I’m a skilled amateur chef and, indeed, one of the many (many) jobs I’ve held over the years is that I’ve worked as a cook. Given that background I can say with confidence that it’s very disconcerting when the recipe you’ve got in hand lists an ingredient that’s not mentioned in the preparational steps.

This morning Venezuelan Moisés Naím, editor of the magazine Foreign Policy, has an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he presents the recipe enabling “autocrats to cook up a grab for power”. Among its dozen ingredients is a gratuitous sideswipe against the United States:

A foreign superpower neutralized or distracted by other priorities and congested with too many international emergencies.

That ingredient does not figure in the ten preparation steps with which he follows.

Any number of other possible gratuitous criticisms would have been possible. For example, he might have criticized an international organization (which shall remain nameless) to which Jeanne Kirkpatrick, our delegate to the aforementioned unnamed international organization, referred as a “Third World debating society” as either that or a place where its delegates go to interview for a cushy bureaucrat’s job with the organization so they can live Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous away from their home countries. Or other developed nations who’ve never met an autocratic regime so heinous they were unwilling to cozy up to it to secure lucrative trade deals. But no.

What would he have us do? Should we have bombed Venezuela? Invaded it? Blockaded it? Embargoed its goods? Damned it on the floor of the General Assembly? Imposed sanctions? Issued a stern demarche? Would any of those things have helped Venezuelans? And what of their rights to self-determination?

Isn’t it even in the realm of possibility that somewhere, somehow there’s a tiny, miserable country whose misery was caused entirely by its own society and actions?

The actual recipe may be a good one and it may be a favorite of autocrats everywhere but it’s left a bad taste in my mouth.

Andrew Sullivan lambasts John McCain’s bellicosity on Russia as displayed in his “Today We Are All Georgians” speech:

Sully retorts:

All of this is quite potty. Russia is no longer the Soviet Union. You’d think conservatives would understand this distinction. There is a difference between totalitarian states seeking world expansion and authoritarian petro-states in demographic collapse bullying neighboring states because of perceived humiliations.

Look: every Republican wants to be Churchill. But this is not 1938. And Putin’s Russia is not Hitler’s Germany. You’ll have to find another fantasy on which to base a campaign.

I tend to agree that the Munich analogy has been so misused in the ensuing decades as to be meaningless and that Russia’s reach and grasp are much more modest than that of Nazi Germany.  Then again, Neville Chamberlain and virtually everyone else thought Hitler’s aims were modest and not totally without justification. Hitler didn’t become Hitler until he invaded Poland in 1939.

To the extent that the lessons of Munich still have any bearing, they are that unilateral concessions to despots with territorial ambitions only serve to whet their appetite.  The Russians aren’t going to launch WWIII in an attempt to reconstitute the old Soviet bloc.  Putin and company understand that they lack the resources to do that.  While the West isn’t going to war over Georgia or Ukraine, it would, again, go to war over Poland.

The West needs to recalibrate its foreign policy towards the region with an understanding the Russia is a regional power with real concerns about NATO expansion to its borders.  At the same time, however, Russia has to be made to understand that there are real consequences for bad behavior.

Alex Tabarrok muses,

There’s nothing like visiting a foreign country like China to get an appreciation of what it’s like to live under an authoritarian regime. I was reminded of this when I arrived home and found that the TSA had rifled through my baggage.

That’s the entirety of his post. I presume he means to shed perspective (we complain about high handed government policies in the US but we’re amazingly free compared to just about everywhere else) but one could read it the other way (it takes going through airport security and dealing with the TSA gestapo to truly appreciate authoritarianism).

Of course, “Not As Bad as Red China” is not exactly a motto we should aspire to.

Arthur Silber is, as am I, fascinated by the cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama.  He notes some anecdotal creepy gushing on a local radio show and then

Reactions of this kind to Obama are fairly common. No, they are not this extreme much of the time, but such statements are far from unusual. And many of Obama’s less obviously deluded supporters fall along the same continuum. Take a look at the woozily sentimental, intellectually reprehensible remarks collected at the beginning of “Obama’s Whitewash,” the third excerpt here, and the comments here. Moreover, this kind of reaction — an emotion-driven response utterly devoid of coherent ideational content, a response that leads far too many people to be enthusiastically willing to believe virtually anything that Obama might proclaim and to follow him anywhere — is one that Obama and his campaign explicitly seek to elicit.

People had better wake the hell up, and they had better study some history very damned fast. I have sometimes remarked, and I repeat the warning here, that the twentieth century was a nonstop train of horrors — yet in one sense, the most terrible and horrifying aspect of the twentieth century is that we learned absolutely nothing from it.

Among the horrors of the twentieth century were several notable leaders who initiated events that led to slaughter and destruction on an ungraspably monumental scale. These charismatic leaders evoked a response from their followers almost identical to that called forth by Obama. These leaders specialized in “personal stories of political conversion.” Doesn’t anyone see the connection? Doesn’t anyone remember any of this?

This, incidentally, from a man who can scarcely imagine voting for a Republican.

James Benjamin goes further:

Although I seriously doubt that Obama is the next Hitler, his followers are every bit as authoritarian as those who followed Bush (or Schwarzenegger, as I seem to recall) just a few years ago, and that’s something a despot, a strongman would want.

[...]

I would not be at all surprised if either Obama himself were revealed to be some sort of wild card authoritarian in his own right, and/or numerous of his followers were wild card authoritarians – i.e., those who can pose as “leftists” but once in a position of power begin to crack down on dissent much like the right-wingers we all know and loathe. Obama’s own embrace of warmongers, neoliberals, and of course of the awful FISA bill that is likely destined to pass does not bode well for those who wish to continue arguing that he is “progressive” (whatever that is supposed to mean any more). The behavior by groups of Obama fanatics on some of the community blogs (lots of bully tactics as I recall) and the apparent efforts by Obama partisans to shut down individually run anti-Obama blogs is a relatively mild expression of that authoritarianism; we should keep in mind that we’re still early in the game.

Jesse Taylor believes this line of reasoning has guano-level sanity and snarks, “While he lacks any political element of fascism in his platform, he makes up for it in some people liking him a lot, which is like 60% of fascism anyway.”

Obama is quite possibly the most charismatic politician of my lifetime.  Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had superb oratorical skills and charismatic personalities but neither made crowds swoon to the extent Obama does.  John Kennedy was murdered before I was born and it’s hard for me to assess him apart from the strange fascination and conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination plot.  Perhaps Dwight Eisenhower and, certainly, Franklin Roosevelt had it.

Like Silber, it worries me when people get so emotionally involved in their leaders.  I’m not concerned that Obama is going to annex Canada and start the ethnic cleansing of white working class Appalachians and people named Larry;  Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were evil men, not good ones who went mad with too much power.

Then again, I don’t think that George Bush or Arnold Schwarzenegger (or even Rudy Giuliani) are “authoritarians,” “despots,” or “strongmen,” either.  Executives naturally believe in the rightness of their cause and seek to push the envelope of their power when they’re being thwarted by inconvenient institutions.  Some do so more than others.

The problem with cults of personality in the American experience is it that it furthers our tendency to trust government to take care of us.  FDR was well meaning in constructing the New Deal and the vast machinery of government bureaucracy needed to support it to combat the unique challenges of the Great Depression; unfortunately, the solution long outlasted the crisis.  Similarly, I believe torture, rendition, habeus corpus suspension, the Department of Homeland Security, and the other over-reactions to the 9/11 attacks were well intentioned measures to make us safer.

Both Obama and his opponent, John McCain, have a streak of crusading righteousness in them that leads to a dismissiveness to criticism.  Some of our best and some of our worst presidents have had it.   Fortunately, we have a set of institutions — separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism — and a political culture that make realizing authoritarian ideals difficult.

via memeorandum

The lovely and talented Belle Waring is visiting her native New York from her home in Singapore and was shocked to find how dirty Manhattan, and in particular the Pulaski Skyway (pictured right), is.

Old metal that’s just black with soot! And graffiti! Man, if I fully acclimatize to the level of cleanliness, safety, and well-built massive public investment projects of Singapore I’ll never be able to move home.

Matt Yglesias, from whom I learned of the above post along with Belle’s husband, John Holbo, observes that, “a country like the United States just isn’t going to be able to compete infrastructure-wise with a newly-prosperous country like Singapore — we have a lot of stuff that’s oldish, but still usable, and shutting it down to fix or replace it would be extremely inconvenient.” He helpfully adds, “But it’s also the case that Singapore’s not spending 1 percent of GDP a year on a misguided effort to control Iraq.”

The latter is no doubt [probably] true. [Dave Schuler notes in the comments that, "Singapore has been part of the MNF in Iraq since the beginning and have been enthusiastic supporters of the enterprise."] Then again, I don’t recall Manhattan having been exactly spic and span in 2003. Or, indeed, 1985. So I’m going to discount the war as the proximate cause of the Skyway’s sootiness nothwithstanding that we could undoubtedly get Manhattan quite clean if we were to devote 1 percent of GDP a year to that end.

It does strike me, though, that a newly rich, authoritarian island city state has decided advantages over an enormous continental liberal democracy in presenting a shiny face to the world. If, arguendo, the next president were to come to office with prettying up the infrastructure as a top priority, he’d surely face strong opposition in both Houses of Congress. Members would no doubt prefer to spend limited resources on building new roads and bridges rather than sandblasting the old ones, for reasons both practical and political. Further, infrastructure spending has to compete against other demands, such as health care, education, and, yes, defense. And, of course, there is enormous popular resistance to raising taxes. In hierarchical societies such as Singapore, these constraints are largely absent.

Beyond that,though, I think there are cultural differences. Americans seem much more willing than people in most of the rest of the developed world to accept visual blight. Dilapidated structures, abandoned buildings, garish billboards and neon signage, overhead utility cables, and the like are quite normal even in close proximity to affluent areas. That’s much less the case in, say, Amsterdam or Frankfurt. Why this is, I have no idea.

Photo: Doc Searls

That’s how Instapundit refers to James Hansen, apparently the most intemperate of the global warming alarmists (yes, he’s worse than Gore because he’s Gore’s science advisor). Here’s Hansen’s latest proposal:

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress – in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming – to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

Hansen isn’t clear as to which court would have jurisdiction, nor is he very specific on any other details. Frankly, any attempt to prosecute people for their opinions like this strikes me as authoritarian and something that should be avoided. In addition, when scientists become activists I find it pretty alarming; they’re supposed to be dispassionate about their conclusions and should be aiming for the truth. Maybe they are, but episodes like this make me question their objectivity.

It’s a shame it comes down to something like this as well. As a non-scientist I am forced to trust people who do understand these things to make informed judgments of my own. It’s difficult to trust their conclusions when they put someone like Hansen front-and-center and he makes statements like this. I suspect it does more harm to their cause than good.

For my own part, I’m content to go with what the scientists say on this issue, mostly. One very basic item would make it much easier to go along with the scientists unequivocally. In all I’ve read about climate change in the popular press, I haven’t seen that they even have a model that can predict the earth’s average temperature from one year to the next, much less decades into the future (if anyone can point me to an example of this, please put it in the comments). Hopefully this is something they took care of long ago.

Also, whether climate change is true or not, that doesn’t tell us what, if anything, needs to be done about it. My personal preference would be a revenue neutral, distribution neutral carbon tax.

I’ve long thought that American politics and the fact that we have an activist/interventionist government when it comes to economic policy leads to a race to see who can pander the most to voters, or at least a sub-class of voters. John McCain’s new “plan” to bail out the greedy and stupid when it comes to mortgages is another data point supporting this theory.

NEW YORK — Amid widespread concerns about the nation’s mortgage crisis, John McCain outlined Thursday a proposal to help “well-meaning, deserving homeowners who are facing foreclosure” and called for a Justice Department investigation into possible “criminal wrongdoing” by unscrupulous lenders.

The proposals marked a shift in tone from McCain’s admonition two weeks ago against adopting a mortgage plan that would be “a multibillion-dollar bailout for big banks and speculators.” That set the Arizona senator apart from his Democratic rivals in the presidential contest, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, who have both said there is a need for government intervention to fight the nation’s wave of home mortgage foreclosures and overall economic slowdown.

I’m sorry, but this just completely turns me off to a candidate that I already see as having a nice authoritarian streak to him. Lets translate the phrase “well-meaning, deserving homeowners who are facing foreclosure”. To me I see that as a bailout for people who bought a house that was too expensive for them, or couldn’t resist the temptation of using their homes like ATM machines to tap into the equity (that is now gone, or substantially smaller) of their homes to promote a lifestyle they couldn’t actually afford. In short, Republicans, their presumptive nominee at least, doesn’t give a crap about personal responsibility and making wise financial choices. From there it is a few short steps to, “Well clearly we can’t let these people manage their own money since they make a mess of it anyways.”

The plan would retire old loans that homeowners no longer can pay and replace them with less expensive, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages that are federally guaranteed.

Some political commentators look at things like that and wonder, “Do these candidates understand economics?” I’m more cynical, I’m sure the candidates understand economics, or at least some of their advisers do and are aware of the problem of moral hazard. However, the benefits of pandering to voters has far greater rewards for the candidates. Of course, this also exposes the fatal flaw to the view of “government would work great if we could just get the right person in there”. The wining candidate can never be the “right person” because to win the candidate must pander and that means policies that are, generally, not good policies. They end up promoting irresponsible behavior such as lowered savings rates, buying a house that is too expensive, and so forth.

About the best thing that can be said about McCain’s plan is that it isn’t as expensive as the Obama or Clinton plans.

Matt Welch has an excellent, link-filled article asking newspaper editorial boards to, if they are going to endorse McCain, endorse the real McCain, rather than the “straight-talking”, “maverick”, “Iraq war skeptic” that newspaper editorialists tend to tag with the name “McCain”.

Considering that McCain in New Hampshire this month railed against “negative ads” while running them, and then bragged in his victory speech that he “always told you the truth,” it seems timelier than ever to double-check, rather than rubber-stamp, the new front-runner’s honesty. Particularly since his voluminous writings are filled with warnings like: “the worst decisions I have made, not just in politics but over the course of my entire life, have been those I made to seek an advantage primarily or solely for myself.”

Read the whole thing, especially for the context and copious citations. Frankly, I’ve never been a big John McCain fan, even though I’ve predicted that he will take the Republican nomination. I don’t like his “national greatness”, give up your life for the state brand of conservative authoritarianism. I don’t like his warmongering. I don’t like the fact that a member of the Keating Five somehow has the audacity to be the guy who “stands up to corruption” and doesn’t get called on it.

That said, one of the most heartbreaking things about this election season is that John McCain is actually an attractive candidate. Not because he’s become a better candidate or politician, but rather because the rest of the field is just that bad. I will give McCain credit for his standing up to the Administration on torture. I’ll also definitely give him credit for trying to push through immigration policies that at least have some modicum of decency, as opposed to the Know-Nothing position of the rest of the Republican Party. But those are small potatoes compared to his numerous flaws as a Presidential candidate.

Yesterday’s release of a National Intelligence Estimate reporting that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has, as Steven Lee Meyers points out, dramatically shifted the landscape.

Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here. An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.

The impact of the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion — that Iran had halted a military program in 2003, though it continues to enrich uranium, ostensibly for peaceful uses — will be felt in endless ways at home and abroad.

It will certainly weaken international support for tougher sanctions against Iran, as a senior administration official grudgingly acknowledged. And it will raise questions, again, about the integrity of America’s beleaguered intelligence agencies, including whether what are now acknowledged to have been overstatements about Iran’s intentions in a 2005 assessment reflected poor tradecraft or political pressure. Seldom do those agencies vindicate irascible foreign leaders like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who several weeks ago said there was “no evidence” that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, dismissing the American claims as exaggerated.

Peter Baker and Robin Wright add:

The new intelligence report released yesterday not only undercut the administration’s alarming rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear ambitions but could also throttle Bush’s effort to ratchet up international sanctions and take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his presidency.

Iran had been shaping up as perhaps the dominant foreign policy issue of Bush’s remaining year in office and of the presidential campaign to succeed him. Now leaders at home and abroad will have to rethink what they thought they knew about Tehran’s intentions and capabilities.

“It’s a little head-spinning,” said Daniel Benjamin, an official on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. “Everybody’s going to be trying to scratch their heads and figure out what comes next.”

Critics seized on the new National Intelligence Estimate to lambaste what Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards called “George Bush and Dick Cheney’s rush to war with Iran.” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), echoing other Democrats, called for “a diplomatic surge” to resolve the dispute with Tehran. Jon Wolfsthal, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, termed the revelation “a blockbuster development” that “requires a wholesale reevaluation of U.S. policy.”

Many are digging in, though. Meyers again:

The findings, though, remain open for interpretation, as they always do, even in documents meant to reflect the consensus of the intelligence community. When it comes to Iran, at odds with the United States on many fronts beyond the nuclear question, hawks remain.

“Those who are suspicious of diplomacy are well dug in in this administration,” said Kurt M. Campbell, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security.

Victor Davis Hanson is fighting a two front war: Since our intelligence estimates are so often wrong, the neocons might still be right about Iran’s nukes. And, if not, it’s only because the neocons were right on Iraq!

The latest news from Iran about the supposed abandonment in 2003 of the effort to produce a Bomb — if even remotely accurate — presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats.

Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that, Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture around (say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.

After all, what critic would wish now to grant that one result of the 2003 war-aside from the real chance that Iraq can stabilize and function under the only consensual government in the region-might have been the elimination for some time of two growing and potentially nuclear threats to American security, quite apart from Saddam Hussein?

Less dramatically is the “it happened on our watch” fallback:

But the report included language that the administration can cite to claim success, according to some analysts. Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA official who has been critical of the Bush administration’s run-up to war with Iraq, said the revelation about the halted weapons program is a “shocker” but noted that “the administration can say that Iran halted its program during our administration and this is a success for us. And with some good reason.”

Not to be outdone, founding neocon Norman Podhoretz directs all its fire at the (take your pick) evil and/or stupid intelligence community:

In other words, a full two years after Iran supposedly called a halt to its nuclear program, the intelligence community was still as sure as it ever is about anything that Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal. Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same “high confidence,” that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003?

[...]

It is worth remembering that in 2002, one of the conclusions offered by the NIE, also with “high confidence,” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.” And another conclusion, offered with high confidence too, was that “Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.”

I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.

[...]

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again.

The Weekly Standard’s Thomas Joscelyn offers a more nuanced challenge to the NIE, wondering what has caused this dramatic change in the assessment. He is doubtful that we have good intelligence inside Iran, would like to know what information the IC has that it didn’t in 2005, wonders how one draws the line between military and civilian nuclear development, and is curious as to what internal changes in Iran would have caused such a sea change.

Those are actually pretty good questions, albeit ones to which we’re not likely to get answers. Sources and methods and all that.

The IC gets it wrong so often, not because they’re incompetent but because their task is so incredibly difficult. It’s therefore more than fair to doubt intelligence assessments, especially those that involve the most sensitive issues in authoritarian societies.

Still, one can’t treat intelligence assessments as gospel when they support one’s policy preferences and dismiss them as idle guesses when they don’t.

Further, there’s no question that bureaucratic politics plays a role in these reports. The incentives, though, are entirely in the direction of producing the most dire warnings. Podhoretz’ notion, that to compensate for being wrong on Iraq they’re now overly cautious on Iran, is absurd. For one thing, the IC knew they’d blown it on Iraq WMD in 2005 when they produced the last Iran estimate and they were still expressing strong confidence that a threat existed. More importantly, though, false positives are much more forgivable than false negatives.

Could this NIE be wrong? Could Iran be incredibly clever in hiding a weapons program? Should we still continue to act as if the Iranian regime is hostile? Absolutely.

But let’s not pretend that yesterday’s news doesn’t dramatically alter the debate.

Graphic: NYT

Vladimir Putin’s United Russia had won 64.1 percent of vote, nearly six times as many as his nearest rival, in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. All observers are crying foul but Putin is claiming the result as a mandate for his leadership.

The international community is demanding a probe. Mark John and David Brunnstrom for Reuters:

Europe joined the United States on Monday in demanding Russia probe alleged abuses in an election won overwhelmingly by party, and Germany denounced the poll as undemocratic. European states expressed alarm over the outcome of Sunday’s parliamentary poll after rights watchdogs said the campaign had been marred by biased media coverage and abuse of government resources in favor of Putin’s United Russia.

But analysts said there was acknowledgement by many European states that Moscow, whose cooperation the West wants for disputes from Iran to Kosovo, was increasingly impervious to criticism from outside.

Indeed, Putin is taking the criticism in stride.

President Vladimir Putin on Monday hailed his party’s landslide election victory and brushed off opposition charges of fraud that were echoed by foreign observers and European governments. “The legitimacy of the Russian parliament has without a doubt been increased,” Putin told reporters after visiting a space research centre in Moscow.

With 98 percent of ballots counted from Sunday’s election, Putin’s United Russia party had secured 64.1 percent of the vote, giving it more than two thirds of seats in parliament — a majority sufficient to change the constitution.

“It is clear that Russians will never let their country go down the destructive path of certain countries in the former Soviet space,” Putin said, referring to pro-Western popular revolts in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.

[...]

The Communist Party came a distant second with 11.6 percent, while two other pro-Kremlin parties — the ultra-nationalist LDPR party and the centre-left A Just Russia party — got 8.2 percent and 7.8 percent respectively. Seven other parties failed to achieve the election threshold, making it the first time since the Soviet collapse in 1991 that the liberal opposition failed to win a single seat. The nationwide turnout was 62 percent, but in war-ravaged Chechnya it reached Soviet-style records of 99 percent of eligible voters, according to election officials.

Obviously, one does not get results like this in free and fair elections. That Putin has dragged Russia back into authoritarian rule is a given.

At the same time, though, there’s little doubt that he’s incredibly popular. As AP’s Douglas Birch observes, “Putin is widely credited here with leading his country out of the social and political wilderness of the 1990s when the collapse of Soviet power nearly led to the disintegration of Russian society.” So, while United Russia assuredly wouldn’t have won by these margins in elections held according to international norms, the order of finish might well have been identical.

What happens next is unclear. Putin is constitutionally prohibited from remaining in office past next year. Will he now change the constitution? Or simply rule under a different title?

CNN guesses the latter, which strikes me as most likely as well.

Putin was top of United Russia’s list of candidates, guaranteeing him a parliamentary seat and allowing him to extend his influence when his presidential term ends in 2008, perhaps as prime minister.

“I headed United Russia ticket, and, of course, it’s a sign of public trust,” Putin said in televised comments reported by AP, adding that victory would let the United Russia party cement its power base in the Duma.

Douglas Birch paints a grim future.

There is little incentive for Putin to relinquish power over Russia, which is flush with revenue from oil and natural gas and where his power arguably rivals that of many of his Soviet and czarist predecessors.

Candidates for president may register until Dec. 23. Many are expected to do so, but only Putin’s hand-picked successor seems to have a real chance of winning. Whoever is chosen is likely to be a figurehead, or could even step aside early to allow Putin to recapture the presidential office. Currently the constitution prohibits a president from running for a third consecutive term.

Two-thirds of Russians polled by the respected Levada Center recently said they would support Putin serving another term. But Putin has repeatedly promised not to run, and a reversal would be out of character for the stern, tough-talking former KGB spy.

Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist and political analyst, believes that Putin will become United Russia’s party chief and that the future president would follow his orders – recreating to some extent the Soviet-era model in which the government was subservient to the Communist Party. “A president will be nominated by United Russia, and he will obey party discipline,” she commented recently.

Sunday’s election, meanwhile, eliminated all of Putin’s liberal opponents from parliament. Amended election rules barred individual races that in the past allowed mavericks to win seats.

“We will continue our fight for democracy and liberal values,” retiring deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov told the Associated Press in an interview Friday. “Not in the parliament, but in society. It’s like in Soviet times, we are becoming dissidents because there are no legal ways to be in the opposition.”

Allusions to the Soviet era are hardly misplaced. Indeed, the parallels to the rise of Adolph Hitler, who came to power through the ballot box (albeit in elections impacted by Nazi violence and intimidation) are also hard to overlook.

Stories via OTB News. Photo source: Getty Images/CNN.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez will have to make do with the powers he currently has after voters narrowly rejected two packages of constitutional amendments proposed by Chávez and the Chavista-dominated national legislature:

Venezuelan voters narrowly rejected a constitutional referendum that would have bolstered President Hugo Chavez’s embrace of socialism and granted an indefinite extension of his eligibility to serve as president, the National Electoral Council reported early Monday.

About 51 percent of voters opposed the amendments, while approximately 49 percent were in favor of them.

“Don’t feel sad. Don’t feel burdened,” Chavez told supporters immediately after the results were announced.

More than nine million of Venezuelan’s 16 million eligible voters went to the polls Sunday.

President of the National Electoral Council, Tibisay Lucena, said the process “shows the entire world that we are a democratic country.”

Chavez, in what he called a talk “from my heart” acknowledging the results, thanked those who opposed his proposal, saying the election had proven that Venezuelan democracy is maturing.

Thousands of people gathered in the streets, many of them university students who worked to defeat the measure, burst into singing their country’s national anthem upon hearing the news.

Quite a few of us political science types figured Chávez would win, either by hook or crook, but apparently we were mistaken, which is probably good news for those concerned by the possibility of further slides to authoritarianism in Venezuela. It’s possible that these amendments will be resurrected again, however, as the next legislative elections aren’t due for over two years and Chávez’s term doesn’t end until January 2013.

America’s greatest journalist, Radley Balko, has an excellent piece on why a Clinton II Presidency would differ very little from the Bush II Presidency.

For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush’s aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It’s odd, then, that they’re prepared to nominate Hillary Clinton to carry the party into the 2008 elections.

[...]

Then there is Hillary Clinton on the issues. Cato Institute President Ed Crane recently wrote a piece for the Financial Times pointing out that when you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton’s grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn’t conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.

[...]

Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government’s ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing “decency” standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.

[...]

What about secrecy and executive power? It’s difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband’s administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious “executive privilege” claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests—claims the left now (correctly, in my view) regularly criticizes the Bush administration for invoking.

Hillary Clinton herself went to court to keep meetings of her Health Care Task Force secret from the public, something conservatives were quick to point out when leftists criticize Vice President Cheney’s similar efforts to keep meetings of his Energy Task Force secret.

Read the whole thing.

Personally, my Election 2008 nightmare is one in which next November, the country is forced to choose between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. Both persons are, by personality and inclination, more authoritarian than just about anyone else in the field. Both are smart enough to take advantage of the past two decades of increasingly consolidated presidential authority to bolster their own power. Both seem to think that the threat of military force is the end-all be-all of American diplomacy. Both have little regard for individual liberty.

And both of them are the current frontrunners.

All signs point to France rejoining NATO’s military structure more than forty years after declaring its independence and kicking the alliance headquarters out of Paris. Norman Polmar provides some background:

France is expected to soon rejoin NATO’s military command after a 40-year absence. The French government withdrew from the NATO military structure in 1966 (although remaining a member of NATO’s political-policy structure). France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has placed strong emphasis on France’s relationship with the United States. And, he recently declared that he would soon undertake “very strong” initiatives on European defense and give France “its full place” in NATO. Subsequently, Defense Minister Herve Morin said that he was “convinced that European defense will make no progress unless France changes its political behavior within NATO.”

It’s important to recall that, despite notable differences, France has remained a NATO ally:

Despite having withdrawn from the NATO military structure, French naval forces conducted bilateral exercises with other NATO navies, including the U.S. Navy. And, certain U.S.-French weapon agreements were undertaken, especially for upgrading American-built tanker aircraft and ship-launched missiles. The French joined other NATO forces in the Bosnia conflict as well as the 1991 assault on Iraq to free Kuwait, which Iraqi forces had taken over the previous summer.

Although the previous French government was not supportive of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the French did send forces to Afghanistan. However, earlier this year France withdrew its 200-strong special forces from Afghanistan; those ground troops were participating in the U.S anti-terror operation code-named Enduring Freedom. The then-Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said, “There is a general reorganization of our [troops].” However, the 1,100 French troops engaged in the separate, NATO-led International Security Assistance Force remain in Afghanistan.

U.S. forces have also worked with French forces in Djibouti in northeast Africa. (Djibouti is a small, impoverished republic just north of the Horn of Africa on the strait of Bab el-Mandeb. It is bordered by Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, an area of great political and economic turmoil.) The United States has used the French military-air base in Djibouti for several combat and support operations in the region. Indeed, the case can be made that—despite its public stance—the French have been most helpful to several U.S. military activities.

Still, full integration is not only a positive step for Transatlantic relations but significant militarily. And it serves French interests, too, as Denis MacShane explains:

[I]t is hard to see how a sovereign, French-alone geopolitics has helped advance French national interests or made the world safer.

Mitterrand was unable to shape an effective Balkans politics despite huge public pressure in France to stop the Serb siege of Sarajevo and killings of Catholic and Muslim opponents. In the end it was American air power and the ruthless application of Nato military-political diplomacy that stabilised the Balkans.

Jacques Chirac believed he had the magic touch with Arab leaders, whom he endlessly courted. But French soldiers are now bogged down in Lebanon and Afghanistan, unable to move and unwilling to fight. Despite the grand noise of sending French troops to Lebanon after the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah, France has been unable to prevent the flow of arms from Iran and Syria into Lebanon as Islamist forces prepare for another assault on Jews living in Israel.

While the rest of Europe, starting with socialist Spain in the 1980s and followed by post-communist Europe a decade later, scrambled to join the organisation, France maintained its Gaullist indifference to a Nato that was searching for a new role.

Russian officers now work at Nato headquarters in Brussels and Russian MPs outnumber French politicians at the important Nato parliamentary assembly meetings, where top US generals explain their thinking to and take hard questions from European and North American policy-makers.

In the 1960s, America was the supreme military power outside the communist bloc. Today, America is a wounded beast. Its soldiers are surrounded by a growing Islamist enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. America’s leaders are looked upon with dismay by pro-Americans and with open contempt by much of the political class in Europe.

While many Europeans hanker after the pleasure of soft power, the enemies of democracy have no compunction about using hard power.

Germany is the strongest defender of soft power and refuses to allow her soldiers to do any fighting in Afghanistan. Yet the arrest of German citizens trained by al-Qa’eda in Pakistan and ready to kill fellow Germans en masse shows that for jihadists, Frankfurt is as much a target as London or Madrid. The lack of success of the occupation policies in Iraq is not appeasing Islamist armed violence. The former German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, called fundamentalist jihadi politics “the new totalitarianism”.

The democracies failed in the 1930s to arm themselves against fascism. After 1945, the lessons were learnt. Nato sent an unmistakable message to Stalinist ideology that on the armed front democracy would defend itself.

De Gaulle had the luxury of pulling France out of Nato because the alliance had already stabilised Europe. Is the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, prepared to be as bold as de Gaulle and say the time has come for France to re-enter Nato? It would send the clearest signal possible to the enemies of democracy that the new totalitarianism, to use Fischer’s words, will not pass.

The Cabinet minister Ed Balls has rightly argued in a report just published that Palestinians need economic development. So does every part of the Arab and Muslim world from Morocco to Pakistan.
But economic development will not take place without a defeat of jihadi terrorism. That needs harder power. Nato with France reintegrated can shape a European dimension to a new security policy aimed at helping the elected governments of Afghanistan, Lebanon, and in due course, Pakistan – even Iraq – to defeat their external enemies.

France outside Nato makes the concept of a common European defence policy difficult – if not impossible. France in Nato can take the lead, with Britain, in the long overdue rationalisation of Europe’s military policy, profile and procurement.

[...]

No European nation can alone exercise effective military puissance. A new Nato and a new integrated military unity in Europe would send the enemies of democracy a clear message that they will not win.

While the United Nations Security Council remains the preferred vehicle for collective security, for a whole host of reasons, the requirement for unanimity among its Permanent Members, including authoritarian Russia and China, almost always takes that option off the table. Despite its divisions — especially given its rapid membership expansion — NATO is a far more wieldable tool. The full participation of France would make it a more viable one.

Bill O’Reilly made some, um, interesting comments on his radio show Wednesday that have sparked some controversy in the blogosphere after being highlighted by Media Matters. Here, in context, is what he said. All emphases from the Media Matters transcript:

O”REILLY: Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they’ve had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don’t think there’s a black American who hasn’t had a personal insult that they’ve had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don’t think there’s one in the country. So you’ve got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] “You call me that, I’m gonna be more successful.” OK, it depends on the personality.

So it’s there. It’s there, and I think it’s getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They’re getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They’re just trying to figure it out: “Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.”

You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he’s made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia’s, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that’s really what this society’s all about now here in the U.S.A. There’s no difference. There’s no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment — people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you’re gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody’s skin.

[...]

O’REILLY: No, no, I mean, I like that soul food. I had the meatloaf special. I had coconut shrimp. I had the iced tea. It was great.

WILLIAMS: Well, let me just tell you, the one thing I would say is this. And we’re talking about the kids who still like this gangsta rap, this vile poison that I think is absolutely, you know, literally a corruption of culture. I think that what you’ve got to take into account that it’s still a majority white audience — young, white people who think they’re into rebelling against their parents who buy this stuff and think it’s just a kick. You know, it’s just a way of expressing their anti-authoritarianism.

O’REILLY: But it’s a different — it’s a different dynamic, though.

WILLIAMS: Exactly right –

O’REILLY: Because the young, white kids don’t have to struggle out of the ghetto.

WILLIAMS: Right, and also, I think they can have that as one phase of their lives.

O’REILLY: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: I think too many of the black kids take it as, “Oh, that’s what it means to be authentically black. That’s how you make money. That’s how you become rich and famous and get on TV and get music videos.” And you either get the boys or the girls. The girls think they have to, you know, be half-naked and spinning around like they’re on meth in order to get any attention. It really corrupts people, and I think it adds, Bill, to some serious sociological problems, like the high out-of-wedlock birth rate because of this hypersexual imagery that then the kids adapt to some kind of reality. I mean, it’s inauthentic. It’s not in keeping with great black traditions of struggle and excellence, from Willie Mays to Aretha Franklin, but even in terms of academics, you know, going back to people like Charles Drew or Ben Carson here, the neurosurgeon at [Johns] Hopkins [University]. That stuff, all of a sudden, is pushed aside. That’s treated as, “You’re a nerd, you’re acting white,” if you try to be excellent and black.

O’REILLY: You know, and I went to the concert by Anita Baker at Radio City Music Hall, and the crowd was 50/50, black/white, and the blacks were well-dressed. And she came out — Anita Baker came out on the stage and said, “Look, this is a show for the family. We’re not gonna have any profanity here. We’re not gonna do any rapping here.” The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedoes, and this is what white America doesn’t know, particularly people who don’t have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg.

WILLIAMS: Oh, and it’s just so awful. It’s just so awful because, I mean, it’s literally the sewer come to the surface, and now people take it that the sewer is the whole story –

O’REILLY: That’s right. That’s right. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, “M-Fer, I want more iced tea.”

WILLIAMS: Please –

O’REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.

Hilzoy wonders, “If it was wrong for Don Imus to refer to the Rutgers basketball team as ‘nappy-headed hos’, and it was, and if MSNBC rightly decided that they had to drop him, then why on earth does Bill O’Reilly still have a job?”

Barbara O’Brien terms O’Reilly’s comments “racist” and “unreal” and remarks, “This would have been bad enough if O’Reilly were some teenage yahoo fresh from all-white Snipe Hunt, Kentucky. But O’Reilly is even older than I am, and grew up on Long Island, for pity’s sake. Did his parents keep him in a box?”

It’s apparently fine for educated middle aged people to buy in to negative stereotypes about the rural South but confessing to being pleasantly surprised that the stereotypes of black urban culture are overblown makes you a racist? And FOX ought to fire its highest rated host for saying things no worse than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden have said?*

I’m no fan of O’Reilly, who I find to be pompous, phony, and just generally annoying. But what he’s expressing here isn’t racism but 1970s style white liberal guilt.

It’s noteworthy that the WILLIAMS in the dialog above is Juan Williams, a black man and chronicler of the civil rights movement who authored Eyes on The Prize, Thurgood Marshall—American Revolutionary, and The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do about It.

Like Williams, O’Reilly is frustrated with the worst elements of hip hop culture. He’s a very wealthy and successful man, which means the blacks in his community and workplace are people like Williams or Barack Obama or Colin Powell. His sense of black inner city culture, then, is shaped by the entertainment industry, which in fact depicts urban black men as loud, vulgar thugs. It’s been a staple of mainstream black standup comedians for decades that black men holler at the screen in the movie theater and are otherwise rather obnoxious when among their own kind. So, he’s pleasantly surprised to go into a restaurant in Harlem — the epitome of what we used to call ghetto culture — and find it indistinguishable from a little Italian joint in his own neighborhood. And he can’t wait to share that news with his mostly white audience.

O’Reilly’s real thesis — interestingly, not in bold text above — is this:

It was the same, and that’s really what this society’s all about now here in the U.S.A. There’s no difference. There’s no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment — people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you’re gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody’s skin.

It wasn’t all that long ago that a white man saying that would have been looked at as an ultra-liberal. Now, he’s a bigot?

Note that Williams didn’t seem the least bit offended or put off by O’Reilly’s remarks. My guess is that he’s had variations of this conversation before with O’Reilly and other white friends. It’s a very worthwhile one to have, in my view, and the more public the better.

UPDATE: Juan Williams has responded angrily to these smears against O’Reilly, calling them “rank dishonesty.” Here’s the video:

Stephen Spruiell and Johnny Dollar have more.

__________

*I’ve defended both the Clinton and Biden remarks; I merely use them here to illustrate that it’s not just conservatives who say awkward things about racial matters and yet aren’t “racist” in any meaningful sense.

If John Edwards is elected president, Americans will have no choice but go to the doctor when told.

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.” Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.

Most of the bloggers covering this one are, understandably, focusing on the tyranny angle:

• Steven Taylor: “If one doesn’t go to one’s annual whatever, will there be a fine? Will the CDC dispatch agents to your house to force the tests on you?”

• Jon Henke: “Which one of John Edwards’ two Americas gets a freedom of choice and privacy that extends beyond the uterus?”

• Darleen Click: “State nannyism doesn’t get much better than this.”

• Brennan: “You want to get an abortion? That’s up to you. You want to decide not to go to the doctor? He’ll force ya to. Oh the freedom!”

• Ann Althouse: “He’s so warmed up about the generous benefits he’s promising that he doesn’t even hear the repressiveness in his own statements.”

• Ron Chusid: “A plan like this makes Edwards even more authoritarian than the current Republican Party.”

It strikes me, though, that Edwards is at least being honest about the trade-offs involved. If the government is going to be responsible for everyone’s health care (and at some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be) then it will naturally set all manner of preconditions for receiving treatment. If you’re morbidly obese, you’ll be denied heroic treatment for heart disease. If you don’t get preventative screenings, you’ll be denied remedial treatment.

From a pure business standpoint, this makes perfect sense. If you tear the back off your electronics equipment in an attempt to do repairs, you void the warranty. If your engine seizes up at 30,000 miles and you have never had the oil changed, the manufacturer won’t repair it on their dime. By the same token, why should the taxpayer be on the hook because you won’t take care of your body?

Those who value freedom would argue that the human body is different from mere property. Then again, they wouldn’t insist on cradle to grave health care on the public dime.