President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have announced a dramatically-altered approach to deploying U.S. missile defenses. Click through this slideshow for a look at the current deployment of our missile defense systems, and how they'll change.
To the frustration of many a cabinet secretary, the Obama administration is a little behind on its appointments. At this point—with only five weeks to go before the Senate breaks for recess—a little over half of the 514 positions that need filling have been filled. Some jobs are really important: The nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel has been held up for months. Obama’s choice for a USAID director came down just today. U.S. attorney nominations have slowed to a crawl.
Other jobs? Not as important.
Take, for example, the eight-person Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the five media entities—Voice of America foremost among them—tasked with broadcasting American culture and journalism around the globe. In theory, the board is supposed to serve as a “firewall” between the broadcasters’ mission of journalistic objectivity and the political whims of legislators, who would often rather see taxpayer dollars go towards burnishing America’s image abroad. By statute, the president and minority party nominate four governors each to keep a bipartisan mix. But right now, the BBG is only half full. The four currently serving members were all appointed in 2002, and have overstayed their terms by three years—if anyone left, the board would no longer have a quorum to conduct business. Journalistic wise man Walter Isaacson is rumored to be the administration’s choice for the vacant post of chairman, and it’s hard to imagine him being held up for any substantive reason. It’s also hard to imagine the administration nominating him between now and when Congress leaves town in December.
The sad saga of the BBG began almost as soon as it was created in its current form, when the U.S. Information Administration was dissolved in 1999. As this magazine documented in 2005, Bush partisan Kenneth Tomlinson turned the board into an ideological battleground—purging people whom he saw as insufficiently conservative—that hamstrung the broadcasters’ operations and drove morale into the toilet. After Tomlinson was ousted, the well-respected editor James Glassman restored the board to some order, before he was tapped as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy in the dying days of the Bush administration.
There are two broad views on our newly resurgent global bubbles--the increase in asset prices in emerging markets, fuelled by capital inflows, with all the associated bells and whistles (including dollar depreciation). These run-ups in stock market values and real estate prices are either benign or the beginnings of a major new malignancy.
The benign view, implicit in Secretary Geithner’s position at the G20 meeting last weekend, is most clearly articulated by Frederic (Ric) Mishkin, former member of the Fed’s Board of Governors and author of "The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems To Get Rich," in the Financial Times this morning.
In the few hours between landing after a swing through Pakistan, the Middle East, and North Africa and taking off again for Berlin, Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found time on Friday to stop over in much friendlier territory: a subterranean banquet hall at Washington’s Reagan International Trade Center. There, she addressed the people who tried to make her president of the United States.
The occasion: a “policy conference”—really more of a reunion—put on by a Hillary-centric advocacy group called NoLimits.org, which her staunchest defenders had founded in the wake of the 2008 election. They wanted to preserve the sisterhood that had grown up around her campaign, and the secretary, by being there, was just returning their loyalty. “We have had some extraordinary times,” Hillary said, relaxed and smiling. “There were so many of you here who were there with me on that long, exciting, death-defying journey across our country! You’re the ones who helped put all those cracks in the glass ceiling.”
The conference drew a peculiar mix: well-preserved Hillraisers, mingling and gossiping in their blonde coifs and furs, alongside supporters of a more pedestrian stripe, many of whom came with one friend or sat alone. They had all paid upwards of $175 apiece to listen to speakers like Barney Frank and Obama aide Jim Messina talk about issues of the day. The real draw, though, was Hillary herself.
The crowd (women, mostly) sat spellbound while she narrated her travels. They shook their heads when Hillary told them, in intimate tones, of visiting rape survivors in the Congo. When she finished, they surged forward to touch her hand, catch her eye, or take her picture—flashes of recognition crossed her face as she bent down from the dais to greet them.
For the moment, at least, House liberals still aren't backing away from their push to strengthen the public option in the reform bill. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, sent a letter to Pelosi on Friday that demanded an up-or-down vote on the Medicare-plus-5 rates--the strong public option that was passed up in favor of negotiated provider rates. The next best thing?
Earlier today, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was up at the House Financial Services Committee testifying on the administration's proposal for dealing with threats to the financial system ("Too Big To Fail," etc.).
WASHINGTON--Is there room in the Republican Party for genuine moderates? Truth to tell, the GOP can't decide. More precisely, it's deeply divided over whether it should allow any divisions in the party at all.
That's why the brawl in a single congressional district in far upstate New York is drawing the eyes of the nation. Conservatives are determined to use the race to prove that there is no place in the party for heretics, dissidents or independents.
Bernard Kerik, former New York City Policy Commissioner, Interim 
Interior Minister of Iraq, and nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security, will now be serving time in a Westchester County prison.
Stephen Power has a good story in the Wall Street Journal that explains a lot about why America’s clean energy future may be a while in coming. Power notes that although Energy Secretary Steve Chu set out this year to begin reshaping America's energy future with a network of highly-focused, results-oriented research labs, lawmakers have been busy with business-as-usual. Continue reading "Energy Pork: Why the Green Future May Take a While"
With all the focus on a handful of high-profile items, many important features in the House and Senate health reform proposals are being overlooked.
Pop quiz: You read a draft notice for a federal grant program containing the terms, “internal validity,” “quasi-experimental,” “regression discontinuity,” and “interrupted time series.” The program in question is:
a) A CDC program to fund pre-development of the porcupine flu vaccine
b) An FDA program to spur commercialization of an at-home test for polonium in your food
c) A NASA program to support design of a low-cost module that will allow humans to populate Venus
d) A Department of Education program designed to support and scale innovation in K-12 education
Answer: d). These and other Econometrics 101 terms can be found in the just-released prepublication notice for the new Investing in Innovation (I3) Fund at the Department of Education. What’s going on here? Are Secretary Arne Duncan and his deputies just showing off?
Actually, the structure they are proposing for this new $650 million fund deserves a close look. Last year, Sara Mead and Andy Rotherham called on the department to help bring successful educational entrepreneurs to scale, and to purposefully foster transformative educational innovations. It envisioned achieving these aims through two separate funds that the department would operate, but I3’s design could permit Duncan (and in particular, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Jim Shelton) to pursue both goals.
Trying to hold on to the New York House seat being vacated by John McHugh, the Republican leadership has thrown its support behind a candidate deemed insufficiently orthodox by its base, prompting the by-now-par-for-the-course display of in-fighting, name-calling, and savage screeching about out-of-touch RINOs' putting politics over principle.
I realize this isn't why Obama tapped McHugh to be his Secretary of the Army, but it's not a bad bonus.
The latest wrinkle in the public option debate (via Politico initially) is a proposal that comes from Senator Tom Carper, the Delaware Democrat that sits on the Finance committee. According to the proposal's latest draft, which Carper's staff is circulating but--I'm told--Carper himself is not really hawking yet, the idea is to let states set up their own alternative coverage options. Those options include starting a non-profit co-operative, opening up the benefits plan for state employees, or, yes, starting a real public plan.
There's no trigger, at least in the document I've seen. All it would take would be action by a state legislature, signed by that state's governor. And states would be free to join with other states and create joint plans.
But there would be various restrictions: A state couldn't create a public plan that tied reimbursements to federal Medicare rates (even with a higher percentage added on) and they couldn't compel providers to participate. In these respects, states would be free to create relatively weak public plans--like the compromise measure Senator Charles Schumer has proposed--but not relatively strong ones--like the version Senator Jay Rockefeller has put forward.
One interesting question is whether the proposal is already redundant, thanks to an amendment that another member of the Finance committee, Ron Wyden, introduced that Chairman Max Baucus accepted before the hearings even began.
Hillary Clinton has become the president's secretary for women's affairs, and she's done a good job at it--within the severe limits of what realistically can be done to protect females from sexual violence in war zones. On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council met, with Hillary in the chair, and as the Associated Press put it, "adopted a resolution ...
Yet one more reason Obama shouldn't go to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics: Chicago doesn't need him, since, judging from this report, it looks like Oprah's got things under control:
``Everyone is mesmerized by Oprah,'' said Charmaine Crooks, an Olympian and former International Olympic Committee member from Canada.
Alright, here we go on the climate front. After nearly a year of secretive discussions, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) will release global warming legislation Wednesday intended as a “starting point” for Senate negotiations that they hope will lead to an eventual conference with the House. That’s good. Congress needs to get back to work on climate. But more than that, it needs a good serious public deliberation that gets straight on what really matters in a bill.
So let’s go over this again, then, and repeat our frequent watchwords: To produce a useful and valuable climate bill, the Senate needs, yes, to set a price on carbon through a cap-and-trade system but also to greatly increase the flow of revenue to research on low-carbon technologies.
Price signals (sent through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system) are necessary to get industry and consumers to invest in the deployment of existing carbon-neutral or low-carbon technologies in the near term. This is the so-called “low-hanging fruit” that Energy Secretary Steven Chu talks about. As detailed in a new National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, such near-term clean-up runs from replacing incandescent lights and improved building efficiency to improved fuels and motors in the transportation sector to improved energy distribution systems and wider use of solar and wind energy. Accelerated deployment of such technologies could reduce energy use by 15 percent by 2020 relative to a “business-as-usual” reference projection, according to the NAS. And the way to get those gains is through carbon pricing. Such pricing, whether delivered by direct taxes or through a cap-and-trade system such as the Senate will now contemplate, will boost the demand for clean energy and products and place a premium on such solutions all across the private sector.
The steady accretion of decades of social programs at the federal level leads to frequent violations of the duck test. For instance, just because a neighborhood’s subsidized housing might exhibit the same physical and social problems as distressed public housing, that doesn’t mean it’s public housing. It could be something else entirely--project-based Section 8, or tax credit units, or single-family homes with FHA-insured mortgages. These distinctions translate into different sets of governing rules, and disparate, disconnected options for promoting revitalization.
HUD’s proposed Choice Neighborhoods Initiative would take a different approach, promoting strategies that tackle concentrations of poverty arising from multiple types of HUD-subsidized housing, beyond public housing alone. Secretary Shaun Donovan outlined this in a July speech, recounting the challenges that multiple forms of HUD-subsidized housing posed to redevelopment of the Washington Highlands neighborhood here in D.C. in the early 1990s.
But what do the numbers say?
Lost in the hubbub about health care last week were some remarkable comments from U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood. While certainly not as weighty as many of the issues Washington is wrestling with now that Congress is back in session, they represent a sea-change in rhetoric about national transportation policy.
Give the White House credit. Amid signs that the recession is ending, administration officials are resisting what must be an enormous temptation to gloat. “I think we’re certainly on track to, at least, stabilizing the patient,” said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis during a recent cnbc appearance. But “[t]he patient is still sick.” It’s hardly a triumphalist metaphor.
Want a hint about what the president will say tonight? Check out the guest list for the First Lady's box, which the White House just published. It's full of people who had trouble paying for their medical care--people who, though from different walks of life, all had to confront the same essential dilemmas. Whether or not Obama mentions them explicitly, it suggests the personal stakes Americans have in reform will be a major theme tonight--as it should be, but hasn't always in the last few months.
One other notable guest: Vietoria Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted.
Full list of guests follows:
It might just be the forthcoming Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman. According to The Hill, Frank admits in the book that his ultimate political ambition is to serve as HUD Secretary, which would make him America's only left-handed, gay, Jewish cabinet member.
Last Sunday’s third episode of this season’s Mad Men was one of the best in the series on many levels, which was why for me, a frequent little problem with the show stood out more than ever. Namely, the show’s depiction of how people speak is less accurate than the loving exactitude with attire, cocktails, product labels, and the like.
'We'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN," then-presidential candidate Barack Obama explained, "so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."
