Scaling Back Missile Defense

I had thought this already happened a couple weeks ago:

WASHINGTON -- The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, according to people familiar with the matter, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.

The U.S. will base its decision on a determination that Iran's long-range missile program has not progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The findings, expected to be completed as early as next week following a 60-day review ordered by President Barack Obama, would be a major reversal from the Bush administration, which pushed aggressively to begin construction of the Eastern European system before leaving office in January.

Cue the howls that Obama is a terrorist trying to kill all of us in our beds.

Actually, this is a nod to the Russians, who found the missile defense system provocative. Russia wasn't willing to sanction Iran in the UN Security Council, and the Obama Administration wants their support. So as much as I'd like to think that the White House recognized that hitting a bullet with a bullet is kind of fantastical and untested, as the GAO says in this report, and we shouldn't blow a bunch of money trying to make it work, actually it's more of a political play. Anyway, the Administration still wants to fund regional missile defense sites throughout Europe. Leading me to wonder, if Europe is threatened by short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, um, why can't they develop their own defense system?

I know, that's outrageous, we have to be the world's protector...

...I should say that on balance this is a good idea, as Robert Farley explains. I love this notion on the right that Obama is abandoning Europe - because conservatives have been alone in their proud defense of European values over the years, right?

Coming Around?

Maybe the Obama Adminstration's apparent abandoning of missile defense installations in Eastern Europe can signal a new way of thinking about national security, instead of relying on the old thinking.

Expect the usual shrieking from the wingnut gallery. No one could ever conclusively argue why these bases were a good idea; they were supposed to deter Russia, but at the same time weren't aimed at Russia, and couldn't possibly have stopped a Russian attack. They were supposed to defend from Iranian missiles, even though no one could ever figure out a plausible reason why Iran would fire ballistic missiles at Europe. Eastern European missile defense was, in short, insane; it was conceived by missile defense fanatics in the United States, and abetted by policymakers in Poland and the Czech Republic who wanted a clear signal of US commitment to their defense. The latter motivation was defensible; the former not so much.

We cannot just be the world's protector; heck, with our desiccated financial state, we can hardly be our own protector anymore. A more balanced multilateralism will reduce our military commitment globally and promote a more lasting peace. Bugging out of useless missile defense sites in Europe could lead to bugging out of, I don't know, the military outposts in 130 nations throughout the world.

Now, if we can apply this to Afghanistan, and actually think critically about the task at hand and how best to reach it, we may have something. Although, it appears the commanders will ask for another slow and steady escalation of 20,000 more troops. We have to break out of this kind of thinking.

Throw Them A Life Raft

Yesterday, Brian Kilmeade walked down a rhetorical blind alley and found himself arguing in favor of "ethnically pure" societies. It's painful to watch. And yes, the likes of Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs call America home. But in fairness, we don't have all the racists. My favorite part of this is the backtrack ("Hey, I didn't say kill them!"):

Boats carrying illegal migrants to Europe should be sunk, Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National party, said yesterday.

In a provocative intervention, Griffin, elected to the European parliament last month, called on the EU to introduce "very tough" measures to prevent illegal migrants entering Europe from Africa.

"If there's measures to set up some kind of force or to help, say the Italians, set up a force which actually blocks the Mediterranean then we'd support that," Griffin told BBC Parliament's The Record Europe.

"But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over. Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats. Anyone coming up with measures like that, we'll support, but anything which is there as a 'oh, we need to do something about it' but in the end doing something about it means bringing them into Europe we will oppose."

Shirin Wheeler, the programme's presenter, interrupted him to say the EU did not murder people. "I didn't say anyone should be murdered at sea – I say boats should be sunk, they can throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya," Griffin said. "But Europe has, sooner or later, to close its borders or it's simply going to be swamped by the third world."

Maybe Britons should pay more attention to those European Parliament elections, ay? Do us all a favor.

They Get Our News

I seem to remember a common complaint during the Bush era that Al Qaeda was watching our TV shows and paying attention to what Democrats have to say, and when they criticized the President, Osama bin Laden rejoiced and threw a party, so everyone had better shut up. That was a go-to argument for the right for a while.

I never much worried about Al Qaeda getting out their rabbit ears and watching C-SPAN. However, unquestionably leaders in Europe read our newspapers and consume our media. And when political leaders run a steady diet of pants-pissing missives about the big bad Guantanamo super-villains and how they can never set foot on US soil, small wonder that Europe, a key player in the White House's efforts to find settlements for detainees scheduled for release, wants no part of them either.

The Obama administration's push to resettle at least 50 Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Europe is meeting fresh resistance as European officials demand that the United States first give asylum to some inmates before they will do the same.

Rising opposition in the U.S. Congress to allowing Guantanamo prisoners on American soil has not gone over well in Europe. Officials from countries that previously indicated they were willing to accept inmates now say it may be politically impossible for them to do so if the United States does not reciprocate.

"If the U.S. refuses to take these people, why should we?" said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of the German Parliament from Bavaria, where the White House wants to relocate nine Chinese Uighur prisoners. "If all 50 states in America say, 'Sorry, we can't take them,' this is not very convincing."

The scaremongering has legs, you see, and politicians everywhere being of a spineless nature, they don't want to face their constituents and explain why released Gitmo prisoners are terrorist masterminds to every portion of America but just fine for their country.

Funny how the same people who shrieked that Democrats were "making us less safe" with their words are now causing an international incident through deliberate lying and severely damaging an American President's efforts to improve foreign relations, huh? I guess politics doesn't end at the water's edge anymore.

Harry Reid has composed himself and acknowledged that some prisoners would be resettled in US prisons. Hopefully this constant agreement with the latest bedwetting scenario on the right has ended, and we can actually face our allies again.

Guantanamo East=Not Change

Robert Gates lets the cat out of the bag by acknowledging that up to 100 Guantanamo detainees could be held on US soil once the prison camp closes. What shocked me is that he acknowledged that these would be detainees who remain in a legal limbo, without an awaiting trial but without a release. That represents no difference from keeping Gitmo open. The problem was not the location, but the indefinite detention going on there.

Mr. Gates said discussions had started this week with the Justice Department about determining how many of the Guantánamo detainees could not be sent to other countries or tried in courts. He did not say which detainees might be in that group, but independent experts have said it probably would include terrorism suspects whom the military has not yet brought charges against, among them detainees from Yemen and the Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to brutal interrogation in secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“What do we do with the 50 to 100 — probably in that ballpark — who we cannot release and cannot try?” Mr. Gates said in a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee.

He did not say whether the detainees would be imprisoned temporarily or indefinitely or under what law they would be held. The Obama administration is debating how to establish a legal basis for incarcerating detainees deemed too dangerous to be released but not appropriate to be tried because of potential problems posed by their harsh interrogations, the evidence against them or other issues.

Eric Holder gave a slightly better answer while in Berlin, saying “We have to determine what would be our basis for holding that person that would to the world appear to be fair and that would in fact be fair... How could you ensure that due process was being served by the detention of such a person?” In addition, Holder appeared to be making headway on releasing some detainees in Europe, as countries seem willing to accept them. Similarly, Gates did defend the expected action of the United States settling the 17 Uighurs whose life has been a nightmare, cleared for release from Guantanamo but unable to return to China for fear of persecution. But the idea that we would continue indefinite detentions on anyone truly worries me. Here's Sharon Franklin of The Constitution Project:

"If the United States were to simply move the detainees onto U.S. soil and continue to detain them without charge or legal process, then the act of closing Guantanamo would have been meaningless," said Sharon Bradford Franklin, a lawyer for the Constitution Project, an advocacy group.

As for the Congressional NIMBYs who don't want to see detainees imprisoned in their districts, they might want to appropriate more money for their prisons, then, if they find them so insecure. Ali al-Marri, a legal resident who was held without charges at a Navy brig for five years before being charged through the criminal justice system, just pleaded guilty to conspiring with Al Qaeda operatives, and will spend 15 years in prison at a minimum. Should Illinois lawmakers be wary of his entry into jail? Should they want to offshore him? How about a carjacker? How far does this go? Saying that dangerous terrorists shouldn't be allowed in the jails equals saying that jails in America aren't secure. Is that the message they want to send?

Different Answers Across The Pond

The town hall meeting President Obama held in Strasbourg, France today included some answers I would like to see at town halls in Omaha, Nebraska:

Even with the Cold War now over, the spread of nuclear weapons or the theft of nuclear material could lead to the extermination of any city on the planet. And this weekend in Prague, I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.)

We also know that the pollution from cars in Boston or from factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, and that that will disrupt weather patterns everywhere. The terrorists who struck in London, in New York, plotted in distant caves and simple apartments much closer to your home. And the reckless speculation of bankers that has new fueled a global economic downturn that's inflicting pain on workers and families is happening everywhere all across the globe.

He later elaborated that time is running out to tackle climate change, and that all the countries of the world must do more. With Arctic sea ice now thought to be virtually gone within 30 years, he's absolutely right. But changing public opinion in Strasbourg is a lighter lift than changing it in Nebraska, in Mississippi, in Alabama. They too need to hear a progressive message from their leaders.

They may even be ready to hear the President's middle name:

Q I just want to know what do you expect from the French and the European countries regarding the war on terror?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good. That's a good question. Look, I think that over the last seven, eight years, as I said in my speech, a lot of tensions have developed between the United States and Europe. And one of the legacies, I hope, from my administration is, is that we start bringing our historic alliance back together in a much more effective way.

Now, that doesn't mean that we're not going to have honest disagreements. All countries have disagreements between themselves. But I think that we can work much more effectively and cooperatively, and maintain that core trust that we have towards each other.

Nowhere have we seen more suspicion than around questions of war and peace and how we respond to terrorism. When 9/11 happened, Europe responded as a true friend would respond to the United States, saying, "We are all Americans." All of us have a stake in ensuring that innocent people who were just going about their business, going to work, suddenly find themselves slaughtered -- all of us have an interest in preventing that kind of vicious, evil act.

But after the initial NATO engagement in Afghanistan, we got sidetracked by Iraq, and we have not fully recovered that initial insight that we have a mutual interest in ensuring that organizations like al Qaeda cannot operate. And I think that it is important for Europe to understand that even though I'm now President and George Bush is no longer President, al Qaeda is still a threat, and that we cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as President, suddenly everything is going to be okay.

I agree with all these messages. I just think an American audience could handle them, too.

Obama Spars With The World

On the eve of the G20 summit. McClatchy looks at whether Europe will embrace the President the way they did during the campaign.

Obama leaves on Tuesday on a whirlwind eight-day tour. He remains enormously popular in Europe, and the throngs that greeted him last summer as a candidate are likely to grow. With first lady Michelle Obama along, Obama's debut on the world stage as president already is inspiring anticipation of the kind of rock-star reception that greeted John and Jackie Kennedy on their first trip a first couple to Europe in 1961.

Yet Obama also heads into his first overseas trip with grand goals _ looking to forge a coordinated global response to the Great Recession, hoping Europe will send more of its sons and daughters to help in an escalating war in Afghanistan, and seeking to restore international cooperation that he thinks suffered in the Bush years.

That will be a tough sell. Publicly, European and world leaders will embrace Obama. But privately, they likely will say no to some of his requests, most notably sending combat troops to Afghanistan, or simply avoid the subject.

Certainly that's the case with regard to global stimulus, which the Obama Administration has pushed but which has caused such pushback that the US has backed off. Europe appears to prefer increased regulation of financial markets and to resist the United States trying to encourage additional spending. The Guardian writes that Europe has won the debate:

European leaders, led by Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, come to the crucial Docklands summit on Thursday believing they are winning or have won the argument about how to tackle casino capitalism.

The case pushed by Merkel repeatedly in recent weeks, and echoed by France and the European commission, is that there is no point now in more tax cuts and deficit spending to boost demand since it is not yet clear whether the huge fiscal stimuli packages already launched are actually going to work.

Rather, the Europeans argue, the focus should be on fixing a European and global system that is broke – through a new supervisory and regulatory regime. This option, Merkel declared at the weekend, offers the best chance of avoiding similar crises erupting once a decade, as has been the cycle since the 1980s.

While this is a noble goal, the problem is that the "regulatory reform" elements of the G20 communique look toothless - additional boards and structures composed of the same people who missed this crisis. One point of concurrence could spell the end of offshore tax havens, althought the changes could also be cosmetic. In short, the G20 could result in nothing done on the fiscal and monetary levels, and nothing of substance on the regulatory level. Simon Johnson suggests how Obama can salvage the summit, but only on the issue of funding and staffing for the IMF.

The larger issue is the lack of coordinated action among the world in addressing a truly global crisis. America's tarnished reputation through the Bush era has lessened the influence on these matters, as Paul Krugman notes:

The details of our current crisis are very different, but the need for cooperation is no less. President Obama got it exactly right last week when he declared: “All of us are going to have to take steps in order to lift the economy. We don’t want a situation in which some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren’t.”

Yet that is exactly the situation we’re in. I don’t believe that even America’s economic efforts are adequate, but they’re far more than most other wealthy countries have been willing to undertake. And by rights this week’s G-20 summit ought to be an occasion for Mr. Obama to chide and chivy European leaders, in particular, into pulling their weight.

But these days foreign leaders are in no mood to be lectured by American officials, even when — as in this case — the Americans are right.

The financial crisis has had many costs. And one of those costs is the damage to America’s reputation, an asset we’ve lost just when we, and the world, need it most.

The summit begins on Wednesday, April Fool's Day. Stay tuned.

Europe's Dangerous Lag

You may have heard about the Czech Prime Minister making a bizarre rant against President Obama's spending policies, calling them "a road to hell." It turns out that the Prime Minister already faced a no confidence vote in the Czech Republic, where their right wing is far closer idelogically to US Republicans. So that's not really a big issue. The far bigger issue is Europe's persistent resistance of any stimulus measures for its countries, which could be partially due to their generous social welfare states, meaning that the people are less dramatically impacted (so far) by the crisis.

The Europeans say they have no need for further stimulus right now because their social safety nets, derided in good times by free market disciples as sclerotic impediments to growth, are automatically providing the spending programs that the United States Congress has to legislate.

Europe’s extensive job protections and unemployment benefits are “bad in the upswing, because firms don’t dare to hire people, because then they are glued to them,” said Hans-Werner Sinn, president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich. “In the downswing, it’s good if the people are glued to the companies. They keep their jobs. They keep their income. They keep consuming.”

The Wall Street Journal has more. Certainly Europe's citizens have to be thankful for these "automatic stabilizers" that kick in to protect them, keeping them solvent and able to spend. At the same time, Paul Krugman argues that the automatic stabilizers have been exaggerated from a macroeconomic perspective, and the European response still comes up short. According to James Surowiecki, Europeans are simply more concerned with hyperinflation than they are with increasing economic growth, and the social safety net is being used as more of a cover story.

European economic policy seems to reflect the conviction that inflation, not stagnation, is the greatest threat to an economy. If the episode that haunts the U.S. is the Great Depression, in Europe, where the Germans have been dominant in shaping economic policy, the defining historical moment is the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, when prices rose more than seventy-five billion per cent in just one year, 1923, and, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “trust, calm, and health” vanished. The legacy of that episode lives on not just in German policymakers’ inflation phobia but also in their sense that there is something fundamentally distasteful about debt. For Germany, fiscal rectitude even in the face of a crisis is not just economically sensible but morally correct.

There’s a price to be paid for hostility toward fiscal stimulus and easy money: Europe and, arguably, the world will take longer to recover. But European policymakers seem willing to weather this outcome in exchange for stability. They’re also probably counting on the fact that, even as they sit tight, their economies will get a boost from the American and Chinese stimulus packages. The thing about government spending is that it “leaks”: a good chunk of our stimulus package will buy other countries’ goods. So Europeans can avoid getting too deeply into debt and still reap some of the benefits of our borrowing. This is unfair: in effect, Europe is refusing to carry its share of the global economic burden and is piggybacking on us. But it’s hard to see how things could have turned out otherwise. The U.S. economy, much more than Europe’s, is like the proverbial shark: if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies (or at least creates a lot of misery). In some sense, we need economic growth more than Europe does. It’s not surprising that we’re going to be the ones who end up paying for it.

I don't think European policymakers are wrong at all - it just reflects a different philosophy. But at a time when coordinated global action may be needed, hopefully they won't be so resistant to meeting the moment. Ezra Klein reports that they won't, quoting Martin Wolf about Germany: "They will act, but only on the doorstep of Armageddon. Not a second before."

Will Regulations Save Us?

The supposed saving grace of the Geithner bank bailout is that at least regulations will be imposed that would eliminate the possibility for this to ever happen again. At least that's Europe's view, as well as Obama's long-term position:

But I think the most important thing that we can do is make sure that we put in a bunch of financial regulatory mechanisms to prevent companies like an AIG holding the rest of us hostage. Because that's -- that's the real problem.

The problem is not just what's happened over the last six months. The problem is what was happening for years, where people were able to take huge, excessive risks with other people's money, putting the entire financial system at risk -- and there were no checks, there were no balances, there was nobody overseeing the process.

Just enforcing the laws already on the books would represent an improvement over, say, the past thirty years. But any confidence that some kind of regulatory overhaul is imminent gets sapped by the first major "reform".

The Financial Accounting Standards Board, pressured by lawmakers to change the fair-value rule blamed for worsening the financial crisis, proposed permitting companies to use “significant judgment” in valuing assets [...]

Fair-value, also known as mark-to-market accounting, requires companies to set values on most securities every quarter based on market prices. Wells Fargo & Co. and other companies argue the rule doesn’t make sense when trading has dried up because it forces banks to write down assets to fire- sale prices.

What this boils down to is that the government will allow banks to pretend that their worthless assets are worth significantly more than what the market will pay for them. In other words, banks will rescue themselves from insolvency by using the magical power of bullshit.

You can't blame this one on the Bush Administration.

Meanwhile, the next regulatory move appears to be vesting more power in the Fed, which failed to regulate the banks the last time. I agree with a new authority to oversee massive financial industry risk and their exotic products, but not with an unaccountable and secretive board that won't even account for the trillions of dollars in hastily printed money they've spent on bank assets.

Regulators have plenty of authority right now. Their reticence to really challenge elites and risk a short-term loss in GDP to protect a larger meltdown reflects a lack of will.

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight the issue isn’t so much that we needed better “rules” as it is that we needed regulators we took seriously the idea that cracking down on private sector funny business is their job. Instead, we seem to have mostly had regulators who regarded the laws on the books as an unfortunate and anachronistic departure from a pure laissez faire ideal. So you got things like the SEC prosecuting celebrities on tenuous charges, but no real oversight of a mortgage sector run amok. When you look back at the trajectory leading up to the crisis, the problem of “deregulation” isn’t so much that there’s some particular rule that was removed during the Greenspan Era that could have saved us as it is that the mindset that drove the legislative agenda of deregulation ultimately proved paralyzing to policymakers.

Certainly, if anything would destroy the mindset of Randian laissez-faire capitalism, it would be the events of the past six months. But given the clear signs from this allegedly "socialist" Administration thus far, I'm not so sure.

Global Letdown

Paul Krugman, reporting from Europe, shows his concern with how European leaders are dealing with, or failing to deal with, the global economic crisis.

Europe has fallen short in terms of both fiscal and monetary policy: it’s facing at least as severe a slump as the United States, yet it’s doing far less to combat the downturn.

On the fiscal side, the comparison with the United States is striking. Many economists, myself included, have argued that the Obama administration’s stimulus plan is too small, given the depth of the crisis. But America’s actions dwarf anything the Europeans are doing.

The difference in monetary policy is equally striking. The European Central Bank has been far less proactive than the Federal Reserve; it has been slow to cut interest rates (it actually raised rates last July), and it has shied away from any strong measures to unfreeze credit markets.

The only thing working in Europe’s favor is the very thing for which it takes the most criticism — the size and generosity of its welfare states, which are cushioning the impact of the economic slump.

Actually, the social welfare system may be the reason why the crisis is being faced with such less urgency, because the popular outrage is necessarily more muted than in a country whose social safety net is frayed. On balance, I'd rather have the state protect its citizens from harm, but the policymakers cannot rely on the automatic stabilizers of social democracy to sustain them through a massive crisis.

There's a bigger problem, however; the continent has a loose affiliation without any institutional strength from the structures that the EU has put in place, and the result is chaotic:

Europe’s economic and monetary integration has run too far ahead of its political institutions. The economies of Europe’s many nations are almost as tightly linked as the economies of America’s many states — and most of Europe shares a common currency. But unlike America, Europe doesn’t have the kind of continentwide institutions needed to deal with a continentwide crisis.

This is a major reason for the lack of fiscal action: there’s no government in a position to take responsibility for the European economy as a whole. What Europe has, instead, are national governments, each of which is reluctant to run up large debts to finance a stimulus that will convey many if not most of its benefits to voters in other countries.

You might expect monetary policy to be more forceful. After all, while there isn’t a European government, there is a European Central Bank. But the E.C.B. isn’t like the Fed, which can afford to be adventurous because it’s backed by a unitary national government — a government that has already moved to share the risks of the Fed’s boldness, and will surely cover the Fed’s losses if its efforts to unfreeze financial markets go bad. The E.C.B., which must answer to 16 often-quarreling governments, can’t count on the same level of support.

Hendrik Hertzberg calls this particles of confederation - the limits of a weak federal system and a bias toward, in effect, state's rights. On issues where they have a rough consensus, like re-regulation of the banks, they can move forward; but since no country wants to create the deficits necessary to make up for demand, the urgent short-term crises go unfixed. I am happy that Switzerland and smaller countries are loosening their bank secrecy rules, for example, which will lead to a greater crackdown on offshore tax havens. But that's not going to create any jobs in the short term. So the confederation has to make up for a lack of institutional muscle by relying on international economic diplomacy, which is not advisable. And the crisis deepens.

Someone needs to help do the lift of picking up global demand, and we're running out of countries.

Stimulus Monster Hungry, Needs More

Tim Geithner is seeking global stimulus from the G20.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner urged the Group of 20 nations to take “forceful” actions to end the financial crisis and called for an expansion of the International Monetary Fund’s supplementary borrowing program by about $500 billion.

“This is a global crisis which requires a global response,” Geithner said yesterday in a statement from Washington. “G-20 countries must take strong macroeconomic and financial sector measures.” A “reasonable benchmark” is the IMF’s recommendation for stimulus equivalent to 2 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product, Geithner said.

Geithner will make the recommendations at a meeting starting tomorrow near London of finance ministers from 20 of the world’s industrial and developing nations that will lay the groundwork for a summit of leaders on April 2 in London.

2% of GDP is probably small based on the demand shortfall. That is roughly equivalent to our stimulus, which many economists believe is insufficient. And yet the EU is pushing back on this call for increased public spending.

But many European leaders say they have stimulated their economies enough. What the world needs now, they say, are tougher, globally enforced regulations on financial markets to avoid a repeat of the mistakes that led to the current troubles.

This week, they pushed back against Obama's plan.

"We are not ready to increase the packages we have established for the current situation," said Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister and finance minister of Luxembourg and head of a European economic commission that met Tuesday in Brussels.

"The Americans should be more modest about giving lessons, because the crisis comes from them," Patrick Devedjian, France's minister for recovery, said in a TV interview.

Of course, this is true, but it's also entirely besides the point. There is a consistent global demand problem and it hardly matters where it came from. Failure to stimulate the economy now will lead to greater debts in the future as world economies spiral downward and revenues dry up. I don't disagree that regulatory reform is essential, but the real-world impact of a lack of demand is more far-reaching.

Meawhile, there is the question of whether American lawmakers are willing to lead by example. Nancy Pelosi signaled openness to a second stimulus if the economy needed one, but quickly walked the comments back, preferring to wait and see how the initial program is implemented along with the omnibus spending bill. This is probably prudent, but of course you have the neo-Hooverist wing best exemplified by Meghan McCain:

This morning on Fox & Friends, John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain railed against President Obama for signing the omnibus spending bill yesterday. “I think it’s so disappointing and it’s scary,” McCain said, referencing the earmarks in the bill. “Hope and change – what’s going on?” She added, “This second stimulus package that Nancy Pelosi’s talking about I think doesn’t make sense.”

Meghan McCain’s comments this morning are surprising, given that last night she was telling MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that she doesn’t know much about the economy. Here’s how McCain responded when Maddow asked her whether she agrees with her father’s call for a spending freeze:

McCAIN: Spending freeze? You know, econ – economic things, I said this last night on Hannity, I said is my — I didn’t even take econ in college. I don’t completely understand it so I’d hate to make a comment one way or the other. That’s – truly of all the things – I keep reading and I just don’t understand it.

Of course, McCain Blogette isn't in a position to set policy, but her perspective really isn't all that different from South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, turning down stimulus money while his state has the fastest-growing unemployment rate in the country, and not recognizing that his legislature is going to accept the federal funding anyway. Meanwhile he's out in public comparing the stimulus to the economic policy of Zimbabwe.

It's hard for Geithner to play the role of responsibility in front of the world, given that someone like this is running a state back home.

Fears of A Real Crash

I'd like to laugh at the Republican growing pains from dealing with the minority and the near-universal opprobrium for their policies, and I'm sure I will in a future post. Maybe even the next post. But we're seeing the consequences of those policies resulting in a seemingly unending death spiral, a global death spiral, and I'm afraid schadenfreude can't even cheer me up.

A year ago Roubini was forecasting an 18-month recession with a U-shaped recovery; now, he's now expecting the downturn to last at least 24 months and possibly 36-months. He also sees rising risks of a Japanese-style L-shaped stagnation, i.e. a prolonged period with little or no economic growth.

"I was one of most bearish people [but] the economy has surprised the bears on the downside," says Roubini of NYU's Stern School and RGE Monitor. "What's happening in the world now is scary."

Indeed, while the U.S. economy contracted 6.2% in the fourth-quarter, Roubini's main concern is economic activity in much of the rest of the world is in much worse shape. And while he is often critical of U.S. policymakers - including over the stimulus package, Fed policy and bank bailouts - Roubini says "the rest of the world is way behind the curve," in terms of doing the "right things" to confront the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

It's the global component to this that has me extremely worried, aside from the Geithner/Summers effort to pay off the banksters. The EU is stiffing Eastern Europe as that region bears some of the toughest burdens of the financial crisis. Case-by-case support will simply staunch the bleeding without saving the patient. The Hungarian Prime Minister called it "a new Iron Curtain" to divide Europe. Before long, what is currently happening in Ukraine - where tent cities on the main square bear signs saying "Everyone Out" and many cities are WITHOUT HEAT AND WATER - could set a depressing standard. The European Central Banker seems like he's in a dreamworld, predicting that there's no threat of deflation against all evidence. There's a report that European banks have $24 TRILLION in toxic assets on their balance sheets. That is a bona fide crisis in global debt that is destroying entire nations. Put it this way, when the lender of last resort is increasingly the Mafia - yes, the actual Mafia - there's a serious problem. Basically, there is an increase in savings to manage the debt, and it's causing investment to plunge. And somewhere in the world, one of the richer countries has to pick up the slack for all this shortfall in demand, and nobody is doing it with the speed or decisiveness required.

It's quite scary, and our brainiacs Tim Geithner and Larry Summers aren't helping at all. In an article designed by the leakers to pin the blame of any failure on them, their policies on the financial crisis are displayed:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and National Economic Council Chair Lawrence H. Summers pushed for weeks for a strict cap on the nation's debt. And while other advisers argued that the administration needed a more flexible spending plan, they could not deter the president from ultimately agreeing with the views promoted by the partnership of Geithner and Summers [...]

Geithner and Summers are also taking the lead in shaping the Obama administration policies for creating millions of jobs through the economic stimulus plan, rescuing the banking system, revitalizing the housing market, restructuring the auto industry and overhauling financial regulation.

Obama's decision to make Summers and Geithner the key players in such a wide-ranging agenda has left some within the government concerned that they will be unable to handle so many complex issues at once. Geithner already was widely criticized on Wall Street for being too vague when he announced the financial rescue package last month.

The reviews are in on this dynamic duo, and they are not good. Not good at all. As Paul Krugman says:

The sickening feeling of drift — the sense that policymakers are refusing to face hard facts, and are dithering while the world economy burns — just keeps getting stronger.

I may throw up.

Don't Make Bagram Guantanamo II

Today the Justice Department announced that Ali al-Marri, the last enemy combatant held inside the United States, would be charged and tried in a federal court in Illinois. This is a major victory for the rule of law. Instead of being held indefinitely without due process or habeas corpus, al-Marri will be given charges and prosecuted in an American courtroom, not a military commission. All Guantanamo prisoners deserve the same courtesy - either be tried, or released. In addition, we will probably get a ruling on al-Marri's detention anyway, which would be positive to set the precedent:

The Supreme Court already agreed to consider a challenge to the constitutionality of al-Marri’s detention, and the ACLU is asking the Court still to consider that case. According to Al-Marri’s attorney, the ACLU’s Jonathan Hafetz, “it is vital that the Supreme Court case go forward because it must be made clear once and for all that indefinite military detention of persons arrested in the U.S. is illegal and that this will never happen again.”

There is another group of detainees that should be extended the rights of being tried or released - those at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan who were transferred there from around the world. The expansion of Bagram has raised fears that Obama may use it the way George Bush used Guantanamo.

Now, human rights groups say they are becoming increasingly concerned that the use of extra-judicial methods in Afghanistan could be extended rather than curtailed under the new U.S. administration. The air base is about to undergo a $60 million expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.

Apart from staff at the International Red Cross, human rights groups and journalists have been barred from Bagram, where former prisoners say they were tortured by being shackled to the ceiling of isolation cells and deprived of sleep.

The base became notorious when two Afghan inmates died after the use of such techniques in 2002, and although treatment and conditions have been improved since then, the Red Cross issued a formal complaint to the U.S. government in 2007 about harsh treatment of some prisoners held in isolation for months.

While the majority of the estimated 600 prisoners are believed to be Afghan, an unknown number -- perhaps several dozen -- have been picked up from other countries.

Hilzoy had a great piece about this, showing the genuinely conflicting issues at play here. But one thing seems fairly obvious - if we are going to restore our moral authority around the world, we need to have the same standard for those detainees at Bagram not detained in the course of military conflict as we ought to have for those at Guantanamo. That's not just true of the Muslim world, where support for Al Qaeda itself is mixed, but strongly in favor of their efforts to drive the United States off their land, through force if necessary. It's also true of our allies in Europe, who will not work with us on key issues if we just rebuild Guantanamo at Bagram.

In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama ordered the closure within one year of Guantanamo Bay, where about 245 people are still detained and which has been widely viewed as a stain on the U.S. human rights record.

But Obama has yet to decide what to do about the jail at Bagram, where more than 600 prisoners are held, or whether to continue work on a $60 million prison complex there.

Washington wants the EU to help it close Guantanamo by agreeing to accept discharged prisoners who cannot be returned to their own countries for fear of torture.

But a confidential EU policy paper, obtained by Reuters, said such help would depend on Washington's overall anti-terrorism policies, including assurances that Bagram or other camps would not become new Guantanamos.

"I would find it very surprising, if the (U.S.) policy remained the same while Guantanamo was closed, to see the EU mobilize itself," EU anti-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told Reuters.

The EU policy paper said: "It would not be in conformity with EU fundamental rights policies to simply transfer Guantanamo elsewhere (i.e. in Bagram) without solving the underlying question of the detention of terror suspects for indefinite time and without trial."

This is going to undermine our efforts at global cooperation if it is allowed to fester. Obama's honeymoon around the world will quickly come to an end. We will have lost a great opportunity to push the reset button.

Wall Street Reform

Not one to tackle a manageable amount of issues at one time, the President today mad some remarks on regulatory reform. Now, I am going to be perfectly honest that a lot of this is above my pay grade. In general I think that we need to regulate banks for what they do and not what they pretend to be, and that Kevin Drum's hobby-horse of regulating leveraging is quite right. Canada is doing much better in this economic environment right now because their banks weren't as over-leveraged. In addition, the country might want to find a way to encourage banking decisions like the ones made by the Lebanese central banker who barred his country from investing in mortgage-backed securities.

Nonetheless, here are the President's 7 principles for reform:

• Enforce strict oversight of financial institutions that pose systemic risks
• Strengthen markets so they can withstand both system-wide stress and the failure of one or more large institutions
• Encourage our financial system to be open and transparent, and to speak in plain language investors can understand
• Supervise financial products based on "actual data on how actual people make financial decisions"
• Hold market players accountable, starting at the top
• Overhaul our regulations so they are comprehensive and free of gaps
• Recognize that the challenges we face are global

I read #2 as "we can no longer have any institution that is too big to fail," which is quite right. The rest seems like a lot of poll-tested and voter-approved speak. The details are important here. Actually, this paragraph is a better expression of core principles:

Let me be clear: The choice we face is not between some oppressive government-run economy or a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. Rather, strong financial markets require clear rules of the road, not to hinder financial institutions, but to protect consumers and investors, and ultimately to keep those financial institutions strong. Not to stifle, but to advance competition, growth and prosperity. And not just to manage crises, but to prevent crises from happening in the first place, by restoring accountability, transparency and trust in our financial markets. These must be the goals of a 21st century regulatory framework that we seek to create.

With this being a global problem, it's good to see the EU stepping up more forcefully on the specifics, with sanctions for tax havens and caps on bonuses. Ultimately I think Obama could be brought around to that view, although the fear is that the New Democratic caucus will undermine whatever final legislation comes out of Congress as a payoff to their financial services industry paymasters.

World Report

Been a while since I got into this.

• Iraq: The speaker of the Parliament has been officially ousted in a move that doesn't seem to bother anyone, not even the speaker, who was kind of a loose cannon. But if anything, it's a symbol of the political power plays that have gripped the country for the past six months, leading into provincial elections. The Prime Minister is surely consolidating power, using a narrow amount of goodwill engendered by security gains to muscle his competition for power. Maliki wants a strong central government because he's at the head of it, while the Sunni and Kurdish factions want their own authority and independence.

“Maliki is monopolizing all the political, security and economic decisions,” said Omar Abdul Sattar, a Sunni member of Parliament. He listed political parties that he said were turning against the prime minister, including a powerful Shiite party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is fighting Mr. Maliki’s drive to centralize power in Baghdad and pushing to give more to the provinces — where the party has important power bases, particularly in the south. “It’s simply the story of the transformation from a democratic prime minister into a dictator,” he said.

Given Iraq's history with dictatorships, and the fractious nature of ethnic and sectarian divides in the country, this is a natural state of affairs, which is why the hopeful talk of democratic transformation in the heart of the Middle East was always such rubbish. We invaded Iraq to remove a dictator so they could eventually install another one, this time with a more overtly religious cast. Not that Iraq was a threat to the United States beforehand, but it's hard to see how this made our country any safer, especially when factoring in the human and financial costs.

• Israel: I'm very worried that full-scale fighting is about to break out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Hamas ended its cease-fire last week, and has been lobbing dozens of rockets into Israeli territory. Since Hamas' electoral victory, Israel has sealed off the Gaza strip, turning it into essentially a large prison. Egypt, which has been offering aid and assistance to the Palestinians in Gaza, wants to mediate a truce, but I don't think it's likely. There is a faction in Israel that sees crushing Hamas as part of the road to peace - and that's the LESS hawkish faction! This is going to explode in the next several days. Very worrying.

• Japan: The Pacific Rim nation is mired in another deep recession, as industrial output cratered and deflation appeared imminent. Japan was growing largely on the back of American consumption of their goods the past few years, and so this was inevitable. As America's rise back to prominence is tied to stimulating a home-grown industrial base, it's hard to see how Asian nations like this improve unless we give up and try to return to an unsustainable consumption model again.

• Somalia: The President of the transitional (read: powerless) government is resigning. By next year, I gather that you will see the Islamic Courts Union back in power here. Ethiopia will pull all their forces out in the next few weeks, and there is little to stop the ICU. And so a US-sponsored war will have produced nothing but more bloodshed and the rise of a powerful cadre of pirates, who reduced global economic trade through thievery. It was a shortsighted solution lacking a regional context, and it failed totally.

• Guinea: I'm not going to lie and say that I am perfectly well-versed about Guinea (not to be confused with Guinea-Bissau or Papua New Guinea), but they've had a coup by a military junta, which is the 10,834th of the military-led coups in Africa since, oh, last week. The latest in Guinea followed the death of a longtime dictator, Lansana Conte. The cycle of coups and state-sponsored repression is so commonplace on the continent, that it's hard to find a glimmer of hope. The African Union is simply not a strong enough institution to deter the practice.

• Europe: European leaders are talking about accepting some Guantanamo detainees as a gesture of goodwill toward the new President. Obama is going to have a global honeymoon period where he can really get a lot accomplished, and closing Gitmo should be at the top of that list as pertaining to foreign policy. One possible red flag is the persistence of Robert Gates at the helm of the Defense Department. He is being sued by Guantanamo detainee lawyers for signing a false affidavit that allowed him to sidestep disclosure of torture. That will not help any charm offensive. Pro Publica has a good roundup of the year in Gitmo here.

Down, Down, Down

The Dow is currently under 10,000 for the first time since I don't know when, and world markets are plunging as well as the credit crisis spreads globally, particularly in Europe:

European nations scrambled on Sunday night to prevent a growing credit crisis from bringing down major banks and alarming savers as troubles in financial markets spread around the world, accelerating economic downturns on three continents.

The German government moved to guarantee all private savings accounts in the country on Sunday, hoping to reassure depositors who had grown nervous as efforts to bail out a large German lender and a major European financial company failed.

Late Sunday, it was disclosed that new bailouts had been arranged for both of those companies, Hypo Real Estate, the German lender, and Fortis, a large banking and insurance company based in Belgium but active across much of the Continent.

The spreading worries came days after the United States Congress approved a $700 billion bailout package that officials had hoped would calm financial markets globally.

The shaky instruments that the US investment firms were using to package mortgages and leverage risk were sold on the gloval market. It was inevitable that this would spread to even the most stable country. The entire financial system needs to be scared straight and massively re-regulated so they never take down the entire world again. The last countries standing will be those that make things.

The Great Debate

John McCain's surrogates are having a very hard time figuring out whether or not Barack Obama is a patriot. It's a pity they can't settle on an answer. On one hand, Charlie Black was recently forced to concede that Obama's a patriot. But Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney say no, because he's popular in Europe. In that case, hang Jerry Lewis for treason! I think REM had a hit over there too, put them on the Terrorist Watch List!

This comes out of the great outrage of Obama suggesting that bilingual education might be a positive for American children. The scoundrel! He wants to educate youth! Doesn't he know what America's all about?

I'm going to outsource further commentary on this to Alex Knapp.

Frankly, all this seems to be is a pathetic attempt to feed the ‘Barack Obama is Unamerican’ narrative. A narrative that, I might add, has the result of making Americans sound like ignorant hillbillies. ‘He’s got a funny name!’ ‘He likes food that tastes good instead of crap that’s fried in lard!’ ‘He likes foreigners!’ ‘He wants to speak other languages!’ ‘He’s educated!’ ‘He played basketball instead of football!’ Embarrassing, really.

Your modern conservative movement: embarrassing. No wonder even some of its elected officials think it would be a good step to lose a lot of elections and "clean house."

The State Of Our Union

I'm going to miss tonight's State of the Union address, but I don't think I'll be missing much. It'll be the same propaganda on low taxes and "good progress" in Iraq that we've heard for years now, as well as churlish demands for more money for endless war ($70 billion worth) as well as a complete evisceration of the Fourth Amendment. Apparently he's also going to fight the war on earmarks, not the ones he casually slips into every bill imaginable, of course. The address is not a document about policy but purely about politics, and the lines of attack Republicans will use in November.

I know that Kathleen Sebelius will be delivering the Democratic rebuttal, but I have an idea for her. Rather than reading her prepared remarks, she should just open the New York Times and recite this story of the loss of American power in the age of Bush. It's a bit long but maybe she can summarize it in parts.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren’t we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no “permanent enemies,” but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

It's a dark and pessimistic view, but one that the public deserves to hear in full. The European Union and China are not bogged down in multiple wars, they are not stricken by failed leadership on the economy, energy, and global warming. They do not have a dollar that is almost as useful as tissue paper. They are finding room to maneuver in a time of an America adrift, and they are not entirely likely to give up the advantage they are pressing. While we refocus to Afghanistan after seven years, China and Europe are moving forward. While we appear unable to get anything done on major issues, China and Europe are moving forward. Instead of nation-building, they are alliance-building. And we face serious risk of being left behind.

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec [...]

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia’s rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged. Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America’s economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle — of which China sits at the center — has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

We are in a very difficult spot and it's important for us to remember that a new Democratic President will get blamed for all of this. It's the Republican way. George Bush, however, has fundamentally changed our position in the world, and it's going to take a supreme effort to counteract that, probably over decades.

This is a dispiriting, yet must-read, article.

Rudy Gets Government-Funded Health Care From Euro Doctors!

This latest radio ad from Rudy Giuliani about health care is a perfect example of the Big Lie, where someone packs so many deliberate fabrications into one 30-second spot that it's almost too difficult to unravel them all. But Ezra Klein does a good job. Basically, Rudy says in the ad that the survival rate for prostate cancer in the US is 82%, and in England, with "socialized medicine," it's 44%. This is not true.

England and America have vritually the same mortality rates from prostate cancer. In England (as of 1997), 28 males of every 100,000 died from prostate cancer. In America, then number was 26. The difference comes in "incidence" -- there are many more diagnoses of prostate cancer in America, as we have an aggressive screening process.

Problem is, most of those cancers simply aren't deadly, or even necessarily damaging. They're slow-moving and benign. It's like saying we have a lower death rate from car crashes because we record more near-misses in the statistics. We may indeed have a slight advantage of prostate treatment, but it's not what Guliani is suggesting it is.

In Giuliani's age group, where screening evens out, the percentages are precisely the same. In addition, most of that screening in later years falls under the Medicare program, which is - boo! - socialized medicine! And indeed, if you actually judge apples to apples, using a metric like years of life lost due to the health care system, the United States is actually pretty terrible, especially considering we spend twice as much on health care as practically every indstrialized nation.



But the most intriguing part of Klein's takedown was this postscript at the end.

Wouldn't it be interesting to find out if the gold-standard care Giuliani got during his prostate cancer came while he was on government-provided health insurance? He was mayor at the time, suggesting his care was coming through the city, which would suggest it was through the state insurance pool, which works very much like FEHBP -- which is what the Democrats are proposing to expand to all Americans, and what Giuliani is calling deadly, socialized medicine.

And more has been added to that story today:

[T]he technique used on Giuliani, prostate brachytherapy--using radioactive seeds--was pioneered in the modern era by a physician in Denmark, and brought to the US by one of his students.

http://caonline.amcancersoc.org/cgi/reprint/50/6/380.pdf

You'd think a guy whose life was saved by brachytherapy would admit, however grudgingly, that European socialized medicine ain't all bad.

Rudy's seeming "plan" is to give people a tax incentive on purchasing health care (which is not at all the same as a subsidy, and people who can't afford health care to begin with aren't taxed at the rate where such an incentive would make any difference). But he wouldn't rely on that same health care system to deal with his own medical issues. To sum up:

So Giuliani's case for the superiority of our "free market" health care system goes something like this: While on health insurance provided by New York state, he was treated, using a surgery developed by Europeans, for prostate cancer, a disease that most commonly afflicts those covered by the federal government's single-payer health care system. Take that, Europe/national health insurance.

The incoherence is just staggering.

Dateline 1863: President Schwarzenegger Vows To Veto Emancipation Proclamation

Washington (Pony Express Press): As the War between North and South rages on, President Arnold Schwarzenegger has again announced his intention to veto a bill that would emancipate the slaves throughout the American territories, based on the fact that the practice of slavery has been ratified in the states of the Confederacy in the past.

“It would be wrong for the people, and by people I mean wealthy landowners, to vote for something and for me to then overturn it,” Schwarzenegger said. “So they can send this bill down as many times as they want, I won't do it.”

This is the second year in a row that President Schwarzenegger has vetoed the emancipation bill from the Congress, refusing to offer a proclamation of his own. The bill would set free millions of colored Americans from the bonds of slavery. Some have suggested that the people actually voted for the legislators who drafted the bill, but the President, in the midst of shuttling back and forth to Gettysburg for updates on the fighting, dismissed this.

The situation was made all the more intriguing by the fact that the President's chief of staff is currently a slave. Abolitionist activists have called on the chief of staff to resign.

OK, the metaphor is getting tired, but you get the idea. But really, gay activists have called on Susan Kennedy to resign.

GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER said today, that he will veto the bill legalizing same-gender civil marriage because 61% percent of California voters favored Proposition 22 in March 2000. Ms. Kennedy agreed with the Governor's decision using Prop 22 (which only bars California from recognizing same-sex marriages performed outside California), when he used the same excuse to veto the bill in 2005. He says he will never sign this bill. In 1948, if California voters had been allowed to vote on inter-racial marriage when the California Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation law and found in favor of inter-racial marriage, over 72% of the voters would have voted against it.

Even though I, a plaintiff, am going to the California Supreme Court next year, (and the Governor has said he will "abide" by the CA Supreme Court's decision), I am not only extremely disappointed in the Governor's lack of courage, but am especially disappointed in Susan Kennedy, his chief of staff, whose "same gender wedding" I attended in Hawaii several years ago.

Since I attended Susan's wedding, why is she so against attending mine? Both Arnold and Susan know that it is unconstitutional for the majority to deny a minority equal protection under the law. To hide behind that [Prop 22] as an excuse, is cowardly and unforgivable, for both the Governor and especially for Ms. Kennedy, a lesbian. Rather then backing the Governor's decision with unacceptable excuses, I ask that Ms. Kennedy resign as Chief of Staff. If not, shame on you Susan, to side against your community, and deny civil marriage to your friends.

I wonder if she'll respond.

UPDATE: Just to show you the deception at work on the part of those who argue against two people who love each other being allowed to marry, look at this cool new feature in the Washington Post, The Claim, which takes down Sen. Brownback's silly notion that countries with lenient policies on gay marriage have all kinds of kids born out of wedlock:

Republican presidential hopeful Sam Brownback posits a strong correlation between the introduction of civil unions and same-sex marriage and the increase in the number of children being born out of wedlock. His argument appears to rely on two premises: (1) that the marriage rate has plummeted in countries that have "redefined" marriage, and (2) that the declining marriage rate has in turn resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of babies born to unmarried parents.

Both parts of Brownback's claim are questionable. The decline in marriage rates and the increase in the number of children born out of wedlock long precede attempts to "redefine" marriage by permitting civil unions and same-sex marriage. Domestic partnerships or civil unions were introduced in the District in 1992, Hawaii in 1997, Vermont and California in 2000, Maine in 2004, Connecticut in 2005, New Jersey in 2006, and Washington state this year. Only one state permits same-sex marriage: Massachusetts, since 2004.

Marriage rates in the United States have been falling steadily since at least 1960, according to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. They have not dropped appreciably faster in the past decade than during the preceding four decades.

As support for Brownback's statement, his campaign cited articles in National Review by Stanley Kurtz, an adjunct fellow at the Hoover Institution, on marriage rates in northern Europe, particularly the Netherlands. Kurtz has also cited counties in northern Norway where 80 percent of firstborn children are born out of wedlock. Although it is true that there has been a sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births in the Netherlands since domestic partnerships were introduced in 1997, there has been no appreciable increase in several other countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, that changed their marriage laws at the same time. In general, the rise in out-of-wedlock births in Europe predates changes in marriage legislation, according to the European Commission.