]

In other venues, Krugman describes the problems as extending far further than this – as above when he discusses the trend towards increasing the influence of American finance and increasing income disparity. This stands on contrast to the approach of both Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner who believe that the crisis is primarily one of confidence. They are treating the crisis as a more technical and esoteric version of a bank panic solved by a show of strength, as for example, the Panic of 1907:

Shipments of gold were on the way from London to New York, and confidence had returned to the French Bourse, “owing,” reported one paper, “to the belief that the strong men in American finance would succeed in their efforts to check the spirit of the panic.” During a panic, confidence is almost as good as gold.

Today, the government has taken the role of “the strong men in American finance” who are seeking a show of strength to boost confidence.

On the one side, you have economists – from Simon Johnson to Paul Krugman to Nouriel Roubini – who have been predicting doom for some time claiming that there are fundamental problems with our finance industry – and as a result of the size and influence of our finance industry – our entire economy. On the other you have men and women with power – in both finance and government – who are acting as if the problem is mainly one of a lack of confidence and a broken mechanism. 

My bet – based in no small part on my innate optimism as well as a respect for people on both sides of this debate – is that in the short term, the Geithner plans will work to restart the “old” economy. In this moment before that happens though, pressure from Europe and internal critics as well as a desire to avoid a repeat of this fiasco will enable enough forward-looking, gradualist regulation and legislation to correct the long-term problems with high finance.  Already, there are some signs that this is what is happening.

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Barack Obama Humor Politics The Opinionsphere

Joe Campbell: I’m Not a Sexist Because I Disagree With Angie Harmon

 

[digg-reddit-me]Contra this tirade which the Drudge Report is somewhat inexplicably promoting. (Inexplicable because it seems like such a fluff story of Hollywood conservatives elites.)

Joe Campbell (me) is not afraid to come out and say he doesn’t like how Angie Harmon is insinuating Barack Obama is accusing people of racism — but he’s sick of having to defend himself from being deemed a sexist.

“Here’s my problem with this,” I quote myself, “I’m just going to come out and say it. If I have anything to say against Harmon it’s not because I’m a sexist, it’s because I don’t like what she’s saying and anybody should be able to feel that way, but what I find now is that if you say anything against her you’re called a sexist,” Campbell told a reporter for 2parse.com, the esteemed blog. “But sexism has nothing to do with it, I don’t care what genitalia she has or doesn’t have – or what gender she identifies herself as. I’m just not crazy about what she’s saying. I mean – I understand Obama has been in office for 69 days so it’s hard to understand how he hasn’t accomplished everything he promised he would. He only has about 1,400 days in office. I know he said he’s gonna do that and change and change, so okay … but he’s still got some time. There’s still a recession over here, woman, and you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about when you say that “we’ve got unemployment at an all-time high” (Unless you mean “all-time” since after Reagan was president.) If I’m going to disagree with Angie Harmon, that doesn’t make me a sexist.  It has to do with the fact that she sounds like an uninformed dolt. If I was to disagree with W, that doesn’t make me sexist. It has nothing to do with it, it is ridiculous.”

When asked to provide any examples of the accusations of sexism that provoked this tirade, Campbell finally fell silent. 

Angie Harmon has also neglected to provide any examples of accusations of racism. 

Unfortunately, Matt Drudge has only been promoting one of these stories, so the unfounded allegations of charges of sexism insinuated by Campbell will not gain as large of an audience as the unfounded accusations of Harmon.

Campbell admitted though that the fake umbrage-taking in the media circus was entertaining, even if it detracted from the overall political discourse. “But I get to promote myself!” he said.

[Image courtesy of Bristol Motor Speedway and Dragway licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

The Obama Doctrine

Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

This is a tricky, auspicious moment for a young president. [Obama] is ending one century, beginning another. Concisely, he essentially laid out his approach to foreign policy in a blurb for a recently reissued book by the late theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He wrote that he took away from Niebuhr’s works “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain.” He added that “we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”

This, then, is the Obama Doctrine: wisely, to have none at all.

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Barack Obama The Opinionsphere

Glenn Greenwald uses hyperbole the way other writers use punctuation.

[digg-reddit-me]I felt as if Glenn Greenwald’s blog post earlier this week was directed at me. Probably not – as Greenwald has never linked here. But reading his piece, I felt targeted. Greenwald castigated

those who invoke Bible-like “he’s-a-master-of-11-dimensional-chess” clichés to justify whatever he does

He mocks those “who pay homage to Kim Jong Il-like imagery such as this and this.”

He calls “these drooling, worshipful, subservient sentiments.” (I don’t consider myself to have anything near this level of Obama-adoration. But discounting for the fact that Glenn Greenwald uses exaggeration the way other writers use punctuation – in other words, constantly, and as a matter of course – it felt as if he might be directing his apparently reasoned tirade.

Following the links Greenwald provides, it seems more like he has a personal beef with Al Giordano of The Field than anything else. But Greenwald addresses his point broadly and it deserves to be taken seriously.

First, one must translate from the Greenwaldese. As I said before, Greenwald uses exaggeration the way other people use punctuation – so when he says Al Giordano is invoking “Bible-like ‘he’s-a-master-of-11-dimensional-chess’ clichés” if you actually follow the link, you find a rather mundane article defending Tim Geithner and insisting that this isn’t the time to sack him unless progressives can come up with a realistic alternative. Giordano does invoke chess once:

[Obama’s opponents] are stuck playing checkers while Obama beats them at chess.

Bible-like master of 11-dimensional chess indeed. The “Kim Jong Il-like imagery” is only this LOLcat inspired image from the Sarah Palin surge of early September 2008. I liked that picture a lot – and even posted it on the blog here. It seemed to be both ironicly over-the-top yet comforting as it conveyed the very real sense from that time period that Obama was confident and in command and believed his campaign would weather that storm. With everyone hyperventilating over the Palin surge, Obama stuck to his plan and won out in the end. There has been a remarkable steadiness to Obama’s campaigning – that has perhaps carried over into his governing. As individual issues flare up each day, Obama deliberately concedes much of the daily war, choosing to focus on the long-term. Greenwald seems to find this implausible – because of his distorted view of politics. 

There are voices out there that are over-the-top in their praise of Obama – though Greenwald apparently wasn’t able to find them before publishing this piece – and Greenwald makes a valid point when he writes that trust is “a sentiment appropriate for family and friends but not political leaders.” But his view of politics as merely transactional – and more important – of moment-to-moment is idiotic. As when he writes:

Political leaders deserve support only to the extent that their actions, on a case-by-case basis, merit that support, and that has largely been the behavior of progressives towards Obama. [my emphasis]

What a ridiculous and irrational statement. Politics is about building coalitions, compromising and fighting to get as much of what you want done as possible, setting up later opportunities, judging what is the best that can be gotten at any moment. You don’t judge whether you support a politician on a case-by-case basis anymore than you judge a blogger on a post-by-post basis or sentence-by-sentence basis or clause-by-clause basis. You look at the whole picture.

Imagine a blogger such as Greenwald evaluating Abraham Lincoln. (Not because Obama is just like Lincoln – but because Lincoln’s legacy is almost unquestioned today, so he provides a useful example. And we don’t have to try too hard to imagine what these principled critics of Lincoln would sound like as there were many columnists who used overripe prose much as Greenwald uses hypberbole.) Think of a principled abolitionist such as Greenwald evaluating Lincoln on a case-by-case basis – frustrated at Lincoln’s reticence during the campaign – and his refusal to call for abolition; savaging the Emancipation Proclamation as too weak; furious at the violations of habeas corpus rights; castigating the incompetence of the war management. 

Yet it was stupid – and short-sighted – to judge Lincoln based on any of these events in isolation on a case-by-case basis. Many in his time did judge him in this light – and thought he was a poor president. That is, until they noticed that his steady leadership had brought America through a difficult time – that he had been pushing the country in a positive direction. 

Glenn Greenwald isn’t simplistic enough to believe his case-by-case rhetoric. But this example illustrates what bothers me about Greenwald – not just the overheating, but the way he pushes his points to ridiculousness if he isn’t careful. There is something fundamentally flawed about the way Greenwald proposes to judge politicians in this piece. It illustrates the extent to which Greenwald’s writing must be carefully calibrated so that outrage and exaggeration must reach a crescendo without becoming cacaphonous. Greenwald’s writing is a high-wire act – and if he succeeds in pulling it off, you’re thrilled and impressed. But if he screws up once, the act is over and it’s clear that he has failed.

This piece is clearly one of those failures.

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Barack Obama Politics

The Paradox In Organzing For America

[digg-reddit-me]Last week, I received a phone call from an Obama-affiliated group asking me to “Call my congressman and tell them to support Obama’s budget,” or something along those lines. I didn’t. Apparently, many others didn’t as well.

At the same time, Organizing for America, the follow-up to the Obama campaign organization run by David Plouffe, sent out emails and organized people to knock on doors to encourage support for Obama’s budget. From what I’ve heard and read, all this push is having an effect, but it’s been underwhelming.

Here’s my thought:

The Obama campaign was extremely effective about this because it people knew they had to make a choice and vote. Knowing that this was coming up, they evaluated all the information they came across with this in mind. Those who settled on Barack Obama then had to defend their choice – and if they were of a particular type of person – they could promote his candidacy. And so it was that hundreds of thousands of people became convinced to try to achieve a single shared goal. This group proved extremely effective – at fundraising, knocking on doors, defending Obama against attacks, mounting attacks against his opponents, and eventually, getting people out to vote.

The process was something like this:

  1. Citizens realize they must make a choice.
  2. They evaluate the choices.
  3. They make a choice.
  4. Their goal becomes to convince others to make the same choice.
  5. As more citizens become convinced to take on this shared goal, the process accelerates.

Organizing for America faces a different challenge on several levels – the first of which is the difference between choosing a candidate and supporting a policy that you will not be required to vote on. In the first case, there is a level of personal responsibility inherent in choosing and voting for a candidate. Regarding legislation though, the people have no direct voice. Their only direct responsibility is to vote in the right people to make these decisions. The influence they might or might not have is indirect. That’s why organizing people for this purpose is more complicated. The tendency is for people to take a more passive approach to legislation – “Let’s give them a chance” rather than “This is the best policy.” Citizens evaluate information differently if they know they will be forced to make a choice based on their evaluation of the information.

It seems the Obama administration and Organizing for America are aware of this – and are trying to figure out how to keep people involved, to change the expectations and force people to take a position, to make a choice. Thus they are encouraging people to pressure those representing them and to try to convince other citizens of the worth of Obama’s budget. But the problem is this type of movement will never gain momentum unless people first have a shared goal. 

So, the Catch-22 is that without a shared goal, citizens are less likely to organize; citizens are less likely to have a shared goal unless they are forced to make a simple choice; the main means Organizing for America is using to force people to make a choice implicitly assume a shared goal.

There is some reason to have faith that Obama can overcome this seemingly impossible loop. Because he already did so with a similar loop – which I described in The Paradox of Obama. Or even better, and more appropriately, the answer might come from citizens discussing these ideas within the tubes of the internets.

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Barack Obama National Security War on Drugs

Former Drug Czars Against the War on Drugs

[digg-reddit-me]

Updated.

When I reported this a few weeks ago, I think I was the first to see significance in what former Drug Czar Brigadier General Barry McCaffrey said – and to be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up more. (The full video of the Council on Foreign Relations event on US-Mexico relations is here.) One of our more aggressive drug czars who vehemently attacked those politicians who suggested even allowances for medicinal marijuana and under whom arrests for mere marijuana possession went way up [pdf] now says this:

QUESTIONER: …[W]hy not just legalize drugs?

Former Drug Czar, General BARRY MCCAFFREY (retired): …[S]ince I’m not in public life, [I can say] I actually don’t care.  I care about 6th graders through 12th graders.  If you’re 40 years old, and you’re living in Oregon, and you have 12 giant pot plants in the back of your log cabin, knock yourself out.

(Laughter.)

(For those watching the video, the first questioner who did not identify himself sounded like Ted Sorenson, the venerable former Kennedy speechwriter who is a frequent guest at Council on Foreign Relations events. )

McCaffrey is not the first drug czar to reveal more nuanced views after his tenure was over. Matthea Falco, a drug czar in the 1970s, has become a strong proponent of the harm reduction over the prohibition approach. When asked why by PBS, she responded:

It’s very hard not to change your vision if you stay in the field long enough…

If you look over the sweep of time, what changed for me from 1980 until about 1990, and continuing today, is that the price of drugs has just plummeted in this country…So that’s got to be a failure [of the War on Drugs]…

It’s also a flawed strategy. Many people argue that it just hasn’t been implemented enough, that, “If you just put ten times as much money into it, it would change everything.” But, in fact, it’s a flawed strategy at its very core. [my emphasis]

Yet another former Drug Czar Peter Bourne commented on the evolution of the War on Drugs into the war on marijuana – beginning here with the claims that marijuana had significantly bad health effects:

It was policymakers trying to hide behind the skirts of science, trying to say that marijuana poses a threat to the health of young people.

Taking any drugs is probably not a good idea. But [marijuana] certainly posed no significant public health problem. In many ways, it’s somewhat reminiscent of 50 years ago when moralists argued that masturbation was morally wrong. They couldn’t just argue that it was morally wrong, so they argued that it made you insane. They were able to get enough physicians to say, “Yes, masturbation makes you insane,” and people argued that this was causing insanity. Therefore, you were justified in condemning masturbation. I see the same sort of process with the use of marijuana, which is a trivial health problem. 

These are the men and women who were in charge of the War on Drugs – and in running this war, they have come to see it’s madness.  As Matthea Falco said, “It’s very hard not to change your vision if you stay in the field long enough.” Those who are engaged with these issues begin to see the obvious:

The War on Drugs is a war on our citizenry which has led us to imprison a higher percentage of our population than any other country on earth. It is destabilizing our neighbors and other countries essential to our national security with the Pentagon going to far as to claim that Mexico is at risk of a complete collapse due to the effects of the Drug War. Domestically, it competes with police resources leading to a measurable rise in non-drug related serious crimes [pdf] as police attention is diverted. It competes with counterterrorism measures and resources. The War on Drugs is actively making us less safe – and it has failed to stop or even reduce the availability or price of drugs. As one wise senator said in 2004:

The war on drugs is an utter failure.

Now that senator is president of the United States of America – and though he offers better policies and a softening of the hardest edges of the Drug War (which includes refraining from calling it a war), he does not offer the bold action that we need to make us safer. The Obama administration seems content to maintain the prohibitionist policies “firmly rooted in prejudices, fears and ideological visions” that have failed decisively (in the words of the major report on the Drug War by the former presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia.) But the War on Drugs and the prohibition it is based on endanger both our liberty and our security. Both must end.

Continue reading “Former Drug Czars Against the War on Drugs”
Categories
Barack Obama Criticism The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Obama on the Blogs

This just peeved me – from Obama’s interview with the New York Times over the weekend:

Even so, [Obama] said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example.

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

Now that’s just a stupid thing to say – not only because he’s gratuitiously insulting many people who worked hard for him during his campaign – including me – but it makes him look like an idiot technologically. The problems isn’t “blogs” – and in fact, the substance of his criticism probably applies best to cable talk shows.