The Sanford Project

Peter King: "PANTHERS (Spartanburg, S.C.): It's hard to imagine a player not wanting to play for John Fox. What more do you want from a coach than a man who puts you in the best position to win, with a competitive team, and who looks you in the face and tells you what's what? Every time I'm around his team, I appreciate the hold he has on it -- and the fact that his players know he'll do whatever it takes to win, playing whomever he has to play to get that win."

Please name my brother coach of the US National Team. Pretty please!

"Eh, about yeah big"

I'm calling bullsh*t on Rummy's latest pronouncement:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday that weapons recently confiscated in Iraq were "clearly, unambiguously from Iran" and admonished Tehran for allowing the explosives to cross the border.

How stupid does he think we are (ok, we are stupid, but I'm saying...)? We've allowed the election of a pro-Iranian Shi'a government in Iraq. We've got Iraqi PM Ibrahim al-Jaafari meeting with Iranian leaders and laying flowers on the tomb of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The insurgency is being led by Sunnis who hate the Shi'a. As Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria explained, the message coming from Sunni insurgents is that the U.S. "is not our strategic enemy. Our strategic enemy is Iran. We want to end the war with America." And as Juan Cole explained, if there's one winner from the Iraq war, it has undoubtedly been Iran.

So why in the hell would Iran be giving bombs to Sunni insurgents? They have a decided interest in seeing the insurgency end, not continue.

Now, might there have been bombs crossing from Iran into Iraq? Possibly. But there's no way they were meant to be used by insurgents. A more likely possibility is that they were moved across the border by one of the pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

But it also wouldn't surprise me at all if the story were pure bullsh*t. After all, it was Rumsfeld's Pentagon that announced it was going to start lying to us to further its goals. And Rumsfeld himself has been known to get in front of the cameras and lie right to the American people.

The lesson: don't let Rummy and the batsh*it-insane, pro-war crowd use this as an excuse to invade Iran. You all know how well wars built on false premises end up...

(hat tip to Ubell)

Earlier, I speculated that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts is very likely a douchebag. At the time, few people knew anything about Roberts, but I figured it was a safe guess given that W only nominates douchebags. Since then, additional information has been released providing insight into exactly what kind of douchebag John Roberts is.

The general consensus is that, ideologically, Roberts is no Sandra Day O'Connor. He's the new Rehnquist. During his time on the White House counsel's staff from 1982 to 1986, Roberts consistently advocated for the more conservative side of issues, and sometimes took "positions even more conservative than those of his prominent superiors." During this period, Roberts advocated for:

• less government enforcement of civil rights laws rather than more
• restricting application of the Voting Rights Act
• eliminating the wall between church and state
• limiting the role of the courts while enhancing the president's powers
• eliminating the ability of state prisoners to have their claims heard in federal court

He also exposed his frighteningly ignorant understanding of affirmative action, writing that affirmative action programs were bound to fail because they required "the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates." Affirmative action programs require no such thing. As the National Organization of Women explains, "under the law as written in Executive Orders and interpreted by the courts, anyone benefitting from affirmative action must have relevant and valid job or educational qualifications."

Frighteningly, the White House is refusing to release a number of other important sets of documents, including Roberts’ tax returns and relevant papers from his tenure as deputy solicitor general under the first President Bush. Sure, we don't know that the White House is covering up anything bad by witholding thise papers, but it certainly raises the question as to what exactly they're trying to hide.

Outside his ideology, Roberts has proven himself a liar. Here he is claiming not to remember whether or not he was a member of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, even though he's listed as a member of the steering committee of the organization's Washington chapter in the 97-98 directory. And here he is, lying to Coretta Scott King.

But what really makes him a primo douchebag in my book, is that he was an accomplice to the theft of the 2000 election. Miami Herald reporter Marc Caputo learned from Ted Cruz, a policy advisor to the Bush election campaign in 2000, and now the Texas solicitor general, that:

Roberts was one of the first names he thought of while he and another attorney drafted the Republican legal dream team of litigation ‘lions' and ‘800-pound gorillas,' which ultimately consisted of 400 attorneys in Florida.

Until now, Gov. Jeb Bush and others involved in the election dispute could recall almost nothing of Roberts’ role, except for a half-hour meeting the governor had with Roberts. Cruz said Roberts was in Tallahassee helping the Bush camp for ’’a week to 10 days,’’ and that his help was important, though Cruz said it is difficult to remember specifics five years after the sleep-depriving frenetic pace of the 2000 recount.

[...]

Roberts traveled from his Washington office at Hogan & Hartson to Tallahassee to lend advice and help polish legal briefs. Later, Roberts participated in a dress rehearsal to prepare the Bush legal team for the U.S. Supreme Court.

In short, Roberts went down on his own dime to make sure that the votes in Florida would not be counted, and that the election for president would be decided by the courts. Later analysis showed that a full state-wide vote count would have resulted in a win for Al Gore. But John Roberts evidently thinks democracy is too good for Florida's citizens.

Unfortunately, all this complaining is really good for nothing. Because our good-for-nothing Democrats in Congress are going to approve the nomination with little fight. Apparently being a right-wing ideologue, liar, hater of democracy, and all-around douchebag are no longer disqualifying characteristics to get onto the Supreme Court.

In the end, I view the passage of CAFTA as a net positive. Both sides in this issue (as they do in EVERY trade pact) vastly overstate the costs or benefits, depending which side of the issue they're advocating. So digging through the claims of the various camps was a bit of hard work, but in the end, I think it's good policy.

Economically, CAFTA will have very little impact from the US's perspective. 80% of imports from CAFTA nations already receive duty-free treatment. The other 20% will have very little impact on US jobs, mostly because we don't compete in the same industries as a Costa Rica or a Honduras, etc. On the other hand, our businesses will now have improved access to CAFTA markets, where our goods currently face substantial duties. This will be, unquestionably, a net positive for the US economy. Not a huge gain, but a net positive none the less.

The main criticism with CAFTA, from a pure policy perspective, is that it's weak on labor. I agree, and it's a shame, because we easily could have included stronger labor standards if we had tried (incorporating labor standards in trade policy is most likely going to be the focus of my masters project). That said, CAFTA is not going to result in a "race to the bottom" in CAFTA countries. Multinationals are seldom able to go into a country and attract workers by offering worse working conditions than the options currently available. While they might not offer US-calibre working standards, they usually offer better standards that what's currently available in the foreign country. Many are recognizing that you will have a more productive workforce if you offer decent standards. Furthermore, name-brand companies are under pressure from labor NGOs, and desperately want to avoid the bad publicity of operating a sweat shop.

The main reason I was almost against CAFTA, was due to the process of how this legislation was created. Traditionally, free trade agreements have been crafted with bipartisan input. In this case, Dems were completely excluded from the process. Completely...as in no input whatsoever. So CAFTA sets a very bad precedent in using free trade to advance a partisan agenda, versus seeking consensus and trying to create as good of a policy as possible.

A further positive that people should consider is the impact of CAFTA on advancing the Doha development round of the WTO. If we wouldn't have passed CAFTA, there was fear that the already sticky Doha negotiations would end. After all, if the US wouldn't agree to what is (from our perspective) an economic no-brainer where we were forced to give up virtually nothing, why would we ever be willing partners in advancing an agenda where we can and should make legitimate sacrifices?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention a few things. First, the expanded intellectual property protection for US drug companies will make drugs more expensive for the Central American countries. The patent system creates huge economic distortions. That's why many economists refrain from calling CAFTA a "free trade" agreement. Hopefully we can reach some sort of supplemental agreement to make sure people aren't dying because their medicine is now too expensive. I haven't seen any reliable studies on how big or small of an effect this will have, so if somebody can point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated.

Second, while I still believe that the number of US workers affected by CAFTA will be quite small, there will still be some job losses. Unfortunately, W has tightened the eligibility criteria for Trade Adjustment Assistance. It would have been nice if he would have loosened the requirements in order to help those who will end up on the losing side of CAFTA.

Finally, I neglected to mention the costs of W's last minute horse-trading. By all accounts, it was open season on pork for those Congressmen whose votes were up for sale. The pork-laden Highway Bill and Energy Bill are testaments to this fact. How many taxpayer dollars were wasted in order to pass CAFTA? It's unknown, but given the size of the CAFTA economies (about the same as New Haven, CT by some estimates), it wouldn't surprise me if the losses from wasteful spending outstripped the potential economic gains from the deal.

Does this change my conclusion? Were Democrats right to vote against it? I think I'm leaning "yes" right now. Can someone out there convince me that my original analysis was correct?

UPDATE 2: Here's the World Bank's take on the effect of expanded IP rules on pharmaceuticals:

no methodologies have yet been developed to evaluate the welfare impacts of these types of commitments – especially if we consider gains from other aspects of the FTA. While greater IPR protection usually means restrictions on the use of generic drugs, the treaty seems to provide flexibility for government’s [sic] to bypass the usual protections in order to protect public health, through compulsory licensing and the option of parallel imports.

That was the cry of an exasperated Toby Ziegler, as he railed against WTO protestors in a fine West Wing episode, "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail". And you know what? He's right.

Unfortunately, it's eminently clear that not enough people watched it, or that encouraging hemispheric peace wasn't important enough...given that CAFTA passed the House yesterday by a vote of only 217-215.

Kudos to the Bush administration for pushing this through...and shame on any representative of any party who opposed it. The economic arguments are there. The security arguments are there. The ideological arguments are there. Any member of Congress standing in the way simply lacked the stones to say to their constituents, "The economies of the US, Central America, and the world at large all need to evolve, and this is a step in the right direction."