I’ve been asking this question for a while now (see here and here). Now the influential liberal foreign policy analyst Kenneth Pollack and coauthor worry that the United States is headed for “premature evacuation” [.pdf] in Iraq. Pollack and coauthor argue that “if the United States turns away from Iraq prematurely, it would have dire consequences for Iraq, whose fragile government will be more likely to fail, and for the United States, because success in Iraq is vital to U.S. interests.” Accordingly, the United States needs to aim at “securing a new agreement with the Iraqi government that would allow U.S. military forces to remain in the country beyond 2011.”

Oh, and it’s not just Iraq. “Like Iraq, Afghanistan will require roughly 50,000 U.S. combat troops, probably rebadged as advisors, for many more years before it is able to stand on its feet.”

It seems cruelly ironic that Pollack, whose most recent book is titled A Path Out of the Desert, seems only to have a bottomless stack of plans to keep America stuck on the treadmill in the desert he urged us onto more than seven years ago.

I’ve only skimmed the piece, so maybe there’s more going on here, but this drip, drip, drip of Beltway elites urging the president to stick around for several more years is cause for alarm. (And cause for me to start thinking about drawing up odds about whether we’re going to actually leave.)

Keep in mind, the president doesn’t have anybody who vocally opposed the Iraq war in the upper echelons of his administration, so there likely is nobody on hand to challenge the logic that “success in Iraq is vital to U.S. interests.” It’s like it’s 2002 all over again. With the economy in the front of the president’s brain, he seems much more likely to outsource foreign policy decisions to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the gaggle of “strategic class” foreign policy elites they brought into office with them. And the American people seem less likely to punish him if he does so.

The USPS has taken the first step toward reducing mail delivery to five days a week by sending a request to the Postal Regulatory Commission. However, it will be ultimately up to Congress whether or not Saturday delivery is eliminated.

The USPS, which is in a death spiral, views the elimination of Saturday mail delivery service as a step toward regaining its financial footing. Not surprisingly, the decision is proving controversial among some members of Congress.

Here’s a better idea: give Americans the freedom to choose the mail services they want by repealing the USPS monopoly. That way consumers and businesses could choose to provide and use mail services zero days a week or seven days a week.

Online movie rental services like Netflix offer a small example. A lot of folks time their Netflix rentals so that they have movies for Saturday night. Eliminating Saturday delivery will necessarily degrade the quality of online movie rental services that people are paying for. With competition, Netflix could offer Saturday (or even Sunday) delivery through a private alternative. Perhaps there would be a surcharge, but at least consumers would be allowed to make that choice.

Supporters of the government mail monopoly regularly cite their amazement that they can drop a letter in a mailbox and it will arrive unharmed in another mailbox clear across the country. As a $70 billion operation with the largest workforce in the country, I would hope the USPS can pull off such a feat.

I find it more impressive that I can go into a grocery store almost anywhere in the country and be met with an incalculable number of choices. Take Coke products for instance. I recently made a list of the various Coke products available to me at a local grocery store. The following is just a sample: regular Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Coke, Diet Caffeine-free Coke, Coke Zero, Coke with Splenda, Coke with Lime, Coke with Lemon, and Diet Coke Plus. Don’t like Coke? There’s a similar array of Pepsi products. Don’t like either? The grocery stores also offer pricier micro-brands with all sorts of unique flavors.

These choices reflect the awesome power of the market, which provides nearly all the goods and services people want without any direction from officials in Washington. It would interesting to see what sorts of innovations and products private mail deliverers would come up with if the government’s mail monopoly didn’t exist. Instead, Americans are stuck with a government operation whose floundering business model will require it to raise prices while simultaneously reducing its services. So much for freedom of choice.

Congratulations Delaware and Tennessee — you’ve won the Race to the Top beauty contest! Of course, the grading was subjective and will be disputed by lots of states that haven’t won. Well, haven’t won yet — there’s a second round to this, remember.

So what do the victories for Delaware and Tennessee mean? The edu-pundits will no doubt be reading deep into the results over the coming days, trying to determine what they portend for the future of RttT, federal education policy generally, and politicians across the country. And there are some juicy political leads worth following, including the possibility that the winning states were chosen because they have Republican congress members who could be pivotal in getting bipartisan support for the administration’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization plans. 

All of this, though, will ultimately miss by far the biggest point about RttT: The most beautiful promises and laws mean nothing unless they are implemented, and history offers little reason to believe that even the finest parts of the RttT winners’ applications will be brought to bear.

Despite over forty years of federal education interventions, and nearly two decades of state-level standards-and-accountability reforms, academic achievement has stagnated. Long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in mathematics and reading for our schools’ “final products” — high-school seniors — have been almost completely flat since the early 1970s, and fourth and eighth-grade “main NAEP” reading scores released just last week demonstrate the same awful trend since the early 1990s. This despite a 123-percent increase in real, per-pupil funding since 1970. 

Quite simply, no degree of legislative tinkering within the system has produced lasting improvements because those who would be held to high standards — teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats — have by far the most political clout in education, and they’ve hollowed out anything “tough” that’s been tried. The only thing that will move us powerfully forward — as extensive research on educational freedom demonstrates — is empowering parents to bypass education politics by freely choosing schools that have the autonomy needed to compete and innovate.

Unfortunately, that kind of reform wouldn’t gain a state so much as a point in the Race to the Top. And the limited choice — charter schools — that could get a state some points? According to the Center for Education Reform, Delaware only gets a B for its charter school law — a grade based generally on how free and competitive charter schools can be — while Tennessee gets an atrocious mark of D.

There’s nothing beautiful about that.

David Boaz posed some questions about diversity promotion in American newsrooms in a post yesterday:

But if reflecting the community is essential, why are race and gender the only categories to be considered? Alexander doesn’t mention sexual orientation. Does the Post have gay (and lesbian and bisexual and transgender and questioning…) journalists in the correct proportions?

And how about ideological diversity? In the 2008 exit polls, 23 percent of voters described themselves as white, Protestant, born-again or evangelical Christians. A survey of American religion said that 34 percent of Americans describe themselves as evangelical or born-again. How many editors and reporters at the Post would describe themselves that way? I’ll bet that born-again Christians are the most underrepresented group in elite newsrooms.

I think David mostly means to offer these as a reductio of preference policies generally, but I think they’re fair enough questions on face—possibly because I’m less confident than David that there’s a useful operational concept of “merit” in reporting that can be disentangled from identity given some intransigent social facts about 21st century America. Past some threshold level of competence, a gay reporter is just going to be able to do a better job of reporting on the gay community than I am, and a black reporter is going to have an easier time covering Anacostia. And yes, a white evangelical will probably have an easier time covering white evangelicals—though it’s no mystery why editors might be more skittish about an active preference for historically privileged groups. In a better world, identity might be less important, but in the one we’ve got it’s likely to bear on a reporter’s effectiveness in certain beats. The principle has its limits—Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe are going to be brilliant covering just about anyone—but among mortal reporters you’d expect some effect.

That said, I can think of a couple reasons why religion and (especially) ideology might be less desirable diversity targets than immutable characteristics like race, sex, or orientation. First, outside the realm of screwball comedies from the 80s, there’s not all that much reason to worry about aspiring reporters trying to “pass” as black or Hispanic or (Jack Tripper notwithstanding) gay in hopes of securing a professional advantage. Religion and politics, by contrast, are fundamentally choices we make, and a system of preferences would create an unseemly incentive to—either cynically or subconsciously—drift in the favored direction. There is, I think, something clearly distasteful about a professional environment in which (say) a mainline Protestant reporter is perpetually awkwardly aware that his chances at promotion might turn on whether he’s prepared to declare himself “born again.”

Second, because religion and political ideology are identities fundamentally grounded in belief, they necessarily go beyond the reportorial desiderata of being able to understand and get access to a community you cover. They entail a commitment to seeing one group as systematically in the right in an array of different types of conflicts or disagreements with other groups. Making that kind of intellectual commitment a prerequisite of covering certain beats might run contrary to the norms of objectivity good newsrooms try to cultivate.

So that might be a legitimate reason for papers to aim for some level of representativeness along racial, gender, or sexual orientation lines, but omit religion and ideology—from the newsroom, at any rate. Those arguments don’t apply as strongly to the editorial page—where, indeed, we do often see conscious (if not always competent) attempts to maintain some semblance of balance among perspectives.

From Robert J. Samuelson’s column in today’s Washington Post:

When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody’s Investors Service — the bond rating agency — published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama’s health-care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.

Should the United States someday suffer a budget crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and his allies sowed the seeds, because they ignored conspicuous warnings. A further irony will not escape historians. For two years, Obama and members of Congress have angrily blamed the shortsightedness and selfishness of bankers and rating agencies for causing the recent financial crisis. The president and his supporters, historians will note, were equally shortsighted and self-centered — though their quest was for political glory, not financial gain.

I hope Samuelson is wrong, but it’s probably a good idea to behave as if he’s right, and repeal ObamaCare’s new entitlement spending.

As the nation contemplates the new health care entitlements that Congress and President Obama just created, it is worth noting an article in today’s Washington Post, which reports on the performance of past efforts to eliminate fraud in another health care entitlement:

More than a decade ago, Congress set out to squeeze the fraud out of Medicare billing at nursing homes, requiring more precise justifications for costs. It created new “ultra-high” billing categories intended to be used for only 5 percent of the patients needing highly specialized care and rehabilitation.

But within a few years, nursing homes flooded the ultra-high categories with patients, contributing to $542 million a year in potential overpayments, federal analysts found.

Since then, the numbers in the ultra-high categories have quadrupled, and the amount of waste and abuse could reach billions of dollars a year…

The article ends with the ominous implication that eliminating fraud in entitlement programs like Medicare will ultimately require government agencies to decide whether certain services are medically necessary.

Death panels, anyone?

He did it again: Florida governor and senatorial candidate Charlie Crist cited Cato’s 2008 Governors’ Report Card as evidence of his fiscal conservative credentials, this time in a Fox News Sunday debate with his primary opponent Marco Rubio.

Trouble is, the report card’s author, Chris Edwards, has gone on the record again and again explaining how Crist has fallen hard off the fiscal responsibility wagon since the report was released two years ago.

The Florida media has publicized Edwards’ correction of the record numerous times since Crist began citing the Cato rating in his political ads. It is difficult to believe that Crist can be unaware of that.

Here’s Edwards in October 2009:

Since I wrote the report in mid-2008, the governor seems to have fallen off the fiscal responsibility horse.

In particular, Crist approved a huge $2.2 billion tax increase for the fiscal 2010 budget, even though he had promised that $12 billion in federal “stimulus” money showered on Florida over three years would obviate the need for tax increases.

About $1 billion of the tax increases are on cigarette consumers, which will particularly harm moderate-income families. The rest of the increases are in the form of higher costs for often mandatory services, such as automobile registration, which is really just a sneaky form of tax increases.

Watch the exchange below. Crist cites Cato at 8:43:

Watch the latest news video at video​.foxnews​.com

Transcript here.