Climate science isn’t perfect. It’s not even very good. But the basic theme is pretty clear, and denying it at this point should seem pretty absurd. Climate policy — certainly open to debate. I personally favor a carbon tax. But the science, the part that says that manmade carbon emissions are already impacting the earth’s climate and will do so to an increasing degree as carbon builds in the atmosphere? Difficult to dispute.

Let’s ignore the flawed premise underlying the article, though, and address the substance. Is Obama waffling on Afghanistan, and if so, will waffling be the reason we ‘lose’ the war?

On the first point, I would argue that Blankley is on to something. Maybe not as much as he believes he is, but something. It is certainly true that announcing a surge and a fairly brisk timeline for withdrawal in such close proximity sent a mixed message. What’s more, it’s a mixed message that never could have made anyone happy, since the timeline is mostly unpalatable to the people who support the surge and vice versa. The Administration’s true priority, I suspect, may be drawing down forces, and officials would probably argue that explicitly laying out the details of any drawing down of forces so far in advance of the intended date would have the effect Blankley ascribes to existing policy, frustrating our allies and encouraging the insurgency to bide its time. Whether this alternative is any better is unclear, though.

On the subject of how much any of this really matters, I find Blankley’s position much more untenable. The current situation in Iraq, even if it can be sustained, is far from an ideal outcome, and we appear to be pursuing something similar or perhaps slightly worse in Afghanistan as our absolute best-case scenario. Though Blankley criticizes the Obama Administration’s portrayal of Karzai as corrupt, it’s an indisputable fact that this characterization is something with which a large segment of the Afghan people themselves agree. What’s more, they consider governmental corruption, which is something the US has very little control over, a significantly more important problem than the Taliban, whom we ostensibly remain in the country to fight. And unlike Iraq, where much of the political opposition to the current government seems willing to attempt to continue to operate within a democratic system for the time being, it is not at all clear that this is the case in Afghanistan.

The President is in a lose-lose situation regarding Afghanistan. The hawkish elements of the right will never approve of his policies there. The portion of the left who makes up his base would like to see us gone, leaving behind only residual forces to train an Afghan force and help maintain order in the cities. Unfortunately, as with many other policies, in walking the tightrope, Obama seems to be pleasing no one.

Which is not to downplay its gaffeyness. Bolden’s characterization of his outreach to Muslim countries is definitely one of the more uncomfortable non-Biden utterings of Obama’s term. It’s more than a little condescending to the Muslim world, and it makes the Administration look weak on an issue that most people would never pay attention to otherwise. But if we characterize the policy more charitably, akin to the clarifications issued recently by both NASA and the White House (described in the previous link), it seems fairly obvious that it’s about scientific collaboration with countries we often neglect in our scientific endeavors. Though NASA is often wasteful, this seems like a worthy endeavor.

…unless you make your living on talk radio. In that case, it’s a conspiracy designed to undermine freedom and coddle tacit sponsors of terror who are Our Enemies, by jingo! Elevating the discourse beyond ‘gotcha!’ is off the table.

(Postscript: Normally I try to avoid the Levins of the world. There are plenty of people with similar views who are more articulate and better able to keep their polemical tendencies in check. However, since I happened to catch some of his broadcast today, I felt like using his show to set up this post.)

Levinson is in favor of a new constitution for Maryland, and I’m inclined to agree. The underlying WaPo article provides a much clearer justification than the blog post. In a nutshell, Maryland’s Constitution dates to the Reconstruction era, includes a vast number of amendments, some dealing with issues that can only be described as minutiae, and spans a word count nearly eight times that of the combined US Constitution + Bill of Rights. Levinson uses this particular issue as a springboard  for a discussion of his belief that states have proven they require an fairly robust federal government to remain viable. I think that perhaps he overreaches here — the problems with, say, California’s Constitution, or New York’s, are fairly unique. The former is crippled by the ballot initiative system, while the latter suffers from gridlock due to disproportionate representation of its less populous regions.

Though Maryland’s Constitution is not as broken as either of these examples, I believe an opportunity to update a vast, unwieldly document reflecting all of the state of the art political thinking of 1867 would prove fruitful. I’ll throw a plug in here for unicameralism while I’m at it, but I won’t hold my breath on that.

• Brad DeLong on how Obama’s mixed macroeconomic messaging is not a good thing.
• David Byrne talks about his ideal city in the Wall Street Journal. I love America. (via MR)
• Jonathan Adler points out some sniping at the Senate by Jack Goldsmith, testifying on Elena Kagan’s behalf on Volokh.
• Former Post reporter Garrett Epps runs down the Kagan hearings for The Atlantic.
• Jack Balkin writes on Viacom v. YouTube.
• Alex Hart makes some good points about public benefits at Citizen Cohn.

I’m not sure I will be able to maintain my former pace of posting. Frankly, having a summer job with low expectations, followed by a period of unemployment, was much more conducive to blogging than my current lifestyle. Still — I’ll try to get something up most days, and we’ll see how that goes. Looking forward to it.

It was the powerful Iraq that provided the threat then [in 1991], and the weakened, chaotic Iraq that is threatening now. Jordan has a permanent “stability issue,” as one U.S. official describes it. In the past, it was intimidated by its two powerful neighbors, Israel and Iraq; now it is troubled by the weakest of the weak, the Palestinian Authority and Iraq.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this problem. Jordan, despite its ambivalent attitudes toward democracy and civil rights, remains a fairly modern, fairly stable ally in a region where they are hard to come by. Jordan already suffers from instability caused by its large, more radically Islamic Palestinian community. (A former professor of mine, an expert on Jordan, claimed to know which American political scientist the monarchy hired to gerrymander districts several years ago).

However, to date, they have managed to contain the internal dissidents, more or less, with only very occasional attacks in recent years. However, if, as the article claims, 750,000 Iraqi refugees, some doubtless radicalized, have now entered the country, it may prove more than the secular monarchy can contain. That would not be a good thing.