Nation-Building

The Obama Administration's woes in filling political appointees are getting a lot of attention in the media. However, it should be noted that Obama is doing better than average when compared to previous presidents . Much of the problem is that Obama's ethical standards are so stringent that qualified candidates with relevant experience are forced to screen themselves out of consideration. For example, Obama's ban on lobbyists sounded great in theory, but often people with the right skills do have lobbyist gigs on the side. There's a good story at NPR on this, too. Plus, there's a decent amount of scalp-hunting at work here that ultimately goes against our national interest - as Megan McArdle puts it , This new tradition of bulldogging every appointee in the hope of embarrassing the president has to stop. We should be focusing on whether or not the nominee can do the job, not whether there is some small breach of an onerous regulation in his history that ca...

I am not a global warming expert but I do follow the debates with reasonable attention to detail. I think my scientific training provides me the tools to assess the scientific claims to a reasonable degree even though I lack the training to go much deeper than abstracts, figures, and conclusions of papers on the topic. Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit (the global warming skeptic's counter-site to the Real Climate project) points to a new paper that purports to show that the relative humidity of the upper atmosphere is declining rather than increasing as one might expect based on climate models. The implication pertains to how much feedback there is with increase in atmospheric CO2 - a positive feedback (increasing relative humidity) would imply greater temperature change per doubling of CO2 concentration increase, ie making global warming worse, whereas a negative feedback would imply the opposite, that global warming is less of a threat. Note that the debate is only about the ...

One of the strategies of the conservative right has been to try and politicize the military. The confuse their own military fetish and partisan self-interest with genuine patriotism and the public good (because in their view, they hold a monopoly on both). In so doing, they disrespect the very troops they allegedly revere. For example, the Bush Administration paid great lip-service to veterans on the field but left them hanging out to dry when they got home . Now, the right is taking their insult to the military to new levels, by promoting this video which allegedly shows that the military does not respect Obama the way they did Bush: At Redstate.com, the bloggers crow that this is the "Semper Fi Zone" which is about as gross an insult to the professional ethics of the Marine Corps as you can imagine. In the fevered imaginings of the conservative right, a military that shows a preference for one political party over another is actually a desirable thing, instead of the ...

In Fareed Zakaria's book The Future of Freedom , he makes an extended argument for why the possession of oil resources has historically been a barrier to liberalization and freedom. He made a condensed version of that argument in an essay in Newsweek back in April 2003 when the Iraq war was just beginning: A 'SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGE' Vice President Dick Cheney recently remarked that Iraq's oil resourcesóthe second largest in the world--will be a "significant advantage" when building democracy. This is a common refrain, echoed by many within and without the administration. Unfortunately, the opposite is closer to the truth. With the exception of Norway, virtually all the worldís oil states are dictatorships. This is not an accident. Oil--like other natural resources--does not help produce capitalism, civil society and thus democracy. It actually retards that process. Countries with treasure in their soil don't need to create the framework of laws and policie...

The GOP is in full obstructionist mode regarding the economic stimulus plan - there's an excellent summary at myDD of the GOP's general strategy: The GOP's main contention has been now for over 30 years that by reducing the top tax rate on personal and corporate income that a large increase in aggregate total savings would result. Yet the savings rate of American households has been declining for more than a decade and it now stands at the lowest level of the post-WW II era. Since 2003, the combined annual net savings of households, businesses, and government have declined to about one percent of gross national income. So if increasing the savings rate is the goal so as to thus increase investment, cutting taxes hasn't worked. And yet the GOP continues to pitch the idea that tax cuts lift the economy. Well, the Democrats are batting now and they shouldn't swing at balls outside the strike zone. To continue the metaphor, this is the GOP's set up pitch. They wan...

More Obama Derangement Syndrome, this time from Leon at RedState, who labels Obama as "corrupt" and "morally deparaved": as we will remember in two short days, all is not morally well in America. Barack Obama is sure to have a lengthy honeymoon with many people, who will be willing to overlook his essential moral emptiness for as long as it appears that he is doing a competent job of running his Administration. As for me, it is my hope for America that Obama’s moral emptiness will be exposed through his actions for all to see, and in such a way that we will not continue to allow ourselves to sweep it under the rug. I anticipate that after Obama's (second) term as president ends, these will be the same voices calling for him to be impeached.

The Senate testimony of Steven Chu for Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration gave a very specific, detailed look at how the new Administration will treat nuclear energy as a priority. The NEI Nuclear Notes blog , which follows the commercial energy industry, has compiled a list of excerpts from the testimony in which Chu is questioned on specifics about how he would promote nuclear power. Chu answered a number of questions from Senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, about the various issues including waste storage and loan guarantees. I think this final back and forth with Senator Mary Landrieu served as a good summary: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA): My question is, to follow-up, and I ask this, because, not because it hadn’t been asked ten times to you this morning, but I think, in asking, you’ll understand how many of us feel about nuclear. You’ve had a least six or seven questions. Mine’s going to be the eighth. It’s just apparent to us, mainly based on the great leader...