After critiquing the gauzy proposals of each of the Democratic candidates for Afghanistan, the editors of the Washington Post finally get around to their own plan—stay:

What if ground troops are the best, or only, way to keep a pro-Western government in Kabul, and if keeping such a government stable is the best, or only, way to prevent a terrorist resurgence? The United States has ground troops in South Korea and Western Europe decades after the shooting wars that brought them there, precisely because their stabilizing presence helps prevent war. Afghanistan is, to be sure, a much more dangerous environment, but U.S. combat deaths have numbered in the low double digits in recent years.

Note that they conflate, without evidence, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism strategies. I would genuinely like to see any evidence that a counter-insurgency strategy can be effective in Afghanistan or that it does not actually conflict with a counter-terrorism strategy.

Before leaving this subject I do want to point out one egregious bit of crackpottery:

On the debate stage, former vice president Joe Biden defended the Obama administration’s decision, then reiterated his long-held view that Afghanistan “will not be put together” and that the United States should withdraw its troops, except for bases in Pakistan, from which it can strike at terrorists when the need arises.

The United States presently has no bases in Pakistan; on occasion we have used Pakistani bases. The Pakistani government has steadfastly refused to allow the U. S. to have bases within Pakistan. And there’s actually pretty fair evidence that the Pakistani government is sponsoring the Taliban. Also, take a glance at a map and consider the geopolitical implications of a U. S. military base with adequate resources to “strike at terrorists when the need arises”. India? China?

or, what low interest rates do. I found this article at Curbed New York about the large number of unsold new condos in New York very interesting:

According to the StreetEasy report, there have been some 16,242 new condos constructed in the city in the past six years. Of those, more than 25 percent are still sitting on the market—including around 40 percent of the condos for sale on Billionaires’ Row, according to an analysis of data conducted for the New York Times by data guru Jonathan Miller.

Miller’s analysis makes StreetEasy’s look downright conservative: “By Mr. Miller’s count, which includes buildings that are still under construction, there are over 9,000 unsold new units in Manhattan,” according to the Times.

And the condos that have sold are not necessarily being used by their buyers. Around 30 percent of luxury condos that have closed have since re-appeared on that site as rentals, according to StreetEasy.

These are sobering, if not totally unsurprising, statistics, putting real estate insiders—a bevy of whom spoke with the Times—on edge. “People don’t realize this is already as bad as it was after Lehman, purely from a supply standpoint,” Mark Chin, the CEO of Keller Williams, told the Times.

I think that this is what happens when interest rates are extremely low. People speculate on building condos for the rich or ultra-rich because, as Willie Sutton said, that’s where the money is.

But there is a tremendous temptation to lose track of an economic fact. As prices for anything rise, the market for it shrinks until, ultimately, you’ve outraced the actual market for whatever it is. That may be what has happened in New York. The top .1% of income earners is something like 140,000 people and all of them don’t live in New York or want to, something New Yorkers may find inconceivable. They should remember that for some people in California there is no life east of Sepulveda.

I didn’t watch the Democratic presidential candidates’ “debate” last night; I have limited time and a limited appetite for stress. I have been listening to the coverage on the morning news and will follow it in the opinion sections of the newspapers.

So far what seems to me the frankest assessment came from former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. After a few minutes of being a good soldier and saying nice things about the candidates the savviest political strategist the Democrats have said something to the effect that the debate was a net negative for Democrats, that the candidates needed to stop saying things that would hurt the Democrats in the general election, and that everything that any of them said would be fodder for Trump to use against them.

There was one clip of Joe Biden which everyone seems to take at face value but it was yet another gaffe. He said that under Obama they didn’t take children away from parents or put people in cages. Actually, they did just not in the volume of the Trump Administration. A frequently used photo of “people in cages” was actually taken during Obama’s term of office. VP Biden should have just attacked Trump’s cruelty in general terms and omitted the details. The reality is that we take children away from their parents every day in the United States for example when their parents have been arrested for a crime.

It’s good to see someone other than me pointing out what is the obvious truth. From Philip Stephens at the Financial Times:

The eurozone needs strong incentives for politicians in debtor states to take the unpopular measures needed to improve competitiveness. The flawed assumption is that there is a straight either/or choice. Why not structural modernisation and fiscal support for growth-enhancing investment?

There has rarely been a better time for Europe to invest in its future. Inflation has disappeared. Germany is awash with fiscal surpluses, federal, state and municipal. The cost of borrowing is zero. In Emmanuel Macron’s France, Berlin has a partner that has shown it will take tough supply side decisions.

Fiscal support for the eurozone economy is not about digging-holes-and-filling-them-in demand management, though even that would be better than nothing. The continent faces a yawning investment gap. Communications networks need replacing (check your WiFi speed or cellular telephone connection in Germany). The decarbonisation required to meet climate targets demands the re-engineering of the continent’s economy. Europe is way behind the US and China in advanced computing and machine learning.

German leaders know what needs to be done they just don’t know how to get re-elected if they do it, as Jean-Claude Juncker quipped.

You might find this snippet of Daniel Henninger’s latest Wall Street Journal column, on the dilemma the Democrats are facing, interesting:

With Mr. Trump’s approval rating stuck permanently in the low- to mid-40s, and 57% thinking the country is headed in the wrong direction, one would expect Democrats to be buoyant. Not the nonactivist Democrats I talk to. They’re depressed.

They like Mr. Biden, but it’s striking how many don’t think he’ll make it to the nomination. And if he falters, for them there is no Plan B unless Mr. Biden (or in their dreams, the sainted Barack Obama ) were to throw his support to one of the “normal” Democrats at the bottom of the standings—Sen. Klobuchar, Sen. Michael Bennet, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock or perhaps an undeclared candidate such as Ohio’s left-leaning but blue-collar Sen. Sherrod Brown. History’s most reluctant dark horse, Michael Bloomberg, might even re-emerge in a post-Biden vacuum.

Their frustration is born of the belief that a “normal” Democratic candidate should be able to beat the increasingly mercurial Mr. Trump. It’s a plausible scenario, but what really depresses many Democrats is the expectation that a normal candidacy isn’t going to happen.

It won’t happen because the Democratic left holds the commanding heights of politics now—traditional and social media, whose combined powers of candidate intimidation (as CNN’s climate groupthink proved) seem impossible to overcome. Building out from this “base,” the Democratic left thinks it has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to win the presidency.

Or, alternatively, Trump might be re-elected. Feel lucky, punk? The key problem is that the non-“normal” Democratic presidential candidates do not share the views of the voters of the Democratic electorate but of the progressive wing of the Democratic electorate which is less than half. And Democrats are presently around 30% of the total electorate.

The non-“normal” Democratic presidential candidates do represent the views of the supportive media outlets which means that it’s very difficult for that message to get out. The assumption is that every prospective Democratic voter hates Trump as much they do.

Pointing to President Trump’s low approval rating is meaningless. People can disapprove of him yet vote for him anyway if the alternative is bad enough.

At Foreign Policy Daniel Byman observes that his students had not been born when the attacks on 9/11 took place and presents a fair backgrounder on the attacks. Here’s his conclusion:

Under current U.S. President Donald Trump, students find it hard to understand the idea that a terrorist attack might bring people together.Under current U.S. President Donald Trump, students find it hard to understand the idea that a terrorist attack might bring people together. After all, Trump used the Orlando attack as an excuse to blast a “dysfunctional immigration system” and an “incompetent administration.” Right-wing terrorist attacks and white supremacist gatherings during his tenure have led him to talk about gun rights and the “very fine people” involved rather than bringing Americans together.

Today’s students also lack a sense of historical perspective. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was an average of more than one airplane hijacking per week globally, and those two decades saw hundreds of bombings in the United States by groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Weather Underground. Indeed, on U.S. soil, both terrorist incidents and fatalities are down in the post-9/11 era compared with the years before.

I think the post-9/11 sense of national unity is greatly exaggerated. After all, the New York Times was back to publishing anti-Bush editorials by Thanksgiving 2001 and did so regularly for the rest of his presidency.

One thing I find missing from Dr. Byman’s account is that prior to 9/11 we had troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. That’s a pretty significant omission given that was the stated grievance that spurred the attacks.

I also think he skips a lot in dismissing the connection between Al Qaeda and DAESH. As I understand it DAESH was a splinter group from Al Qaeda in Iraq that disagreed with the main organization over when the caliphate should be declared.

I think one thing we can conclude from John Bolton’s peremptory exit from the Trump Administration is that Trump values loyalty (defined as agreeing with him and otherwise keeping your mouth shut). Every president of my lifetime has fit Alice Roosevelt’s famous characterization of her father, Teddy:

My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.

and Trump more than most.

I see that Thomas Edsall is coming to see black voters more as I do. From his New York Times column:

The African-American electorate has been undergoing a quiet, long-term transformation, moving from the left toward the center on several social and cultural issues, while remaining decisively liberal, even radical, on economic issues, according to a series of studies by prominent African-American scholars.

“There has been a shift in the attitudes of black masses about the extent to which systematic discrimination and prejudice are the primary reasons blacks continue to lag behind whites,” Candis Watts Smith, a political scientist at Penn State, wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Black Studies in 2014, “Shifting From Structural to Individual Attributions of Black Disadvantage: Age, Period and Cohort Effects on Black Explanations of Racial Disparities.”

Smith argues that older black Americans with deeply ingrained memories of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s have been joined by a younger generation, with the result that

African Americans’ attention has increasingly shifted from structural reasons of black disadvantage (e.g., systematic discrimination in the job or housing markets) to individual-based explanations (e.g., lack of individual motivation; oppositional attitudes to school and learning) of these disparities, especially in the post — civil rights era.

I don’t encounter young black Americans as frequently as I used to but middle-aged and elderly blacks are a lot more socially conservative than you might conclude if you get your information from the major news outlets. And, based on the times I’ve served with blacks on juries, they not only believe in law and order, they believe in punishment. Much more than I do I should say.

In the recent Chicago mayoral primary elections black voters voted for the most conservative candidate running. Lori Lightfoot didn’t get elected by blacks. Her primary supporters were whites living on the Northwest Side. And Toni Preckwinkle didn’t even carry her own ward in the general election.

I’m surprised at his figure that blacks comprise 25% of Democratic primary voters. I would think it was a lot higher. Maybe it’s just a lot higher here. Whatever their numbers or percentage middle-aged and elderly black voters do register and vote, much more regularly and faithfully than their white counterparts in my experience.

Democrats ignore them at their own risk but that’s become a very bad habit. Judging by the polling information more blacks support Joe Biden than they do either of the black (or at least notionally black) candidates running for president. Maybe that’s name recognition. Maybe it’s because of his association with Barack Obama. I think it’s because he’s seen as a more centrist candidate than Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren and they think he can win.

As has been mentioned on many networks, in newspapers, and on blogs, today is the anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. I don’t care to dwell on it but I do have a couple of points to make.

First, whatever others say we did not overreact to the attacks. If anything we underreacted. I think we did misreact and have said so ever since.

Second, all of the critical success factors behind the attacks are still in place with one exception: passivity. I’m not as convinced as some are that’s dispositive. Other than that we’ve changed very little. Oh sure, our travel is made incredibly inconvenient by security theater, clearly intended to convince Americans that we’re doing something. As I said that’s theater. How do I know? For a year and a half after 9/11 I traveled without hindrance with a boxcutter in my bag that I didn’t even realize was there. So much for security.