This image perfectly summarizes Washington.

I’ve written before on the presidential candidates’ positions on trade (and spoke at a forum here on their economic positions more broadly) but the Wall Street Journal has gotten one degree closer to the candidates by getting their advisers to engage in back-and-forth discussions on trade.

The latest entry was a discussion on farm subsidies. John McCain has been a staunch opponent of farm subsidies, never voting for any during his time in Congress. Barack Obama, however, seemed to out aside his general theme of change to support the 2008 Farm Bill, a shameful example of Lobbying 101 and outmoded pork. What caught my eye, though, was this quote from Daniel Tarullo, economic adviser to Senator Obama, when he was asked about a possible change in negotiating strategy on farm subsidies should the failed Doha round ever be revived:

…as a matter of negotiating strategy to advance American interests, it would be self-defeating to indicate to the rest of the world what positions an Obama Administration might or might not take should serious negotiations eventually resume.

Why the secrecy? Does Tarullo not know the answer to the question? Does Obama?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the heroes of the long struggle against Soviet communism, has died at 89. As the New York Times says, he “outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.”

After he came to the United States in 1974 and was free to express himself, we discovered that he was a scathing critic not just of communism but also of capitalism, consumerism, America, modernity, and liberalism. Nevertheless, he is a hero of freedom. After spending more than a decade in the gulag and internal exile, he wrote The Gulag Archipelago and smuggled it out of the Soviet Union so it could be published in the West. He could have been sent back to prison or even executed. What an act of courage and resistance. As it turned out, the Soviet czars didn’t dare to kill or imprison him. They “only” deported him. To some of us, being deported from the Soviet Union might seem like a reward. To Solzhenitsyn, it was not. Just four years earlier, he had declined to travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, lest he not be allowed back into his beloved Russia.

NPR declared this morning that Solzhenitsyn was “in some way as dictatorial as the regime that he criticized.” Really. The rest of us will remember him as an irascible intellectual who for decades told the truth about the totalitarian state that had seized his country.

Before leaving for its August recess last week, Congress saw the introduction of its 10,000th bill. Meanwhile, not a single one of the twelve annual bills that direct the government’s spending priorities in 2009 has passed the Senate and only one has passed the House. Congress is neglecting its basic responsibility to manage the federal government, and is instead churning out new legislation about everything under the sun.

What does Congress occupy itself with? A commemorative postage stamp on the subject of inflammatory bowel disease. Improbable claims of health care for all Americans. And, of course, bringing home pork. Read about it on the Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com blog.

An Alaskan author explains Ted Stevens’ continuing popularity:

In Haines alone, Ted has helped fund our public radio station, new library and Native-run health clinic.

Wrong. As far as I know, Ted Stevens didn’t contribute a dime to any of those projects. (True, some Alaskans helped fund his house, but the reverse isn’t true.) Rather, Stevens was a sort of Bridge to the Taxpayers of the lower 48. We’re the ones who paid for all the projects in oil-rich Alaska, not Ted Stevens.

Just north of D.C., in the small suburb of Berwyn Heights, a county SWAT team raided a house last week after a shipping service delivered a large quantity of illegal drugs to the front door.

Good police work in the war on drugs? Probably not.

The house is home to Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, and their two black Labs (pictured left). Though the package containing more than 30 lbs. of marijuana was addressed to Tomsic, the couple may have had nothing to do with the drugs. In recent months there have been incidents in which large quantities of drugs were shipped to homes in the D.C. area, where they were then supposed to be intercepted by drug dealers — all without the package addressees’ knowledge or involvement. Calvo and Tomsic may have been caught up in just such a scheme.

This would make Calvo and Tomsic the unfortunate victims of an understandable error by the police SWAT team, except…

The police action was yet another guns-ablazin’, no-knock raid, in which the officers (in what seems like SOP) shot the couple’s dogs, even as one of the pups tried to run away. The cops then handcuffed Calvo and his mother-in-law and interrogated them for hours, while the dogs’ bodies laid in pools of blood nearby. The cops later found the package of drugs — unopened, as if it were an unexpected package. No arrests were made.

“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs,” Calvo told the Washington Post. “They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t.”

Of course, it may end up that Calvo and his wife are part of a drug distribution ring, and the police have gotten their man. But even if that’s true, was a no-knock, shoot-the-dogs raid an appropriate police action for a lousy shipment of pot?

And what if the current, emerging picture is correct, and this is yet another botched police raid and cops-gone-wild? If that’s the case (and I emphazie the “if”), the Prince George’s County SWAT team and its superiors need to be held accountable.

Law enforcement officers have a difficult and dangerous job, and I do not make light of that. But their sworn duty is to protect and serve the public, not blast their way into innocent people’s houses and shoot their dogs. If they cannot fulfill that duty, then they cannot be law enforcement officers.

UPDATE (8/6): It turns out that the Prince George’s County police who no-knock raided Calvo and Tomsic’s home did not have a no-knock warrant. The police did have a standard search warrant (which they apparently failed to show to Calvo, as they are supposed to). If that warrant had been executed properly, it is unlikely that Calvo and Tomsic’s dogs would have been killed or their house damaged. Add one more to the long list of botched police raids.

This also raises an interesting question: If this illegal raid had been visited on someone other than a white mayor, would it be receiving the scrutiny it deserves?

A SECOND, MORE TROUBLING UPDATE (8/7) is here.

Governors David A. Paterson of New York and Martin O’Malley of Maryland deplore the federal government’s fiscal irresponsibility:

The Bush administration announced this week that the federal deficit could reach an unprecedented high, $482 billion, next year.

Time to stop spending, eh? That would be most people’s response to an unprecedented deficit. And they do mention “irresponsible spending” later in the piece. But somehow, it appears that the governors thought that was a good lead for an article in the Washington Post demanding more federal spending to subsidize state governments.

They lamented the plight of the state budgets; New York, for instance, asked state agencies “to slash their state budgets by 3.35 percent.” Now, if I had to cut my budget for a new sofa, say, from $1,000 to $966.50, I don’t think I’d call that a “slash”; it’s more like margin of error. And I’d be willing to bet that New York State’s budget wasn’t cut by 3.35 percent from last year’s levels. But maybe it’s a trim of some kinds of state spending. But their point is to demand that taxpayers across America send more money to Washington, which — despite that $482 billion deficit — should take a cut of it and send the rest to America’s governors:

No matter how prudent states are, they cannot solve the nation’s economic problems on their own. The federal government must provide serious leadership and resources and be willing to make difficult short- and long-term decisions to move our country forward.

In the short term, federal officials must pass a second stimulus package that includes investments in our nation’s infrastructure.…

Other short-term stimulus investments should include an additional extension of unemployment insurance and assistance for low-income Americans.

That’s making those difficult decisions in an era of unprecedented deficits!

And then, the final summation:

In the long term, our federal government should examine its fiscal track record from the past several years. We can no longer allow irresponsible spending, chronic underfunding of critical programs and a refusal to partner with state governments to determine the economic future of our country. It is time for fiscal responsibility.

What the heck is this article about? It begins with “an unprecedented deficit,” ends with “irresponsible spending” and “time for fiscal responsibility,” but is in fact simply a demand for huge new federal transfers to state governments. Who wrote this thing? And did the editors read it?