Effective Habits of Political Advisors

“He was and is a bare-knuckles administrator, and by that I mean someone who not only makes the trains run on time, he makes them run ahead of time,” Mr. Lehane said. “He walked into a situation where there were disparate voices and disparate viewpoints and he quickly brought order to the house. He held people accountable. He was not afraid to make decisions.”

Now Mr. Daley — lawyer, business executive, campaign strategist, scion of Chicago’s famed political dynasty and President Obama’s new chief of staff — will bring his discipline and critical eye to the White House, which many Democrats say is in need of fresh blood. Blunt yet charming, he is a skilled negotiator and smoother around the edges than his older brother Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, or his in-your-face predecessor, Rahm Emanuel.

“He’s tough, but he’s not a bully,” said Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who relied on Mr. Daley as an “adviser and a troubleshooter” when he ran for president in 1984

-Obama’s Top Aide a Tough, Decisive Negotiator

To Think About

Stephen Walt writes;

So if one leaked cable is just normal media fodder, how about two or three? What about a dozen? What's the magic number of leaks that turns someone from an enterprising journalist into the Greatest Threat to our foreign policy since Daniel Ellsberg? In fact, hardly anyone seems to be criticizing the Times or Guardian for having a field day with the materials that Wikileaks provided to them (which is still just a small fraction of the total it says it has), and nobody seems to hounding the editors of these publications or scouring the penal code to find some way to prosecute them

Neuroscience and Democracy

Quote of the Day

"From the perspective of the human brain, it's a miracle that democracy works at all"

Source:

Controversial Book Cover Art- Israel and South Africa

The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa
Author: Sasha Polakow-Suransky

But Vorster was unapologetic and proudly compared his nation to Nazi Germany: “We stand for Christian Nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism . . . you can call such an anti- democratic system a dictatorship if you like,” he declared in 1942. “In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism and in South Africa Christian Nationalism.” As a result of their pro-Nazi activities, Vorster and van den Bergh were declared enemies of the state and detained in a government camp.

Three decades later, as Vorster toured Yad Vashem, the Israeli government was still scouring the globe for former Nazis— extraditing or even kidnapping them in order to try them in Israeli courts. Yet Vorster, a man who was once a self- proclaimed Nazi supporter and who remained wedded to a policy of racial superiority, found himself in Jerusalem receiving full red-carpet treatment at the invitation of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin....

In April 2006, the Israeli Defense Ministry intervened to block South Africa’s release of a 1975 agreement outlining the planned military cooperation between the two countries, which is signed by Defense Ministers Shimon Peres and P. W. Botha. The Directorate of Security of the Defense Establishment (known by its Hebrew acronym Malmab) insisted that declassification of the 1975 document or any others would endanger Israel’s national security interests.

Listen to a podcast about the book

Think about for the Day

In the United States today, democracy means that most people have essentially zero political power, and a relative handful of people have almost unimaginable power. The central point of Unchecked and Unbalanced is to call attention to the extreme political inequality that has emerged in the United States, particularly over the past fifty years.

-Arnold Kling

Weird Art

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated.

via Boing Boing

More Game Theory from Middle East

In early summer 1995, a few months before his assassination, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin asked Jordan's King Hussein to approach Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on his behalf and arrange a joint visit by Rabin and Hussein to Baghdad, according to Nigel Ashton, author of "King Hussein: A political Life" (Yale University Press).

Ashton, a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics who is close to the Hashemite royal family, was given rare access to Hussein's private archives. In his Hussein biography, Ashton writes that when handed a secret letter by a Jordanian official, "Saddam did not rule out direct contacts with Rabin," but was reluctant "to work through lower-level intermediaries." No further moves on the Israel-Iraq initiative were recorded before Rabin's murder that November....

Aston calls the Rabin request for Hussein's intervention with Saddam "a bold and remarkable secret initiative." Saddam, a bitter enemy of Israel, had launched some 40 surface-to-surface missiles at it in 1991, partly in retaliation for the 1981 bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor.

Rabin reasoned that opening up relations with Iraq would increase pressure on Syrian leader Hafez Assad, Saddam's enemy, to cut a peace deal with Israel. Perhaps even more importantly, Rabin saw Iran, Iraq's arch-rival, as posing a more dangerous threat to Israel, with Iran bent on a nuclear-weapons program and Iraq under an international-sanctions and monitoring regime after the 1991 war.

-British author: Rabin asked Jordan to arrange secret visit with Saddam

An overdose of Obama merchandise

We can truly understand the feeling;

Am I the only person who finds the glut of Obama merchandise, well, gross? It has moved from memorializing his victory to trivializing it. There are commemorative newspaper front pages and magazine specials and plates and coins. There are also condoms and cake molds and gym shoes and dolls and comic books and a thousand schlocky t-shirts. (His Senate seat may even have been for sale.)

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

US Elections links for the Day

A visual comparison of the four acceptance speeches

The Rhetoric and the Reality

Be realistic about politics

Dear Sara:

Thanks for writing. I often say, quite sincerely, that I'm not cynical about politics; I'm realistic about politics.

If a stranger knocks on your door and tells you that he or she is here for the express purpose of helping you, of serving you, of making your life better -- not because of anything that he or she will gain by doing so, but because he or she believes in your goodness and knows that you deserve more than you have -- what would you think? Would you give this person the benefit of the doubt, and trust that he or she really and truly is motivated chiefly and overwhelmingly by a desire to serve you?

Would you continue to give this person the benefit of the doubt on this score when he or she informs you that, to help you, he or she must have the power to tax you and to take away some of your liberties? When he or she assures you that, by some mysterious process, he or she "feels your pain"? When he or she modestly exclaims that those other persons standing on your porch ready to make pretty much the same offer cannot possibly care about you as much as he or she cares about you -- cannot possibly have sufficient skill, determination, and wisdom to improve your life; that only he or she possesses these qualities?

Would that benefit of the doubt continue to be given when you learn that, should you decide to trust this stranger with some of your wealth and your liberties, he or she will get lots of prestige and acclaim and applause simply because he or she holds power over you?

And would you persist in giving this person the benefit of the doubt when, should you ask probing questions about his or her motives or about inconsistencies you believe to have spotted in the plans he or she laid out for helping you, he or she suddenly begins dissembling or speaking in platitudes or vague generalities, or launches into stories of his or her past glory in some endeavor or other that has little to do with the power that he or she now seeks from you?

I suspect, Sara, that should such a person arrive at your door and deliver such a spiel to you that you'd quickly slam the door in his or her face, convinced (and correctly so) that that person is either an utter goofball or a supremely arrogant busybody. You'd want nothing at all to do with him or her, and if he or she persisted in knocking on your door you'd call the police or your bouncer-friend Bubba to escort this obnoxious person as far away from your home as possible.

So, if you'd not give such a person the benefit of the doubt, why in the world are you surprised that I don't give Barack Obama, John McCain, or any other successful politician you care to name the benefit of the doubt?

Sincerely,
Don Boudreaux

Inside USA

US Agriculture


American Education

The Award for protesters in China

One in year jail for 79 year old illiterate lady- and electricity was also cut from her apartment.

Meanwhile Chinese youth embrace Communism;

The first rule of politicians

Politicians do what they do to stay in office or come to office

From a debate in 2007, a clip shows Mr. Biden standing next to Mr. Obama. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News queried Mr. Biden: “You were asked, “Is he ready?” You said, ‘I think he can be ready but right now, I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.’”

Mr. Biden: “I think that I stand by the statement.”

In addition, the McCain ad uses footage from another TV appearance, where Mr. Biden said, “I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off.”

Reading for the Day

How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy

Kissinger on Kissinger and Nixon

Former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Henry Kissinger joined CEO Eric Schmidt for a fireside chat at Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters

Welcome to The Dark Side

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

- Vice President Dick Cheney

A review of THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American IdealsBy Jane Mayer.

Nuke, Kooks and Democracy in Iran

Abbas Milani's talk will be "Nuke, Kooks and Democracy in Iran: a discussion of Iran's current political situation, and the prospects of democracy, and a resolution of the country's nuclear program." His most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir.

-Iran signed an agreement with MIT to train 100 nuclear scientists in 1976
-Khomeni stopped the program after the revolution, started it after Saddam's use of chemical weapons (and when the world ignored it).

Related;
Islamic Republic of Iran: 2008 Article IV Consultation - Staff Report

Islamic Republic of Iran: Selected Issues

Blaming Monica Goodling

Economics … by John McCain