Herbert, solo

Gail Collins and Charles Blow are both off today, so Bob Herbert is flying solo.  In “Constraining America’s Brightest” he says instead of getting a chance to set the world on fire, college graduates are facing a gloomy economy, unpaid internships and unemployment.  Here he is:

That period right after college graduation is when young people tend to think they can set the world on fire. Careers are starting, and relationships in the broader world are forming. It’s exciting, and optimism is off the charts.

So the gloomy outlook that this economy is offering so many of America’s brightest young people is not just disconcerting, it’s a cultural shift, a harbinger. “Attention,” as the wife of a fictional salesman once said, “must be paid.”

Maggie Mertens graduated in May from Smith College, where she was an editor of the student newspaper. She applied for “tons” of jobs and internships, probably 50 or more. “I was totally unemployed all summer,” she said. She eventually landed an internship at NPR in Washington, which she described as “awesome,” but it is unpaid.

“I was lucky enough,” she said, “to connect up with a family that let me live with them for free in exchange for watching their baby a few times a week.” But there was still no money coming in. So in addition to the 40-hour-a-week internship and the baby-sitting chores, Ms. Mertens is doing part-time seasonal work at a Whole Foods store.

Welcome to the new world of employment in America as we approach the second decade of the 21st century.

Josh Riman graduated from Syracuse University in 2006. “I had a job at a great advertising agency,” he said, “but was laid off in 2007. I found a job the next day, amazingly enough, and worked at this next advertising shop for about a year and a half. Then, on my birthday, the place went bankrupt. We all lost our jobs.”

Since then, Mr. Riman has been doing freelance and “pro bono” work. He has been unable to find anything even reasonably secure.

As jobs become increasingly scarce, more and more college graduates are working for free, at internships, which is great for employers but something of a handicap for a young man or woman who has to pay for food or a place to live.

“The whole idea of apprenticeships is coming back into vogue, as it was 100 years ago,” said John Noble, director of the Office of Career Counseling at Williams College. “Certain industries, such as the media, TV, radio and so on, have always exploited recent graduates, giving them a chance to get into a very competitive field in exchange for making them work for no — or low — pay. But now this is spreading to many other industries.”

Lonnie Dunlap, who heads the career services program at Northwestern University and has been advising young people on careers since the mid-70s, said today’s graduates are experiencing the worst employment market she’s ever seen.

“There’s a sense of huge emotional anxiety among our students,” she said. The young people are not only having trouble finding work themselves; many feel a sense of obligation to parents who are struggling with job losses and home foreclosures.

“In the past two years,” said Ms. Dunlap, “we have seen a huge uptick in the number of recent alums coming back for services because they still haven’t found work, as well as midcareer alums who have been laid off and need our help.”

Like Mr. Noble, she mentioned the growing use of interns versus paid employees and said she can see the value of such unpaid work for some recent graduates, “though, of course, not everyone can afford to do that.”

Despite the expansion of the gross domestic product in the quarter that ended in September, there is no sign of the kind of recovery in employment that would be needed to bring the American economy and the economic condition of American families back to robust health. It would be nice if some of the politicians and economists so obsessed with the G.D.P. would take a moment to look out the window at what is happening with real people in the real world.

They might see Laura Ram, who graduated from Baruch College in New York in May 2007. She was laid off from a full-time job almost exactly a year ago and hasn’t worked since. She’s been diligent about submitting applications and showing up at job fairs and so on, but nothing has come close to panning out.

“I haven’t gone on a single interview,” she said, “which manages to shock just about my entire family.”

These recent graduates have done everything society told them to do. They’ve worked hard, kept their noses clean and gotten a good education (in many cases from the nation’s best schools). They are ready and anxious to work. If we’re having trouble finding employment for even these kids, then we’re doing something profoundly wrong.

 

Bobo and Krugman

Bobo, who doesn’t seem to have served in the military, has produced “The Tenacity Question” in which he sniffs that military experts say that President Obama is intellectually sophisticated, but they do not know if he has the determination needed from a war president.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Defining Moment,” says the health care legislation on the table isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as anyone could reasonably have expected. It is time for everyone to decide which side they’re on.  Here’s Bobo:

Today, President Obama will lead another meeting to debate strategy in Afghanistan. He will presumably discuss the questions that have divided his advisers: How many troops to commit? How to define plausible goals? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns?

For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.

I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested.

Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level.

They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.

Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence.

But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

Their second concern is political. They do not know if President Obama regards Afghanistan as a distraction from the matters he really cares about: health care, energy and education. Some of them suspect that Obama talked himself into supporting the Afghan effort so he could sound hawkish during the campaign. They suspect he is making a show of commitment now so he can let the matter drop at a politically opportune moment down the road.

Finally, they do not understand the president’s fundamental read on the situation. Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.

The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal.

The determination vacuum affects the debate in this country, too. Every argument about troop levels is really a proxy argument for whether the U.S. should stay or go. The administration is so divided because the fundamental issue of commitment has not been settled.

Some of the experts asked what I thought of Obama’s commitment level. I had to confess I’m not sure either.

So I guess the president’s most important meeting is not the one with the Joint Chiefs and the cabinet secretaries. It’s the one with the mirror, in which he looks for some firm conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable commitment. If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later. If he does find that conviction, then he should let us know, and fill the vacuum that is eroding the chances of success.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that counterinsurgency is “an argument to win the support of the people.” But it’s not an argument won through sophisticated analysis. It’s an argument won through the display of raw determination.

Now that he’s admitted that he’s “tried to do what journalists are supposed to do” for a few days if we’re lucky maybe Bobo will think it’s icky and quit.  Let us pray.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

O.K., folks, this is it. It’s the defining moment for health care reform.

Past efforts to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have — guaranteed access to essential care — have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, usually dying in committee without ever making it to a vote.

But this time, broadly similar health-care bills have made it through multiple committees in both houses of Congress. And on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, unveiled the legislation that she will send to the House floor, where it will almost surely pass. It’s not a perfect bill, by a long shot, but it’s a much stronger bill than almost anyone expected to emerge even a few weeks ago. And it would lead to near-universal coverage.

As a result, everyone in the political class — by which I mean politicians, people in the news media, and so on, basically whoever is in a position to influence the final stage of this legislative marathon — now has to make a choice. The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way.

For conservatives, of course, it’s an easy decision: They don’t want Americans to have universal coverage, and they don’t want President Obama to succeed.

For progressives, it’s a slightly more difficult decision: They want universal care, and they want the president to succeed — but the proposed legislation falls far short of their ideal. There are still some reform advocates who won’t accept anything short of a full transition to Medicare for all as opposed to a hybrid, compromise system that relies heavily on private insurers. And even those who have reconciled themselves to the political realities are disappointed that the bill doesn’t include a “strong” public option, with payment rates linked to those set by Medicare.

But the bill does include a “medium-strength” public option, in which the public plan would negotiate payment rates — defying the predictions of pundits who have repeatedly declared any kind of public-option plan dead. It also includes more generous subsidies than expected, making it easier for lower-income families to afford coverage. And according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, almost everyone — 96 percent of legal residents too young to receive Medicare — would get health insurance.

So should progressives get behind this plan? Yes. And they probably will.

The people who really have to make up their minds, then, are those in between, the self-proclaimed centrists.

The odd thing about this group is that while its members are clearly uncomfortable with the idea of passing health care reform, they’re having a hard time explaining exactly what their problem is. Or to be more precise and less polite, they have been attacking proposed legislation for doing things it doesn’t and for not doing things it does.

Thus, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut says, “I want to be able to vote for a health bill, but my top concern is the deficit.” That would be a serious objection to the proposals currently on the table if they would, in fact, increase the deficit. But they wouldn’t, at least according to the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that the House bill, in particular, would actually reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next decade.

Or consider the remarkable exchange that took place this week between Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, and Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post’s opinion editor. Mr. Hiatt had criticized Congress for not taking what he considers the necessary steps to control health-care costs — namely, taxing high-cost insurance plans and establishing an independent Medicare commission. Writing on the budget office blog — yes, there is one, and it’s essential reading — Mr. Orszag pointed out, not too gently, that the Senate Finance Committee’s bill actually includes both of the allegedly missing measures.

I won’t try to psychoanalyze the “naysayers,” as Mr. Orszag describes them. I’d just urge them to take a good hard look in the mirror. If they really want to align themselves with the hard-line conservatives, if they just want to kill health reform, so be it. But they shouldn’t hide behind claims that they really, truly would support health care reform if only it were better designed.

For this is the moment of truth. The political environment is as favorable for reform as it’s likely to get. The legislation on the table isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as anyone could reasonably have expected. History is about to be made — and everyone has to decide which side they’re on.

 

Kristof, solo

Gail Collins is off today.  Mr. Kristof, in “More Schools, Not Troops,” says a compelling argument against more troops in Afghanistan rests on this trade-off: For the cost of an additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for a year, nearly 20 schools could be built.  Here he is:

Dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a monumental bet and probably a bad one, most likely a waste of lives and resources that might simply empower the Taliban. In particular, one of the most compelling arguments against more troops rests on this stunning trade-off: For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.

It’s hard to do the calculation precisely, but for the cost of 40,000 troops over a few years — well, we could just about turn every Afghan into a Ph.D.

The hawks respond: It’s naïve to think that you can sprinkle a bit of education on a war-torn society. It’s impossible to build schools now because the Taliban will blow them up.

In fact, it’s still quite possible to operate schools in Afghanistan — particularly when there’s a strong “buy-in” from the local community.

Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” has now built 39 schools in Afghanistan and 92 in Pakistan — and not one has been burned down or closed. The aid organization CARE has 295 schools educating 50,000 girls in Afghanistan, and not a single one has been closed or burned by the Taliban. The Afghan Institute of Learning, another aid group, has 32 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with none closed by the Taliban (although local communities have temporarily suspended three for security reasons).

In short, there is still vast scope for greater investment in education, health and agriculture in Afghanistan. These are extraordinarily cheap and have a better record at stabilizing societies than military solutions, which, in fact, have a pretty dismal record.

In Afghanistan, for example, we have already increased our troop presence by 40,000 troops since the beginning of last year, yet the result has not been the promised stability but only more casualties and a strengthened insurgency. If the last surge of 40,000 troops didn’t help, why will the next one be so different?

Matthew P. Hoh, an American military veteran who was the top civilian officer in Zabul Province, resigned over Afghan policy, as The Washington Post reported this week. Mr. Hoh argues that our military presence is feeding the insurgency, not quelling it.

Already our troops have created a backlash with Kabul University students this week burning President Obama in effigy until police dispersed them with gunshots. The heavier our military footprint, the more resentment — and perhaps the more legitimacy for the Taliban.

Schools are not a quick fix or silver bullet any more than troops are. But we have abundant evidence that they can, over time, transform countries, and in the area near Afghanistan there’s a nice natural experiment in the comparative power of educational versus military tools.

Since 9/11, the United States has spent $15 billion in Pakistan, mostly on military support, and today Pakistan is more unstable than ever. In contrast, Bangladesh, which until 1971 was a part of Pakistan, has focused on education in a way that Pakistan never did. Bangladesh now has more girls in high school than boys. (In contrast, only 3 percent of Pakistani women in the tribal areas are literate.)

Those educated Bangladeshi women joined the labor force, laying the foundation for a garment industry and working in civil society groups like BRAC and Grameen Bank. That led to a virtuous spiral of development, jobs, lower birth rates, education and stability. That’s one reason Al Qaeda is holed up in Pakistan, not in Bangladesh, and it’s a reminder that education can transform societies.

When I travel in Pakistan, I see evidence that one group — Islamic extremists — believes in the transformative power of education. They pay for madrassas that provide free schooling and often free meals for students. They then offer scholarships for the best pupils to study abroad in Wahhabi madrassas before returning to become leaders of their communities. What I don’t see on my trips is similar numbers of American-backed schools. It breaks my heart that we don’t invest in schools as much as medieval, misogynist extremists.

For roughly the same cost as stationing 40,000 troops in Afghanistan for one year, we could educate the great majority of the 75 million children worldwide who, according to Unicef, are not getting even a primary education. We won’t turn them into graduate students, but we can help them achieve literacy. Such a vast global education campaign would reduce poverty, cut birth rates, improve America’s image in the world, promote stability and chip away at extremism.

Education isn’t a panacea, and no policy in Afghanistan is a sure bet. But all in all, the evidence suggests that education can help foster a virtuous cycle that promotes stability and moderation. So instead of sending 40,000 troops more to Afghanistan, how about opening 40,000 schools?

If you haven’t read it yet, I’d strongly urge you to read Three Cups of Tea.  It’s a wonderful book.

Dowd and Friedman

Oh, Gawd…  MoDo has produced a POS called “”Oval Man Cave” in which she squeaks that after getting knocked for being traditionally male and for stories about a frat-house atmosphere, the president is finally willing to let women in on the games.  Sweet FSM on toast points  — she’s got the gall to use the phrase “frat-house atmosphere” about THIS administration?  Cripes.  The Moustache of Wisdom now says “Don’t Build Up,” and that the U.S. does not have the Afghan partners, the allies, the domestic support or the financial resources to justify a nation-building effort in Afghanistan.  So I guess it’s only Iraq that gives him a little frisson of delight?  Here’s that moronic bitch:

I felt a twinge of envy when I heard that my pal Tom Friedman had played golf with the president for five hours one September Sunday.

Tom learned a lot about Barack Obama’s positions on weighty issues and sporty ones. (This president doesn’t cheat and he does expect bets to be paid off.) My natural impulse was to shrug it off. Men have always craved private realms — the golf club, men’s club, garage, workshop, shed; a place to get away from the chatter and clatter of women and kids. (In Obama’s case, he may desire a testosterone break from his estrogen nest — a wife, two daughters and a mother-in-law.)

Gordon Thorburn, the British author of the book “Men and Sheds,” explained that the word shed derived from the Anglo-Saxon “scead,” or shade. It was, in a metaphorical sense, obscure, an “intellectual pantry” or “spiritual home” where a man could reflect and dawdle with tools and toys.

But I don’t kid myself that the presidential playing fields are merely about play. After Tom’s golf outing, Politico ran the headline: “Friedman jumps to the front of the influence list.”

Like other bosses, presidents surround themselves with people who make them comfortable. Poppy Bush liked racy humor, but was too gentlemanly to use it with women. So male advisers bonded with him by telling dirty jokes.

Obama likes to play sports, watch sports and talk sports. (Even his favorite TV shows, “Mad Men” and “Entourage,” are set in male-dominated worlds.) So the Obama aides who can do that, like Robert Gibbs, have a deeper personal connection with the president than someone like Rahm Emanuel, the former ballet dancer who prefers yoga to golf.

Just as some men can’t ingratiate themselves through sports, some women can. Condi Rice drew close to W. — nudging away Dick Cheney — by working out with him and talking football.

As long as I’ve covered politics, there were always women running up against “The Boys.” In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro complained about the “smart-ass white boys” from Walter Mondale’s campaign who tried to boss her around. As first lady, Hillary Clinton had to deal with Bill’s coterie of cocky “white boys.”

It was a bit surprising that the same dynamic recurred with the first black president. But it is the very enormity of the change Obama represents that makes him cautious at times about more change.

Because Obama regards himself as the change, he didn’t immediately see the need to alter what his aide Anita Dunn calls the “optics.”

His race also gives him cover; it took quite a while for anyone to accuse Obama of being exclusionary.

After stories about the frat-house atmosphere in the spheres of economics and national security, and snipes about an all-male basketball pickup game at the White House with cabinet secretaries and congressmen, the president took Melody Barnes, his chief domestic policy adviser, golfing on Sunday.

“I wanted women to still hold their heads up so I didn’t want to shoot triple bogies every hole,” said Barnes, who was hailed by the press for “smashing the grass ceiling.”

She told me she grew up golfing with her dad and shoots around 100. She and Obama were partners and beat White House trip director Marvin Nicholson and Obama’s Chicago pal Eric Whitaker.

“We laughed and gave each other a hard time and psyched each other out,” she said. “It was all on the line on the 18th hole and I made a clutch putt and now I’m $10 richer.”

Naturally, some men — and women — caviled that Obama shouldn’t have caved on his Man Cave.

“Will every game now have to have a certain number of Asians, atheists, vegetarians and public-option hard-liners?” groused one of my girlfriends.

Just as the hoops-playing president is getting knocked for being too traditionally male, the hula-hooping Michelle is getting knocked for being too traditionally female.

“She’s mostly played it safe,” Allison Samuels writes in Newsweek, “dabbling in traditional East Wing issues — much like the first ladies before her — without yet gaining much traction on any particular front.”

The First Couple is trying to let America digest the huge change that they signify. They know that Fox News is always ready to pounce with that “radical” label.

Besides, if Obama starts using a quota system for recreation, it will give fuel to the Republican campaign to paint him as a hand-wringing, Mom-jeans-wearing girly-boy. Churlish Cheney charged the president with “dithering” on Afghanistan and nerdy potential 2012 rival Tim Pawlenty, the Terror from Minnesota, accused Obama of “projecting potential weakness” on national security.

Since the president is finally willing to let women in on the games, I offered up my own challenge: Scrabble. I’m curious about what X and Z words the smarty-pants Y chief executive can come up with.

There might even be $10 in it for you, Mr. President.

If that wasn’t enough to put you off your feed here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.

America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try to do it for them, whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and they languish.

The Camp David peace treaty was not initiated by Jimmy Carter. Rather, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, went to Jerusalem in 1977 after Israel’s Moshe Dayan held secret talks in Morocco with Sadat aide Hassan Tuhami. Both countries decided that they wanted a separate peace — outside of the Geneva comprehensive framework pushed by Mr. Carter.

The Oslo peace accords started in Oslo — in secret 1992-93 talks between the P.L.O. representative, Ahmed Qurei, and the Israeli professor Yair Hirschfeld. Israelis and Palestinians alone hammered out a broad deal and unveiled it to the Americans in the summer of 1993, much to Washington’s surprise.

The U.S. surge in Iraq was militarily successful because it was preceded by an Iraqi uprising sparked by a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who, using his own forces, set out to evict the pro-Al Qaeda thugs who had taken over Sunni towns and were imposing a fundamentalist lifestyle. The U.S. surge gave that movement vital assistance to grow. But the spark was lit by the Iraqis.

The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon, the Green Revolution in Iran and the Pakistani decision to finally fight their own Taliban in Waziristan — because those Taliban were threatening the Pakistani middle class — were all examples of moderate, silent majorities acting on their own.

The message: “People do not change when we tell them they should,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “They change when they tell themselves they must.”

And when the moderate silent majorities take ownership of their own futures, we win. When they won’t, when we want them to compromise more than they do, we lose. The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so they exploit our naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries and to defeat their internal foes.

That’s how I see Afghanistan today. I see no moderate spark. I see our secretary of state pleading with President Hamid Karzai to re-do an election that he blatantly stole. I also see us begging Israelis to stop building more crazy settlements or Palestinians to come to negotiations. It is time to stop subsidizing their nonsense. Let them all start paying retail for their extremism, not wholesale. Then you’ll see movement.

What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after. Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.

And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone.

My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.

The U.S. military has given its assessment. It said that stabilizing Afghanistan and removing it as a threat requires rebuilding that whole country. Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we can’t afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a strategy that will get the most security for less money and less presence. We simply don’t have the surplus we had when we started the war on terrorism after 9/11 — and we desperately need nation-building at home. We have to be smarter. Let’s finish Iraq, because a decent outcome there really could positively impact the whole Arab-Muslim world, and limit our exposure elsewhere. Iraq matters.

Yes, shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats, but expanding there will, too. I’d rather deal with the new threats with a stronger America.

 

Bobo, Cohen and Herbert

In “The Fatal Conceit” Bobo says the effort to cap executives’ compensation is a good example of an overconfidence in government to solve everything.  Mr. Cohen is all in favor of sending people off to get killed.  In “Britain Resolves, U.S. Wavers” he asks more troops for Afghanistan? As Barack Obama hesitates, a talk with David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, offers as good an indication as any of what the president will do.  In “Changing the World” Mr. Herbert says Americans need to shake off their passivity in confronting today’s problems and believe that their actions can make a profound difference.  Here’s Bobo:

Humans are overconfident creatures. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they are above average teachers, and 90 percent of drivers believe they are above average behind the wheel. Researchers Paul J.H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave computer executives quizzes on their industry. Afterward, the executives estimated that they had gotten 5 percent of the answers wrong. In fact, they had gotten 80 percent of the answers wrong.

Fortunately, for those who study the human comedy, the epicenter of overconfidence moves from year to year. Up until recently, people in the financial world bathed in the warm glow of their own self-approval. Hubris in that world always takes the same form: The geniuses there come to believe that they have mastered risk. The future is an algorithm and they’ve cracked the code.

Over the past year, the bonfire of overconfidence has shifted to Washington. Since the masters of finance have been exposed as idiots, the masters of government have concluded (somewhat illogically) that they must be really smart.

Overconfidence in government also has a characteristic form: that of highly rational Olympians who attempt to stand above problems and solve them in a finely tuned and impartial manner. In moments of government overconfidence, officials come to see society not as a dynamic and complex organism, but as a machine, which can be rebuilt. In such moments, governance and engineering merge into one.

Examples of this overconfidence abound. But let us pick just one: the effort to cap financial compensation.

Back in the days of Wall Street overconfidence, the financial titans believed that they deserved to give each other G.D.P.-level pay packages, even though there is no evidence that such packages improve performance. Now in disgrace, Wall Street firms are rewriting their rules, but the Obama administration has decided it should take control of compensation reform. Nobody seriously believes high pay caused the financial meltdown; it was bubblicious groupthink. But cutting executive pay just polls so well.

Every great action can be done in a spirit of humility or in a spirit of overconfidence. Regulating pay in a spirit of humility would mean rebalancing the power between shareholders and executives, without getting government involved in micromanaging individual pay decisions.

But this is not a moment of humility. Treasury officials are now making individual pay-package decisions across an array of different companies — and they must have really big brains to understand the motivational psychology of all those different people. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has decided to police banks and veto pay deals that lead to excessive risk. Those experts must have absolutely gigantic brains if they can define excessive risk years before investments pay off.

The best and the brightest in government are now rewriting existing pay contracts and determining that certain firms will be compelled to pay much less than their competitors. They’re not leveling the playing field, as a humble government would do. They’re making it less level in complicated ways.

Reality, of course, has a way of upending finely crafted plans. The effort to cap golden parachutes in 1989 perversely caused companies to increase their golden parachute packages right up to the legal limit. A 1993 law to cap C.E.O. pay led to greater use of stock options and encouraged riskier behavior.

In advance of the current new pay restrictions, 12 out of the 25 highest-paid executives have already left A.I.G., and 11 out of 25 have left Bank of America. We’ll never know how much future talent was dissuaded from working at these ailing firms.

Citigroup used to have a really high-performing energy unit. But under the new salary regime, the bank wasn’t permitted to pay the chief of that unit what he thought he was worth. Citigroup was forced to sell that profitable unit at bargain-basement prices to Occidental Petroleum.

These rules probably won’t even have a big effect on executive wealth. They’ll just drive compensation into back channels and risk-taking into unseen parts of the market.

Again, the issue is not whether government acts, but whether it acts with an awareness of the limits of its knowledge. Sometimes we seem to have a government with no sense of those limits, no sense that perhaps government officials don’t know how to restructure General Motors, pick the most promising battery technology, re-engineer the health care system from the top, or fine-tune the complex system of executive pay.

Furthermore, when extending federal authority, the Obama folks never seem to ask how Republicans will use this power when they regain the White House. The Democrats trust themselves to set private-sector salaries and use extralegal means to go after malefactors, but would they trust a future Dick Cheney?

I hope they know what they’re doing. Because when a future Cheney comes into office, I’m pretty sure he’ll be coming after columnists’ salaries first.

Damn.  It appears Bobo realizes how useless he is…  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

In Afghanistan there’s the United States, Britain and then the rest. Britain has lost 85 soldiers this year, more than all other European NATO allies combined. For both countries the annual death toll has been rising steadily since 2006, and with it the drumbeat of public opposition to the war. In all, more than 1,100 U.S. and British troops have died.

Special relationships are forged in blood; the U.S.-British bond is no exception. So, as President Obama hesitates, his decision on American troop levels ever “weeks away” as the weeks pass, the British view of the war offers as good an indication as any of what Obama will do. An hour-long conversation with David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, suggests reinforcements are on the way.

When I asked if the mission needed substantially more troops, Miliband said, “What I think that you can see from the prime minister’s strategy is that we believe in serious counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is a counterterrorist strategy.”

He continued: “The Taliban has shown what it means to provide safe space for Al Qaeda.” Describing the fights against the Taliban and Al Qaeda as “distinctive but related missions,” Miliband said “the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan are the incubator of choice for international terrorism,” adding that, “Ceding ground happened in the ’90s and then we all know what happened.”

That’s a clear rebuttal of the ever-larger school, most often identified with Vice President Joe Biden, advancing the view that Al Qaeda is the real threat, the Taliban much less of one; and so the United States should not commit more military resources to a nation-building struggle in Afghanistan that’s an expensive diversion from core U.S. strategic interests.

Wrong. Counterinsurgency in the “Af-Pak” theater is indeed a counterterrorist strategy. I see no workable distinction.

As Prime Minister Gordon Brown has noted, three-quarters of all terrorist plots uncovered in Britain in recent years had links to Islamic extremists in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The defense of the West begins in the Hindu Kush and Helmand. Would-be bombers must be kept off-balance. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking.

But of course the campaign has to be smart. Miliband identified several things that have to change, among them governance, outreach and military strategy.

Whatever Afghan government emerges has to be “credible,” where Hamid Karzai’s administration has not been, and provide a new “offer to the Afghan people of security and economic development.”

Miliband also called for “serious outreach to the insurgency to divide it,” estimating that “70 to 80 percent of the foot soldiers are recruitable.” The choice they are being given now is “fight or flight” where it should be “fight, flight or flip” because “an enduring settlement must be a political settlement in which conservative Pashtun nationalism has a place.”

That’s critical. The Taliban are a Pashtun movement. Pashtunistan straddles the porous Afghan-Pakistani border. Afghanistan has always been ungovernable without a Pashtun buy-in. Pakistan’s strategic interest in that buy-in is non-negotiable. These are basic — but long ignored — building blocks of successful strategy.

Finally, Miliband argued for a different focus to military operations. “Occupying land for the sake of occupying land is not what counts,” he said. “It’s population. You need to make sure the major cities are secured and Kandahar is vital.”

These were the convictions behind Brown’s decision earlier this month to send 500 more British troops to Afghanistan, bringing the contingent to 9,500 — a decision the prime minister expected to be “consistent with what the Americans will decide.”

The reinforcement was about one quarter of what British generals had requested. In the U.S. case, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has asked for about 40,000 more troops. Doing the math on a “consistent” basis suggests a substantial American reinforcement short of McChrystal’s request will eventually be announced by the White House.

I asked Miliband if Obama’s protracted ponder worried the Brits. Miliband pondered in turn before saying, “No, I think it’s a measure of the seriousness with which he takes the decision.”

O.K., but I still worry. If counterinsurgency is counterterrorism, if this theater is the “incubator of choice,” if McChrystal is the most lucid product of America’s crash post-9/11 course in counterinsurgency, then Obama should step up.

Beyond Kabul I got these two nuggets from Miliband. Asked how worried he was about an Israeli military strike on Iran, he said: “I don’t provide a running commentary on other countries’ concerns or policies, but we are one hundred percent committed to a diplomatic resolution.”

Asked about a Mideast peace, he said, “It’s very stalled and that’s very dangerous.” He said Israeli settlements must stop, calling them “illegal” and “an obstacle to peace.” He said: “I profoundly believe that Israel’s security depends on a two-state solution and I think that a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders plus or minus agreed land swaps, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, and a fair settlement of the refugee issue is the right basis for Israel’s future as well as the Palestinians’ future.”

I have not heard President Obama be quite as candid. It would help.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” it says, “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”

That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi — June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.

The postcard was given to me by Andrew’s brother, David, who has become a good friend.

Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly a decade long, are going badly, and there is no endgame in sight.

Monday morning’s coffee was accompanied by stories about suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad that killed at least 150 people and wounded more than 500 and helicopter crashes in Afghanistan that killed 14 Americans.

Here at home, the terrible toll from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression continues, with no end to the joblessness in sight and no comprehensible plans for fashioning a healthy economy for the years ahead. The government’s finances resemble a Ponzi scheme. If you want to see the epidemic that is really clobbering American families, look past the H1N1 virus to the home foreclosure crisis.

The Times ran a Page A1 article on Monday that said layoffs, foreclosures and other problems associated with the recession had resulted in big increases in the number of runaway children, many of whom were living in dangerous conditions in the streets.

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.

Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you’d watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach’s strategy or a script for “Law & Order.”

With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have happened. Betty Friedan would never have written “The Feminine Mystique.”

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

It’s a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that’s how you change the world.

 

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz is all agog over “Benedict’s Gambit,” and he gurgles that Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam could be the reason for Pope Benedict XVI’s outreach to Anglicans.  He manages to pack a whole lot of his regular stupid into this, along with a staggering ignorance about Anglicanism.  He’s a buffoon.  Prof. Krugman, in “After Reform Passes,” says if the Massachusetts experience is any guide, health care reform will have broad public support once it’s in place.  Here’s that moronic Pasty Little Putz:

The Church of England has survived the Spanish Armada, the English Civil War and Elton John performing “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Diana’s Westminster Abbey funeral. So it will probably survive the note the Vatican issued last week, inviting disaffected Anglicans to head Romeward, and offering them an Anglo-Catholic mansion within the walls of the Roman Catholic faith.

But the invitation is a bombshell nonetheless. Pope Benedict XVI’s outreach to Anglicans may produce only a few conversions; it may produce a few million. Either way, it represents an unusual effort at targeted proselytism, remarkable both for its concessions to potential converts — married priests, a self-contained institutional structure, an Anglican rite — and for its indifference to the wishes of the Church of England’s leadership.

This is not the way well-mannered modern churches are supposed to behave. Spurred by the optimism of the early 1960s, the major denominations of Western Christendom have spent half a century being exquisitely polite to one another, setting aside a history of strife in the name of greater Christian unity.

This ecumenical era has borne real theological fruit, especially on issues that divided Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. But what began as a daring experiment has decayed into bureaucratized complacency — a dull round of interdenominational statements on global warming and Third World debt, only tenuously connected to the Gospel.

At the same time, the more ecumenically minded denominations have lost believers to more assertive faiths — Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism and even Islam — or seen them drift into agnosticism and apathy.

Nobody is more aware of this erosion than Benedict. So the pope is going back to basics — touting the particular witness of Catholicism even when he’s addressing universal subjects, and seeking converts more than common ground.

Along the way, he’s courting both ends of the theological spectrum. In his encyclicals, Benedict has addressed a range of issues — social justice, environmental protection, even erotic love — that are close to the hearts of secular liberals and lukewarm, progressive-minded Christians. But instead of stopping at a place of broad agreement, he has pushed further, trying to persuade his more liberal readers that many of their beliefs actually depend on the West’s Catholic heritage, and make sense only when grounded in a serious religious faith.

At the same time, the pope has systematically lowered the barriers for conservative Christians hovering on the threshold of the church, unsure whether to slip inside. This was the purpose behind his controversial outreach to schismatic Latin Mass Catholics, and it explains the current opening to Anglicans.

Many Anglicans will never become Catholic; their theology is too evangelical, their suspicion of papal authority too ingrained, their objections to the veneration of the Virgin Mary too deeply felt. But for those who could, Benedict is trying to make reunion with Rome a flesh-and-blood possibility, rather than a matter for academic conversation.

The news media have portrayed this rightward outreach largely through the lens of culture-war politics — as an attempt to consolidate, inside the Catholic tent, anyone who joins the Vatican in rejecting female priests and gay marriage.

But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.

Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

Just for shits and giggles, here’s a link about what The Archbishop of Canterbury actually said.  Stupid and offensive is no way to go through life, Putz.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

So, how well will health reform work after it passes?

There’s a part of me that can’t believe I’m asking that question. After all, serious health reform has long seemed like an impossible dream. And it could yet go all wrong.

But the teabaggers have come and gone, as have the cries of “death panels” and the demonstrations by Medicare recipients demanding that the government stay out of health care. And reform is still on track. Right now it looks highly likely that Congress will, indeed, send a health care bill to the president’s desk. Then what?

Conservatives insist (and hope) that reform will fail, and that there will be a huge popular backlash. Some progressives worry that they might be right, that the imperfections of reform — what we’re about to get will be far from ideal — will be so severe as to undermine public support. And many critics complain, with some justice, that the planned reform won’t do much to contain rising costs.

But the experience in Massachusetts, which passed major health reform back in 2006, should dampen conservative hopes and soothe progressive fears.

Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage. It is, to be frank, a bit of a Rube Goldberg device — a complicated way of achieving something that could have been done much more simply with a Medicare-type program. Yet it has gone a long way toward achieving the goal of health insurance for all, although it’s not quite there: according to state estimates, only 2.6 percent of residents remain uninsured.

This expansion of coverage has tremendous significance in human terms. The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured recently did a focus-group study of Massachusetts residents and reported that “Health reform enabled many of these individuals to take care of their medical needs, to start seeing a doctor, and in some cases to regain their health and control over their lives.” Even those who probably would have been insured without reform felt “peace of mind knowing they could obtain health coverage if they lost access to their employer-sponsored coverage.”

And reform remains popular. Earlier this year, many conservatives, citing misleading poll results, claimed that public support for the Massachusetts reform had plunged. Newer, more careful polling paints a very different picture. The key finding: an overwhelming 79 percent of the public think the reform should be continued, while only 11 percent think it should be repealed.

Interestingly, another recent poll shows similar support among the state’s physicians: 75 percent want to continue the policies; only 7 percent want to see them reversed.

There are, of course, major problems remaining in Massachusetts. In particular, while employers are required to provide a minimum standard of coverage, in a number of cases this standard seems to be too low, with lower-income workers still unable to afford necessary care. And the Massachusetts plan hasn’t yet done anything significant to contain costs.

But just as reform advocates predicted, the move to more or less universal care seems to have helped prepare the ground for further reform, with a special state commission recommending changes in the payment system that could contain costs by reducing the incentives for excessive care. And it should be noted that Hawaii, which doesn’t have universal coverage but does have a long-standing employer mandate, has been far more successful than the rest of the nation at cost control.

So what does this say about national health reform?

To be sure, Massachusetts isn’t fully representative of America as a whole. Even before reform, it had relatively broad insurance coverage, in part because of a large union movement. And the state has a tradition of strong insurance regulation, which has probably made it easier to run a system that depends crucially on having regulators ride herd on insurers.

So national reform’s chances will be better if it contains elements lacking in Massachusetts — in particular, a real public option to keep insurers honest (and fend off charges that the individual mandate is just an insurance-industry profit grab). We can only hope that reports that the Obama administration is trying to block a public option are overblown.

Still, if the Massachusetts experience is any guide, health care reform will have broad public support once it’s in place and the scare stories are proved false. The new health care system will be criticized; people will demand changes and improvements; but only a small minority will want reform reversed.

This thing is going to work.

Dowd, Friedman and Rich

Nicholas Kristof is off today, so he didn’t drink whatever the Times put in the water coolers to produce today’s cavalcade of stupid.  STOP THE PRESSES!  MoDo, who I recall has mentioned growing up Catholic, has had a blinding revelation:  In “The Nuns’ Story” she breathlessly informs us that forty years after feminism utterly changed America, nuns are still considered second-class citizens by the Roman Catholic Church.  No shit, MoDo — really?  First I’ve heard of it…  The Moustache of Wisdom has dusted off his cheerleader pom-poms:  I-R-A-Q! Rah, rah, rah!  In “Eyes on the Prize” he says let’s figure out Afghanistan. But Iraq must remain a priority. Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world.  He neglects to say how many Friedman Units the job will take…  Mr. Rich writes “In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad,” and says to see what “balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes.  Here’s MoDo and her revelation:

Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.

Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.

Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church.

Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.

In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!

“It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”

As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.

“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”

The nuns are pushing back a bit, but it’s hard, since the church has decreed that women can’t be adversarial to men. A nun writing in Commonweal as “Sister X” protests, “American women religious are being bullied.”

She recalls that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who heads one of the investigations, moved a meeting at the University of Notre Dame off campus to protest a performance of “The Vagina Monologues.” “It is the rare bishop,” Sister X writes, “who has any real understanding of the lives women actually lead.”

The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)

When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women.

Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Toledo and one of Bishop Blair’s flock, got a resolution passed commending nuns for their humble service and sacrifice. “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said. “Maybe people do things differently there. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will intervene.”

And perhaps the Holy Spirit will lead MoDo stop writing drivel, but I doubt it.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom’s cheerleading gig:

BAGHDAD, Aug. 25, 2012 — President Obama flew into Baghdad today on his end-of-term tour to highlight successes in U.S. foreign policy. At a time when the Arab-Israel negotiations remain mired in deadlock and Afghanistan remains mired in quagmire, Mr. Obama hailed the peaceful end of America’s combat presence in Iraq as his only Middle East achievement. Speaking to a gathering of Iraqi and U.S. officials under the banner “Mission Actually Accomplished,” written in Arabic and English, Mr. Obama took credit for helping Iraq achieve a decent — albeit hugely costly — end to the war initiated by President Bush. Aides said Mr. Obama would highlight the progress in Iraq in his re-election campaign.

Could we actually read such a news article in three years? I wouldn’t bet on it. But I wouldn’t rule it out either. Six years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq continues to unnerve and tantalize. Watching Iraqi politics is like watching a tightrope artist crossing a dangerous cavern. At every step it looks as though he is going to fall into the abyss, and yet, somehow, he continues to wobble forward. Nothing is easy when trying to transform a country brutalized by three decades of cruel dictatorship. It is one step, one election, one new law, at a time. Each is a struggle. Each is crucial.

This next step is particularly important, which is why we cannot let Afghanistan distract U.S. diplomats from Iraq. Remember: Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world. Change Afghanistan and you just change Afghanistan.

Specifically, the Obama team needs to make sure that Iraq’s bickering politicians neither postpone the next elections, scheduled for January, nor hold them on the basis of the 2005 “closed list” system that is dominated by the party leaders. We must insist, with all our leverage, on an “open list” election, which creates more room for new faces by allowing Iraqis to vote for individual candidates and not just a party. This is what Iraq’s spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is also demanding. It is a much more accountable system.

If we can get open list voting, the next big step would be the emergence of Iraqi parties in this election running for office on the basis of nonsectarian coalitions — where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds run together. This would be significant: Iraq is a microcosm of the whole Middle East, and if Iraq’s sects can figure out how to govern themselves — without an iron-fisted dictator — democracy is possible in this whole region.

What is tantalizing is that the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who emerged from the Shiite Dawa Party, has decided to run this time with what he calls “The State of Law Coalition,” a pan-Iraqi, nationalist alliance of some 40 political parties, including Sunni tribal leaders and other minorities.

Mr. Maliki was in Washington last week, and I interviewed him at the Willard Hotel, primarily to ask about his new party. “Iraq cannot be ruled by one color or religion or sect,” he explained. “We clearly saw that sectarianism and ethnic grouping threatened our national unity. Therefore, I believe we should bring all these different colors together and establish Iraq as a country built on rule of law and equity and citizenship. The Iraqi people encouraged us. They want this. Other parties are also organizing themselves like this. No one can run anymore as a purely sectarian bloc. … Our experiment is very unique in this region.”

That’s for sure. The Iranians want pro-Tehran Shiite parties to dominate Iraq. Also, the Iranian dictatorship hates the idea of “inferior” Iraq holding real elections while Iran limits voting to preselected candidates and then rigs the outcome. Most Arab leaders fear any real multisectarian democracy taking root in the neighborhood.

“The most dangerous thing that would threaten others is that if we really create success in building a democratic state in Iraq,” said Maliki, whose country today now has about 100 newspapers. “The countries whose regimes are built on one party, sect or ethnic group will feel endangered.”

Maliki knows it won’t be easy: “Saddam ruled for more than 35 years,” he said. “We need one or two generations brought up on democracy and human rights to get rid of this orientation.”

If this election comes off, it will still be held with U.S. combat troops on hand. The even bigger prize and test will be four years hence, if Iraq can hold an election in which multiethnic coalitions based on differing ideas of governance — not sectarianism — vie for power, and the reins are passed from one government to another without any U.S. military involvement. That would be the first time in modern Arab history where true multisectarian coalitions contest power, and cede power, without foreign interference. That would shake up the whole region.

Yes, let’s figure out Afghanistan. But let’s not forget that something very important — but so fragile and tentative — is still playing out in Iraq, and we and our allies still need to help bring it to fruition.

And now here’s Mr. Rich, with what I hope will be the last time I ever have to see the words “balloon boy” in my life:

For a country desperate for good news, the now-deflated “balloon boy” spectacle would seem to be the perfect tonic. As Wolf Blitzer of CNN summed up the nation’s unrestrained joy upon learning that the imperiled boy had never been in any peril whatsoever: “All of us are so excited that little Falcon is fine.”

Then came even better news. After little Falcon revealed to Blitzer that his family “did this for the show,” we could all luxuriate in a warm bath of moral superiority. No matter what our own faults as parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado.

Or such are the received lessons of this tale.

Certainly the “balloon boy” incident is a reflection of our time — much as the radio-induced “War of the Worlds” panic dramatized America’s jitters on the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America’s pre-9/11 drift into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what “balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the piece, the Bad Dad. And you can’t grant blanket absolution to those in the American audience who smugly blame Heene and television exclusively for the entire embarrassing episode.

It would be lovely, for instance, to believe that cable audiences doubled in size that afternoon because they were rooting for little Falcon’s welfare. But as Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler would say on Weekend Update at “Saturday Night Live,” “Really?!?” Many of those viewers were driven by the same bloodlust that spawns rubberneckers at every highway accident: the hope of witnessing the graphic remains of a crash, not a soft landing.

It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.

“They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax. His words could stand as the epitaph for an era.

In this case, the show wasn’t even that good. But, as usual, the news media nursed it along, enlisting as sales reps for the smoke and mirrors. While the incident unfolded, most TV anchors hyped rather than questioned the aeronautical viability of a vehicle resembling the flying saucers in Ed Wood’s camp 1950s sci-fi potboiler, “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” But no sooner had the balloon been punctured than the press was caught in another flimflam. Reuters and CNBC delivered the bombshell that the United States Chamber of Commerce had abruptly reversed its intransigent opposition to climate-change legislation. The “spokesperson” source turned out to be the invention of liberal activists who had attempted to stage a prank press conference at Washington’s National Press Club.

Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.

As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated.

There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.

That circus is among the country’s last dependable job engines. More than a quarter of prime-time broadcast television is devoted to reality programs. And so, with only a high-school education, Heene tried to reinvent himself as a cable-ready tornado-chasing scientist. Robert Thomas, a Web entrepreneur who collaborated with Heene on a pitch to ABC for a science-based reality show, saw the “balloon boy” stunt as a sad response to his economic plight. “I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear,” Thomas said in an interview with Gawker.com. (It’s no less desperate a sign of the times that Thomas insisted on being paid for his interview.)

Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business. Some aspired to the “American Idol” of the day — “Major Bowes Amateur Hour,” a hugely popular weekly talent contest on network radio. Others traveled the seedy dance marathon circuit, entering 24/7 endurance contests that promised food and prize money in exchange for freak-show degradation and physical punishment. Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel memorializing this Depression milieu was aptly titled “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

In 1939, the year that John Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Depression classic about dispossessed Dust Bowl sharecroppers migrating to California’s Salinas Valley in search of work, Nathanael West published “The Day of the Locust,” about those equally destitute Americans who traveled to Hollywood hoping to land in the movies. “They have been cheated and betrayed,” West wrote. “They have slaved and saved for nothing.” He could have been describing Americans who lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s in our own Great Recession.

The role models for today’s desperate fame seekers are “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” not Gable and Lombard. But even if they catch a break, as Heene did on “Wife Swap,” they still may end up betrayed by a stacked system. As The Times reported in August, many reality shows are as cruel as the old dance marathons. The usual Hollywood workplace rules allowing breaks for rest or meals often don’t apply. Nor, sometimes, does the minimum wage. Let ’em eat fame.

If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.

I’ve got to give Mr. Rich mad props for knowing about Plan 9 From Outer Space.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s an absolute classic piece of bad film-making.

Blow and Herbert

Gail Collins is off today.  Mr. Blow, in “The Magic of Michelle,” says this is America. We respect fearlessness, regardless of what we feel about the person who embodies it. With Michelle Obama, we have it both ways.  Mr. Herbert, in “We Know What He Means,” asks why has Mayor Michael Bloomberg allowed Rudy Giuliani to fan the flames of racial tension while campaigning on his behalf?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Forgive me in advance for fawning, but Michelle Obama is the coolest first lady ever. She clinched it for me this week by jumping double Dutch on the South Lawn as part of a “healthy kids fair.”

The scene underscored my impression of the first lady as utterly unencumbered by convention. She seems to feel free — free enough to loosen up and laugh a little, free enough to let her inner child peek through the veil of parenthood, free enough to be herself.

I couldn’t imagine recent first ladies jumping a puddle on the sidewalk, let alone two ropes swinging at the same time in opposite directions. So, on behalf of New York City, the so-called double Dutch capital of the world (so much so that this year it became a varsity sport in the city’s schools), allow me to say: Well played.

I could pile on platitudes here about her professional accomplishments, or explore to what degree she is redefining the role of women, or predict how she will be viewed by historians in the pantheon of her predecessors. I could, but I won’t. That’s not my bailiwick.

But I will say that she seems particularly suited to these times. She provides a certain authenticity and clarity of self in a time of uncertainty, projecting a casual grace onto a world of amplified anxiety. She has become a powerful symbol of fearlessness, refinement, frugality and frivolity, managing to be both fun and serious simultaneously. She’s genuinely human.

Mrs. Obama is redefining my concept of a first lady, and I like it. Apparently, I’m not alone.

In April, at the peak of her popularity, a New York Times/CBS News poll measured her favorability at 67 percent. The same poll found that a stratospheric 84 percent approved of how she was handling her role as first lady. That means that even half of those who didn’t hold a favorable view of her as a person still liked what she was doing as first lady.

(It should be noted that polls by USA Today/Gallup and CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, both released this week, put the first lady’s favorability ratings in the 60s and above those of her husband.)

It’s hard to believe that this is the same woman who during the presidential campaign was repeatedly portrayed as the neo-radical albatross to a postracial candidate.

This is America. We respect fearlessness, regardless of what we feel about the person who embodies it. With Mrs. Obama, we have it both ways.

If George W. Bush was the president that Americans most wanted to have a beer with, then Michelle Obama is becoming the first lady we most want to have a laugh with. And that’s cool.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

I wasn’t at all surprised at Rudy Giuliani. He couldn’t find his way off the low road with a handful of maps and a GPS device. But I was very surprised at Mayor Bloomberg.

One of the signal successes of Mike Bloomberg’s tenure is that during his two terms as mayor of a rough, tough, extremely contentious city, he has helped lower the racial temperature. You can say whatever you want about his policies, you can like him personally or not, but he has not played that cheap and tired game of ethnic politics. He has not tried to divide people along racial, ethnic or religious lines, exploiting fears and pitting groups against one another. And he has stood up against those who would do so.

The city has benefited from this. So it was truly disheartening, dismaying, to have the mayor turn his back on all that last Sunday during an appearance with Mr. Giuliani before an Orthodox Jewish group in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Mr. Giuliani, campaigning on Mr. Bloomberg’s behalf, warned that if the mayor is not elected to a third term on Nov. 3, the city could become unsafe — a place of escalating crime and heightened tensions and fear.

Homing in with the instincts of a born divider, Mr. Giuliani suggested that an environment filled with danger might be right there on the next horizon if the voters were to elect “the wrong political leadership.” The “wrong” leadership in this case would be Mr. Bloomberg’s opponent, the City Comptroller William Thompson, who is black.

Giuliani said he worries daily that the city might revert “to the way it was before 1993,” the year he was elected mayor. He then pointedly added, so that no one within earshot could mistake his not-so-coded meaning: “And you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

It was vintage Giuliani, as subtle as a heart attack, deliberately fanning the fears of a community that has long been the locus of tensions between blacks and Jews. And Mayor Bloomberg sat there, allowing that lousy message to be delivered on his behalf.

Mr. Bloomberg has had many opportunities to disavow Mr. Giuliani’s remarks, to say that as a city we’re better than that, to repudiate (as he has before) the very idea that exploiting fear and division for political gain is acceptable in this great city. But he has chosen not to. He chose instead, later that same day, to raise the specter of one of the worst big-city tragedies in American history: Detroit, which was laid low by every ill you can imagine, including a catastrophic race riot in 1967.

Detroit, said Mr. Bloomberg, “went from a great city with lots of good-paying jobs to a city that’s basically holding on for dear life.”

Well, that’s true. But what’s that got to do with New York City, or this year’s mayoral election? New York is not an incipient Detroit. New York will not become Detroit if Mike Bloomberg is not re-elected.

The mayor disingenuously said that Detroit’s decline was more about economics than “some other things.” But anyone who knows the sad history of Detroit knows about those “other things.”

This had all the appearance of Mayor Bloomberg piggybacking on Giuliani’s fear-mongering. He picked the worst-case urban scenario available, a crime-ridden, destitute city from which most whites have long since fled, and offered it as a suggestion of what might be in store for New York, a thriving metropolis filled with people from virtually every ethnic group on the planet.

Open a window, please. Some fresh air is in order.

The Mike Bloomberg that New Yorkers came to know during his first two terms as mayor was not the same man who remained shamefully silent last Sunday, willing to benefit politically from Mr. Giuliani’s toxic remarks.

Many of us have seen New York convulsed over the decades by one racially charged controversy after another, sometimes violently convulsed. They come easily to mind: The Central Park jogger case, the police killings of Eleanor Bumpurs, Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, the vicious racial attacks in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, the Tawana Brawley affair, the Crown Heights riot and on and on and on.

The Bloomberg administration has helped shield the city from similar convulsions. That the mayor is now willing to lock his principles in a safe deposit box and start riding the broomstick of ethnic politics suggests that he’s worried about the outcome of his race against Mr. Thompson (even though public opinion polls and most of the people I talk to expect Bloomberg to win).

One of the ironies at work here is that it is during the toughest economic times that a city, more than ever, needs a mayor who is committed to bringing people together, not playing them off against one another for short-term political gain. This is absolutely the worst time for that point to have slipped Michael Bloomberg’s mind.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

In “The Quiet Revolution” Bobo says the Obama administration is using its competitive Race to the Top fund to push states to embrace real education reform.  Mr. Cohen, writing from London, gives us “Miliband on Cameron” in which he says a rightward Tory lurch in Europe troubles David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, and President Obama.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Chinese Disconnect,” says something should be done about China’s weak-currency policy, which poses a growing threat to the rest of the world economy.  Here’s Bobo:

A few weeks ago, “Saturday Night Live” teased President Obama for delivering great speeches but not actually bringing change. There’s at least one area where that jibe is unfair: education.

When Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan came to office, they created a $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. The idea was to use money to leverage change. The administration would put a pile of federal money on the table and award it to a few states that most aggressively embraced reform.

Their ideas were good, and their speeches were beautiful. But that was never the problem. The real challenge was going to be standing up to the teachers’ unions and the other groups that have undermined nearly every other reform effort.

The real questions were these: Would the administration water down their reform criteria in the face of political pressure? Would the Race to the Top money end up getting doled out like any other federal spending program, and thus end up subsidizing the status quo? Would the administration hold the line and demand real reform in exchange for the money?

There were many reasons to be skeptical. At the behest of the teachers’ unions, the Democrats had just shut down a successful District of Columbia voucher program. Moreover, state legislatures around the country were moving backward. They were passing laws prohibiting schools from using student performance as a criterion in setting teacher pay.

But, so far, those fears are unjustified. The news is good. In fact, it’s very good. Over the past few days I’ve spoken to people ranging from Bill Gates to Jeb Bush and various education reformers. They are all impressed by how gritty and effective the Obama administration has been in holding the line and inciting real education reform.

Over the summer, the Department of Education indicated that most states would not qualify for Race to the Top money. Now states across the country are changing their laws: California, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and Tennessee, among others.

It’s not only the promise of money that is motivating change. There seems to be some sort of status contest as states compete to prove they, too, can meet the criteria. Governors who have been bragging about how great their schools are don’t want to be left off the list.

These changes mean that states are raising their caps on the number of charter schools. When charters got going, there was a “let a thousand flowers bloom” mentality that sometimes led to bad schools. Now reformers know more about how to build charters and the research is showing solid results. Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University recently concluded a rigorous study of New York’s charter schools and found that they substantially narrowed the achievement gap between suburban and inner-city students.

The changes also will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs. There is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores, and that teachers who do not need to be identified and counseled. Cracking the barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay would be a huge gain.

Duncan even seems to have made some progress in persuading the unions that they can’t just stonewall, they have to get involved in the reform process. The American Federation of Teachers recently announced innovation grants for performance pay ideas. The New Haven school district has just completed a new teacher contract, with union support, that includes many of the best reform ideas.

There are still many places, like Washington, where the unions are dogmatically trying to keep bad teachers in the classrooms. But if implemented well, the New Haven contract could be a sign of perestroika even within the education establishment.

“I’ve been deeply disturbed by a lot that’s going on in Washington,” Jeb Bush said on Thursday, “but this is not one of them. President Obama has been supporting a reform secretary, and this is deserving of Republican support.” Bush’s sentiment is echoed across the spectrum, from Newt Gingrich to Al Sharpton.

Over the next months, there will be more efforts to water down reform. Some groups are offering to get behind health care reform in exchange for gutting education reform. Politicians from both parties are going to lobby fiercely to ensure that their state gets money, regardless of the merits. So will governors who figure they’re going to lose out in the award process.

But President Obama understood from the start that this would only work if the awards remain fiercely competitive. He has not wavered. We’re not close to reaching the educational Promised Land, but we may be at the start of what Rahm Emanuel calls The Quiet Revolution.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

With an election months away, the governing Labour Party’s prospects against David Cameron’s Conservatives look near hopeless. But I found Foreign Secretary David Miliband in a combative mood, fired up by more Tory lunacy on Europe, an issue that has also piqued the interest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Miliband, a bushy-tailed 44-year-old with a brain of rat-tat-tat precision, represents the next generation of Labour leadership. But that’s a story for another day given that the Gordon Brown saga, with its heavy-browed air of inevitable tragedy, limps still toward its Heathcliffian conclusion.

The story for now is sexy enough. It involves the strange confluence of Tory Europe phobia, far-right fringe parties in Poland and Latvia, charges of anti-Semitism, Tony Blair’s political ambitions, Cameron’s Blair complex, and the Obama administration’s interest in a strong European Union with an effective British presence.

Don’t worry, I’ll explain. Cameron, whose party holds an advantage of close to 17 percent over Labour, is likely to become prime minister next year. Britain, governed by Labour for a dozen years, craves change.

A centrist makeover has characterized Cameron politics (didn’t it work for Blair?), but not on Europe. Bowing to his party’s Euroskeptics, he’s broken with the conservative mainstream in the European Union — the parties of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel — and hopped into bed with a band of central European right-wingers united only in loathing for European federalism. These include a Polish politician who thinks apologizing to Jews for World War II massacres is a bad idea and a Latvian party called For Fatherland and Freedom.

Miliband is not amused. In an interview, he called Cameron’s embrace of “fringe groups” in the European Parliament a move “deeply detrimental to the British national interest.” He added, “I would say to you as British foreign secretary that it’s deeply dangerous for a putative British government to think it can have influence in the world while opting out of influence in the European Union.”

On his desk lay highlighted articles from the Jewish Chronicle about Michal Kaminski of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, one of the parties now allied with Cameron. Kaminski claims Poland should not have apologized for massacring hundreds of Jews at Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941 until Jews apologized for collaborating with the Soviet Union. Miliband’s mother is a Polish Jew whose family lost dozens of members in the Holocaust.

“This is what really got me,” Miliband told me. “Kaminski refused to apologize for the massacre.” Various American Jewish groups have expressed outrage.

What concerns the Obama administration is not Cameron’s loopy European Parliament allies — the Tory leader is clearly a mainstream pragmatist — but the conviction that a Euroskeptic Tory obsession could undermine British influence in Europe at a time when the Obama administration needs an effective E.U. partner.

Clinton, who met with Miliband earlier this month, has conveyed concern about any marginalization of Britain in Europe if Cameron wins.

Under George W. Bush, friends were privileged. Under Obama, friends have ceded to American interests coldly assessed. And on issues from Afghanistan to climate change, Obama wants Europe to step forward.

Miliband said “a strong Britain is a key to a strong Europe” and accused the Tories of fighting yesterday’s battles over “the phantom ghost of federalism.” In Europe, he noted, “there is no federal super state about to emerge.”

He’s right. Tory little-Englandism has become a strange anachronism since the end of the Cold War dictated a broad Europe rather than a deep one, a loose bloc rather than a United States of Europe. Cameron should lay the ghost to rest and start by reversing his weird European Parliament lurch.

And then there’s Blair.

Cameron has dispatched his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, who met this week with Clinton, to take down Blair’s unannounced but compelling candidacy to be the European Union’s first president under the all-but-ratified Lisbon Treaty.

Just imagine! Cameron becomes prime minister and finds his alter-ego Blair looming over him. You have to feel a twinge of sympathy. But not enough to believe that appointing some nonentity from a Lilliputian European state as Europe’s first president would work.

“Does Europe need strong leadership? Yes it does,” Miliband told me, adding of Blair that “If he were a candidate, he’d be an excellent choice.”

The foreign secretary called Blair “a great European” and spoke passionately of the challenges facing Europe, not least ushering Turkey into the Union. “I’m very pro Turkish enlargement,” he said. “And I think it’s a critical issue given the energy role of Turkey but also in showing that the European Union is not a Christian club.”

Blair also has strong feelings on Turkey — as well as on European defense. And the United States has strong feelings about Blair — that he’s a good friend to America, at a time when it needs friends, and could make an excellent first European president.

This pro-Blairism, of course, creates other U.S. tensions with Cameron as the Tory leader seeks a meeting with Obama. Cameron the charmer needs to remind himself: Policies, not charm, drive the agenda with Obama.

And now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Senior monetary officials usually talk in code. So when Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, spoke recently about Asia, international imbalances and the financial crisis, he didn’t specifically criticize China’s outrageous currency policy.

But he didn’t have to: everyone got the subtext. China’s bad behavior is posing a growing threat to the rest of the world economy. The only question now is what the world — and, in particular, the United States — will do about it.

Some background: The value of China’s currency, unlike, say, the value of the British pound, isn’t determined by supply and demand. Instead, Chinese authorities enforced that target by buying or selling their currency in the foreign exchange market — a policy made possible by restrictions on the ability of private investors to move their money either into or out of the country.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a policy, especially in a still poor country whose financial system might all too easily be destabilized by volatile flows of hot money. In fact, the system served China well during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. The crucial question, however, is whether the target value of the yuan is reasonable.

Until around 2001, you could argue that it was: China’s overall trade position wasn’t too far out of balance. From then onward, however, the policy of keeping the yuan-dollar rate fixed came to look increasingly bizarre. First of all, the dollar slid in value, especially against the euro, so that by keeping the yuan/dollar rate fixed, Chinese officials were, in effect, devaluing their currency against everyone else’s. Meanwhile, productivity in China’s export industries soared; combined with the de facto devaluation, this made Chinese goods extremely cheap on world markets.

The result was a huge Chinese trade surplus. If supply and demand had been allowed to prevail, the value of China’s currency would have risen sharply. But Chinese authorities didn’t let it rise. They kept it down by selling vast quantities of the currency, acquiring in return an enormous hoard of foreign assets, mostly in dollars, currently worth about $2.1 trillion.

Many economists, myself included, believe that China’s asset-buying spree helped inflate the housing bubble, setting the stage for the global financial crisis. But China’s insistence on keeping the yuan/dollar rate fixed, even when the dollar declines, may be doing even more harm now.

Although there has been a lot of doomsaying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere.

But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead.

And that’s a particularly bad thing to do at a time when the world economy remains deeply depressed due to inadequate overall demand. By pursuing a weak-currency policy, China is siphoning some of that inadequate demand away from other nations, which is hurting growth almost everywhere. The biggest victims, by the way, are probably workers in other poor countries. In normal times, I’d be among the first to reject claims that China is stealing other peoples’ jobs, but right now it’s the simple truth.

So what are we going to do?

U.S. officials have been extremely cautious about confronting the China problem, to such an extent that last week the Treasury Department, while expressing “concerns,” certified in a required report to Congress that China is not — repeat not — manipulating its currency. They’re kidding, right?

The thing is, right now this caution makes little sense. Suppose the Chinese were to do what Wall Street and Washington seem to fear and start selling some of their dollar hoard. Under current conditions, this would actually help the U.S. economy by making our exports more competitive.

In fact, some countries, most notably Switzerland, have been trying to support their economies by selling their own currencies on the foreign exchange market. The United States, mainly for diplomatic reasons, can’t do this; but if the Chinese decide to do it on our behalf, we should send them a thank-you note.

The point is that with the world economy still in a precarious state, beggar-thy-neighbor policies by major players can’t be tolerated. Something must be done about China’s currency.

Kristof, flying solo

Gail Collins is off today, so Mr. Kristof is flying solo.  In “More Troops Are a Bad Bet” he says if billions of dollars of aid to Pakistan can trigger nationalistic resentment, don’t expect a benign reaction in Afghanistan to tens of thousands of additional American troops.  Here he is:

The United States was born of our ancestors’ nationalistic resentment of a foreign power whose troops we saw as occupiers, not protectors. The British never fathomed our basic grievance — this was our land, not theirs! — so the more they cracked down, the more they empowered the American insurgency.

Given that history, you’d think we might be more sensitive to nationalism abroad. Yet the most systematic foreign-policy mistake we Americans have made in the post-World War II period has been to underestimate its potency, from Vietnam to Latin America.

We have been similarly oblivious to the strength of nationalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly among the 40 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the border there. That’s one reason the additional 21,000 troops that President Obama ordered to Afghanistan earlier this year haven’t helped achieve stability, and it’s difficult to see why 40,000 more would help either.

American policy makers were completely blindsided in recent weeks by outrage in Pakistan at the terms of our latest aid package — and if we can’t even hand out billions of dollars without triggering nationalistic resentment, don’t expect a benign reaction to tens of thousands of additional American troops.

We have been fighting in Afghanistan for twice as long as we fought in World War II, with a current price tag estimated to be more than $60 billion a year. Standard counterinsurgency ratios of troops to civilians suggest we would need 650,000 troops (including Afghans) to pacify the country. So will adding 40,000 more to the 68,000 already there make a difference to justify the additional annual cost of $10 billion to $40 billion, especially since they may aggravate the perception of Americans as occupiers?

I’ve been fascinated by Pashtuns ever since I first sneaked around the tribal areas as a university student, hiding in the luggage on tops of buses. My interviews in recent years with Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan leave me thinking that we profoundly misunderstand the nature of the insurgency.

Some Taliban are fundamentalist ideologues who will fight us to the death. But others become fighters because they are paid to do so, because a tribal elder suggests it, because it gives them an excuse for traditional banditry, because American troops killed a cousin, or because they resent infidel forces in their land.

When Pakistani troops enter Pashtun areas, the result has sometimes been a backlash that helps extremists. If Pashtuns react that way to Punjabis, why do we think they will react better to Texans?

Indeed, modern Pashtun history is, in part, one of backlashes against overambitious modernization efforts that lacked local “buy-in.”

The American military has become far more sensitive to Afghan sensibilities in the last few years, and there are some first-rate commanders on the ground who cooperate well with local Pashtun leaders. That creates genuine stability. But all commanders cannot be above average, and a heavier military footprint almost inevitably leads to more casualties, irritation and recruitment for the Taliban.

One of the main arguments for dispatching more troops is the terrorist threat from Al Qaeda. But Steven Simon, a National Security Council official in the Clinton years who is now a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that there may be more Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Yemen and perhaps Somalia than in Afghanistan.

“I’m skeptical that the war in Afghanistan is going to solve the Al Qaeda problem,” he said.

That’s not to say we should pull out, and it’s a false choice to suggest that we should either abandon Afghanistan or double down. A pullout would be a disastrous signal of American weakness and would destabilize Pakistan.

My suggestion is that we scale back our aims, for Afghanistan is not going to be a shining democracy any time soon. We should keep our existing troops to protect the cities (but not the countryside), while ramping up the training of the Afghan Army — and helping it absorb more Pashtuns to increase its legitimacy in the south. We should negotiate to peel off some Taliban commanders and draw them over to our side, while following the old Afghan tradition of “leasing” those tribal leaders whose loyalties are for rent. More aid projects, with local tribal protection, would help, as would job creation by cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan exports.

Remember also that the minimum plausible cost of 40,000 troops — $10 billion — could pay for two million disadvantaged American children to go to a solid preschool. The high estimate of $40 billion would, over 10 years, pay for almost half of health care reform. Are we really better off spending that money so that more young Americans could end up spilling their blood in Afghanistan without necessarily accomplishing much more than inflaming Pashtun nationalism?