Category Archives: The Sifted Bookshelf

book reviews

The Sifted Bookshelf: Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds

July 18, 2011 – 11:29 am

In one memorable scene from The Matrix, a boy apparently bends a spoon with his mind, and then gives Neo advice on how it’s done: by realizing that there is no spoon.

At first “there is no spoon” sounds like mystic mumbo-jumbo, but eventually you come to understand that it is literally true: The world the boy and Neo share is a computer simulation, and the apparent spoon is just a pattern of data. If you believe it is a solid object, you expect it to obey physical laws and not bend. But if it is a pattern of data, why couldn’t it be a different pattern of data — a bent spoon — instead?

As you watched that scene, you may not have realized you were learning about economics, but you were. If you need that idea spelled out more clearly (as I did) you should read a down-to-earth little book that is available for free on the internet: The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy by Warren Mosler. (Don’t let the blank first page confuse you. Keep scrolling.)

The deadly frauds, which very serious pundits and politicans tell you every day (innocently, because they don’t know any better) are:

  1. The government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.
  2. With government deficits, we are leaving our debt burden to our children.
  3. Government budget deficits take away savings.
  4. Social Security is broken.
  5. The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes away jobs and output.
  6. We need savings to provide the funds for investment.
  7. It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher taxes tomorrow.

Now, chances are all seven of those seem like common sense to you, just as the spoon looked very solidly spoonlike to Neo. What people have trouble grasping, Mosler explains, is what dollars are: Dollars are numbers on a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve. Dollars are a pattern of data, and (like Neo’s spoon) could just as easily be a different pattern of data.

When, for example, the government pays my Dad’s monthly Social Security benefit, the Fed just increases the balance in the account of Dad’s bank. No object of any real-world value moves or changes.

Where else do we see this happen? Your team kicks a field goal and on the scoreboard, the score changes from, say, 7 points to 10 points. Does anyone wonder where the stadium got those three points? … Do you think all bowling alleys and football stadiums should have a “reserve of points” in a “lock box” to make sure you can get the points you have scored? …

Just keep this in mind as a starting point: The federal government doesn’t ever “have” or “not have” any dollars. It’s just like the stadium, which doesn’t “have” or “not have” a hoard of points to give out. When it comes to the dollar, our government, working through its Federal agencies, the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department, is the score keeper.

Not bankrupt. So Mosler immediately discards any notion that the U. S. government might “go broke”. Paying interest or redeeming a bond means changing the numbers in the spreadsheet, not coming up with real assets that are conserved by physical laws.

Ditto for parts of the government going bankrupt. If the Social Security Trust Fund “runs out”, that just means that the corresponding entry in the spreadsheet is zero and about to go negative, not that some real cupboard is now bare.

Taxes and inflation. The purpose of taxing is not to acquire assets that the government needs to fund its programs (because the government never has or doesn’t have any dollars). It is to take dollars out of circulation so that they don’t cause inflation.

Inflation happens when the real economy isn’t able to produce enough goods to satisfy all the people who have money to spend. So consumers bid up the price of scarce goods and businesses bid up the wages of scarce workers.

Seen any scarcities of goods or workers lately? There are occasional bottlenecks (like gasoline), but in general the economy has plenty of room to produce more goods to cover more dollars. There is no good reason not to create those dollars so that more people can work and spend.

What about saddling future generations with government debt? Again, the problem is our mis-framing of what money and debt means: Everything produced in the future will be consumed in the future, not sent back in time to pay for our spending today.

Some day it will be our children changing numbers on what will be their spreadsheet, just as seamlessly as we did, and our parents did, though hopefully with a better understanding!

There are many more quotable passages, but I’ll limit myself to this one, where Mosler answers the people who think that we need to change Social Security because the worker-to-retiree ratio is shrinking.

Let’s look at it this way: 50 years from now when there is one person left working and 300 million retired people (I exaggerate to make the point), that guy is going to be pretty busy since he’ll have to grow all the food, build and maintain all the buildings, do the laundry, take care of all medical needs, produce the TV shows, etc. etc. etc. What we need to do is make sure that those 300 million retired people have the funds to pay him??? I don’t think so! This problem obviously isn’t about money.

Mosler’s book falls into three parts: the explanation of the seven frauds (56 easy-to-read pages), the story of his career as a banker and fund manager (entertaining if you like business stories, but not necessary to get the point), and his prescription for the economy (which I’ll cover next week).

Another common-sense story that explains money-supply issues is Paul Krugman’s 1998 article about a baby-sitting co-op whose “money” consisted of coupons the participating parents traded when they baby-sat for each other.

Now what happened in the Sweeneys’ co-op was that, for complicated reasons involving the collection and use of dues (paid in scrip), the number of coupons in circulation became quite low. As a result, most couples were anxious to add to their reserves by baby-sitting, reluctant to run them down by going out. But one couple’s decision to go out was another’s chance to baby-sit; so it became difficult to earn coupons. Knowing this, couples became even more reluctant to use their reserves except on special occasions, reducing baby-sitting opportunities still further.

In short, the co-op had fallen into a recession.

They got out of the recession by printing and distributing more coupons, which worked because their “economy” was willing and able to produce more nights-out and more hours of babysitting.

A related discussion this week has concerned a novel solution to the debt-ceiling “crisis”. The Pragmatic Capitalism blog claims that the Treasury, which unlike the Fed is completely under the President’s control, has unlimited authority to produce palladium coins. Treasury could strike a small coin, stamp $1 trillion on it, and use it to redeem $1 T worth of bonds, thereby creating $1 T of space under the debt ceiling.

Independent of whether this is good economic policy, it completely avoids the current hostage situation. Even skeptics like Matt Yglesias are coming to believe that this would work.

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Wolf Liberation

October 18, 2010 – 2:12 pm

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

— Isaiah Berlin

In this week’s Sift:

  • What Money Buys. The flood of special-interest money coming into our political process doesn’t just buy ads. It buys whole movements.
  • The Sift Bookshelf: Merchants of Doubt. A new book looks at the small group of scientists who have spear-headed most of the science-obfuscating crusades of the last few decades, from secondhand smoke to global warming.
  • Short Notes. Not even Fox can get a straight answer out of Carly Fiorina. Diagnosing God. Cancer-free mummies. Corporate privacy rights. Why the Chilean miners might not thank free-market capitalism for their rescue. And gay-bashing at the Washington Post.
What Money Buys

The Democrats are trying to make a late issue out of the anonymous money flowing from corporations and billionaires (and even foreign countries) to front groups that support Republican candidates. I think it’s an important issue; I’ve been banging that drum myself longer than most people. (Rachel Maddow’s takedown of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Thursday was excellent. The Chamber takes donations from foreign corporations, supports American corporations sending jobs overseas, and then spends $75 million on ads that blame Democrats for killing jobs.)

While this problem is starting to get some attention, I still don’t think many people understand what outside money buys in politics. Of course it buys ads — something like half a billion dollars worth of ads this year, according to McClatchey Newspapers. But even that doesn’t capture the problem, because you can watch a lot of “Jones is a schmuck; vote for Smith” ads and still blacken the oval for Jones. No amount of advertising, for example, is going to make Delaware put Christine O’Donnell in the Senate. (She trails by 15-20% in all the recent polls.)

But well-organized money buys something more sinister: control of the public narrative. For example, we all know the narrative that the Tea Party has put forward since it first hit the headlines in Spring, 2009: The policies Obama implemented when he took office were so shockingly radical and leftist that crowds of ordinary Americans — mostly independents who had never identified with one party or the other — spontaneously found themselves organizing to protest.

Pretty much every part of that story is false. You want to know where the Tea Party folks were in 2008? Check out this video of people waiting to get into a Sarah Palin rally in Ohio or Pennsylvania, or this McCain rally in Denver, or Ohio again. It’s the same people — white, mostly over 50, angry — saying the same things: Obama’s a communist, a terrorist, a Muslim, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”. They have the same insensitivity to racial symbolism. Blur out the McCain signs and you would never know these videos are two years old. It’s the Tea Party.

So the Tea Party is continuous with disgruntled McCain voters, particularly the ones energized by Sarah Palin. They were never independent; they backed a candidate who lost by a wide margin. They are not typical, mainstream Americans; the candidate who most energized them appears to have had an unusually large negative effect on her ticket in 2008. (Post-election academic research indicates that Palin cost McCain about 2% of the vote; most VP candidates have almost no net effect on the final vote. And a poll taken this month indicates that only 44% of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, with her national favorability rating at 22% — about half the size of Obama’s.)

Tea Partiers were not shocked into action by the agenda Obama implemented when he took office. The videos show that they had the same opinion of him before he was elected. And what are these shocking leftist policies? A health-care reform bill that resembles Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts, a climate-change bill similar to one John McCain sponsored in 2003 and was still supporting when I saw him campaign in New Hampshire in late 2007, implementation of George W. Bush’s TARP plan. He has continued Bush’s wars and started no new ones. The U.S. has suffered no major terrorist attacks or serious foreign policies reverses on his watch. (By this time in the Bush administration, 9-11 had already happened.) In short, Obama has governed as a moderate Democrat. His agenda has been a compromise between the Democratic platform and policies continued from the Bush administration.

Then we come to the “spontaneously organized” claim. No one denies that the people who show up for Tea Party rallies are a voluntary and enthusiastic audience. But they are and always have been an audience for a show written and performed by someone else. The right comparison is not the Boston Tea Party, it’s the Rocky Horror Picture Show: Dress up in funny costumes, make a lot of noise, act out when you get your cues — but only in your imagination are you part of the movie.

The Tea Party has never been a bottom-up, pass-the-hat movement. From the beginning, the tab has been picked up by corporations and billionaires. Incalculable amounts of free advertising and organizing has been supplied by Fox News, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation. National organizing and messaging, as well as education of local organizers, has been the job of corporate funded lobbying groups like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity.

That’s what money will buy you: A disgruntled lunatic fringe of sore losers from one election can be turned into the driving story of the next election. And that story can shut down entire avenues of public discussion: We’re not talking about the gap between rich and poor, doing something about global warming, trying to get health coverage for the people who still fall through the cracks of the new bill, ending the Afghan War, or any similar issue — even though there are as many or more Americans who care about those issues as their are Tea Partiers.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s ads are all the more effective because many people confuse the U.S. Chamber, which is dominated by mega-corporations, with their local shops-on-Main-Street Chamber of Commerce. The two often have no connection at all.

Sunday, my local newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, reported that the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Hudson is not going to be renewing its membership in the U.S. Chamber because it wants to stay non-partisan. The Nashua Chamber hasn’t had a national membership “for many years.”

Tim Wise’s essay came out last summer, but the question is still worth asking: What if the Tea Party were black? The music video is pretty good too.

The Sift Bookshelf: Merchants of Doubt

Last year I told you about the book Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels. Michaels was writing about what corporations do when they face one of those unfortunate situations that sometimes come up in a modern economy: They discover that one of their major sources of profit is killing people — workers, customers, the people who live downstream from the factory, or somebody like that.

Now, when you imagine being in that boardroom yourself, you probably think something foolish, like: “Let’s stop killing people. We can shut down the factory, pull the product off the shelves, and warn everybody involved that they need to see a doctor right away.”

Whoa, there, Galahad. Don’t go all Mother Theresa on us. We’re talking about money here. Profits. Don’t be selfish and give the company away just to stroke your over-pampered conscience. We’ve got a moral obligation to our stockholders to keep those profits flowing as long as we possibly can.

And there’s a way. The tobacco industry blazed a trail, and now there’s a whole industry of PR firms and think tanks and “research” institutes that will obfuscate any issue you want. They’ll get “scientists” to say that the case against your product is still controversial. And that looks fabulous on TV, because it forces the real scientists to argue that there’s not really an argument. (They look so arrogant when they do that. The viewers have just seen somebody with a Ph.D. take the other side. And then some guy who’s spent his whole life in a laboratory and never appeared on TV before tries to tell them that the scientific debate is over and it’s time for action. It’s like, “Don’t believe your lying eyes. The debate is over when I say it’s over.”)

No matter how bad your product is — it can’t be worse than asbestos, can it? — you can argue that more research is needed to resolve the “controversy” before the government regulates anything. Then your lobbyists can get those regulations watered down before they go into effect, and if somebody tries to put teeth into the regulations later, it starts the whole cycle again: Your “scientists” say that the toothless regulations solved the problem, and where’s the proof that they’re wrong? It’s a whole new “controversy”.

This game can go on for half a century or more. And maybe someday the heirs of the people you killed will end up winning a lawsuit and owning a big chunk of the company — that’s what happened in asbestos — but it probably won’t come to that, and in the meantime the company has paid decades of dividends and executive salaries. Nobody’s ever going to get that money back.

See, that’s how it’s done. Now don’t you feel silly for making that stupid suggestion that we should just stop killing people? Don’t be such a baby next time.

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway tells a different piece of the same story. Michaels is a government guy (currently an assistant secretary of labor), so his book focuses on the regulatory process and the industry designed to manipulate and defeat it. Oreskes and Conway are historians who specialize in the history of science and technology, so Merchants is more about the scientific community and the handful of scientists who work to subvert it.

By following the PR firms, Michaels’ trip goes from one product-liability issue to the next: tobacco, asbestos, leaded gasoline, and so on up to my favorite chapter where Republicans unite in the Senate to defeat regulation of a deadly additive for making butter-flavored microwave popcorn. (Clearly the economy would collapse if we had to do without butter-flavored microwave popcorn.)

Oreskes and Conway follow a handful of industry-shill scientists through a somewhat different path that starts in defense, and then goes from tobacco through a series of public debates that are mostly environmental: nuclear winter, acid rain, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the ozone hole, secondhand smoke, global warming, and finally the posthumous smear of environmental pioneer Rachel Carson.

The tactics evolve and get darker as time goes by. What begins as an attempt to blow smoke (so to speak) about the tobacco-and-cancer link ultimately becomes an all-out assault on the integrity of science. Decades ago, anti-tobacco scientists were mainly portrayed as over-zealous — too quick to claim certainty when the science wasn’t 100% clear. Today’s climate scientists, however, are smeared as evil: They are supposedly part of a sinister conspiracy that aims to take control of the world economy via a scientific hoax about global warming. The scientific community as a whole is routinely portrayed as a special interest — not people trying to solve problems and find truth, but conspiring to gain power and influence for their (mainly socialist) political views.

The mystery is why legitimate scientists (and the people Oreskes and Conway track were almost all legit at one time) would get involved in this.The corporate money and the attention you can get by being in the middle of a public debate would be enough motivation for some people, but that’s not the conclusion Oreskes and Conway come to. They tell the story this way:

Why did this group of Cold Warriors turn against the very science to which they had previously dedicated their lives? … they were working to “secure the blessings of liberty”. If science was being used against those blessings — in ways that challenged the freedom of free enterprise — then they would fight it as they would fight any enemy. … Each of the environmental threats we’ve discussed in this book was a market failure, a domain in the which the free market had created serious “neighborhood” effects. … To address them, governments would have to step in with regulations, in some case very significant ones, to remedy the market failure. And this was precisely what these men most feared and loathed, for they viewed regulation as the slippery slope to Socialism, a form of creeping Communism.

Sadly, what is being defended here is wolf-freedom, not lamb-freedom. It’s freedom to be a predator and do damage rather than freedom to romp through the unblemished fields, breathe clean air, and drink from the lake with confidence.

To me, the nuclear winter debate seems pivotal. Scientists had been involved in liberal causes before — Linus Pauling, for example, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 by organizing scientists around the world to push for a nuclear test-ban treaty. But never before had a scientific argument been so central to the issue. If the nuclear winter hypothesis is true, winning a nuclear war is impossible because winners and losers alike will be swept up in the global environmental catastrophe that follows.

That issue was a bridge from defense issues to environmental issues. The political sides that formed there were ready to take up the ozone hole and other subsequent environmental issues.

By today, the attack on science and the scientific community has become a common cause uniting the various factions of the political Right. Christian groups are pushing a variety of pseudo-scientific causes, from creationism to the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education to abortion as a cause of breast cancer. Libertarians will argue against the existence of any global environmental problem, because such problems have no free-market solutions. And of course corporations will fund bogus institutes and journals to “prove” that their products are not really killing people. Anti-science fits in well with the Tea Party crusade against “elitism” — where the “elite” are not the billionaires or the bankers, they’re the people who know things you wouldn’t understand.

And that, I think, is going to be the hardest nut to crack. Expertise by its nature is anti-democratic. On scientific issues, the opinions that should matter are the opinions of the scientists who have spent their careers working on this stuff — and they are a mostly self-selected and self-validating group. A high-tech society can only survive as a democracy if the people are able to figure out which experts to trust. And that’s getting harder and harder to do as the techniques of obfuscation get better developed and better financed.

You’ve probably heard the claim that global warming might just be due to the Sun rather than anything humans have done. The Sun might be hotter for some reason like the sunspot cycle or something.

It turns out that was all studied and resolved about 15 years ago. It turns out the Earth would be warming differently if the Sun were the cause. If the Sun were the cause, all the layers of the atmosphere would be heating up as the solar energy passed through them on its way to us. But if greenhouse gases cause warming by trapping heat in the lower levels of the atmosphere, then the lower levels of the atmosphere should be warming while the upper levels are cooling.

That’s what’s happening: the lower levels of the atmosphere are warming while the upper layers are cooling. So we know — and have known for 15 years — that the cause of global warming is not the Sun. (Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know this; I didn’t either until I read the first chapter of this book.)

This is a common pattern, something to watch out for. When somebody claims that they have an explanation that the scientific community refuses to consider, often it turns out that the scientific community had this conversation a long time ago and it’s over now. The biggest example of that type is the creation/evolution “controversy”. It’s not that scientists rejected creationism out of hand. The creation/evolution question was a scientific controversy in the 19th century, but evolution won that argument more than 100 years ago and there has been no scientific reason to reopen the discussion since then.

Short Notes

Sometimes candidates are so evasive that even Fox News people start to act like journalists. Here, Chris Wallace gets frustrated that he can’t get a straight answer from Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina about where to find the spending cuts to balance extending the Bush tax cuts.

How did I not notice this myself? The Onion News Network reports that God has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It explains so much.

A study of Egyptian mummies shows that cancer was almost non-existent in ancient Egypt. Dr. Michael Zimmerman of the University of Manchester (UK) concludes:

The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialisation.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explains how privacy rights are decreasing for people but increasing for corporations:

It used to be the case that embarrassment, harassment, and stigma were the best check against corporate wrongdoing. But that was before corporations had feelings.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger announced: “The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.”

Seriously? His reasoning, such as it is, is that the miners were rescued using cool new equipment developed and built by for-profit companies. In the parallel regulated-capitalism universe, we all know, there is no technological change or quality manufacturing. And government could never have invented anything as high-tech as the Internet or space travel or nuclear power, so specialized drill bits are out of the question.

Bill Black of New Deal 2.0 gives the obvious counter-argument: Free-market capitalism is why those miners were down there needing rescue in the first place.

A $25 ladder apparently would have prevented the tragedy, but the private owners’ profit motive led them to avoid that expense.

The Washington Post hits a new low. It’s “On Faith” feature gives a platform for Family Research Council President Tony Perkins to spew misinformation about homosexuality. Media Matters responds.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Help me figure out what to do with the Sift’s Facebook page.

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Evolving Traditions

August 9, 2010 – 11:08 am

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. … The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children.

–– Sir William Blackstone
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769)

In this week’s Sift:

  • Proposition 8 is Unconstitutional. The trial record may be as important as the ruling. If same-sex-marriage opponents think there’s so much “evidence” supporting their position, why didn’t they present any?
  • The Sift Bookshelf: The Living Constitution. An easy-to-read new book explains how interpretations of the Constitution legitimately change with time.
  • Ground Zero Mosque, Part II. “Opposing” the mosque can mean two very different things, but not many mosque opponents are making the distinction clear.
  • Short Notes. What Fox thinks of the 14th Amendment. China takes on bold new infrastructure projects, while we let things fall apart. Superman saves a home in the real world. A suggestion for protesting the Tea Party. Civil disobedience in Arizona. And where you can hear me next Sunday.
Proposition 8 is Unconstitutional

Every few months, it seems, the saga of same-sex marriage in California takes another twist or turn. Since the voters passed Proposition 22 ten years ago, there have been votes by the legislature, vetoes by the governor, civil disobedience by the City of San Francisco, a second referendum passing a constitutional amendment, and countless trips up and down the state court system.

By May, 2009, things had gone as far as they could at the state level: The voters had passed Proposition 8, which wrote one-man-one-woman into the state constitution, and the California Supreme Court had recognized its validity (while still upholding the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed prior to Prop 8).

At that point a liberal/conservative all-star team of lawyers decided to take the argument federal. Ted Olson and David Boies, who had been the opposing lawyers in Bush v. Gore, filed suit in federal court to have Prop 8 declared unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws” and “due process of law” to everyone.

Wednesday they succeeded in their first step: Judge Vaughn Walker declared Prop 8 unconstitutional. (Judge Walker’s ruling is long, but easy to read.)

As I explained last month after the Defense of Marriage Act was declared unconstitutional, just about all same-sex-marriage decisions hang on the same question: Laws that treat one group of people differently from another have to pass the rational basis test, which asks whether the law is “rationally related to furthering a legitimate government interest”. Can a law banning same-sex marriage pass that test? What legitimate government interest is furthered by treating same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex couples?

This is why court decisions often come out differently than referenda: Voters don’t have to answer that question. As Judge Walker put it:

The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose.

The secular logic of Prop 8 hangs on some real-world questions about the institution of marriage, its effects on children, the nature of homosexuality, and so on. So Judge Walker held a trial to gather testimony on those issues.

Evidence-based knowledge vs. faith-based knowledge. Boies and Olson called a series of expert witnesses: historians to describe the long-term evolution in American marriage laws (allowing wives to own property, allowing interracial marriage, etc.) and the history of discrimination against homosexuals; demographers to compare same-sex couples to opposite-sex couples (they’re not that different); economists to assess the impact of Prop 8 on the City of San Francisco (negative) and on same-sex couples and their children (also negative); social scientists to assess the affects of social stigma on gays and lesbians (bad), the impact of seven years of same-sex marriage on family issues in Massachusetts (negligible), and how children raised by same-sex couples compare to those raised by opposite-sex couples (not much difference); psychologists to discuss whether therapy can change a person’s sexual orientation (it can’t) and whether same-sex couples receive the same psychological benefits from marriage as opposite-sex couples (they do), and so on.

In other words, every question a reasonable person would ask about the impact of Prop 8 was answered by a professor of some relevant subject with peer-reviewed publications in the field, who cited actual research on the topic.

The defenders of Prop 8 did nothing of the kind. (The name of the case is Perry v. Schwarzenegger, but although California officials like Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown were named in the suit, they wanted no part of defending Prop 8. So the job passed to the people who got Prop 8 on the ballot in the first place.) They announced a number of expert witnesses, but only called two of them to the stand — neither of whom was actually in expert in what he was testifying about, and one of whom, David Blankenhorn, doesn’t seem to be an expert in much of anything. (This section of Judge Walker’s opinion is a good primer on the legal definition of expert witness.) Rachel Maddow spent an entire segment of her show Wednesday making fun of Blankenhorn’s “expertise”.

WaPo’s Jonathan Capehart commented:

if I were the conservatives I would troop back into court — and sue the pro-Prop 8 attorneys for malpractice.

Here’s an example from Judge Walker’s decison:

At oral argument on proponents’ motion for summary judgment, the court posed to proponents’ counsel the assumption that “the state’s interest in marriage is procreative” and inquired how permitting same-sex marriage impairs or adversely affects that interest. Counsel replied that the inquiry was “not the legally relevant question,” but when pressed for an answer, counsel replied: “Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”

The impression the trial leaves — and this may have political implications even if the ruling is overturned by the Supreme Court — is that the logic of banning same-sex marriage is all 30-second sound bites and won’t stand up to scrutiny. The Religious Right may claim that there is massive evidence ( James Dobson has claimed “more than ten thousand studies“) relating same-sex marriage to dire outcomes for society, but when they had a chance to present their evidence in court, they folded.

As David Boies said on Face the Nation (in response to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council):

It’s easy to sit around and … cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do. … But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence, there weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science. It’s easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court you can’t do that.

This case may affect the overall national discussion in the same way that the Dover intelligent design case did. After a court show-down in which one side has no real evidence to present, it’s hard for the media to go back to he-said-she-said coverage.

Marriage evolution. Testimony from the historians dismantled another standard talking point: That marriage has been one thing for thousands of years and now gay activists want to change it to something else.

To the extent that the phrase traditional marriage means anything at all, it refers to the kind of relationship this week’s Sift quote describes: domination of the wife by the husband. Through all of American history marriage has been slowly evolving away from that: allowing wives to own property; letting them sign contracts and accept employment without their husbands’ approval; protecting against domestic violence; recognizing marital rape; and so on.

As a result of that evolution, marriage laws no longer enforce separate gender roles. So the gender-specific titles of husband and wife no longer correspond to any legal rights or responsibilities not included in spouse.

Without that evolution — in the 18th-century world of Blackstone’s Commentaries — Prop 8 proponents would be right: Same-sex marriage makes no sense if the law requires a dominant male husband and a submissive female wife; two men or two women can’t do it.

But in marriage as it stands today (and how many people would really want to go back?) two men or two women can fulfill the legal roles of spouses as well as opposite-sex couples do. Laws that prevent them from doing so are relics of a system whose underlying logic was abandoned decades ago.

Impact. Ultimately this is headed for the Supreme Court, where (as Dahlia Lithwick explains) the case will be decided by Justice Kennedy, the Court’s swing vote.

If the Supreme Court reverses Judge Walker, the impact of would not be as great as some people seem to think. It would be harder for a future Supreme Court to find protection for same-sex marriage in the 14th amendment, but state legislatures could still recognize same-sex marriage and state courts could still find a same-sex couple’s right to marry in their state constitutions.

Rather than take on the evidence, most “family values” spokesmen attacked the judge: He’s gay. And all those professors of whatever who testified? They’re gay too. What more do you need to know?

While Boies does CBS, Olson is handling Fox.

Stephen Colbert sees Judge Walker’s decision as “Arma-gay-ddon“.

Humorist Andy Borowitz explains why most marriages are already gay:

“Soon after marrying, most men stop hitting on women and start shopping for furniture,” Dr. Logsdon said. “Scientifically speaking, how gay is that?”

I’m coming to like NYT’s conservative columnist Ross Douthat even though I seldom agree with him. He consistently offers something genuine to disagree about, and doesn’t just spout nonsense and make stuff up.

The Sift Bookshelf: The Living Constitution

The Living Constitution by David Strauss is the best popularization of constitutional law I have read. It is short (139 pages of 300-350 words each), readable, and well organized. Best of all, it does something important: debunks the theory of constitutional interpretation that you most commonly run across in the media (originalism) and provides an alternative that makes sense out of what the courts have been doing for the last 200-or-so years.

Let’s start with originalism. This theory says that the Founders had a definite idea in mind when they wrote each line of the Constitution, and that the role of a judge is to ascertain that idea and apply it to the case at hand. There are two problems with originalism: (1) it’s impossible to carry out; and (2) it violates Thomas Jefferson’s principle that the dead should not rule the living. (De-sound-biting that a little: The democratic principle of “the consent of the governed” doesn’t mean much if the consent was given once and for all in 1787.)

Strauss brings home the impossibility of knowing the Founders’ original intent by recalling what Americans went through in the 1970s around the Equal Rights Amendment. (The ERA was passed by Congress in 1972, but fell just short of ratification by 3/4 of the states, so it is not part of the Constitution now.)

If the ERA had passed, originalism would have future judges try to ascertain and apply what the people alive in the 1970s had “intended” by it. That’s laughable to anybody who lived through the 1970s, because to a very large extent we didn’t know. (I remember hearing long arguments about whether the ERA would force all bathrooms to be unisex.) Different people intended different things, and we couldn’t agree on what the ERA would mean even for the situations we could envision, much less situations that might arise in 200 years.

I know the founding generation was supposed to be full of giants, but were they really that much more self-aware than the Americans of 1972?

So, if we admit we can’t always find a well-defined meaning by recreating the mindset of 1787, how are we supposed follow the Constitution? Well, some things are obvious, like a president’s term lasting four years or senators needing to be 30 years old. But how “freedom of the press” applies to the Internet, or exactly what constitutes “abridging the freedom of speech” — now or in 1787 — requires some interpreting. How do we do it?

The defenders of originalism say that the only alternative is anarchy; the law will be whatever the current judge wants it to be, until he’s overruled by some other judge.

Strauss describes the alternative method of common law, a pre-constitutional process we inherit from England. Under common law, a judge considers how similar cases have been decided in the past. And if there’s still wiggle room, s/he resolves it by applying more abstract principles of justice, fairness, and common sense to the facts of the case at hand. For centuries, common law provided a workable legal system even in situations where there was no written law.

Strauss claims that this is in fact what our courts have been doing for the last two centuries: applying the text of the Constitution when it is clear (four-year presidential terms), consulting precedents to interpret provisions that are not clear (abridging freedom of speech), and attempting to resolve the remaining uncertainties with justice, fairness, and common sense.

A written constitution combined with a common-law method of interpretation produces a “living constitution” — one whose meaning evolves from generation to generation.

Strauss’ examples are the best part of the book. He devotes a chapter to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools. Half a century later, everybody likes the Brown decision. But it clearly violated originalism: Hardly anybody who voted for the 14th Amendment in 1868 thought they were voting for desegregation.

On the surface, Brown also violates common law, because it reverses a precedent rather than following it. The key precedent in this case isPlessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 decision saying that the 14th Amendment‘s promise of “the equal protection protection of the laws” can be satisfied by facilities that are “separate but equal”.

Looking deeper, though, Strauss shows that the 1954 Court was not just saying “Our moral values are better than the 1896 Court’s moral values.” He goes through a series of cases between 1896 and 1954 in which the Court tried to make separate-but-equal work. In case after case, it decided that the specific separate arrangements at hand (mostly concerning segregated law schools) were not equal. If you collected all those precedents, it became hard to imagine how to design racially separate facilities that the Court would consider equal.

So when the 1954 Court says that racially separate schools can’t be equal, it isn’t pulling that conclusion out of its own sensitive conscience. Instead, it’s amalgamating the conclusions of many specific cases decided since 1896, and coming up with an interpretive scheme that retroactively explains those decisions better than separate-but-equal did.

That’s how the common-law method works: You stick with an interpretation until the exceptions start to overwhelm the rule, and then you come up with a new interpretation that handles the exceptions better. It’s flexible enough to evolve through accumulated experience, but it’s not open to individual whim.

Ground Zero Mosque, Part II

Since I first wrote about the Ground Zero Mosque two weeks ago, more people and organizations have come out against it — bigots and right-wing extremists, of course, but also people who should know better like the Anti-Defamation League, John McCain, and the Wiesenthal Center.

Their statements all fudge an important issue: When you say you’re “against” the mosque, do you mean “I wish the people building it would reconsider” or do you mean “I want the government to stop them”? The first expresses sympathy for the people who feel insulted by the mosque; the second attacks religious freedom in America and sides with anti-Muslim bigots.

It’s important to be clear about this. Whenever a minority tries to exercise its rights, it’s going to be unpopular. In such a climate, announcing that you oppose their efforts is going to encourage bigotry, even if you claim that’s not your intention and even if you word your statement carefully. The headlines you generate are more important than your precise phrasing. The ADL should know that from its own experience battling anti-Semitism. (Some other Jewish groups have supported the mosque project.)

In response to the ADL’s statement, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria returned an award and honorarium the ADL gave him five years ago.

The poll showing that New Yorkers oppose the mosque fudges the same issue. The question asked was:

Do you support or oppose the proposal to build the Cordoba House, a 15 story Muslim Cultural Center in lower Manhattan 2 blocks from the site of the World Trade Center?

I wonder if you could get the opposite result (“New Yorkers Support Mosque”) by asking Mayor Bloomberg’s question:

Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

Short Notes

It’s striking how much of this Sift revolves around the 14th Amendment, or, as Fox & Friends calls it, “the anchor baby amendment.“

Here’s one way in which China has already replaced the United States as the leader of the world. A few decades ago, if you saw plans for some crazily futuristic public-works project, you knew it had to be in America. Now it has to be in China.

Check this out: Train-car-sized buses that use the same right-of-way as ordinary highways, but they sit up so high that cars drive under them. They’re like rolling overpasses. More artist-conception pictures here. Construction in Beijing is supposed to start later this year.

Meanwhile, our cities are turning off streetlights and breaking up roads because we’re not willing to pay taxes to maintain them.

In the real world, a family home facing foreclosure is not usually considered a job for Superman. Except this one time. A previously unexamined stack of old magazines in the basement turned out to include a copy of Superman’s debut comic, Action #1. It’s expected to bring $250,000 at auction.

Jesus’ General is normally a satirist, but he seems serious about this suggestion: Go to a September 12 Tea Party rally and burn a Confederate flag in protest.

The parts of Arizona’s immigration law that were not thrown out by the courts went into effect July 29. Resistance to the law has also begun.

If you happen to be near Bedford, Massachusetts around 10 a.m. next Sunday morning, come listen to me preach on “Spirituality and the Humanist” at First Parish Church.

 

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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Assumed Conditions

September 7, 2009 – 1:18 pm
NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE SIFT RETURNS SEPTEMBER 21.

In the practice of American and Canadian life insurance companies, asbestos workers are generally declined on account of the assumed health-injurious conditions of the industry. — Frederick L. Hoffman, chief actuary, Prudential Life Insurance Company, 1918

The fibrosis of this disease is irreversible and permanent so that eventually compensation will be paid to each of these men. But, as long as the man is not disabled it is felt that he should not be told of his condition so that he can live and work in peace and the company can benefit by his many years of experience. — Dr. Kenneth W. Smith, medical director, Johns-Manville Corporation, 1949

They told me that his death was due to industrially incurred disease from asbestos particles in the lungs, but my appeal for burial and medical expenses was turned down due to statutes of limitations. — from a letter by a Johns-Manville widow, published in Outrageous Misconduct by Paul Brodeur, 1985

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Doubt Is Their Product by David Michaels. I used to think the tobacco companies were the exception. Now I understand that they’re the model.
  • Can Obama Compromise on Health Care? It sounds simple and obvious to go halfway, but the pieces of health-care reform don’t separate easily.
  • Dick Being Dick. The Cheney Family goes on another Torture Misinformation Tour. Why exactly are we listening to these people?
  • Short Notes. Robbing the low-wage workers. The sad state of economics. Long-running political soap operas. And homeless children in our schools.
The Next Time You’re In the Bookstore …

… look for Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels.

I found this to be a radicalizing book. Each chapter examines a separate example of an industry that knew it was probably killing either its workers or its customers, and how it maneuvered to be allowed to keep on killing them.

What becomes apparent is that this is standard procedure. Sure, nobody creates a product with the idea of killing workers or customers. But if a corporation finds out that either its product or its processes are deadly, there is now an entire industry of firms and consultants that help it “manage” the situation and keep the profits rolling as long as possible — maybe for decades.

The blueprint.The tobacco companies were the trail-blazers, and the path they trod is now well mapped and widely followed:

  1. Hide the data you’ve collected as long as possible. Claim that any internal reports you wrote would reveal your “trade secrets”.
  2. Discourage other people from collecting or publishing data. If you can intimidate or destroy the reputations of the researchers who try, so much the better.
  3. Argue that there is not enough data to justify regulating your product or the process by which you manufacture it.
  4. When independent studies are prove that your product kills people, hire your own scientists to obfuscate the issue. No matter how egregiously they have to abuse scientific method, you can publish their results in “scientific journals” set up by you and other like-minded corporations.
  5. Argue that there is no scientific consensus on the harmfulness of your product. Regulation should be delayed until “conclusive” research is done. Then fight the funding of that research, because there’s not enough evidence to justify an effort to gather evidence.
  6. When regulation becomes inevitable, argue that only the exposure levels that have been proven harmful should be banned. Below that, argue that there might be a “threshold effect”. In fact, no one has ever found a threshold for a carcinogen. If some level of exposure causes cancer in 1 out of every 10 people, a lower level might only cause cancer in 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 10,000. But it still kills people.
  7. Fight every attempt to tighten the initially weak standard you got into the first regulation. Lobby, bribe, threaten — do whatever you have to do to influence Congress and the regulating agency. At every proposed tightening of the standard, start a new round of obfuscation and claim that the science is unclear.
  8. Lobby to diminish or eliminate funding for the agency that enforces the regulations. Uninspected is almost as good as unregulated.
  9. When the jig is up, hide behind the government. You always complied with the regulations — or at least no one can prove you didn’t. And the FDA or EPA (or whoever) could have banned your product, but didn’t. So it’s their fault — you should be immune from liability. The Bush administration actually tried to make this federal policy, in a push known as preemption immunity.

In short, as long as the government can’t assemble (over your constant roadblocks) 100%-conclusive proof that you’re killing people, you shouldn’t be regulated. And as long as no one can prove that you didn’t follow all regulations applicable at the time, you shouldn’t be liable. And if you have trouble carrying out this plan, there are public relations firms that will guide you through it, and other firms that specialize in providing the obfuscating scientific reports you’ll need.

Why they get away with it. The striking thing about this pattern is that the individual steps sound reasonable. And that’s always how you hear them. When some corporate flack on TV claims that his company is being regulated or sued based on flimsy evidence, no one points out that his corporation caused that lack of evidence and has manipulated it to its own advantage.

But when you see the pattern laid out end-to-end, it’s just premeditated murder. Go back and re-read this week’s opening quotes and consider whether Johns-Manville murdered its asbestos workers. They did. Now look at the speech then-Majority Leader Senator Bill Frist gave describing Johns-Manville as a “reputable company” that had been driven into bankruptcy by litigation. (Damn those asbestos-injury lawyers and what President Bush called their “junk lawsuits“.)

Corporations get away with this because the public has been primed to hear their arguments. A very effective propaganda campaign tells us every day that industry is burdened by unreasonable regulations and lawsuits run wild. The discussion you hear in the mainstream media takes for granted that regulation is a drag on our economy.

In fact the opposite is true: American industry is vastly under-regulated, and regulating it effectively would be a huge boon to our economy. Good regulation saves money, because it’s much more cost-effective to stop a Love Canal before it happens than to deal with its effects later.

And what do you think the long-term economic effects of this will be: American children born in the 1990s have higher IQs than children born in the 1970s. Why? Unleaded gasoline. Today’s young people are smarter because they breathed in much less lead while growing up. So if you look into the eyes of your kid or grandkid and see something sparkly looking back, thank government regulation.

Buttered popcorn. For me, the example that brings it all home is in Chapter 10. Most of us know that in the Bad Old Days industries did irresponsible things with heavy metals like lead or mercury or chromium, or with chemicals like dioxin or PCBs. But did you know that until just a couple years ago workers were dying to put the artificial butter flavor into microwave popcorn?

It’s true. The flavoring chemical was diacetyl, and while the FDA had approved it for eating, no one had ever tested what happens when people inhale it. Turns out they get the disease now known as popcorn lung. It was discovered, as most of these things are, by what Michaels calls “the body-in-the-morgue method”: Workers at a popcorn plant in Missouri started getting the same previously rare lung disease. At least one frequent popcorn-eater got it.

The government’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommended setting exposure standards for diacetyl in 2003, but (due either to step-8 underfunding or Bush-administration foot-dragging) OSHA couldn’t get around to it. By 2007 Rep. Lynn Woolsey introduced a bill to force OSHA’s hand. So naturally, the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress rose to protest this bill, using the step-5 “inconclusive research” dodge. During Congressional debate, Rep. Buck McKeon said:

More research currently is underway to determine a connection between diacetyl and this respiratory condition, and I fully support that research moving forward. Until the agency draws any conclusions, however, it is an open question as to whether diacetyl alone is to blame or whether the chemical, in combination with other agents, places workers at risk. … In short, without proper scientific research into this question, I do not see how we can effectively legislate on it.

You see, butter-flavored microwave popcorn is so essential to the American way of life that workers should continue dying until we’re absolutely sure what’s killing them. (The workers would have been much better off if terrorists had been poisoning them rather than their employers. Then the one-percent doctrine would have come into play, and even a small likelihood would have demanded a drastic response.)

Eventually, the popcorn lung story got enough exposure that the major microwave popcorn companies stopped using diacetyl. The impact on the economy seems to have been minimal. (And of course we know the new flavoring is perfectly safe.) But it’s still not illegal, and if you get an obscure popcorn brand, diacetyl might still be in there. Don’t inhale the steam when you open the bag.

Now, in some ways the popcorn workers were lucky. Because the disease that threatened them was so rare and showed up so quickly, not that many of them had to die before people started catching on. But chemicals that just increase the rates of more common diseases are much harder to recognize as dangerous. Probably there are factories whose long-term workers suffer an uncommon number of heart attacks or prostate cancers, and nobody notices.

Or maybe just the company notices.

Can Obama Compromise on Health Care?

On Wednesday, President Obama will give a nationally televised address to Congress about health-care reform. He’s expected to lay out what he wants, and to make a case for it to the nation. Everyone is trying to guess to what extent he’ll accept half a loaf, and if so, where he’ll compromise.

Words like compromise and bipartisan sound good, and suggest that if we only do half the job, it should only cost half as much. But the problem with designing half-way measures is that a lot of health-care reform ideas interlock. So if you just pick a few of them, it’s possible to make things worse, or to create a system that will be so unpopular that the public will never support finishing the job. Let’s go through the major reform ideas and see how they depend on each other.

The main idea.Sick people should get care, and paying for it shouldn’t drive them bankrupt. I wish every Democrat who spoke in public about health-care reform started with that statement. It frames health care in terms of people, and makes it a moral issue.

No pre-existing conditions.If you’re insured for everything but the illness you actually have, you’re not insured. No-pre-existing-conditions is the most popular reform idea. Even Republicans say they’re for it. So if you don’t get this, you don’t have reform at all.

No caps. Another very popular idea, for good reasons. If your insurance policy has a lifetime or annual cap, you’re covered unless you really get sick — then you’re not covered. That’s not insurance.

Mandates. Mandates say that people have to be insured, or somebody — either an employer or the individual — pays a penalty. Nobody likes being told what to do, so this is one of the least popular reforms. But it’s linked to no-pre-existing-conditions like this: If you’re healthy and the law says insurance companies can’t turn you down for being sick, the clever thing to do is to stay uninsured until you get sick. You get most of the benefits of insurance without paying the premiums. If a lot of people do that, then everybody else has to pay whopping premiums to make up for them.

Insurance companies love mandates. (What business wouldn’t love to have the government force people to buy its product?) Hospitals also love mandates, because their administrative costs go down if they can assume that everybody who comes in the door is covered.

Minimum coverage standards.If the law is going to mandate coverage, then it has to define what coverage means. Otherwise bogus insurance companies will sell worthless policies to individuals and employers who are just trying to avoid the mandate penalty. But defining coverage raises a bunch of hot-button issues like abortion.

Cost.Lowering coverage standards is one way to limit costs. A policy can be a lot cheaper if it has a high deductible, high co-pays, and covers broken legs and heart attacks but not mental health or plastic surgery.

Low cost is particularly important if you have a mandate, because you don’t want to force people to buy something they can’t afford. But there’s a trade-off, because a policy with a $2,000 deductible is useless if you don’t have $2,000. If you can’t go to the doctor because the co-pays and deductibles would bankrupt you, you’re not really insured.

Subsidies.No matter how far you lower the cost of coverage, there will be people who can’t pay it. So the government will have to pick up the full cost of insuring the poor, with a sliding subsidy that pays at least part of the cost of insurance for the working class. Otherwise a mandate is too onerous and the program will be wildly unpopular. Or, without a mandate, people will spend their premium-money on something else and gamble that they can stay healthy for the next few months.

Public option. In many parts of the country, health insurance companies are like Coke and Pepsi: There only a handful of them, and they compete on advertising rather than on anything that matters, like price or quality. Now imagine that people are forced to buy their product and government money flows in to pay for it. What a gold mine! They can continue to raise premiums 10-15% a year without improving anything. So costs get out of hand unless there’s real competition, not Coke/Pepsi competition.

Democrats want competition to come from a government-run public option. I never (OK, rarely) hear anybody make this analogy, but the logic is similar to FDR starting the TVA and the rural electric co-ops: Non-profit power companies provided a point of comparison that kept the profit-making power companies honest.

Republicans want to increase competition by tearing down the barriers to interstate competition between private insurance companies. The Republican plan could work, but only under conditions they undoubtedly would not support. Their plan eliminates any protection you get from state regulators, so there would have to be federal regulation at least as strict as the strictest state. And without serious anti-trust enforcement, a merger binge would replace the current local insurance oligopolies with a national oligopoly. Competition, in other words, would be temporary.

Taxes and deficits. Now that the Democrats are in power, deficits matter again. People who didn’t blink at spending a trillion borrowed dollars to take over Iraq are horrified that caring for the sick might cost money. (It’s all in the New Testament you know: “Curse you to hell, for I was hungry and you didn’t feed me. I was naked and you didn’t clothe me. I was an oil-rich Middle Eastern country and you didn’t invade me.”)

Some moderate Democrats have pledged not to vote for a bill that increases the deficit. (Republicans aren’t going to vote for any bill, no matter what’s in it.) In the campaign, Obama talked about reversing the Bush tax cuts for people who make more than $250,000 a year, but any tax increases beyond that would be a huge loss of face for him.

So what can Obama give up to get more support? Not much that I can see. The danger, if you start compromising, is that you wind up forcing people to buy over-priced policies that don’t really cover them, the extra money flows to the insurance companies, and middle-class folks end up paying for it either in high premiums or increased taxes.

That’s not half a loaf, and it would be so unpopular that you’d never be able to go back and get the rest of the loaf. Obama would do better to push through a good bill on a one-vote margin, and trust the results to speak for themselves.

Let me hit the deficit point a little harder: About 3,000 people died in the 9-11 attacks, and that was a reason to spend literally trillions invading Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention homeland security spending. No one asked how we would pay for it; it just had to be done.

Do you know how many American lives we could save if our death-from-treatable-conditions rate got down the level of France? More than 100,000 a year. That’s like preventing a 9-11 disaster every 11 days. What’s that worth to you?

Dick Being Dick

If a recent liberal administration had been as across-the-board disastrous as Bush-Cheney, I doubt we’d be hearing much from its leading players. But for some reason Dick Cheney can get on TV any time he wants to spout new lies and nonsense. And his daughter can too, which is even crazier.

The Cheney family’s latest grand tour concerned the classified memos Dick said would prove that torture worked. Redacted versions of the memos were released, and they did no such thing. So he altered his phrasing:

The documents released Monday, clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.

Ummm, yeah. But the documents pointedly don’t say — and you have to think they would if it were true — that enhanced interrogation got that information out of those individuals. Former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan says that it didn’t. He also brings up the piece of the puzzle everyone else leaves out: What intelligence did torture cost us?

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Defenders always say something like “they kept us safe” (except for that one time) to excuse all the other Bush-Cheney failures: not catching Bin Laden, not winning the wars they started, wrecking our economy, selling out our moral principles, etc. But President Clinton kept us just as safe, if not safer. Maybe Chelsea Clinton should be on all the Sunday talk shows to tell us how he did it.

Short Notes

Happy Labor Day. A new study surveyed thousands of low-wage workers our three biggest cities. They found that underpaid wages, late paychecks, unpaid overtime, and various other abuses were common. “We estimate that 1.1 million workers across the three cities are robbed of $56.4 million every week because of employment and labor law violations.”

Paul Krugman sums up the current state of economics.

Not even a Death Panel can pull the plug on bad political soap operas: Sarah Palin and Rod Blagojevich.

What are the public schools supposed to do with one million homeless pupils? “We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don’t cry.”

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