Nation-Building

I've been meaning to comment on the Copenhagen conference, since the perspective from the Indian press is probably quite different from that in the US media. According to the papers here, Obama forced his way into a private meeting between Chinese premier Wen Jibao and Indian PM Manmohan Singh because he didn't want them "negotiating in private". China and India resisted all attempts by the US to make the Copenhagen draft legally binding, and fought monitoring and transparency tooth and nail. This plays well here as a strike against US/Western imperialistic moralizing, on behalf of the developing nations, whose champions are now... China and India? really? I am frankly disgusted. India and China - both nuclear powers and members of the UN Security Council - can no longer by any stretch of the imagination be considered "developing nations" and they are cynically using their endemic poverty as bargaining chips to benefit their industrial and economic elites. I...

So much economic hand-wringing , yet all its good for is to reiterate the same tired stale posturing from liberals and conservatives alike. Here's the basic problem. 1. Domestic spending can't go down. It's a fantasy to imagine that even draconian cuts would be tolerable or politically viable. Like it or not, Americans want their social services and safety nets. All the conservative handwringing about Socialism is a Red herring, pun intended. Anyway discretionary spending (non defense, non medicare, non social sec) is a tiny fraction of the overall budget anyway so theres very little to cut; American services are actually an incredible bang for the buck, especially compared to European counterparts. 2. Defense spending can't be cut. The world is a bad place. We have to spend a lot of money in a lot of places for basic reasons of security and global policy. Isolationism doesnt work; 9-11 proved that. Bottom line: we need resources to deal with the crap out there and that...

Nonpartisan argues that Edwards' rhetoric about the poor reveals him to be more of an urban populist than a rural one . I certainly agree that there is a difference between the types of populists that NP presents for comparison, but the evidence for categorizing Edwards seems to be thin; based largely on speeches and implications of campaign rhetoric, and allusions to former populists like FDR. NP cross-posted the piece at a number of venues but I link to the myDD version because the basic thesis comes under considerable scrutiny in the discussion thread. I have a number of observations on the essay below the fold:   One comment I have is that FDR, presiding over the Depression, was probably both types of poopulists because poverty transcended so many boundaries. The poverty of the inner city and the poverty of rural America are very different in scope today - after all, no matter how poor you are you can get emergency care in an urban environment, to name but one example. In FDR...