In a recent New York Times op-ed entitled Know-Nothing Politics, Paul Krugman argues that non-partisanship is a non-starter in today’s politics. And just why might that be? According to Krugman, when one political party is too dumb – incapable of recognizing the difference between a workable policy and one destined to fail – it is neither possible nor desirable to put an end to partisanship. When I first read the penultimate paragraph of Krugman’s piece, I immediately thought to myself, hey, Krugman simply can’t be right. Not-partisan politics is designed to get people with starkly opposed ideas together, so that the bad ideas will be routed out and the good ones conserved. Sounds promising, wouldn’t you agree?

But folks, after reading Condoleezza Rice’s Rethinking the National Interest in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs, I have realized that Krugman is on to something. Why the conversion to pessimism, you ask? The shorthand answer is that if Rice, a former Stanford Political Science professor and sitting U.S. Secretary of State, cannot comprehend that certain key parts of the neoconservative worldview are empirically unsupportable (i.e., stupid), it’s extremely unlikely that the dimmer bulbs in the neocon camp will come around and see the light. (more…)

Today, after 5 long years of odd and unprecedented legal proceedings, Salim Ahmed Hamdan finally received a sentence. Convicted on Monday of providing material support for terrorism, Hamdan was sentenced to 5½ years. The sentence is unexpectedly light, and made more so by the fact that he will likely be given credit for the time he has already spent in incarceration, leaving him with just 6 months left to serve.

Already, the decision is being hailed as proof that the administration’s system is both legitimate and fair. The decision does certainly seem to be a fair one on a moral level; Hamdan’s actions were wrong, and he had to be held responsible, but he never actually killed anyone, so a 5 year sentence seems appropriate. Nevertheless, it does not follow that the system itself is fair. More to the point, it says nothing at all about the legitimacy of our current procedure.

What concerns me is the fact that Hamdan could be convicted of a war crime in the first place. There are two oddities about this case that call the verdict, indeed the entire premise of the trial into serious question. (more…)

Yesterday I was a panelist on a television program talking about the rising number of suicides and suicide attempts in the American military.

Being a veteran myself, and having acted as a veteran’s advocate in my undergraduate days vets issues have always been of special interest to me. So let me summarize some of the facts that you may be unfamiliar with.

Currently, many veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from invisible wounds. As in previous wars, service members can leave a war zone, but the war often follows them in their minds.

Numbers are always iffy but according to a RAND study released in April, nearly one in five Iraq and Afghanistan veterans report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. It estimated that 830,000 veterans – 300,000 of whom served in Iraq or Afghanistan – suffer from depression or PTSD symptoms. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports that oil prices are up again today, apparently because of the fear of a disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. The price bump follows a series of events in what is becoming a familiar pattern. First, an Israeli politician said today that Iran is making “unacceptable” progress with its nuclear program and that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be an “existential” threat to Israel. Presumably investors fear that this statement indicates an increase in the probability that Israel will unilaterally attack Iran. In the past, Iran has promised to respond to an attack by disrupting oil flows, which would increase the price of oil. Traders, wanting to buy low and sell high, rush into the market to buy oil at its current “cheap” price, so the price goes up today.

Today’s Wall Street Journal report was better than most, because it suggested that an Israel-Iran conflict would threaten oil supplies in two ways:

The comments brought to surface long-held market fear over a potential attack on Iran, OPEC’s second-largest oil producer. Apart from a potential loss of Iran’s output of near 4 million barrels a day, conflict in the region could endanger the vast amounts of oil that move through the Middle East. Iran sits at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil flows — a volume that couldn’t be made up fully through the release of emergency stockpiles in consumer countries.

Most articles just point to Iran’s threat to “close” the Strait of Hormuz. Regardless, these regular references — and their effects on oil prices, which affect consumers around the world — deserve deeper consideration. At the bottom of this post, I’ll point you to a tool that I hope will help you to think through the problems in the Strait.

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