Presidential

Andrew Sullivan interrupts his week off to post on Obama's speech today. Bottom line: he loved it!

I regard it as the national security equivalent of his Jeremiah Wright
speech. Why? Because it managed to reach a place apart from, while being fully
part of, the furious debates we have been having. These debates are vital, and
the notion that we can simply move on from the Bush-Cheney era without some
accounting or reform is both empirically and morally false. We are struggling
for a sustainable, long-term balance between security against a ruthless and
unprincipled and lawless enemy - and a law of war, and a judicial system and a
civilization that we rightly love and want to defend. This struggle will be a
long one, and an extremely difficult one....

This speech, to my mind, was a conservative one by a conservative
president who seeks first and foremost to use existing institutions to address
the new challenges of the moment, and then seeks pragmatic compromises, always
open to future checks and balances, in those places where such institutions
clearly need reform and adjustment. The speech does not shrink from clear
positions but it always does so from a place of reason and authority as opposed
to politics and power. It is a presidential speech - from a man who seeks to
unite and lead this country forward, rather than someone who sees fear and
division as a tool to be exploited.

New Urbanism

My son Nathan--a.k.a. The Caretaker of this blog--is a city planner in Colorado, who adheres to the professional philosophy of 'New Urbanism.' Look here to see an interesting video on that subject and why it is important. (Thanks to the Daily Dish)

What Is Wrong With These People?

A reader to the Daily Dish writes about the weird Senator Harry Reid:

I have had a bit of a rough week, haven't smiled or laughed nearly as much
as I usually do, but that changed when I saw video of Harry Reid maintaining
that you can't put accused terrorists in prison without releasing them. I
laughed so hard my cheeks hurt afterward and my patient husband had to put up
with me backing up the Tivo several times just to see it again and again.

I am in awe over the scaredy-cat crap coming out of our senators' mouths (with the
excellent exception of Dick Durbin). What is wrong with these people? They act
like the detainees have crazy superpowers, like they are going to transform into
a millimeter-high insect and crawl out under the cell door into the shoe of a
correctional officer and then ESCAPE.

Trying To Do Too Much?

Richard Posner, writing a number of posts on the current economic crisis at the Daily Dish, gives an interesting analysis of the obstacles faced by the Obama administration in solving the mess they inherited.

It's Economics, Stupid

With Andrew Sullivan taking a week off, it's amazing how much of his blog The Daily Dish is dealing with economic issues. What's that all about?

The Value of a Humanities Education

This posting gives the reasons why a broad-based humanities education may well be the best college education of all. Interesting. Take heart, SB!

It's Over and Isn't Coming Back

This chart--and the accompanying post--may be the most transparent evidence yet that there is little chance that we will be returning to the economy of the last two decades. Rather we are going forward to something that is different--a new 'normal'--, more frugal, and ultimately better, because more in line with reality.

War Without Torture

Blogger Andrew Sullivan makes a plausible case for going along with Obama's current strategy in Af-Pk:

What Obama understands is that the war on terror is real, that we need to
win both ideologically and militarily, and that we have lost a lot of ground in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. I remain worried that this war has become unwinnable,
its goals unclear, its rationale more and more an attempt to prevent the
unpreventable. But it remains a fact that Obama campaigned to wage war
successfully in Afghanistan and Pakistan - and he cannot exactly withdraw
precipitously now. Petraeus, an honorable man whose stance on abuse and torture
has long been unequivocally on the side of the angels, backs McChrystal. A
combination of better Petraeus-style counter-insurgency strategy with McChrystal
special ops' targeting of Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan might be the way to
advance. It certainty would be an advance on these drone attacks, which apear to
be winning battles and losing the war. I don't know, but I'm perfectly prepared
to give the president the benefit of the doubt on this, as I did the last one at
this juncture. And I think all of us who supported him last fall should - for
the current summer military campaign at the very least.

But look forward and see the potential of Obama's offensive against al
Qaeda and the Taliban in Af-Pak. Imagine the political and security impact of
actual success in that war. Imagine if a president who eschews torture captures
Osama bin Laden, or devastates al Qaeda's infrastructure without succumbing to
the pathologies of Cheney. Isn't that in the long run the best way to defang the
threat that Cheney and Cheneyism pose to this country's future?

Housing Bubble Economy

Another interesting Kunstler quote from an interview in the New Yorker:

...over the last decade, the housing bubble sort of became the replacement
for the manufacturing economy. You know, we pretended we had a service economy,
we pretended we had a digital economy, but what we really had was a
housing-bubble economy, and what that was all about was building more of an
infrastructure for a daily life with no future. So it was a completely tragic
fiasco, and now we’re seeing a severe and radical implosion of that, which is
just going to thunder through our lives for years to come.

One Contrarian's Vision of the American Future

Here is James Kuntler's summary vision of the American Future:

There are plenty of things you can state about the economy past and future
with some confidence right now:

-- Cheap energy is over and our wishes for alt.energy are currently
inconsistent with reality, meaning we have to live differently.

-- We have to downscale and re-localize our major economic activities: food
production, commerce and manufacturing, banking, schooling, etc.

-- We can't hope to have a stable money system unless we allow a workout of
unpayable debt to proceed.

-- Even if we can do this, universal easy credit is a thing of the past.
From now on, we have to save for the things we want and run our businesses and
households on accounts receivable.

-- Major demographic shifts are inevitable as it becomes necessary to let
go of suburbia and reactivate our derelict towns and smaller cities (and allow
our giant metroplexes to contract).

-- We have to face the truth that our major social contracts cannot be met,
namely the continuation of social security as we know it and probably all
pension arrangements. We'll probably have to change household arrangements to
make up for these losses.

-- Health care will have to go through a revolution more comprehensive than
just changing how we pay for it. Like everything else, it will have to
downscale, re-localize, and become more rigorous.