Hank Kalet

And so the disappointment begins.

President Barack Obama appears ready to put a budget plan on the table that offers more of the same — which is to say he is willing to damage some of the nation’s most successful and important programs in order to save them.

President Obama will release a budget next week that proposes significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security and fewer tax hikes than in the past, a conciliatory approach that he hopes will convince Republicans to sign onto a grand bargain that would curb government borrowing and replace deep spending cuts that took effect March 1.

The argument here is that the budget will make the president seem reasonable, that he is the man navigating the debates between two extremes — essentially, the adult in a room full of kids.

The problem is his analysis of the problem. He is not navigating among extremes. There is one extreme (the GOP plan to slash and burn government and protect the rich) and a reasonable direction forward. The left is not offering an extreme plan. The House Progressive budget, for instance, moves toward balance in the future without castrating progressive principles or gutting important programs.

But this is what Obama has done since taking office. The problem I’ve had with the president since his initial candidacy — since the publication of his book The Audacity of Hope — is that his primary philosophical sensibility has nothing to do with political principle. He is not the leftist the crazed folks on the right paint him to be. He’s not even what I would call an ideological centrist. That would imply a sense of ideology. He is and always has been a man committed conciliation and compromise at all costs. That puts him at a disadvantage when dealing with the right’s extremism.

The result, in practical terms, has been a willingness to compromise before the negotiations even begin (see healthcare) and a more dangerous tendency to sacrifice the things his base believe in. It is compromise for the sake of compromise.

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I have a piece up at NJ Spotlight today asking the question: Are gun buyback programs effective.

illegal immigration

Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.

Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.

Do not describe people as violating immigration laws without attribution.

Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?

People who were brought into the country as children should not be described as having immigrated illegally. For people granted a temporary right to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, use temporary resident status, with details on the program lower in the story.

Simply put, what we name things matters. If we continue to refer to the undocumented as illegal, we attach the lawbreaker stigma to 11 million men, women and children whose only crime (for most of them) was skirting an inefficient and ineffective immigration system.

Human beings, as the immigrant movement has been making clear for years, cannot be illegal. We need to stop referring to them in that way.

I wrote this piece, which runs in the current issue of The Progressive Populist, the weekend after the hearing in Ocean County that produced a deal that should lead to the end of Tent City, with housing for its residents. The essay offers my view that homelessness is more than just an issue of housing; it is an outgrowth of the systemic failures of corporate capitalism.

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Jackson Diehl has a message for those of us who were right about the Iraq War: You may have been right but you still wrong.

If that sounds like a bit of Alice-in-Wonderland logic, it is. Diehl’s argument is that the war turned out badly, but we remained the indispensible nation in the region. “U.S. influence in the Middle East remained strong,” he said, but only if you ignore the facts on the ground. The Arab Spring, in many ways, was a reaction to the U.S. approach to the region and there are now fewer governments who are friendly to U.S. interests than before we entered Iraq guns ablaze.

But it is the critics of the war — those of us who said months before the March 2003 invasion that we were courting disaster by even talking about war — who have failed to learn its lessons. Diehl wants a more assertive intervention in the Syrian civil war; failure to intervene on at least a Clintonian model (with U.S. air power backing others’ troops), he says, would be to cede leadership. Already, he says “every neighbor of Syria has been shocked and awed by the failure of U.S. leadership.”

Every neighbor? Look at the map. Iran borders Syria and we know where they stand. Then aside from Israel and Turkey, there are not a lot of neighbors who consider themselves steadfast U.S. allies. And Turkey has its own very specific interests to worry about (the Kurds). The other neighbors — Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan — are unlikely to seek out American intervention because it will only inflame core constituencies who remain angry at America’s meddling in the region. So who wants intervention?

The column is typical of the kind of approach used by former war supporters to rehabilitate themselves and paint the original critics as out of touch. It fails the test of logical argument because it cherry-picks evidence. The U.S. intervention was successful in rooting out al Qaeda from Iraq, he says, while ignoring the fact that al Qaeda was not a presence in the country until after the American invasion.

The U.S., he also writes, “triggered the transformation of Iraq, quickly disposing of the old regime and buffering the subsequent sectarian struggle.” What followed the fall of Saddam was a particularly nasty civil war that flared for several years and that continues to smolder and undermine stability in Iraq. It also did more than “prompt low-level meddling” by Iran; it led to an Iraqi government that tilts toward Iran.

Diehl and his colleagues were wrong about Iraq in 2003. They were wrong in the years that followed and they continue to be wrong today. We need to stop taking these guys seriously.

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