Khmalye Memo

Syria is gripped with unrest and rebellion. Rebels and government forces fight city by city, exchanging weapons and mortar fire. On the surface, these circumstances seem quite similar to those in Libya ahead of the overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi. Compared to the full-scale ground invasion and occupation of Iraq, the conflict in Libya seems like a blueprint for how Western nations should help local dissent coalesce into regime change. Overthrowing the Syrian government might weaken the influence of Iran in the Middle East and replace a hostile government with a more democratic one indebted to the West, but it also may aid in the dispersal of deadly chemical weapons, small arms and unemployed combatants throughout the region. Many other factors make an intervention in Syria more difficult to mount: limited international support, including adamant opposition in the Security Council; the threat to Israel of a destabilized Syrian border; the military power of the Assad regime, and the natu...

The 9/11 attacks in New York burned the name Al-Qaeda into the minds of many Westerners as the source of militant Islamism and the root of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism worldwide. In the years that followed, seemingly every region and nation with a significant Islamist presence has acquired a declared branch of Al-Qaeda. The different offshoots seem to share an affinity for militancy and a deep belief in a universal and fundamentalist version of Islam. Beyond tactics and a religious cant, however, it's not clear what these often geographically isolated units share. Other Islamic organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood, are bound internally by common elements: leadership, goals, literature, communications, funding, etc. In contrast, Al-Qaeda is more like an ideological trademark; a moniker or brand that implies certain broad motives and tactics, but little else in the way of cooperation or shared purpose. To the extent that the original Al-Qaeda was a c...

(Fair warning, extremely long post follows) I t's an old standby of election politics that taxes are too high. No one gets elected promising to raise taxes, and no politician would even risk saying that the current tax rates are generally fair. Questions about details generally get limited play because they aren't easily reduced to soundbites. Do we pay more than people in other developed countries? The federal income tax is progressive, but does that reflect the real burden of taxes in the U.S.? Are our corporate tax rates uncompetitive and likely to drive business elsewhere? Bruce Bartlett is a former tax policy advisor for the Reagan and Bush administrations and a former senior staff member for Congressmen Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. Since May he's been a regular columnist for the New York Times Economix blog, and he recently wrote two interesting posts regarding the comparative burden of taxes in the United States. Here is the first, and here is the second. He addre...

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial today dreading what it called the "Obama Downgrade", referring to risk that the United States might lose the AAA credit rating on its debt. As always, it's the hypocrisy and blatant partisan angling that bothers me about such articles. A fair article would share blame for out of control spending between all of the last 4 presidents; each has contributed to the growth of entitlement spending which now threatens to overwhelm the budget. More particularly, policies of the Bush administration and the Republican Party (which controlled all of government for a large part of both Bush terms) exacerbated the debt and deficit problems of the nation in dramatic ways. This is nicely demonstrated by the chart the WSJ provides for its editorial, although you won't see it framed in quite this way. The 10-year cost of the GOP-passed Medicare Part D act? $1 trillion. The 10 year cost of the "Obamacare" act? $1 trillion. T...

Health care in the United States has several defining characteristics: it's extremely effective and high quality for the wealthy, difficult to receive for the poor, and extraordinarily cost inefficient and expensive as a system. Everyone wants to stop the skyrocketing cost of the health care system, many want to establish universal coverage. The first step has to be to control costs, and the best way to do that is with a single payer health care system. The current system is patchwork and somewhat ad hoc, a mixture of public and private facilities providing care with a mixture of public and private funds. This fragmented system is different in every state and every community, built based on local priorities and resources yet straining almost everywhere to keep from falling apart. Politicians in the last two years have debated many strategies for reform, focusing on extending access to health care to more of the people who need it. That is a noble and just goal, but it has a fatal...

Public Information Research (or PIR), not to be confused with the Public Interest Research Group, is a company owned and operated by Internet provacateur Daniel Brandt, of San Antonio, Texas. According to statemaster.com (a source that may be a Wikipedia mirror, entry found here ) and its own website, it is a registered (501c3) charity with revenues under $20,000 per year.Whether that dollar figure is true or not, PIR (a follow-on of Brandt's previous company, Micro Associates) operates the website NameBase.org. Described by Wikipedia as "focus[ed] on the post-World War II era and on left of center , conspiracy theory , and espionage activities", the website purports to contain hundreds of thousands of entries with clippings and documents, scrounged up or received via FOIA requests, about "all sorts of spooks, military officials, political operators and other cloak-and-dagger types." (The Nation, 1988). Somewhat less known, however, is that Mr. Brandt is the ...