Foreign Policy

As a teen-ager, when I lived outside of Washington D.C., I went backpacking with friends along the Appalachian Trail, which runs from Maine to Georgia. Every ten miles or so the white blazes that mark the main trail would intersect with blue blazes leading off to roughly constructed but reliably leak-proof shelters hewn from logs. Usually the shelters sat near freshwater springs. Sometimes, on a stump beside the lean-to, or on one of the walls, you could find a tarnished plaque commemorating the Civilian Conservation Corps and describing the date of the shelter’s construction during the nineteen-thirties. For an adolescent in the confusing, materialistic suburbs of the nineteen-seventies, these shelters were powerful artifacts; they made credible and specific our school-book pages about Great Depression and its improvisational-jobs programs. Like the older brothers of friends who came back to our bloodless sub-divisions shattered by Vietnam, the shelters suggested an invisible fault line of vulnerability running beneath our seemingly impermeable and prosperous neighborhoods. Still, if building such things was what sudden, unexpected destitution might require, it did not seem so bad—internally displaced but skilled men camped on Appalachian ridges to build something of quality that would last and serve the public. For years afterward, when confronted with the idealistic claims of public policy, I often pictured those shelters and the men who built them—as I’m sure many other A.T. hikers did, too...

The entertaining host of NPR’s “On the Media,” Bob Garfield, was kind enough last week to feature this blog’s ongoing tour of the stimulus bill. During a portion of the interview that did not air, he asked if I was really going to see this tedium-laced project all the way through. Do we Protestant workaholics schooled on Pop Warner football fields by off-duty policemen acting out their Woody Hayes fantasies have a choice about such matters? A little late in life to make that suggestion! Yes, of course, we will finish. Not a quitter. However, as the bill does not contemplate the expenditure of its funds until September 2010, we do theoretically have some time. I’ll try to wrap things up over the next couple of months. The occasional post about other subjects should not be interpreted as procrastination!...

Since, some weeks ago, I was among those who commented on how unconvincingly Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner laid out his plan for a private-public partnership to purchase toxic assets from banks, I thought I should probably review the issue now that he has come forward with the details he promised. We analyze where we think we may have some specialty—as a non-economist who reports on financial issues but mainly writes for a living, I was drawn in the first go-round to how sloppy and muddled the principal Treasury statements were, particularly given the extraordinarily high stakes involved. (As a new-fangled blogger, I have learned about the perils of first-draft, hastily-published language that reaches sizable audiences—in my case, however, free market capitalism does not hang in the balance.)

Canadians might wish to make use of their superior social networking skills to examine whether the stimulus bill violates their rights under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Title VI, “Department of Homeland Security,” provides the most depressing read of any chapter so far. Partly this is because the entire subject of D.H.S.—its Orwellian-nativist conception, its bloated shape, and its many inefficiencies—is discouraging. The stimulus bill then takes one of the most over-funded, under-managed bureaucracies in the federal system and reinforces this creeping failure with more money. Actually, it could be worse—the numbers allocated to D.H.S. in the bill are not so large, in a Dirksenian relativist sense. (Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, 1896-1969, may or may not have actually said: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking real money.”) And so we find a mere hundred million dollars for “procurement and deployment of non-intrusive inspection systems” (Non-intrusive—another relative notion); a hundred million dollars for “border security technology”; four hundred and twenty million dollars for customs and border protection facilities; and a billion dollars to speed up delayed plans to install equipment that can reliably check airline baggage for explosives.

A pause from our stimulus blogging for this word from (or about) our sponsor….

Over the weekend, several people sent me Clay Shirky’s essay about the collapse of newspaper business models. Unfortunately, I think the evidence is on his side. Every major metropolitan newspaper, confronted with the digital revolution that Shirky describes, has essentially adopted the same strategy - about eighty percent defense, twenty percent offense, with a bottom-line protecting emphasis on cutting costs to align with declining revenue. This strategy is often accompanied by (too often) self-deceiving hypotheses and public diplomacy organized around the notion that a smaller newsroom will be a smarter and more customer-focused one. Some of the offensive strategies in this mix - such aggressive investments in Web sites and the younger, online innovators who run them - have attracted large audiences and have, not incidentally, proved the enduring value of professional journalism. But they have not yet cracked the code of the digital revolution. As Shirky argues, with a few possible exceptions, that appears to be beyond these news organizations’ capacity, at least anytime soon...

As a potential catalyst for big and lasting changes in American public policy, the stimulus bill has three main sources of interest: Its provisions for energy; its provisions for health care; and its provisions for education. At every opportunity, the Obama Administration has reaffirmed its commitment to pursue transformational policies in each of these fields - and the president pointedly reiterated his intentions this week, even after he had endured intense criticism that his interest in such ambitious domestic policy-making had distracted him from the economic crisis...

All right, we’re moving right along now. Title III, “Department of Defense,” is straightforward. In a formula no doubt hammered out over many hours in the Tank at the Pentagon, each service has been allocated a particular amount, evidently based on its size or need, to “improve, repair or modernize” physical facilities, “to include barracks,” and to invest in the energy efficiency of the Department of Defense. There are also smaller allocations—$75 million per service—for unrestricted research, development, testing and evaluation: a small R. & D. slush fund, it seems...

We have reached that point on any spontaneously conceived, Yellow Brick Road-type journey when the uplifting refrains of Munchkin sendoff songs have faded and we notice that the forest around us has grown dense and forbidding. Do we have a map and a destination with which we are even superficially acquainted? If we had a map, would we use it?

As an organizer of such trips in my family realm, I am accustomed to that moment when coughing into hands begins and people speak of returning to the lodge by the way they came. With one’s children, in particular, proselytizing that getting lost is part of the process has its limits.

I mentioned at the outset that I was inspired by the example of David Plotz’s “Blogging the Bible” on Slate a couple of years back...

Never thought I’d have a chance to write that headline. We continue here with our blogging of the stimulus legislation, a.k.a. the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, plunging now deep into the appropriation weeds.

Title I of Division A, the less-than-explosive opening of our narrative, which covers about eleven pages, is entitled “Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies.” By my math, it contains provisions for about $17 billion in new stimulus spending...

The great David Plotz coaxed me off the fence about blogging when he launched his “Blogging the Bible” feature on Slate, about three years ago. He proved over months that by blogging he could write something very worthwhile and even lasting in a way that could not be done as successfully in any other format. The fruits of his adventure will be published tomorrow in extended book form: “Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.”

No inspired achievement of this kind will long go un-imitated. This morning, full of new-Monday vim, I printed out all 407 pages of the stimulus bill, thinking that I should commit an act of think-tank citizenship and read it. I was planning just to skim through it, educate myself, and find a blog post or two in it. Then I remembered Plotz. Actually, it was the Old Testament type face on the first page that reminded me of his earlier work...