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Pants on Fire

January 4, 2010 – 2:57 pm
President Obama is trying to pretend that we are not at war. … Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. — former Vice President Dick Cheney, December 29, 2009
Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. — President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009
In this week’s Sift:
  • The Zero Decade. For the first time since the Depression, we had a decade with no job growth, and no increases either in median household income or median household net worth. How is that possible? Didn’t we cut taxes, slash regulations, hobble unions, and do everything else in the conservative growth plan?
  • Reacting to the Underpants Bomber. Al Qaeda’s latest star managed to harm nothing beyond his own reproductive prospects. And yet, this supposedly shows that the terrorists have Obama outmatched, and that we need even more draconian procedures to keep us safe. Maybe Dick Cheney’s pants are on fire too.
  • Short Notes. Community banks as an anti-Wall-Street protest. Karl Rove proves that traditional marriage is in trouble.  What makes Garrison Keillor lose his cool? Brit Hume evangelizes Tiger Woods. Bono gives you ten things to think about. And more.
The Zero Decade
Interesting juxtaposition of articles: The New York Times editorialized about what we need to do to avoid a “lost decade” like the Japanese had after their real estate bubble popped in the late 80s, while the Washington Post’s Neil Irwin pointed out that we’ve just finished a lost decade: There’s been no net increase in the number of jobs in this country since 2000. (The article comes with a very good graph.)

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 — and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. … And the net worth of American households — the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts — has also declined when adjusted for inflation

All the decades since the Depression have been very different than this: They all had at least 20% job growth and substantial increases in median income and median net worth.
In part, Irwin acknowledges, this is a statistical anomaly: The decade sandwiched two recessions around a single expansion. But the current recession is very sharp and the expansion (the “Bush Boom”) was anemic — especially if you measure medians rather than averages. (Rich people did quite well during the decade, and their extreme gains pull the averages up, just as Bill Gates raises the average net worth of any crowd he walks into.)
The decade was dominated by bubbles: The Internet bubble popped at the beginning of the decade and the mid-decade expansion was driven by the housing bubble, which popped in 2008. Irwin’s article concludes with economists scratching their heads, trying to learn the lesson that will lead to bubble-free prosperity in the future.
Devilstower on DailyKos is not scratching his head, because he knows exactly what went wrong: During the Naughts, we followed a conservative philosophy that doesn’t work.

this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. Think we should privatize war by handing unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Kiddo, we passed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented — with a side order of Freedom Fries.

… What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world.

It’s important not to forget the bright future that conservatives projected if we cut taxes and regulation: Investors would be motivated to invest productively in new industries that would create new jobs. The people who drive our economy (i.e., the rich) would work harder and more creatively. The benefits would trickle down to everyone.
It didn’t happen, and it never does. When the rich get richer, the rich get richer. That’s the long and short of it.

The point the NYT editorial was making is also worthwhile: If we get overly concerned with the deficit now, the economy could tip right back into recession. Paul Krugman makes the same point in more detail: The housing boom isn’t coming back and consumers are likely to remain wary until after their job prospects perk up. Businesses aren’t likely to make major investments without more evidence that a sustained expansion is starting. So even though we’re likely to get a blip of good economic numbers in the next quarter, if government stimulus fades out this year as expected, the recession is likely to start again.

I wish I heard more long-term vision from Krugman. You can always have short-term growth if somebody is willing to borrow enough money and spend it. Until 2008, middle-class Americans were borrowing and spending their home equity. Now the government is trying to fill the borrow-and-spend role. But sustainable growth requires something else. Where is it going to come from? I understand that this new growth-engine may not appear tomorrow or the next day, and that we need to stave off disaster in the meantime, but which part of the horizon should we be staring at?
Reacting to the Underpants Bomber
I’m sure you heard: On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up Northwestern Flight #253 as it descended towards Detroit. He smuggled chemicals onto the plane in his underwear, but his bomb only managed to ignite rather than explode. Passengers captured him while flight attendants put out the fire. Other than Abdulmutallab himself, there were no major injuries. The plane landed safely.
In a sane world, this event would be seen as a major propaganda coup for the United States. Think about it: You imagine you’re on your way to a glorious martyrdom, but instead of waking up in Heaven surrounded by virgins, you find yourself in an American hospital with painful burns in unmentionable places. Even thinking about those virgins must hurt.
I want Abdulmatallab’s story told in excruciating detail everywhere that young men dream of jihad against the West. All across the Muslim world, I hope that mothers and girl friends are saying, “You keep hanging around with those radicals and you’ll wind up burning your dick off like that Nigerian fool.”
I hope this incident completely dissolves the image of competence that Al Qaeda had after it destroyed the twin towers on 9-11. These guys are going to bring down the Great Satan and restore the Caliphate? They can’t even set their own pants on fire properly.
That’s how sane people would react. Republicans have been responding differently. To them, the attempted underpants-bombing is a disaster comparable to 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina. Janet Napolitano’s “the system worked” is supposedly a gaffe on the scale of “heckuva job, Brownie.” (Let me add this: If the underpants-bombing really is like 9-11, shouldn’t Republicans be rallying around President Obama now the way that Democrats rallied around President Bush then? Just wondering.)
The point man on the Republican criticism of Obama has been Dick Cheney. His statement (issued through Politico’s Mike Allen) contains numerous false assertions like the one I highlighted in the opening quotes. But Politico was founded by veteran Washington Post political reporters, so its mission is not to present facts, but to provide a venue for people like Dick Cheney to issue statements without criticism or follow-up questions. (Like: Wasn’t it your administration that released the Yemenis who supposedly trained the Underpants Bomber? Didn’t your administration try the Shoe Bomber in civilian court — the same thing you’re criticizing Obama for planning to do with the Underpants Bomber?) 
You have to wonder whether Mike Allen had these thoughts and repressed them, or if years of stenography have dulled his journalistic instincts completely. Fortunately, Rachel Maddow does ask questions like this, which is why both Liz and Dick Cheney are afraid to appear on her show, despite numerous invitations.

Charles Krauthammer spreads a related lie: that Obama has “declared the war over.” The Wonk Room rebuts. Matt Yglesias notes that Krauthammer’s column is in both National Review (where publishing lies about Obama is a central part of the mission) and in the Washington Post (where … what?).

It makes you wonder what the Post’s owners and editors think the purpose of the product they’re putting out is. Is it supposed to convey accurate information to readers? If that’s what it’s supposed to be doing, they’re not doing a very good job of it. But what’s more, they don’t even seem to be trying. 

A lot of the Republican criticism has centered on the words President Obama uses rather than any particular thing he has done. In particular, Republicans object to Obama’s reluctance to use the word terrorism. They claim he doesn’t use it at all (which is false), but it is true that Obama says violent extremism in many situations where Bush would have said terrorism. 

I think the administration has done a bad job of explaining this, so let me take a stab: President Bush misused the word terrorist until it broke. Under Bush, terrorist just meant a Muslim I don’t like. That’s how most of the world hears it now.
The dictionary on my desktop widget defines terrorism as: “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” The word would still be viable if the Bushies had consistently used it that way. But when a conservative brought a shotgun into a children’s pageant at a Unitarian church in Knoxville and killed two people because of (as a police report put it) “his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country” — the Bush administration didn’t call that terrorism. Assassinating abortion doctors or trying to blow abortion clinics wasn’t terrorism either.
You had to be a Muslim (or, more recently, a friend of Obama) to be a terrorist. That — along with complete amnesia about 9-11 — was how Dana Perino could say: “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Or how Jeffrey Weiss could claim (and subsequently correct, to his credit, after Glenn Greenwald pointed out that it was just flat false) that “100% of attempted terrorist attacks … since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing have been committed by people claiming to act in the name of Islam.”
The word is tainted now, and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.
There’s been a spirited debate about whether security officials should have known that the Underpants Bomber was dangerous. His father (a Nigerian banker, but apparently not the one who keeps sending me email) had warned the U.S. embassy that his son was involved with Islamic extremists. With the advantage of hindsight, we can now find a number of additional clues about the UB’s intentions. Should the security system have put those clues together and arrested him before he got on the plane? Or would a system capable of doing that create more problems than it solved?
Newsweek does a good job of describing the current system that handles information like the father’s warning. The UB’s name went on a master list of 550,000 names, but wasn’t on the 13,000-name list of people who should get extra screening before they board a plane or the 4,000-name no-fly list. (Other sources claim the number of names on these lists is higher.)
From one point of view this a cumbersome bureaucracy that might let people die while information grinds slowly through its mills. But we also need to think about all the mistakes and abuses this system prevents. We’ve all heard stories about innocent people who are hassled because their name resembles some suspicious person’s. Now imagine that anyone close to you could shut down your travel plans by telling officials that you might be a terrorist. How many angry wives would use such a system to prevent their husbands from flying off to see a mistress? How many controlling parents would use it (or threaten to use it) to keep their adult children from leaving the country?
One lesson we should have learned from the lead-up to the Iraq War (when Dick Cheney established a system to “stovepipe” any raw data that implicated Saddam — circumventing the usual intelligence analysis process that filtered out unreliable reports) is the importance of the distinction between raw data and actionable intelligence. We collect so much raw data that it can imply anything if you cherry-pick it. We need a system in which knowledgeable, unbiased people investigate and make judgments before action is taken. Sometimes, information may not get through the system in time to be useful — but taking action on bad intelligence also leads to horror stories.

Here’s a depressing stat: 58% of Americans want the Underpants Bomber waterboarded. Uh, folks, he confessed already. Unless torturing him is an end in itself, I’m not sure what this is supposed to accomplish.

A retired Air Force general wants to turn our airports into Abu Ghraib: “If you are an 18 to 28-year-old Muslim man then you should be strip searched,” General McInerney said on Fox News. If they’re not terrorists already, they will be.

Former Bush officials who think Obama is doing the right things on terrorism are afraid to say so in public.

Short Notes
Huffington Post is pushing an interesting protest action: Move your money out of the too-big-to-fail banks and into community banks.

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it’s meant to be. 

Daniel De Groot on Open Left puts his finger on why the Right can’t admit global warming is happening: “Denial is the only way to save their worldview.”
OK, I admit I’m highlighting this because it echoes what I said in February:

Global warming became a left/right issue because the right has no answer for it. The market cannot deliver a solution to global warming without governments first constructing a substantial amount of structure (like creating some kind of cap-and-trade system). So if you believe with religious fervor that the market solves all real problems, then global warming can’t be a real problem.

The Swedes are attacking global warming with a foreign aid project to train the natives in Virginia.

Will AIG really suffer a brain drain if we don’t let them pay million-dollar bonuses? Let’s find out.
Karl Rove just divorced his second wife after 24 years of marriage. I guess that proves a point he’s been making for years now: Traditional marriage is in trouble. Glenn Greenwald comments:

If Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their friends and followers actually were required by law to stay married to their wives — the way that “traditional marriage” was generally supposed to work — the movement to have our secular laws conform to “traditional marriage” principles would almost certainly die a quick, quiet and well-deserved death.

Pointing out right-wing hypocrisy and the media’s double standard is shooting fish in a barrel, but this stands out: In 2003, conservatives thought it was almost criminal when one of the Dixie Chicks said in London that she was ashamed to be from the same state as President Bush. Boycotts were organized, and the whole story is told in the movie Shut Up and Sing. Well, Ted Nugent, also in England, told Royal Flush magazine that President Obama is a “communist” who “should be put in jail.” This registered a zero on the outrage meter.

Having listened for years to the calm, understated voice of Garrison Keillor, I have often wondered what it would take to get him to lose his cool. Well, now we know: Unitarians singing unfamiliar lyrics to “Silent Night”. 

As a Unitarian Universalist myself, I thought Cooper Zale’s response was spot on. Zale commiserated with the pain of having your buttons pushed, pointed out where Keillor’s rant had pushed his own buttons, and closed with: “And so, buddy Garrison … I would like to wish you a return to your usual wonderful loving and knowing self, as soon as possible!”
A less charitable but very correct response came from Dan Harper (who I know), writing in his Mr. Crankypants persona. Mr. C points out that the “Silent Night” lyrics in the UU hymnal are not a rewrite (as Keillor charges), they’re a more accurate translation of the German original. The English lyrics Keillor loves are, in fact, the rewrite. (And while we’re on that subject: “O Come All Ye Faithful” is a clumsy translation of “Adeste Fideles”.)
I’ll add this: Garrison, how about showing some gratitude to the Unitarians who wrote “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and “Jingle Bells“?

Surprising fact discovered while researching the previous note: James Pierpont (the Unitarian organist who wrote “Jingle Bells”) was the uncle of John Pierpont Morgan, the banker. (No, Morgan was an Episcopalian.)

Fox News anchor Brit Hume opines that if Tiger Woods wants to “recover as a person” he needs to convert from Buddhism to Christianity. If he does, Hume says, he can “make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.” And get all his endorsements back too, I’ll bet.

Bono’s “ten ideas that might make the next decade more interesting, healthy, or civil” are worth a look. Some are a little fanciful, and you have to bear in mind the Moody Blues’ warning (“I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band“) — but he does give you something to think about.

Ezra Klein asks: 

What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?

That’s what’s happening in California, and is starting to happen nationally. Because it takes a supermajority to get anything done in the legislature (as in the U. S. Senate), the Republican minority can block any proposed solutions to California’s fiscal crisis, and then blame the Democrats supposedly “in power” for the ensuing problems.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Sifting the Sifts of 2009

December 28, 2009 – 9:32 am
Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you. — Satchel Paige
All the 2009 Sift quotes are collected here.
In this week’s Sift:
  • The Theme of the Year: Corporatism. This year I stopped thinking so much about liberals vs. conservatives and started framing the fundamental conflict more as people vs. corporations. That certainly made more sense out of how health care and global warming shook out. It also gives an answer to that frequently asked question: Why can’t our side use the same tactics theirs does?
  • The Sifted Books of 2009. Do you ever find yourself thinking: “I know the Sift reviewed of a book about X, but I can’t find it now.” Here’s the complete list from 2009, with links back to the original articles. Bonuses: Carlos Ruiz Zafon and how my Kindle is working out.
  • Short Notes. I never did figure out Afghanistan. I’m pleasantly surprised by the lack of major right-wing violence. Why history won’t vindicate Bush. The most disappointing thing about Obama. And my growing disappointment with the Washington Post.

The Theme of the Year: Corporatism

Looking back through the year’s Weekly Sifts, one theme pulls everything together: the dark influence of corporations. I’ve never been a big fan of corporate power and its ability to set our country’s agenda, but as the year went on I got more and more radicalized. (The radical turn begins with Pioneers of Corporate Liberation in August.) At the beginning of the year I saw issues through a partisan political lens: I was a liberal and my goal was to battle the distortions that conservatives brought into the national debate. I saw this split as mostly economic: Conservatives represent the rich; liberals represent ordinary people.
Now I think that’s only approximately true. The more important split is that liberals represent people while conservatives represent corporations. The rich tend to side with corporations against the rest of us, but that’s just one of many human fault lines that corporations have managed to exploit. They also take advantage of our racial, religious, and social divisions. Corporations, for example, care not at all about abortion or gay rights — but if politicians who stand for corporate power can use those issues get votes, that’s wonderful for them.
That insight explains so many of the asymmetries in our political debate. Compared to people, corporations are few in number and their interests are simpler, so they are much easier to organize. We the people can only organize in public, through public institutions. So we need a trustworthy and reliable news media. We need that media to report the findings of an unbiased community of scientists and other experts. We need a transparent political process that identifies our common interests, empowers leaders to take action on our behalf, and holds those leaders accountable for their actions. Otherwise, collectively we have a very hard time figuring out what is true and what we can or should do about it.
Corporations don’t need any of that. They hire their own experts to find out the information they need. They strategize behind closed doors. They hire lobbyists to deal directly with politicians and bureaucrats. The more secrecy, the better.
And so corporations don’t need to control public institutions, they just need to make them unreliable. If politics becomes one gang of sleazeballs against another gang of sleazeballs — that’s good for them. If the scientific community obfuscates issues instead of clarifying them — that’s good for them. If the news media just repeats the competing lies of each side, without any attempt to find the truth — that’s good for them. If you wouldn’t trust the media even if it did tell you the truth — that’s even better.
Again and again people ask me: Why can’t our side use the same tricks the other side does? Why did Obama have to fend off scurrilous rumors but McCain didn’t (except when he ran against Bush)? Why can’t we have a propaganda network like Fox News? Why can they raise phony issues like death panels and voter fraud, but we can’t? Why can they threaten to break all the traditions of the Senate, but we can’t? When do we get to swiftboat somebody?
We don’t. If we do, we’ve made a serious mistake, because we need public institutions to work. We need the truth to come out and to be trusted when it does. We need people to trust each other enough to take common action on issues of common concern. The corporations don’t need that, so they can play by a different set of rules.

This year you didn’t have to look very hard to find issues where corporatism was at work. It played a role in everything, as it always does, but it was particularly obvious in health care and climate change.

Health Care. This was an issue just about all year, and I consistently tried to do two things: Assemble real evidence about how bad our health-care system is, and fact-check the incredible stream of lies and nonsense that was put out against the various versions of the health-care bill.
Health-insurance companies, drug companies, and for-profit hospital chains make billions each year from the current system, so it stands to reason that they would put up a fight if those billions seemed endangered. The insurance companies in particular had to worry, because they are basically parasites; they fill a bookkeeping role that (even if they did it well, which they typically don’t) wouldn’t be worth what they’re paid. So there was money aplenty to create reports, influence politicians, fund astroturf groups to organize and publicize protests, and in general influence the public debate in all the ways rich corporations can.
Corporate shills excel in fogging up an issue, so it was rare to hear a clean framing of the problem: Americans who get sick should receive medical care, and they shouldn’t have to go bankrupt paying for it. I kept calling attention to two statistics: Health-care expenses play a role in about a million bankruptcies each year (compared to zero is, say, France), and among people without health insurance there are 45,000 more deaths each year than you would otherwise expect.
I debunked the jingoistic claim that we have the best health-care system in the world by pointing to the large-scale statistics: We spend almost twice as much per person on health care as people in other wealthy countries, and we don’t live as long. But strangely, we do start living as long after we get under Medicare’s umbrella. Our life expectancy after age 65 is not bad. So socialized medicine works. It works in other countries (where people live longer at less cost) and it works here when we try it (Medicare).
In a well-functioning democracy with a people-centered (rather than corporate-centered) news media, we might have had a real debate about expanding Medicare into a single-payer system for everybody. Did we? No. Instead we were bombarded with horror stories about Britain and Canada, whose health-care systems overall are far superior to ours. Again and again, people who thought socialized medicine was evil didn’t realize that Medicare is socialized medicine.
Medicare-for-everybody would leave the health insurance companies with no role, so it was off the table from Day One. The next best idea was a public option, a government-run insurance operation that would compete with private health-care companies the way that the TVA competes with private power companies. The public option consistently polled well, but it got whittled down every time a decision got made, and was finally axed completely to get Joe Lieberman’s vote in the Senate.
On the whole, the health-care package passed by the Senate will cover more people and save lives. But the health insurance companies are winners too, and they win at our expense.
Global Warming. Among climate scientists who are not funded by oil corporations or right-wing think tanks (who get their money from a variety of corporations and billionaires who identify with corporations), these facts are almost universally accepted:
  • The Earth is getting warmer.
  • Increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are the major cause of that warming.
  • Human action — particularly the burning of fossil fuels — is responsible for the build-up of greenhouse gases.
  • The warming process is going to continue.
  • The long-term results could be catastrophic.
But if you’re a fossil-fuel-producing corporation or a fossil-fuel-burning power company, reducing carbon emissions will torpedo billions in future profits. In general, if you are currently sitting on a spigot of money, political and economic change looks more threatening than climate change — and you have that spigot of money to spend to stop it.
So money from corporations like Exxon-Mobil funds “research” by “scientists” who publish in “journals”. All the forms of science are imitated, but it’s not science at all — because the results are dictated by the money, not the data. The “research” is always going to say that global warming is uncertain. (All science is uncertain, especially if you don’t want to believe it. No one can absolutely prove that the laws of the universe won’t be completely different tomorrow morning.) 
And the same money funds political think tanks to say that because global warming is uncertain, nothing should be done yet. And (through advertising) it funds news outlets, so no matter how obvious the information-laundering process is, the media will write he-said/she-said articles quoting a few corporate-shill “scientists” as if they were equal to the larger mass of actual scientists. (Any reporter attempting to determine what is true will be smeared as demonstrating “liberal media bias”.) And it funds politicians who repeat the talking points of think tanks and the media outlets, and vote to do nothing.
Occasionally, this machine may go on offense, as it did when it ginned up the phony “Climategate” scandal just in time to push the Copenhagen talks off the front pages.
I summarized the flaws in some of the major anti-global-warming arguments in February. And I debunked Climategate here and here. But fact-checking and debunking will never be enough, because it only takes a few minutes to make up new misinformation that requires hours of investigation to disprove. As one scientist put it:

At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I’ve seen these kind of claims before, they always turns out to be wrong, and it’s not worth my time to look into it?

Sifted Books of 2009
Near the end of The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon recalls “inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books.” From the beginning, I’ve mentioned new books that were relevant to some current issue, but last year I started an occasional “The Next Time You’re at the Bookstore …” feature to highlight books, new and old, that you might want to read.
Before I list and link to this year’s sifted books, The Shadow of the Wind itself deserves mention. Ruiz Zafon (filed under R) is a Spanish writer whose novels are engaging throwbacks to the 19th century. In the age of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, serious authors could get away with writing larger-than-life characters in larger-than-life plots. Now you either have to be gritty and realistic, ironically over-the-top like Thomas Pynchon, or consign yourself to the lower rank of genre authors like Stephen King or William Gibson. Some of the best  21st-century writers (Michael Chabon, Neal Stephenson) disguised their work as genre novels.
I don’t know what court he had to apply to, but Ruiz Zafon has gotten a waiver from this rule. His two novels (The Angel’s Game has just been translated) are clearly serious literature, but they are also filled with one-true-loves and capital-D Destiny and characters who may or may not be the Devil. Early 20th-century Barcelona (the site of both novels) is brighter and darker and more romantic than any actual city has ever been — and it sits over the labyrinthine Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a sort of book-lover’s catacombs. I can’t think of anyone since Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ) who has pulled off anything like this.
Another book-related topic was the Kindle. I got one at the end of February, told you about it on March 2, and then did a six-month retrospective on August 31. The gist: It works, I use it a lot, and I enjoy using it, but it hasn’t completely replaced paper books for me. The biggest change has been in how I acquire books. I used to make a lot of spur-of-the-moment purchases at book stores. Now, I know I can get what I want whenever I want it, so I’m more disciplined about only buying what I want to read right now. Unexpectedly, that disciplined approach means that I’ve been reading a lot more library books — the library is where my spur-of-the-moment pick-ups happen now. That, more than the cheaper price of Kindle e-books, is why I’ve probably saved enough on books to pay for the Kindle.
Anyway, in no particular order, here are the books I’ve reviewed in the Sift this year:

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough. Geoffrey Canada is a veteran black educator and social activist who is making a demonstration project out of a chunk of Harlem. He thinks he finally understands why rich white kids grow up smarter than poor black kids, and he thinks he can do something about it. In another ten years or so, we might have positive proof that you can change the ghetto rather than just pull a few kids out of it.
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. The beginning of the Red/Blue divide is Richard Nixon. He understood the force of white working class resentment, and how it could be channeled into conservative politics — even conservative politics that worked against the white working class. Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter With Kansas? described a condition; Nixonland explains how it came about.
The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen. Kilcullen is the Australian guru of counter-insurgency (or COIN as the military calls it). The key COIN insight is that you win an insurgency by protecting the people, not by killing the bad guys. My favorite Kilcullen saying is that you should only fight the enemy when he gets in your way. The “accidental guerrilla” of the title is a guy who didn’t have to be your enemy, he just comes to believe that you are a threat to his home and family.
The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric Beinhocker. Classical economics is based on a number of simplifying assumptions that aren’t true, but they make the mathematics work out: the efficiency of the market, the perfect knowledge of all the market participants, and so on. Economists typically act as if these simplifying assumptions make no real difference in the long run, but increasingly it looks like they do. Beinhocker’s book is about the reasons we have to believe that, and what might work instead.
The Dark Side by Jane Mayer. Jane Mayer was the New Yorker reporter who covered torture and civil liberties issues. The Dark Side puts a larger narrative around the various abuses like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford. Update Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with some insights from 1970s Marxist writer Harry Braverman, and you’ve got this protest against the prolertarianization of knowledge workers. Maybe working with your hands isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels. Michaels looks at a number of industries where the same pattern played out: Anecdotal evidence that workers or customers were being harmed or even killed was initially suppressed, and when it couldn’t be ignored any more, the problem was studied ad infinitum. Industry can pay experts to create doubt, and no quantity of evidence will ever be enough to prove that they should clean up their processes. These techniques started with the tobacco companies, but are now universal.
Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq by Steve Fainaru. It reads like an action novel, but it’s not. A Washington Post reporter gets himself embedded with the most slipshod group of mercenaries in Iraq. It had to end badly, and it does. But along the way you get a lot of insight into the whole mercenary phenomenon.
How to Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan. Aslan is a liberal American Muslim of Iranian descent. The title is misleading: He thinks you can’t win a cosmic war. If we frame the War on Terror as our-god-versus-their-god, nobody wins. This book makes a good companion to The Accidental Guerrilla.
In Late Summer Reading, A Last Blast of Summer Reading, and a note under my Big Boy Rules article I discussed some lighter, more entertaining fare:
  • The historical novels of David LIss, specifically The Coffee Trader and The Whiskey Rebels. Since then a new one has come out: The Devil’s Company, which the flap says is about the British East India Company and the birth of the modern corporation.
  • The Echo Falls teen mystery series by Peter Abrahams, beginning with Down the Rabbit Hole. Since then I’ve started reading his suspense novels for grown-ups. He’s another of those good writers hiding inside a genre — or two genres now. Oblivion is a good place to start on his adult novels.
  • The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose. Roose was a liberal student from Brown who decided that rather than spend a semester abroad, he’d go somewhere really foreign — Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
  • Holy Hullabaloos by Jay Wexler. Wexler is a Boston University law professor who came up with an interesting device for making his specialty — church-and-state law — interesting. He went on a road trip to the sites of the major cases.
  • Anything by Lee Child. He writes action/mystery novels whose hero is an ex-military-police drifter named Jack Reacher. I got a Kindle version of one novel free, then took the next dozen out of the library in quick succession. If Tom Clancy had Stephen King’s talent, he’d be Lee Child.
Short Notes
I never did figure out what we ought to do in Afghanistan.

The right-wing violence I warned about here and here still hasn’t happened yet, at least not to any major extent. The initial surge of violent threats against President Obama has settled down, at least for now.

Bushies like to claim that history will vindicate them. Could that happen? In January I explained how historical re-assessment works, and why Bush is a poor candidate for it. In a nutshell, the perspective of history often changes the relative importance of an administration’s successes and failures, but it doesn’t turn failures into successes or vice versa. Bush didn’t leave future historians any successes to re-evaluate.

The year’s biggest disappointment was Obama’s lack of action to restore the civil liberties that Bush took away. In February I gave my initial impressions of where Obama was going and summarized the state of this issue in October. 

In a country that took the rule of law seriously, we wouldn’t just be talking about rolling back Bush’s illegal measures (like torture and warrantless wiretapping), we’d be prosecuting the people who designed and implemented them, including Bush himself. Whenever this notion comes up in the mainstream media, it is dismissed as something wild and radical, when it is actually just a plain reading of the law. Even if you believe that the extraordinary circumstances of 9/11 justified the illegal measures — I don’t — this isn’t the right way to let people off the hook. That decision properly belongs to a jury.

Another subplot of this year’s Sifts was my increasing disenchantment with the Washington Post. As science blogger Tim Lambert put it: “The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes.”

By weeklysift | Comments (7)

How It Goes

December 21, 2009 – 3:17 pm
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
That’s how it goes.
Everybody knows.
— Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows
(thanks to Eschaton for reminding me of this song)

In this week’s Sift:
  • The Health Care Bill: Is Better than Nothing Enough? Other than Republicans and a handful of liberals, everybody thinks the Senate health-care bill is better than the current system. But liberals are split on whether we’d do better to start over and play hardball this time.
  • The Progressive Predicament. With a Democratic president and big majorities in both houses of Congress, why can’t we do more?
  • Because It’s Christmas/Solstice/Hannukah/Whatever. Fun holiday-themed stuff I found, plus I discover that I’ve written more about Christmas than I thought.
  • Short Notes. Ru Paul goes vogue while Sarah Palin stiffs her hairdresser. An example of conservative humor. Video of an undersea volcano. How Creation confused the Sumerians. And Stephen Colbert promotes a balanced doomsday investment portfolio: gold, women, and sheep.
Next week: The Yearly Sift
The Health Care Bill: Is Better than Nothing Enough?
The Senate got past the crucial procedure hurdle on health care: They shut down the Republican filibuster on a party-line vote early this morning, with independents Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman supporting the Democrats. There are few more procedural hurdles, but the 60-vote coalition is expected to hold. A vote on the bill itself is scheduled for Christmas Eve.

Is that the end of it? No, of course not. The Senate bill is different from the one passed by the House, so a conference committee will have to put together a merged bill that will then be voted on in both houses all over again. Liberals will try to get some of the House bill’s progressive features (like a public option) into the conference bill, while Senators Nelson and Lieberman (the last two votes to come around in the Senate) warn that any changes to the Senate bill will sink the whole thing.

Victory or Defeat? A little over a week ago, Harry Reid thought he had a put together a compromise that would hold his 60 votes together — in particular by getting Joe Lieberman’s vote. It replaced the public option with an option for 55-64-year-olds to buy into Medicare — a proposal that Senator Lieberman had publicly supported three months before. Liberals were pretty happy with that, but then Lieberman defected, turning against his own proposal and sending health insurance stocks soaring.

The bill that survives in the Senate has no public option or Medicare buy-in. Federal subsidies are prevented from paying for the part a policy that covers abortion, but abortion-covering policies are allowed to be sold on the state-by-state exchanges — unless the state passes a law opting out, as some will surely do. On the plus side, a loophole in the previous version of the bill allowed insurance policies to include lifetime limits — a big reason why so many people with health insurance end up going bankrupt anyway. That loophole has been closed.

The outlines of this compromise have been clear all week, and Democrat voices have been split down the middle about whether such a bill should pass or not. Howard Dean wanted to kill it (but has since backed off a little):

This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. And, honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House and start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.

Ted Kennedy’s widow Vicki wants the bill passed:

Ted often said that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He also said that it was better to get half a loaf than no loaf at all, especially with so many lives at stake. … I humbly ask his colleagues to finish the work of his life, the work of generations, to allow the vote to go forward and to pass health-care reform now. As Ted always said, when it’s finally done, the people will wonder what took so long.

The top liberal blogs and columnists were all over the map. Paul Krugman called the bill “an awesome achievement” but also “seriously flawed”. Glenn Greenwald was less upbeat:

if progressives always announce that they are willing to accept whatever miniscule benefits are tossed at them (on the ground that it’s better than nothing) and unfailingly support Democratic initiatives (on the ground that the GOP is worse), then they will (and should) always be ignored when it comes time to negotiate; nobody takes seriously the demands of those who announce they’ll go along with whatever the final outcome is.

And Jane Hamsher was even more direct: “From what we know about the bill, it is worse than passing nothing.”

The flaws. The basic analysis I gave you in September still holds: The various pieces of reform interlock in ways that defy a piecemeal approach. Everybody (except the insurance companies) wants to do away with exclusions for pre-existing conditions. But it you only do that, then you create a hole in the system: Healthy people can go without insurance, with the assurance that they can get coverage later if they develop a major health problem. With healthy people’s money out of the system, premiums for everyone else would skyrocket, causing even more people to opt out of the system, until eventually only people with major health problems would seek insurance at all, and they would pay outrageous prices for it. You’ve made things worse, not better.

So if you get rid of pre-existing conditions, you need some kind of mandate that forces (or strongly influences) healthy people to get insurance. (Massachusetts already has a mandate. Ezra Klein interviews its main implementor.) Once you’ve done that, though, you’ve put the health insurance companies back in the driver’s seat, because consumers have lost the option to say no. Even if the companies that sell insurance in your state offer only crappy policies at high prices, the law says you have to buy one anyway or pay a penalty. Under those circumstances, why should the industry offer anything but crappy policies at high prices? You’ve made things worse.

So now you need something that keeps insurance companies in check: Market competition might do it if it really existed — right now it doesn’t in much of the country — and if the insurance companies couldn’t just merge or collude (the problem with Republican proposals). Or the government could step in either with tight regulations or by offering a public option that competes with private insurance.

The main complaint of the kill-bill liberals is that the Senate bill doesn’t do enough to control the insurance companies. (Dean called it “a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG.”) With no public option, there’s no guarantee that the new state-by-state health insurance exchanges will foster enough competition to protect consumers. Although, as Josh Marshall pointed out, the public option as it stood a week or two ago was already so chopped-down that it wouldn’t have accomplished much:

if you are worried about mandates now (and I think that’s a very legitimate worry) you should have been worried about them with a Public Option too.

Probably more important, in the long run, is that the bill forces insurance companies to spend at least 85% of premiums to pay for health care.

What is “reconciliation”? At times it sounded like the kill-bill folks would be happier with the status quo. But (Jane Hamsher aside), their real point was that Democrats could start the process over, play hardball, and get a better result. (Al Franken does a good job explaining why this bill is better than the status quo.) There are basically two arrows that Democrats left in their quiver: They could have threatened a “nuclear option” of doing away with Senate filibusters altogether. When the Republicans were in the majority in 2005, they used such a threat to get Democrats to back down on filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

The second filibuster-breaking option is reconciliation, the majority-rule process Republicans used to pass Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. The Wikipedia article on reconciliation explains the arcane rules of reconciliation pretty well. (Something I didn’t know: the reason the Bush tax cuts phase out is that otherwise reconciliation wouldn’t have applied to them.) Nate Silver explains how those rules would apply specifically to health-care reform.

As Nate points out, reconciliation has a bizarre aspect in this case: The popular parts of health-care reform violate the rules, but the controversial parts (like the public option) satisfy them. The bill would have to be cut in two, setting up a Game of Chicken: 41 senators could still scuttle health-care reform, but only by filibustering the part that got rid of pre-existing conditions. You’d like to think they wouldn’t do that, but if they did we’d all be screwed. Reconciliation would be a very big bet on the general public-spiritedness of the Republicans and Joe Lieberman.

Democrats suck at Chicken, and the media always blames them for any bad results that come from it. We discovered this in 2007 when Bush vetoed the appropriation bill for his own wars, claiming that the Democrats had put too many strings on the money. The media blamed Democrats (not Bush) for endangering our troops, and the Democrats backed down, giving Bush the no-strings appropriation he wanted.

We’ll discuss why things break that way in the next article.
After last week’s deal broke down, liberal anger expressed itself in a stream of anti-Lieberman ridicule. DailyKos’ Cheers and Jeers column published the lyrics to “Lieberman“, which is sung to the tune of “Silver Bells”. And there’s a hilarious sock-puppet version of Democratic senators trying to negotiate with Lieberman.

Did you hear the one where Al Franken shuts down Joe Lieberman’s speech? If you didn’t, don’t worry about it, because the whole story was bogus.

James Fallows dispels a lot of myths about the filibuster.

I really don’t understand Olympia Snowe. Democrats went to great lengths to try to win her vote, and various versions of the bill had the public-option trigger that she said she supported. But at no point did she do what a person negotiating in good faith does: make a definite offer. She always had some suggestion that would make the bill more to her liking, but she never promised, “I’ll vote for it if …” We come out of this process still not knowing what SnoweCare would look like.

The statement she released Sunday to explain her anti-health-care vote complained about the “artificial and arbitrary deadline of completing the bill by Christmas that is shortchanging the process.” We can only speculate how much time Snowe’s ideal process would take. The House passed its version of the bill November 7. President Obama’s original goal was a bill by the end of August. Health care plans were widely discussed in the 2008 elections — Ezra Klein points out how close this plan is to what Obama campaigned on — and President Truman proposed the first national health care plan in 1945. If not now, when?

Republicans played no constructive role in this process. They still refuse to recognize that the uninsured or under-insured are a problem. They eventually did present a health-care proposal, but the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis concluded that it would accomplish virtually nothing: The number of uninsured would continue to increase, from 50 million in 2010 to 52 million in 2019. (The Republicans’ summary of their plan in fact makes no claim about helping the uninsured, who aren’t a problem.) Their plan would make it harder for an insurance company to cancel your policy because you got sick, but do nothing to help people with pre-existing conditions.

One of the more bizarre anti-health-care arguments came from Chuck Norris, who writes a syndicated column. (Liberals get tarred with being the party of Hollywood, but notice that whenever the conservatives get a movie star — Reagan, Schwarzenegger — they showcase him. Outspoken liberals like George Clooney and Sean Penn don’t have columns.) Norris writes:

What would have happened if Mother Mary had been covered by Obamacare? What if that young, poor and uninsured teenage woman had been provided the federal funds (via Obamacare) and facilities (via Planned Parenthood, etc.) to avoid the ridicule, ostracizing, persecution and possible stoning because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy?

Does Norris really believe that if Mary had just had the money she would have forgotten that visit from the Archangel Gabriel and aborted Jesus? I wonder how Catholics are reacting to this implied slur against the Mother of God. So far my “Chuck Norris” search on Catholicblogs.com is coming up with no comment. Catholic League President Bill Donohue is so quick to jump on any liberal statement that he thinks abuses Catholic symbols or concepts, so surely he’ll be all over this. Won’t he?

In fact, he’s not reacting. Because Donohue’s outrage is not religious at all; he fakes it for partisan political purposes. Norris is a conservative, so Donohue (and other Catholic conservatives who use religion to mask politics) has no reason to gin up phony indignation against him.
The Progressive Predicament
Watching the ever-shrinking reform of the health-care system has made a number of progressives ask some bigger, harder questions. Thomas Shaller wonders why

the bar to clear for public support seems to be asymmetrically higher for progressive agenda items than conservative agenda items. … the political reality that less support is needed, say, to pass a tax cut for rich people or start a war than is needed to expand health care coverage or raise the minimum wage

And John Aravosis asks:

how was George Bush so effective in passing legislation during his presidency when he never had more than 55 Republicans in the Senate?

DailyKos’ thereisnospoon says outright that Obama and the Democrats in Congress sold us out on health care and financial reform, and delivers this wake-up slap-in-the-face:

He hasn’t done this because he’s a bad guy. In fact, he’s a great guy. I think he’s doing pretty much the best job he can. He’s sold you out because he’s not afraid of you. And really, if I may be so bold, he shouldn’t be afraid of you. You don’t know who really runs the show, and you’re far too fickle and manipulable to count on.

S/he (I’m not sure) laughs at the idea that Democrats could elect a president and 60 senators and then expect that they will go off and work our will. It’s more difficult than that.

The Right has built vast networks of think tanks, newspapers, periodicals, cable news channels, and political advocacy organizations to spread their finely tuned, well-honed messages. Their politicians may fail them, and their actual policies may be deeply unpopular, but their message machine nearly always works its magic to get them what they want, even when Democrats are in power.

That’s partly because the American political Right never quits and never gives up. They know that organization is the key to their success, and they don’t trust politicians to do their work for them. Democrats, on the other hand, get disappointed and quit when our politicians don’t pan out the way we wanted. That’s why we lose.

Until liberals have an equivalent level of organization, s/he claims, our agenda will always fall by the wayside.

OpenLeft’s Paul Rosenberg pulls a bunch of this together, and then makes some very good observations about structural problems in the American political system.

We are the only advanced industrial nation with a pronounced and persistent class skew to our rates of voter participation-a skew that persistently under-represents progressive views, and like any feature of the political system that has endured this long, there is nothing accidental, incidental, casual, or individual about this.

Sure it’s specific individuals who are not voting, but their non-participation is not fundamentally a result of individual choice. They are responding rationally to the fact that their votes don’t make a difference, that politicians don’t listen to people like them, and that paying attention to politics only gets their hopes up in order to dash them–an extra helping of bitter disappointment that they really don’t need in their lives.

He proposes an agenda to change the nature of the political process: election reform, strengthening unions, immigration reform so that we no longer have a non-voting underclass, and so on. Democrats pay lip service to this stuff, but haven’t put any real muscle behind it.

I’ll add this: It all comes down to the difference between corporations and people. Corporations are rich, they’re totally amoral, they never take their eyes off the ball, and they don’t get discouraged. People aren’t like that. So a political movement that looks out for people is disadvantaged when it faces a political movement that looks out for corporations. This doesn’t mean that people can’t win, but they’ve got to face their disadvantages squarely.

Because It’s Christmas/Solstice/Hannukah/Whatever

A chorus of silent monks does the Hallelujah Chorus with cue cards. (And this has nothing to do with Christmas, but having found the Amazing Acts blog, I had to show you the Grocery Store Musical.)

The Guerrilla Handbell Strikeforce gives a Salvation Army bell-ringer some unexpected support.

I linked to this last year, but it deserves to be an annual: Straight No Chaser’s version of the 12 Days of Christmas. (If you also like their playing-it-straight Carol of the Bells, you should buy their album.)

A former Disney special effects guy does Christmas Light Hero, sort of Guitar Hero in Christmas lights. But I still like the classic 2005 Christmas Lights Gone Wild.

Here are some science tricks to amaze your friends with at the Christmas Party.

I have a Christmas column out today at UU World: Christmas Nostalgia for the Family We Never Were. I’m not generally negative about Christmas, but here I take a look at one of its stranger aspects: The way we get nostalgic for a way of life most of us have never actually experienced. It’s not just that you can’t go home again, it’s that home never was that way. What can you do with that?

Looking back, I’m a little surprised to realize just how much holiday writing I’ve done over the years: Midwinter, a short story about an ancient Solstice, Carol at Christmas, one of my Mike DeSalvo stories, a poem titled Christmas, and comic fiction I wrote for UU World last year: The Ghosts of a Unitarian Christmas.
Short Notes
Video worth watching: a deep sea volcano erupting.
People say conservatives have no sense of humor, but it’s not true. Their humor is like the guys in junior high who would trip somebody and then laugh at them. If you can stand it, check out the “Feliz Navidad” parody “Illegals in My Yard.”

The best parody of Sarah Palin’s book is Ru Paul’s Going Vogue.

Another great Sarah Palin story. But I think this one calls for a generous interpretation: She didn’t intend to stiff the hairdresser, paying just fell through the cracks. It makes me wonder, though: How much stuff will fall through the cracks when she starts running a national campaign?

Last week I linked to Jon Stewart’s exposure of the incestuous relationship between Glenn Beck and the gold companies that advertise on his show. Well, now Stephen Colbert has extended that critique to the whole conservative talkshow universe, and has decided to get into the act himself. He cuts to an ad where John Slattery (Roger Sterling from Mad Men) explains the three parts of a balanced doomsday portfolio: gold, women, and sheep — because in addition to food and wool they provide warm companionship if someone steals your women.

The Onion counts down the top ten stories of the past 4.5 billion years. My favorite: Sumerians look on in confusion as God creates world.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Circling the Wagons

December 14, 2009 – 2:28 pm
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives. — Mark Twain

This week underlined a theme I wish more people understood: It’s way easier to make stuff up than to do the research to explain what really happened and why. In the time it takes to debunk one lie, ten more can start circulating. So both main stories this week are about undoing the damage of bogus scandals.
In this week’s Sift:
  • Playing Defense I: The Climategate Emails. AP went beyond he-said/she-said journalism and did some actual reporting on the content of the emails. They didn’t find anything alarming. Meanwhile, a scientist blogging at the Economist addressed one data-manipulation charge, and gave us insight into the psychology of climate scientists. Also, WaPo consults its own climate-change expert: Sarah Palin.
  • Playing Defense II: ACORN. If you throw enough accusations at a group and if its political allies are wimpy enough not to say anything, the public will start to think the group did something wrong. Congress banned ACORN by name from any government contracts, based on baseless charges of vote fraud and an edited video. It turns out that’s what a bill of attainder is, and Constitution doesn’t allow them.
  • Short Notes. Stephen Colbert gives a remarkably cogent explanation of a corporate personhood case, and makes it funny too. I don’t know what to tell you about healthcare, or about Uganda’s kill-the-gays bill. Obama in Oslo. Republicans go both ways on impeachment. Gretchen Carlson is smarter than she tries to look. The War on Christmas vs. real religious discrimination. A very Brady apocalypse. And more.
Playing Defense I: The Climategate Emails
Associated Press outdid themselves this week. Instead of just repeating the press releases of anti-global-warming groups, five reporters read more than a thousand of the hacked “climategate” emails, and then sent a number of the key ones to “seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy” for analysis and comment.

Wow. That sounds like something real journalists would do. I didn’t know you still had it in you, AP.

Conclusion: “the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked. … the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.” The scientists tried “to present the data as convincingly as possible,” but were not part of a “culture of corruption” as some Republican politicians have charged. The article also quotes Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, saying that he saw “no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data.”

The article does criticize the scientists who wrote the emails for sometimes making “generous interpretations” of the data and resisting sharing their data with skeptics.
A scientist blogging at the Economist addressed one particular accusation of data manipulation: temperature adjustments at Darwin, Australia, which amateur global-warming skeptic Willis Eschenbach called a “smoking gun.”

Here’s what that’s about: The people who collected temperature data decades ago had no idea anybody would ever look at their measurements as part of a long-term global pattern. So:

The early temperature measurements we have are a broken and incomplete record of more and less good data from instruments that were often changed, moved, or that found themselves in different settings over time. When scientists started putting together the vast library of the planet’s temperature records in the 1980s in order to do climate-change assessment, they needed to be able to weed out these changes and errors.

So climate scientists have developed elaborate statistical methods to estimate how far off a given thermometer was at any particular time by comparing it to nearby weather stations, and checking the record for obvious explanations (like moving the thermometer). Papers on climate change then use the statistically adjusted data rather than the raw data.

Naturally, if you examine all the adjustments to all the weather stations in the whole world, there’s bound to be one where they “adjust” a long-term cooling trend into a long-term warming trend. There is: Darwin. If you cherry-pick that one and present it as if it might be typical, then you have a “smoking gun” of data manipulation.

The Economist’s blogger explains all this, concludes that the Darwin data is nothing to worry about, and then provides this revealing commentary:

So, after hours of research, I can dismiss Mr Eschenbach. But what am I supposed to do the next time I wake up and someone whose name I don’t know has produced another plausible-seeming account of bias in the climate-change science? Am I supposed to invest another couple of hours in it? … At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I’ve seen these kind of claims before, they always turns out to be wrong, and it’s not worth my time to look into it?

This is a point AP barely notices, and it explains something that bothered the AP reporters:

The e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. It raises a science ethics question because free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method.

But that paragraph from the Economist points at an explanation: The scientists know what will happen after the data is released. Exxon-Mobil will pay somebody to go over it with a fine-tooth comb, looking for something like the Darwin adjustments that can be blown into an issue. Then the manufactured issue will be taken up by the conspiracy theorists (with some cheerleading by Glenn Beck and the rest of the right-wing noise machine), and the scientists will have to spend God-knows-how-much time responding. How will they get any work done?

This isn’t the normal give-and-take of science. It’s a campaign of harassment that makes use of amateurs, but is organized and funded at the top levels by corporate vested interests. No wonder independent scientists have a bad attitude about it.
The main denialist argument lately has been the spike of 1998. 1998 was such a hot year (warmer than this year, for example) that if you start drawing your graph there you can claim that there’s no warming trend at all. OK, then why is the now-ending decade the hottest ever recorded?
The Washington Post editorial page continues to plumb new depths. (I stopped reading the Post regularly in June when they fired Dan Fromkin. Now I only go there when somebody else links to them.) In order to increase our understanding of the issue of climate change, they printed an op-ed by Sarah Palin — just the person whose expert opinion I wanted to know.
FireDogLake predicts “Michele Bachman piece on quantum mechanics to follow.” Foreign Policy focuses on Palin’s long-standing misrepresentation of the polar bear issue, while the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder takes her Post op-ed apart line-by-line. On the science blog Deltoid, Tim Lambert compares her whoppers to similar nonsense published in the Post by George Will. He titles his piece “The Washington Post can’t go out of business soon enough” and says that the Post

simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes. … So what use is the Washington Post? If they are not going to do even the most perfunctory fact checking on the stuff they publish, what value do they add?

When global-warming denier Lord Monckton appears in friendly venues, he often doesn’t sound quite as nutty as he really is. (Except maybe this time.) Here, his wiggy side comes out: “The number of people being killed by this misplaced belief in Climate Change, is if anything greater than the number of people killed by Hitler.”

One of the more entertaining global-warming warnings comes from the Blue Man Group.

Playing Defense II: ACORN

When I first read the Constitution back In Civics class, one short line was particularly obtuse: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”

My teacher easily explained ex post facto law: It declares something illegal after the fact — easy to see why we don’t want Congress passing such a thing. But bill of attainder remained mysterious to me. Well, it’s a mystery no longer. According to federal judge Nina Gershon, this is a bill of attainder:

None of the funds made available by this joint resolution or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations.

It was part of the continuing resolution that has funded all government agencies since October 1.

A bill of attainder, it turns out, is “a law that legislatively determines guilt and inflicts punishment upon an identifiable individual without provision of the protections of a judicial trial.” In other words, Congress couldn’t pass a law saying, “Doug Muder is a traitor and shall spend 20 years in prison.” It’s a separation-of-powers thing. Congress can’t circumvent the courts by handing out its own punishments.

Judge Gerson ruled that Congress passed this provision in order to punish ACORN without a trial. “I can discern no non-punitive rationale for Congressional preclusion of the plaintiffs, and the plaintiffs alone, from federal funding.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights has a good summary of the finding, but avoids one important question: Given that the Republicans are badly outnumbered in both the House and Senate, how did they manage to get a bill passed punishing one of their enemies? I mean, sure, Fox News was 24/7 anti-ACORN for a week or two — but how does that get written into law?

The answer is simple: Democrats are wimps. If the right-wing media can stir up enough nonsense about a Democratic ally, so that Democrats in Congress think they’ll have trouble explaining their vote to the public, they’ll abandon their ally, even if the attacks against it are more or less baseless.

Time named the ACORN sting video its #9 scandal of 2009, which shows just how far the nonsense went. Maybe it should have joined Death Panels on the Top 10 Untruths list.

Short Notes
I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about the Citizens United case now before the Supreme Court. It’s a corporate personhood case, and threatens to undo all limits on what corporations can spend in political campaigns — in the name of protecting corporations’ “first amendment rights.” The place to start is probably Stephen Colbert’s discussion: Let Freedom Ka-Ching.
Hard to tell where we are on health care now. Senate Democrats came out of a meeting with an apparent agreement to replace the public option with an option for uninsured people over 55 to buy into Medicare. There was a lot of debate on the blogosphere about whether that plan was better or worse than the anemic public option that had been in the Senate bill. But it may all be moot, because Joe Lieberman has backed out.
I’m coming to think Harry Reid has three options for getting that last vote on the bill: (1) Let Republican Olympia Snowe dictate what it will take to get her vote. (2) Go over Lieberman’s head and negotiate directly with his owners, the health insurance companies. (3) Change the Senate rules to break the filibuster.
Blackwater and the CIA had “a far deeper relationship … than government officials had acknowledged.” The NYT’s James Risen tells us that the mercenary company was involved not just in protecting CIA and State Department personel in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in “snatch and grab” and other offensive operations. Risen and Eric Lichtblau are the reporters who got a Pulitzer for breaking the NSA warrantless wiretap story, and Risen is also the author of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

If you want to see a vision of where this kind of thing can go, read the novel The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen, which I reviewed a year ago. You can wind up with private contractors doing stuff government is forbidden to do, but working hand-in-glove with government agents who do things private contractors can’t do. Between them, very little is forbidden.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey wrote a ten-page memo that (beginning on page 4) takes a short-notes approach to Afghanistan. I think it allows him to do more justice to the chaotic nature of the situation than if he had to assemble a single coherent narrative. Some of his notes are downbeat, some outright Pollyanna-ish. (Like when he says that released detainees at Baghram “invariably” thank the base commander and hug him good-bye.) Maybe that’s really how it looks.

I can’t figure out how much attention I ought to pay to what Rachel Maddow calls “the kill-the-gays bill” in Uganda. It’s based on the theory (popularized by American evangelicals) that homosexuality is curable, and so anyone who remains gay does so by choice. So the Ugandan bill takes a carrot-and-stick approach, pushing “treatment” for homosexuality and ramping up punishment for gay activities — up to and including execution.

What I haven’t been able to figure out is how serious a proposal this is. Lots of outrageous bills get proposed in the parliaments of the world, and you can’t get excited about all of them. If this is a serious threat to murder gays and lesbians, major protest is called for. But if it’s just some Ugandan politician’s posturing for the Ugandan equivalent of the religious right, I’m not interested.
Believe it or not, I don’t have any trusted source on Ugandan politics. So I have no idea.
I do know that the idea of curing gays has been kicking around for a long time in this country, and it is almost entirely the result of wishful thinking on the part of evangelicals. I reviewed a book on the ex-gay movement for UU World several years ago.

Retail sales makes an interesting graph. It bottomed out last December and is starting to inch upward. Still well below the peak in December 2007. Calculated Risk comments.

We still don’t know what to call these last ten years, but they’re almost over. Best and worst lists of the year or decade are already starting to appear. Including: worst movies of the decade, the all-decade baseball team, the all-decade football team, and Time’s Top 10 Everything of 2009.
A new study out of China says soy might actually benefit breast cancer survivors rather than increase recurrence risk, as was previously suspected.

Two reviews [NYT, WSJ] of Barnes & Noble’s e-book reader, the Nook, claim that it was rushed out for Christmas. It has some features that the Kindle doesn’t have, but the complete package isn’t implemented right yet. If you’re tempted, wait for them to iron out the bugs.

The Nook’s most interesting feature could help sell a lot of pricy coffee drinks: You can read whatever you want if you’re in a B&N store.

Gretchen Carlson plays a dimwitted blonde character on Fox News, but Jon Stewart outs her as a high school valedictorian, an honors graduate of Stanford, and a classically trained violinist. Take that, Gretchen. I can’t wait to see how Fox strikes back.

Stewart also pointed out the symbiosis between Glenn Beck pushing paranoia on his show and Glenn Beck pushing gold on an infomercial.

Stephen Colbert was on a roll Tuesday night. In one show, he mocked the Fed on his own, mocked it further while talking to Senator Bernie Sanders, and then interviewed Andy Schlafly, the founder of the Conservative Bible Project.

As part of his annual War on the War on Christmas, Bill O’Reilly ordered an ambush interview of the superintendent of an elementary school in Chelmsford, Mass. — because the school isn’t allowing enough Christmas to suit a few of the parents, who say they’re going to sue. I happen to know one cute little girl who goes to that school. Her mother reports the “general consensus of the parents I know” about the complaints and lawsuit threats: “Don’t these people have anything to DO?”

You know where there’s really a war on Christmas? Israel.

And here’s what actual religious discrimination looks like: Article 6, Section 8 of the North Carolina Constitution disqualifies from elective office “any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.” Based on that, at least one guy is threatening a lawsuit to block Cecil Bothwell from taking his newly-won seat on the Asheville City Council. Bothwell has described himself as an atheist or a post-theist, but denies that he denies the being of Almighty God: “I simply consider the question of denial or acceptance irrelevant.”

Whatever he does or doesn’t deny, a court will undoubtedly rule that the religious freedom Bothwell gets from the U.S. Constitution can’t be invalidated by any state’s constitution. Sooner or later, he’ll take office.

I’m sure this will be news to Bill Clinton, but South Carolina Republicans don’t believe illicit sex is grounds for impeachment — at least not impeachment of Republicans. The constitutional laws subcommittee of the SC House has voted 6-1 against impeachment of Governor Mark Sanford, and the Republican House speaker praised the result. (Meanwhile, wife Jenny Sanford filed for divorce.)

I guess I praise the result too, because the normal way to get sleazeballs out of office should be to wait for their terms to expire and elect somebody else. Impeachment should be reserved for situations where ongoing abuses of power make waiting too dangerous. (That’s why the Constitution suggests treason and bribery as grounds — if the President is working for somebody else, we need him gone.) As subcommittee Chair Jim Harrison (a Republican) said: “Impeachment is not akin to a recall. We can’t impeach for hypocrisy. We can’t impeach for arrogance.” Why do I think he’ll forget this principle the next time a Democrat has a sex scandal?

All four Democrats on the subcommittee voted against impeachment.

When it comes to President Obama, no sex scandal is necessary. A new poll by Public Policy Polling says that 35% of Republicans “support the impeachment of President Obama for his actions so far.” PPP’s Tom Jensen comments:

I’m not clear exactly what “high crimes and misdemeanors” they are using to justify that position, but there may be a certain segment of voters on both the right and the left these days that simply think the President doing things they don’t agree with is grounds for removal from office.

It’s not news, but it’s something I didn’t know and just found out: The Green Bay Packers get their name from the Acme Packing Company that was their sponsor in the early days. Most football team names turn out to have dull histories, but the Baltimore Ravens honor local writer Edgar Allan Poe, and the Philadelphia Eagles are connected to the eagle symbol of FDR’s National Recovery Administration. No wonder Rush Limbaugh was so hard on Donovan McNabb.

Gossip site Heckler Spray on the new baby of quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bundchen:

Let’s pray that this little boy never meets and falls in love with Shiloh Nouvel Jolie Pitt. A baby that mixes the genetics of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Tom Brady and Gisele would probably bring about the end of the world.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Decisions

December 7, 2009 – 3:40 pm
Karma high, karma low.
Blood is precious —
yes or no?
— Robyn Hitchcock, The Yip Song
[Yes, I know the lyrics sites don’t parse it that way. Listen for yourself.]

In this week’s Sift:
  • Doubling Down in Afghanistan. What we’ve done for eight years hasn’t worked, so we either need to do better or get out. President Obama has decided to try to do better. My usual friends on the Left feel betrayed, but I can’t figure out what they expected Obama to do.
  • Economic Notes. The corporate corruption of science. 25 years after Bhopal. Job totals level off. Economics works differently when you’re poor. Gloating about Dubai. And we’re #9.
  • Short Notes. Sarah. Tiger. A Republican ploy backfires. Friedman being Friedman. When polls go down, it doesn’t always mean what they think it does. More on NFL concussions. ACORN. Now they’re claiming Bush had no terrorist attacks on his watch. And more.
Doubling Down in Afghanistan
I listened to President Obama’s Afghanistan speech [video, transcript]. I didn’t know what I wanted to hear, so I don’t know whether I heard it. I know what I didn’t want to hear: That everything is going fine and we’ll just stay the course. Because everything isn’t going fine.
Background. President Bush started bombing in Afghanistan about a month after 9-11. After that we sent in a relatively small number of special forces, who (combined with our air power) helped the Northern Alliance drive the Taliban out of Kabul and the other major Afghan cities. At that point we made the classic mistake that counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen calls “confusing entry with victory.” We thought the war was over but for an occasional skirmish while we looked for Bin Laden.
More troops were sent to help the new government maintain power, but we (and the government) were indebted both to the Northern Alliance and to several major warlords who switched sides when it became clear the Taliban was losing. So the national government never really achieved power in large sections of the country and corruption has run rampant.
In 2002 we started mobilizing for the invasion of Iraq, and Afghanistan left the headlines. The massive aid the country needed to reconstruct never appeared, and such aid as there was often got stolen. The Northern Alliance having been mainly Uzbek and Tajik, the Pashtuns never warmed to the new government. The Taliban regrouped in Pakistan and began coming back. We made a second classic mistake of using firepower to compensate for our lack of troops, and killed a lot of civilians in “collateral damage.”  
Many books will give you the flavor of that early period of the war. One of the most engaging is 2005’s Come Back to Afghanistan by Said Hyder Akbar, a California teen who comes to Afghanistan when his father, an old friend of President Karzai, is appointed governor of Kunar province near Pakistan. He is only beginning to be disillusioned when he comes back to America in 2003, but already you hear stories of projects that don’t happen, and the shock he and his father feel when someone from their province is beaten to death while in American custody.
Since then things have gotten steadily worse. In 2003, 57 coalition troops were killed. That number has gone up every year since, reaching 295 in 2008. In 2009, President Obama announced one troop increase in February and General McChrystal (appointed in June) has pushed for a counter-insurgency strategy, both of which could have been expected to increase casualties in the short run. They have: Coalition troop deaths doubled from June to July, and total 488 so far this year.
General McChrystal’s report in August asked for 40,000 more troops. More troops are an important part of a counter-insurgency strategy, which focuses on protecting the population rather than chasing down the bad guys. COIN, as it’s called, also thinks collateral damage does enormous long-term harm to the war effort, and so tries to use the minimum necessary firepower. Loosely speaking, counter-insurgency needs more troops because you have to see what you’re shooting at. I described the basics of counter-insurgency in March.
What Obama said. He’s going to send another 30,000 troops, which he expects to start withdrawing in July, 2011. Is that a good idea? Most of the people I usually agree with don’t think so. Some of the strongest arguments for pulling troops out rather than sending more are here and here. Andrew Bacevich puts it like this:

I find this notion that we need to pacify Afghanistan, because that’s where the 9/11 attacks were planned, to be absurd. It’s really the equivalent of saying that if we want to prevent the assassination of any future presidents, we need to station Secret Service agents in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas because that’s where an assassination happened.

What keeps me on the fence is Pakistan. They have nukes, and the Pashtun insurgency is operating there too. I’d like to say: “Let’s pull out and they can take care of their own problems.” But I don’t have enough confidence in my own expertise to say that. 
Having read McChrystal’s report, the main impression I get is that he believes he can fulfill his mission. And while it’s easy to over-state what the Surge accomplished in Iraq, it did work better than I thought it would: We are pulling out now, and leaving behind a government that has a chance to survive. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible in 2006.
And one more thing: I’m still not done giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. I won’t support him when he’s obviously wrong, as he is on some civil liberty and executive power issues. But I’m not sure here, so I’ll give his policy a chance.
Politics. In general, the Left is pitching Obama’s decision as a betrayal. Tom Hayden says he’s tearing the Obama sticker off his car. (Joan Walsh laughs at him and reminds us that she’s still bitter about Hillary losing.)
But I don’t understand how progressives can feel betrayed, given what Candidate Obama wrote in Time:

My first order as Commander in Chief will be to end the war in Iraq and refocus our efforts on Afghanistan and our broader security interests. … we must recognize that the central front in the war on terror is not in Iraq, and it never was. The central front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is unacceptable that almost seven years after 9/11, those responsible for the attacks remain at large. If another attack on our homeland occurs, it will likely come from this same region where 9/11 was planned. Yet today we have five times more troops in Iraq than Afghanistan. … I will send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan and use this commitment to seek greater contributions–with fewer restrictions–from NATO allies. I will focus on training Afghan security forces and supporting an Afghan judiciary. I will once and for all dismantle al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The only difference between that statement and what he said Tuesday is the size of the escalation. If you were paying attention in 2008 and feel betrayed now, I can only imagine two possibilities: (1) You were totally convinced that two more brigades would be sufficient to “once and for all dismantle al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” Or (2) you thought Obama was just blowing smoke to appease the moderates.
I’m guessing that in most cases the answer is (2), and the problem is that Candidate Obama was more honest and forthright than people thought he was. (David Sirota disagrees with me.)
You know who would really have a right to feel betrayed? Centrists if Obama had announced a major pull-out from Afghanistan. Obama didn’t run on an across-the-board anti-war platform, and he probably would have lost if he had. He said he would focus our war effort on our real enemies (al Qaeda) rather than our imaginary ones (Iraqis). That’s what he’s doing.
Why a timetable? Nobody, right or left, likes this part of Obama’s speech:

these additional American and international troops will … allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. 

The Left is annoyed that “conditions on the ground” might allow the schedule to slip, while the Right is opposed to “artificial timetables.” 
I like the timetable, and I think both sides are missing the point. Obama is neither making an empty promise nor carving an arbitrary deadline into stone. Instead, he’s giving us a standard to judge him by. If July of 2011 arrives and our troops aren’t beginning to transfer out of Afghanistan, then things haven’t gone as well as he expected. He’ll have to come back to us and explain what is happening and what his new goals are.
This is similar to Obama’s pledge to close Guantanamo within a year. He’s going to miss that deadline, and he’ll owe us an explanation. In other words, he sets goals that make him accountable. That’s what a responsible leader does.
George Bush never did. His wars never had a timetable or a budget, so matter what happened, he was never accountable and never owed us anything. This is the archetypal Bush quote:

the true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

in other words: Any conceivable accountability moment would be premature. If W is still around to be held accountable, it’s too soon to judge.

 
Whenever a president commits our country to some goal, it’s totally fair to ask: “How long do you think this is going to take?” Tuesday, Obama answered that question straightforwardly. It’s a measure of just how degraded the presidency has become that we can’t recognize responsible leadership when we see it.
Economic Notes
The Copenhagen talks on global warming started today. As someone undoubtedly intended, the “climategate” emails are in the opening paragraph of every story, once again creating the idea that there is some kind of scientific controversy.
The real story here is larger and is not getting covered: the corruption of science by corporate money. If you have enough money, you can fund think tanks, establish journals, and hire scientists to confuse almost any issue. The tobacco companies pioneered in this area, and the rest of industry has been perfecting the tobacco-company techniques ever since. That’s why there is a “controversy” about global warming: Oil companies will lose a lot of future profits if we take action to reduce carbon emissions, so they pay scientists (and now, I speculate, hackers) to raise doubt about the need to act.
The infrastructure of science was not built to defend against this kind of thing. Science is a community process by which data is gathered and theories are raised to explain that data. It thrives on open, honest debate, through which reasonable people eventually reach consensus. (For example, we are not still arguing about whether the Sun or the Earth is the center of the solar system.) But it is not equipped to handle persistent dishonest debate, in which scientists dream up increasingly elaborate excuses for doubt because vested interests pay them to do so.
As Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Speaking of corporations, it’s been 25 years since the Bhopal disaster. 15,000 people have died, and Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical, which washed its hands of all responsibility.

If I’m going to keep bad-mouthing corporations, I should at least link to Jared Diamond’s piece on the good they do.
I hate to hear about major layoffs at a big newspaper, because we’re getting such bad news coverage already. But it’s hard to feel bad about layoffs at the Washington Times.
A new book explains how economic reasoning looks different when you’re poor. Well-to-do economics assumes something called “diminishing marginal utility.” In other words: The first bite of a big steak has the most value to you because you’re hungry. Each subsequent bite is worth less and less, until you eventually walk away with steak still on your plate. 
But if you’re poor, everything gets inverted and diminishing marginal utility goes out the window: “paying the first bill in a stack of overdue bills does little to relieve a guilty conscience.” I may have to read and review this.
I shouldn’t really complain about the Tiger Woods coverage, because I also have a prurient interest in how the mighty have fallen. Dubai, for example. The Discovery Network’s Really Big Things shows us the Burj Dubai.
Matt Yglesias puts the decline of the dollar into perspective: It’s back where it was before the economic crisis hit in September 2008.
The 2009 Prosperity Index is out. The U.S. is #9, behind all those socialistic Scandinavian countries. You know what really drags us down? We rank 27th in health — still behind #24 Slovenia.
Short Notes

Another example of corporate money corrupting the public debate is health care, as Rolling Stone outlined in September. And check this out too.

Tom Friedman is a great example of what happens when you start believing your own propaganda. 

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

Matt Yglesias gives him the slap-down he deserves.

Nate Silver points out something important: Whenever Obama’s support goes down, pundits assume that the public is turning more conservative. Sometimes, though, Obama loses support from the Left, not the Center.
That seems to be what’s happening with health care. Support for the plan currently in Congress is going down, but largely because it doesn’t go far enough.

Republican Senators Coburn and Vitter thought they had a great way to expose liberal hypocrisy: Put an amendment in the health-care bill that would force Congressmen to use the public option. Then Sherrod Brown and Al Franken signed on as co-sponsors.

The NFL’s guidelines on concussions, which I discussed last week in a note after the book review, got a little stronger this week.

Sarah Palin joins the Birthers: “It’s a fair question” whether President Obama is really an American citizen. Maybe it was — for about ten seconds two years ago. Snopes summarizes the evidence. Kevin Drum sees this as another step in “the mainstreaming of insanity in the Republican Party.” On XX, Rachel Larimore writes:

I realize now that what I most liked about you was an idealized image of you that I created. I like that a woman can have a political career while raising a bunch of kids, that one could succeed without having the right pedigree or giving those kids country club names, that you were unabashedly pro-life. From now on I’ll be looking for those qualities in someone else rather than trying to reconcile your positive attributes with all the wackiness.

During the same interview, Palin discusses the conspiracy theory about the birth of her son Trig. Apparently, the lesson she draws from that experience is that everybody should be treated just as badly as she thinks she was.
Speaking of Trig, Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory writes about how Trig has become ‘a straw man baby against pro-choice activists.” Pro-lifers are representing pro-choicers as being offended by Trig’s very existence, although they can never seem to name any actual pro-choicer who has that reaction. After all, Palin was exercising her right to choose when she decided to give birth Trig.

While we’re talking about Sarah, here’s another example of image vs. reality. She’s currently on a bus tour of the country to promote her book — sort of. Yes, a bus with her face on it is driving across America, but she’s not in it. She takes a private jet from one gig to the next.

I had avoided reading anything but headlines about the Tiger Woods mess. But then my dentist and his assistant started talking about it, and I couldn’t interrupt because their hands were in my mouth. So now I have an opinion.

Whenever there’s celebrity scandal — whether it’s in sports, entertainment, or politics — the thing that really amazes me is how amazed people are. Think about what celebrity status means: Somewhere in the process of becoming mega-famous, you pick up an entourage of agents, publicists, bodyguards, money managers, and various other folks who just want to bask in your august presence. Before long, whether anybody asks them to or not, the entourage starts taking on three jobs: (1) providing whatever you might want before you think to ask for it; (2) shielding you from blame; and (3) agreeing with all your self-justifications. That sets up a moral test I think very few people would pass.
Back in the impeachment era I used to ask Clinton-bashing guys: How many thong-snapping 20-somethings have you turned down?
You know the worst thing about the Tiger Woods story? ESPN now thinks it’s CNN,  and breathlessly gives us all the “breaking news” on Tiger.  Uh … guys? Who won the game?

Gadget ideas for Christmas.

Emptywheel wonders: Why doesn’t anybody ever ask Dick Cheney the hard questions, or any follow-up questions at all?

ACORN is the right wing’s favorite demon, and liberals have done little to defend it. Here’s what’s behind all the nonsense charges against ACORN.

Just in case I didn’t trash the Conservative Bible Project hard enough in October, here’s a Catholic blog:

Let’s just suppose that there is bias in modern translations, all of which are liberal in character. Apparently, the best way to combat bias is with more bias. This is a fascinating move to relativism, or postmodernism for the CBP. There is no “correct” or “best” translation, just those that reflect my bias or your bias. This is a move that is bound to place the word of God not in the realm of revealed texts, but of crass ideology. It is also to accept that my ideology transcends the truth of the word of God.

How conservative is that?

Al Franken’s first piece of legislation was an amendment that made Republican senators choose between rape victims and corporate allies like Blackwater. This, according to Republican senators, was dirty pool. Senator Thune hopes Franken will “settle down” and focus on “the serious work of legislating” rather than foolishness like helping rape victims seek justice.

No one on Sean Hannity’s show protested when former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said, “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Nobody remembered that one in New York. And the Pentagon. And the anthrax attack. And the guy who blew away two people during a children’s pageant in a liberal Tennessee church. And some I’ve probably forgotten myself.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Obligations

November 30, 2009 – 2:09 pm
We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation. 
— Seneca
In this week’s Sift:
  • Global Warming: What the Hacked Emails Show. Having been in an academic dispute myself once, this all looks pretty normal to me. To find evidence of “the biggest scientific scandal in modern history” here, you’ve got to rip stuff out of context and then squint at it funny. 
  • The Special Inspector General’s TARP Report. The AIG bailout looked nothing like an industrial bailout, and the big investment banks benefited from that difference. Are you surprised?
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … page through Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. A young philosopher finds the blue-collar trades more intellectually stimulating — and maybe more economically secure — than cubicle work. That launches a fascinating meditation about what our jobs do to us. Plus a note relating a previous book review to the NFL’s concussion problem.
  • Short Notes. Laid-off journalists compete with their former employers online. Rush wants a coup. Feminists defend Sarah. Dubai is broke. Why private charity is no substitute for universal health care. What religious persecution really looks like. And more.
Global Warming: What the Hacked Emails Show
By now you’ve probably heard about “climategate” — the emails that supposedly show climate scientists conspiring to promote the global warming theory. Or maybe you haven’t. How could you when (as I keep hearing) the mainstream media is refusing to cover the story? The Columbia Independent Examiner is outraged:

It is almost incomprehensible that major media outlets would refuse to cover what many people believe may very well be the biggest scientific scandal in modern history.

It’s a wonder I heard about it myself, given that no one and no one else and certainly not 2641 hits on GoogleNews said anything about it. Clearly there’s a media conspiracy to suppress the scientific conspiracy that spearheads the political conspiracy to institute a global Communist government through the UN. Nothing else explains it. 
Unless it happened like this: Some hackers stole 13 years worth of emails, leaked them to people who combed through them for more than a month looking for something they could take out of context, and then the right-wing media made a big deal out of nothing — just in time to scoop a new report and damage the Copenhagen talks. Finally, the mainstream media did what they always do: covered the “controversy” created when the right-wing media makes a big deal out of nothing.
Hmmm. I think I’ll go with Option B. My overall reaction is: You stole 13 years of emails and that’s all you got?
Back when I was a mathematician, I was once in a much smaller academic controversy. (See page 8 of this article on the history of Kepler’s Conjecture.) I “conspired” with three better-known mathematicians to publish a letter in the Mathematical Intelligencer saying that somebody else’s paper was full of holes. We poured over each word of that letter to make sure we could defend it. But our private emails were not nearly so circumspect. We were rude, sarcastic, slanderous; we would have looked very unprofessional if those emails had been made public. Fortunately, nobody cared enough to hack into our accounts.
So am I shocked that in private climate scientists get catty about their critics, or that they discuss how to keep journals from publishing papers they believe to be nonsense? Not so much.
Ditto for the so-called smoking gun email, where of the scientists refers to something in his paper as a “trick.” Among scientists, a trick is just something clever, not necessarily something deceitful. Nate Silver looked deeper into the content of this remark and concluded:

Jones is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. … I don’t know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Conspiracy theories typically founder on one point: Conspiring is hard, and the more people you need to organize, the harder it gets. Big conspiracies need a big motive that holds them together. (BTW, here’s how to judge a conspiracy theory: Under scrutiny, bad conspiracy theories grow; they have to postulate more and more conspirators to account for all the details. But good conspiracy theories shrink; as you learn more about the systems involved, you realize how few people it would take to pull this off.)
That’s why I don’t believe that thousands of scientists are conspiring to promote a bogus theory of global warming. What holds them together? (Oil money glues together the smaller counter-conspiracy of global-warming deniers.) In order to make the global-warming-conspiracy theory work, you almost have to assume some larger political motive like a desire to impose a world government. 
But what holds that larger conspiracy together? If you pursue this stuff far enough, I think you wind up at the Devil — some powerful force that is evil just for the sake of being evil. I don’t see any other way to make it work.
Now, if you already have a Devil in your cosmology — and especially if that Devil already sponsors a conspiracy of scientists pushing a bogus theory of evolution — then a global-warming conspiracy makes perfect sense. Otherwise, not so much.

And you know who else is in on it? White House Science Czar John Holdren! He actually wrote email to some of the people involved, and discussed what the phrase “burden of proof” ought to mean. He must be, like, one of the secret overlords or something.

The Special Inspector General’s TARP Report
Here’s how a bailout is supposed to work: Some corporation owes more than it can pay, and its future prospects are dim enough that nobody is willing to make up the difference in exchange for stock. So everybody — workers, management, suppliers, stockholders, creditors — is facing some kind of loss. 
Then the government steps in with money, and that gives it leverage to deal out smaller losses to the stakeholders. It tells the workers, “You’re going to accept some cuts, but that’s better than if you didn’t have jobs at all.” It tells the creditors, “You’re going to loosen the terms on your loans, but it’s a better deal than you’d get if you forced the company into bankruptcy.” And so on.
That’s how the Chrysler bailout of 1979 and the current auto bailout worked. But that’s not how the AIG bailout worked. The new SIGTARP report explains why.
The report does a good job of setting the stage: AIG went broke by selling credit default swaps, which was (and still is) an unregulated kind of investment insurance.

Although credit default swaps are sometimes referred to as insurance-like contracts, they are not technically considered insurance, and, unlike insurance contracts, credit default swaps are not regulated. As a result, AIGFP was not required to hold reserves to cover losses or other claims as it would if it was selling insurance policies.

In other words, the investment bankers were creating all kinds of complicated new investments loosely based on the housing market, and AIG was insuring them through credit default swaps. But the government had jiggered the definition of insurance so that AIG could back those CDSs with just its good name rather than by setting aside any assets. When the housing bubble popped, AIG was obligated to come up with a lot of money it didn’t have.
Fearing that AIG was about to set off a cascading bankruptcy that would bring down the whole financial system, the government (in the person of Timothy Geithner, who in the late Bush years was president of the New York branch of the Fed) stepped in with money. Strangely, though, it didn’t use the leverage its money should have given it.

AIG’s counterparties received $62.1 billion overall, effectively the par value of the credit default swaps. 

The counterparties are well-connected investment banks like Goldman Sachs, which received $14 billion from AIG.
Why? The answer that emerges from the report is one that readers of The Shock Doctrine will recognize: It all happened really fast.

when private financing fell through, [the Federal Reserve Bank of New York] was left with little time to decide whether to rescue AIG and, if so, on what terms. … In other words, the decision to acquire a controlling interest in one of the world’s most complex and most troubled corporations was done with almost no independent consideration of the terms of the transaction or the impact that those terms might have on the future of AIG.

The initial intervention was inadequate, so the bailout of AIG happened in stages. As a result, the government dribbled away its leverage. By the time it was negotiating with Goldman, letting AIG go bankrupt was no longer a credible threat.
Also, the Fed tied itself up in “principles” that favored the investment banks. The Fed has a complicated relationship with Goldman; it could have said, “Play ball with us here or we’ll make it hard on you somewhere else.” But Geithner decided that would be unethical. Also, he and Bernanke respected “the sanctity of contract” — a principle routinely violated when bailouts involve union contracts.
Having read the report, I have a much clearer notion of how the AIG bailout favored the investment banks, but not necessarily why. Or maybe the Why is obvious: They’re the Big Boys in the economy; the government works for them, not for us.
The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …
… page through Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford.
We all think we know stuff like this:
  • Automation replaces drudgery with more meaningful work.
  • The jobs of the future will require more training, education, and just plain intelligence than the jobs of the past. 
  • Careers that involve working with your hands and getting dirty are a dead-end, both economically and intellectually. If your kids have any brains, you should steer them in some other direction.
What if none of that is true? Is that possible?
Matthew Crawford is (like me) a University of Chicago Ph.D. His philosophy degree got him a good-paying job as the head of some science-for-hire “independent” group set up by the oil industry to deny global warming. After a year of that, he junked his whole career to open a motorcycle repair shop. He thinks that was a good move, not just morally but mentally: Fixing bikes is more intellectually stimulating and satisfying than pushing policy arguments toward a predetermined conclusion.
Crawford has written a thoughtful, interesting book that resembles two books from the 1970s: the popular Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the much less popular (but still important) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century by Harry Braverman. The Braverman influence gives Crawford’s book a social/political heft that Zen lacked. The Zen influence gives it a personal resonance that Braverman’s book lacked. 
Crawford takes this point from Braverman: Profit-making industry has a compulsion to turn skilled labor into unskilled labor. What was once the ingenuity of a craft gets captured (imperfectly) in algorithms, which are then either taught by rote to unskilled workers or built into machines. I’ll make up some numbers to illustrate: Over time, a thousand village cobblers might get replaced by two shoe designers, six process engineers, thirty assembly-line workers making 25 cents an hour in Indonesia, and fifty minimum-wage retail clerks — none of whom have a cobbler’s knowledge of the feet in his particular village.
Cubicle-based knowledge workers are not immune to this process, and a great deal of office work has been similarly “stupidized.” With consequences: Push your intelligence down for eight hours a day and you might lose it. Crawford believes our jobs are injuring our ability to think.
Crawford revolts against the idea that manipulating symbolic knowledge requires a higher intelligence than working with things. Mechanics, carpentry, plumbing, and other skilled blue-collar trades not only require ingenuity, they provide the kind of objective feedback — the engine either runs or it doesn’t — that the mind needs. And he suspects they are also safer career paths than many more intellectual fields:

Since manual work has been subject to routinization for over a century, the non-routinized work that remains, outside the confines of the factory, would seem to be resistant to much further routinization.

Finally, he urges us to look at our jobs and ask how they are shaping us. Might we save our souls by accepting lower-paying work that is better suited to human beings — who are both physical and mental — than to machines or pure intellects? Unlike Braverman (a Marxist), Crawford offers no systemic solutions. But he does raise the question: Might we all be happier if we organized our economy around holistic, satisfying work rather than around high production at low cost? Is that possible?
A couple months ago I reviewed Doubt is Their Product. It explored the science-for-hire industry, which corporations routinely use to obfuscate evidence that they are killing their workers and to delay regulations that might stop them from killing more.
Well, here’s a high-profile example: The National Football League has a concussion problem. Evidence is mounting that retired NFL players have high rates of dementia, memory loss, and other long-term brain problems. (An NYT photo caption says: “John Mackey, left, and Ralph Wenzel were both on the San Diego Chargers in 1972, but have no memory of playing together.”) A number of star quarterbacks — Roger Staubach, Troy Aikman, Steve Young — were forced into retirement by repeated concussions.
OK, but killing is an exaggeration, right? Not really.
So naturally the NFL hired its own committee of scientists to “study” the issue. That committee “has been the league’s primary voice discrediting all evidence linking football players with subsequent dementia or cognitive decline.” Of course it has. Now that the public relations problem is getting out of hand, the head of that committee resigns as a scapegoat, and the league is “requesting credit for improving conditions without accepting its role in preserving the conditions that required improvement.” Of course it is.

Short Notes

Some of the people being cut from the big-city newspapers are forming their own web-based local news ventures to do the things the big papers say they can’t afford to do any more: real local coverage and investigative reporting.
Rush Limbaugh calls for a military coup. Unless he’s joking or something. Who can tell?

Conservatives often wonder why feminists don’t speak out against the media’s treatment of Sarah Palin. Well, when the treatment is actually bad rather than just truthful, feminists do.

I guess I should have seen this coming: Dubai is out of money. It is one of the seven United Arab Emirates and sits across the Persian Gulf from Iran. Dubai itself has little oil (another emirate, Abu Dhabi, does), but has been on a debt-financed building binge as it attempts to be the business center and tourist destination of the region. (Picture.) Apparently Abu Dhabi is cutting off its spendthrift cousin.

Individuals in Dubai have been in debt-trouble ever since the worldwide recession started last year. Ex-pats from elsewhere in the Gulf have been fleeing the country rather than face the emirate’s sharia-based punishments for default. By February, Dubai authorities had found thousands of abandoned luxury cars in the airport parking lot, some with maxxed-out credit cards inside. 
NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof tells the story of John Brodniak, a 20-something guy who had a job with health insurance until he got too sick to work. Now he is uninsured, in constant pain, and might die (leaving behind a wife and two step-children) even though an operation might fix what’s wrong with him.
Eric Cantor has already told us the Republican answer to a situation like this: private charity. Now that Kristof has made us aware of Brodniak, we should all send his family a few bucks and soon they’ll have enough to pay for his surgery. The problem (as Kristof points out) is that 45,000 Americans each year die from treatable conditions because they have no way to pay for care. So if each of the top 45 syndicated columnists called our attention to one such case each day, it would take almost 3 years to help them all. (You’d send money every day for three years, wouldn’t you?) 
But wait, that wouldn’t work either: The ones we didn’t get to in the first year would be dead already, and the list would have gotten 45,000 names longer. If only there were some systematic way to provide the care Americans need, rather than depending on individuals like Kristof bringing individuals like Brodniak to our attention. But that’s crazy talk. We’d have to be a totally different kind of society (a Communist or Nazi one like Canada or Denmark) before we could do something like that.
Tom Schaller takes on the strange idea that health-care reform is somehow unconstitutional. (And I know I linked to this Onion piece this week, but it’s relevant again.)

I keep finding articles that make this point: There is a lot of room to give Americans better health care at lower cost, if people are motivated to do it. The secret is that quality doesn’t cost, it pays. We spend vast amounts of money treating the problems caused by low-quality care.

Everybody wonders whether or not consumers will spend this Christmas. The early reports from retailers about Black Friday were mildly optimistic, but I wonder. Late Friday afternoon and again on Sunday I went to my local mall (Pheasant Lane on the NH/Mass border). It was busy, but in an ordinary way rather than a most-wonderful-time-of-the-year way. I easily found parking and walked wherever I wanted without being jostled.
Slate’s Farhad Manjoo advises you on what not to buy this holiday season.

Every year around this time we hear about the War on Christmas and how American Christians are victims of persecution. But a story like this one reminds us what real religious persecution looks like: A Cincinnati atheist group put up a billboard not attacking or insulting anyone, but simply giving the URL of its web site and saying: “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.” Within 48 hours the billboard had to be moved because of “multiple significant threats” to the owner of the property it stood on.

In Europe, religious persecution looks like this.

I have no idea how well this plant-mimicking ocean-wave-power-generating system will work, but it looks cool.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Contradictions

November 16, 2009 – 2:12 pm
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
In this week’s Sift:
  • Fort Hood: What We Do and Don’t Know. Should the Army have seen Major Hasan’s massacre coming? I don’t think I would have. If I forget what I know now and look at the supposed “red flags,” I’m still not all that alarmed.
  • But What About Islam? I’m losing patience with the eternal argument about whether Islam is a “peaceful” or “violent” religion. Any religion that has ever been the basis of an empire is both peaceful and violent. And its scripture contradicts itself. Is that a problem?
  • Short Notes. Stewart catches Hannity red-handed. The political advantage of being a porn star. The danger of using acronyms. Bye-bye Lou Dobbs. How lobbyists are like ventriloquists. And more.
Fort Hood: What We Do and Don’t Know
There’s been a lot to learn from watching the national conversation about the Fort Hood shootings. The Right is winning the interpretative battle for a very good reason: They had a narrative ready and were pushing it long before there were any facts to back it up. The Left asked people to wait for the facts before making up their minds.
Here’s how that has played out: As the facts come out, parts of the right-wing narrative have been verified, while parts of it have turned out to be way over the top. But because they were out there first, they have set the terms for the discussion.
[By the way, as usual the news media has been focusing on whatever new tidbit came out today and not keeping a scorecard of what is currently believed to be true. The best scorecard I’ve found is the Wikipedia article on the Fort Hood shooting. Doesn’t that tell you something about the changing role of the encyclopedia in today’s information environment?]
Major Hasan. To a large extent we still don’t know why Major Nidal Hasan did what he did. He got off a ventilator a few days ago, but if he has said anything about the shooting, it hasn’t been made public. (He’s probably still doped up, and — having recently listened to my father’s post-surgery babbling — I wouldn’t take any of it too seriously yet.) When we talk about him and his motives, we’re all still writing fiction — creating a character rather than reporting it. 
Hasan grew up in Virginia, as the son of Palestinian immigrants who ran a restaurant (described as a “blue-collar beer hall”) in Roanoke. (That quote and several to come is from an article in the Roanoke Times — the best source I’ve found on Hasan’s background and early life.) He enlisted in the Army straight out of high school in 1988. The Army put him through college; In typical Army-education style, he studied at several colleges before graduating with honors from Virginia Tech in 1995. A professor there remembers him as “not making a big splash, either positive or negative” and doesn’t recall any signs of “disturbed behaviors.”
He went to the Uniformed Services University medical school in Bethesda, Maryland and received his doctorate in psychiatry in 2003. He served at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center from then until he was transferred to Fort Hood last July. 
His parents died young — his father was 52 when he died in 1998 and his mother was 49 when she died in 2001. A cousin said that while Hasan had always been a Muslim, his mother’s death made him much less secular and more devout.
Of course, 2001 is also when 9-11 happened and the War on Terror began. Nobody has found a Hasan diary that will pull it all together for us, so when we discuss  the various influences that led to his increasing identification with Islam, we’re all writing fiction. It seems to be a journey he took alone. (He had no wife, and a statement from the Hasan family has deplored the shootings, expressed grief for the victims, and said “there is no justification.”) 
What was the role of mentors like Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who Hasan met when both were at a Virginia mosque, and who he remained in email contact with after al-Awlaki moved to Yemen? According to the New York Times:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Awlaki was quoted as disapproving of such violence and was portrayed as a moderate figure who might provide a bridge between Islam and Western democracies. But since leaving the United States in 2002 for London and later Yemen, Mr. Awlaki has become, through his Web site, a prominent proponent of militant Islam.

Al-Awlaki has since referred to Hasan as “a hero” and “a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.” (Al-Awlaki denies ordering or pressuring Hasan to kill American soldiers.) 
But another imam who knew Hasan described him as “a committed soldier” and “nothing like an extremist”. So maybe al-Awlaki was incidental, and the real cause was Hasan’s reaction to the soldiers he was treating for post-traumatic stress after they returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Family members say Hasan complained about his patients’ anti-Muslim prejudice. (That wouldn’t be surprising. Among soldiers, the popular derogatory term for Iraqis is haji, a reference to those who make the pilgrimage (haj) to Mecca.) 
Or was Hasan reacting to personal religious harassment? Another soldier living at Hasan’s apartment complex was charged with criminal mischief after he apparently keyed Hasan’s car and ripped an “Allah is Love” bumper sticker off it.
Or maybe he was scared. He was about to deploy to Afghanistan, where his army was fighting a war he didn’t believe in. The Taliban would consider him an American soldier; the other soldiers might consider him primarily as a Muslim. Maybe he’d be a target from both sides. 
If I were writing Hasan as a fictional character, I’d have the violent fantasy sprout in his mind while he refuses to take it seriously. His email contact with al-Awlaki had a cover story that investigators found convincing:

The assessment concluded Hasan did not merit further investigation – in large part because his communications with the imam were centered on a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the investigator determined that Hasan was in fact working on such a paper, the officials said. 

Maybe it is convincing to Hasan as well. He is just researching these jihadist ideas, toying with them, trying to get inside the heads of the jihadists — not growing a little jihadist cell in his own head. By the time he consciously realizes what is going on, his plans have too much momentum to stop.
The Right-Wing Narrative. The narrative from the Right took shape almost immediately, and the typical consumer of right-wing media hears it repeated many times each day: Hasan is a jihadist. A reasonable observer would have known that he was a jihadist, but the Army ignored the signs because of “political correctness.” There may be lots of Hasans around, and we should start a witch-hunt into the background and beliefs of all Muslims in the armed forces (while claiming that worries about  a “backlash against Muslims” are pure fantasy.) Or maybe we should eject them from the military completely. But of course we won’t, because liberals aren’t willing to do what’s necessary to protect our country.
This interpretation fits into a larger clash-of-civilizations narrative in which the Judeo-Christian West is in a death struggle with Islam. In this story, Islam is (as Pat Robertson puts it) “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination.” It can’t be tamed or tolerated. You may know some nice Muslims, but that’s because they don’t take their religion seriously. If they did, they’d be jihadists too. (You know what’s funny? If you replace the word jihadist with dominionist, radical atheists say the same thing about Christians.)
In addition to the facts I’ve already mentioned — especially the contact with al-Awlaki — a few other facts fit this narrative:
  • Some witnesses say Hasan yelled “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great!”) before he started shooting.
  • Last May an internet post with Hasan’s name on it (but not definitely verified as written by him) said positive things about suicide bombers.
  • Hasan gave a presentation at Walter Reed called “The Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” The slides are available online.
These are facts, but they have also been spun by right-wing pundits. For example, Hasan’s internet post resembles something I wrote in 2006. His point is that suicide bombers who attack military targets (not 9/11-style killers of civilians) have the same virtues we admire in soldiers who sacrifice themselves in battle.
You can pull alarming quotes out of the context of his Walter Reed presentation, but on the whole I don’t find the slides alarming. (Of course, we don’t know what he said while presenting them.) He starts with a general introduction for non-Muslims, and presents the mixed bag of Koranic suras about violence, both against believers and against non-believers. He seems to be making the case that Muslim soldiers will have severe internal conflicts if they come to believe that they are fighting a war against Islam, or that they are likely to kill non-combatant Muslims. He suggests evocative questions to draw Muslim soldiers into discussing their internal conflicts, and his ultimate recommendation is that a special conscientious objector status be established for Muslim soldiers who are asked to fight a Muslim adversary.
“Political Correctness.” One sign that the Right is winning the interpretive battle is that the mainstream media is using political correctness to describe the Army’s treatment of Hasan. Political correctness is a right-wing pejorative phrase for the following legitimate posture: When you belong to the majority and you are dealing with someone from a minority, your instincts are likely to short-change them. So you need to consciously examine any instinctive negative reaction to see if it’s really justified.
The Hasan case abounds with examples. For example, much has been read into a colleague’s statement that Hasan was “very upfront about being a Muslim first and an American second.” But it’s hard to imagine similar alarm about an officer who claimed to be a Christian first and an American second. Instinctively, the Christian majority reacts negatively to a “Muslim first” comment, and doesn’t recognize it as similar to a “Christian first” comment. They need to think again.
Nothing in that posture says you have to ignore legitimate objections to anyone’s attitudes and behaviors. But sometimes you need to think twice rather than react instinctively. Nothing in the Hasan case makes me back off that point of view.
Should the Army Have Known? Maybe more will turn up that will change my mind, but from what we’ve seen so far, I don’t think so. If you assemble facts with hindsight and then spin them, it looks like the Army ignored red flags. But as we’ve seen in lots of secular workplace shootings, it’s very hard to tell that somebody is about to blow. I can’t think of any general rules that would catch future Hasans without also scooping up lots of people who harbor harmless resentments and grievances.
A Few Final Points. We need soldiers who speak Arabic, understand Islam, and are familiar with the cultures of Muslim countries. Most Americans who fit that description are Muslims themselves. Hounding such folks out of the military would be one of the stupidest things we could do.
If your religion makes you suspect, where does it stop? Are we going to investigate Jewish soldiers’ ties to Israel? Catholic soldiers’ allegiance to the Vatican? 
As Frank Rich points out, the Right has not put forward any coherent strategy for fighting their clash of civilizations. Certainly no strategy of either the Bush or Obama administrations qualifies. If we’re fighting the world’s billion-plus Muslims, we need a much bigger army, and probably ought to consider using nukes. Certainly our tiny Christian Crusader force in Afghanistan stands no chance of securing the country if the entire Muslim population is our enemy.
Commentators like the WSJ’s Dan Henninger are using the Hasan case to push ideas that have no real connection. The first thing Obama should do in response, he says is “Call off the CIA investigation.” 
But What About Islam?
The Fort Hood massacre re-ignited the whole argument about whether Islam is a violent or peaceful religion. I’ll be blunt: This is a stupid argument. 
Any religion that has been the basis for an empire has to be both violent and peaceful. Unless and until God Himself comes down and fights the battles for his people, any religious empire is going to have to be able to make war. But any empire that doesn’t know when to quit fighting and consolidate its gains is going to fall. (Check out Hitler or Napoleon.) Your religion is going to have to be able to sanctify the peace just as it sanctified the war.
So: Christianity is both violent and peaceful. Judaism is both violent and peaceful. Whatever strand of Buddhism the Emperor Asoka practiced had to be both violent and peaceful, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been an emperor.
OK, what about the Koran, and all those quotes about killing the infidels that right-wing websites keep repeating? Or the apparently contradictory quotes about tolerance?
This deserves a longer essay (which, believe me, I outlined once and really intend to write someday) about what a scripture is. The most widespread mistake people make when they read some part of scripture — and this applies both to fundamentalists and atheists — is to interpret it according to the standards of some literary tradition that didn’t exist at the time. Science textbooks did not exist at the time Genesis was written. Journalism did not exist at the time of the gospels. It’s a mistake to read them that way.
The mistake both sides are making about the Koran now (and many people make about the Bible) is to read it like a philosophical treatise. They’re looking for the one true and coherent point of view that animates the whole text.
No scripture has that. A scripture is the early writing of a culture that is still fundamentally oral. (That’s why the words themselves have a sense of awe about them. Writing is still a little bit mysterious and magical.) Oral cultures don’t run by definitions and principles. They run by stories and aphorisms. And your scripture is not complete until it has a story or a saying that applies to any conceivable situation.
That’s why scriptures are full of contradictions. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. You can see the same thing in our culture’s secular folk wisdom: You should always look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines, but you’ve also got to stop and smell the roses. Our culture needs both sides of those contradictory pairs of sayings — otherwise we’d be unbalanced.
A finished scripture is balanced; the canon stays open until it has all the stories and sayings balance requires. And scriptures were not written to be read the way they often are now — silently by individuals, who decide for themselves which of the contradictory pieces to apply to their lives. Scriptures were meant to be read out loud in community — or better still, quoted from memory; the written text would just be a crutch for students or a reference for resolving divergences. 
In each situation the community process would decide which saying or story applied. Is this a time for telling the strict-purity story or the forgiveness story? Is it human to err, or does one bad apple spoil the barrel?
So: The Koran has verses telling Muslims to kill infidels, and it has verses telling them to live in peace with people of other faiths. Of course it does. What else would you expect?
Short Notes
Here’s the sequence of events: Michelle Bachman had an anti-healthcare rally at the Capitol on November 5. She then appeared on Sean Hannity’s show, where they shared a wildly inflated estimate of how many people attended, backed up by unlabeled footage of a different rally, the far larger one on 9/12.
Jon Stewart caught them, and re-played the dishonest report on the Daily Show, next to the two-month-old coverage it was stolen from.
Hannity apologized to Stewart (not to the viewers he conned) on the air, calling it “an inadvertent mistake”. (How do these things happen exactly? Didn’t it take more effort to dig up the two-month-old footage?) And Jon responded:

We thought [the original Hannity-Bachman piece] was funny. Because we finally had a literal manifestation of what we feel is the metaphorical methodology of the entire Fox network — which, of course, is the subtle altering of reality to sell a preconceived narrative.

Porn star Stormy Daniels on why she is the perfect candidate to challenge Senator David Vitters of Louisiana: “I have nothing to hide. A sex tape of me isn’t going to pop up and shame me; there are 150 of them at the video store.”

As the Wisconsin Tourism Federation (WTF) found out, you’ve got to watch your acronyms in this text-messaging age. Before they changed it days later, a Christian Science Monitor headline from Thursday read: “Irish priest kidnapped in Philippines released by MILF“. Obviously a MILF with a thing for Irish priests — oh, sorry, I guess they meant the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The flagship newspaper of the far right, the Washington Times, is going through a shake-up. The executive editor has resigned. The president and publisher was fired. TPM’s full coverage is here.

Apparently this has something to do with a feud within the family of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (“the Moonies”) which owns the Times. Moon is 89 and has been turning operations over to his sons. One son now heads New World Communications, which includes the Times. Another son has become the Church’s religious leader. 
Theoretically, the religious leader has no direct control over the communications arm, but the Times has always lost money and been subsidized by the Church. (John Gorenfeld, author of Bad Moon Rising, estimates Moon has sunk $2-3 billion into the Times, largely to buy legitimacy for his church within the conservative movement. Wikipedia attributes the figure $2 billion-by-2002 to the Columbia Journalism Review.) So the religious leader could probably pull the plug on the whole operation.

AP’s Calvin Woodward puts it like this:

Sarah Palin’s new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven’t become any truer over time.

Retailers are noticing a two-tier market. High-end stores like Nordstroms are starting to see traffic again, as rich shoppers look for bargains. But middle-income and low-income people are still buying as little as they can.

We won’t have Lou Dobbs to kick around any more — at least not on CNN. (SNL gives Lou a send-off.) In recent years Dobbs has become synonymous with illegal immigration issue. As Salon’s Joe Conason put it:

Stoking nativist paranoia, he has blamed undocumented workers for problems both real and imaginary, from lost jobs and violent crime to increasing leprosy and conspiracies against U.S. sovereignty.

Presente.org saw him as an anti-Hispanic racist and started a campaign to get him off CNN. They have declared victory, even though his radio show continues.
Dobbs’ farewell message on CNN referred to “new opportunities.” Conason speculates Dobbs will run for president as an independent, a prospect Conason describes as “a political nightmare for conservatives” because he would be “drawing upon the same resentful remnant that Republicans hope to mobilize in 2012.” 
The idea that we have to get atmospheric carbon down to 350 parts per million isn’t very catchy, but this music video is.
If you’ve ever wondered who your representative in Congress is really speaking for, here’s a hint: During the House debate on health care reform

[s]tatements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. … Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.

Or maybe it’s not so unusual. How would we know?

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Good News and Bad News

November 9, 2009 – 11:18 am
Certainly it constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit. — Philip Dick, Valis.
In this week’s Sift:
  • Interpreting the Off-Year Elections. The temptation is to read too much into spotty results. But they must mean something.
  • Where Are We on Health Care? The House has passed a bill. That’s not like winning the Super Bowl, but it is like getting to the next round of the playoffs.
  • Short Notes. Jon Stewart does a great Glenn Beck impression. Italy convicts the CIA of kidnapping. Bad coverage at Fort Hood. Jobs decline more slowly. Wind power. What you can’t learn from porn. And more.

Interpreting the Off-Year Elections

Tuesday was election day in a few places. For weeks, pundits have been trying to read some national trend into this handful of state and local races. But as far as I can see, each one is a unique story. (Matt Yglesias points out that we don’t need to read tea leaves in other races to see whether Obama is popular. There are polls for that.)
Republicans won the two governor’s races, in Virginia and New Jersey. Democrats won the two House seats, in California and upstate New York. Maine voted down its same-sex marriage law. Here’s the meaning I’m reading into those races.
Virginia governor. The Republican candidate, Bob McDonell trounced the Democrat Creigh Deeds. As the Institute for Southern Studies blogger Chris Kromm notes, this race was all about turnout. Obama carried Virginia last year by bringing out a lot of young, black, and Latino voters. This year, without Obama in the race, they stayed home. Tuesday’s turnout was only 53% of last year’s. Older, whiter voters came out in force and carried the day for the Republicans.
Polls indicate that Obama’s support among the young and non-white is still strong. The question is whether they will identify with the Democratic Party rather than just with Obama.
New Jersey governor. It’s hard to read any larger significance into Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine’s loss, because he tried to tie himself to Obama and failed. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics:

The Garden State results simply prove that New Jerseyans hated Jon Corzine more than they loved Barack Obama. Obama’s high ratings weren’t enough to save Corzine, who was deeply unpopular because of high property taxes, among other reasons.

New York’s 23rd District. This race was great melodrama. The district voted for Obama in 2008, but no Democrat had won its seat in Congress since the 1870s. Its most recent congressman was Republican John McHugh, who is now Obama’s Secretary of the Army.
Republicans tried to play it safe by nominating a moderate woman, Dierdre Scozzafava, but the teabaggers were having none of it and defected to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. National conservatives like Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman, and when a late poll showed Scozzafava running third with no money to turn things around, she withdrew and endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens.
Owens won. So the Democratic majority in Congress is one seat bigger than it was last week. Thank you Dierdre. But also, thank you Sarah.
In retrospect, the most amusing thing about this race was the way Fox News covered it. They were all set to proclaim this race as a victory for the right-wing revolution and a warning to any Republican who might compromise with Obama. They cheered Hoffman. When Scozzfava withdrew, they all but endorsed Hoffman on her behalf. On election night they refused to believe what they were seeing, and when they had to admit that the voters disagreed with them, they did their best to downplay the district whose importance they had been pimping for weeks. DailyKosTV collects the full Fox story arc.
California’s 10th District. The national media forgot about this election. The Washington Post reported that NY-23 was “the only congressional election in an off-year cycle”. But the Nation points out that CA-10 is really the mirror-image of NY-23: Obama appointed its representative Ellen Tauscher to be an Under Secretary of State. Tauscher was a moderate Democrat, and she wanted another moderate to succeed her. But Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi won the Democratic primary by running to the left.
Unlike in NY-23, though, moving to the left did not create an opportunity for Republicans to steal the seat, and Garamendi was elected 53-43. The upshot is that although this seat was already Democratic, it is more reliably liberal now.
Maine Marriage Equality. This was my biggest disappointment of the night. Maine’s legislature had passed a same-sex marriage law, which the voters have now repealed by a 53-47 vote. This is a state that sits 15 miles up the coast from Massachusetts, where same-sex marriages have been happening since 2003 without any subsequent sky-falling.
What’s up with that? AP has a pretty good analysis: The latest anti-gay-marriage tactic is to claim (falsely) that it will force public schools to teach kids about gay sex. So far, marriage-equality advocates have come up with no better response than to say: “Hey, that’s not true.” How often does that work?
Doc on First Draft also has a very reasonable post. He points out that it’s not the flagrant gay-haters who are the problem, it’s the more-or-less ordinary folks.
Laura Clawson explains why New Hampshire’s constitution makes it much less likely that it will repeal its marriage equality law like Maine did.
And this is a great graphic. It illustrates support for same-sex marriage by state and by age, and demonstrates what a generational issue this is. The South and Utah are the only places where a majority of the 18-29-year-olds don’t support same-sex marriage. The same graphic, plus an amusing conversation with his 7-year-old, appears in Steve Singiser’s The Kids Are Alright. Young voters in Mississippi, he points out, are more likely to support same-sex marriage than are elderly voters in Massachusetts.

Where Are We on Health Care?
The House passed a health-care bill Saturday — which is a lot further than the Clinton administration ever got when it tried to reform health care. The Senate is unlikely to pass the same bill for a variety of reasons, both liberal and conservative. So the big question now is whether the Senate will pass something. If they do, that gets the bill into a conference committee where the Senate and House work out their differences.
Getting provisions into the House bill at this point is like getting into your team into the next round of the playoffs. Anything in either the House bill or an eventual Senate bill is at least going to be talked about by the conference committee. Any provision that doesn’t make it into either bill is pretty much dead.
In the Senate, different health-care bills were passed by the five relevant committees, and it’s up to majority leader Harry Reid to decide which provisions make it into the bill that will be presented to the whole Senate. That’s important, because amendments to that bill will take 60 votes. If, say, the public option is in the bill, then it will take 60 votes to take it out. If it’s not in the bill, it will take 60 votes to put it in. Neither amendment would be likely to pass.
TPM has a good summary of the House bill in general terms.

But because the public option is, well, public, it won’t want to do the unpopular things that insurers do to save money, like manage care or aggressively review treatments. It also, presumably, won’t try to drive out the sick or the unhealthy. … The nightmare scenario, then, is that private insurers cotton onto this and accelerate the process, implicitly or explicitly guiding bad risks to the public option. In theory, the exchanges are risk-adjusted, and the public option will be given more money if it ends up with bad risks, but it’s hard to say how that will function in practice. … The most important factor here will be the strength of the risk adjustment in the exchanges, so keep an eye on that.

The biggest liberal objection to the House bill is its anti-abortion provision, in which no insurance plan paid for (even partially) with a government subsidy can cover abortions. In practice, this will make it very hard for poor women to get abortions. What the Senate or the eventual conference committee will do with that is unknowable at this point.
Nicholas Kristof destroys the “self-aggrandizing delusion” that we have the best health-care system in the world. But he has stopped saying that our system is worse than the Slovenians’, because it annoys the Slovenians.

They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system. As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don’t see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

Kristof goes on to make a really interesting point I hadn’t heard before:

there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare.

Kristof references a report funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published on the web by the Urban Institute. The report compares U.S. health care to that of other countries, and notes one possible cause of the American system’s underperformance:

As compared with the residents of other countries, many more Americans — and chronically ill Americans — say they skip medicines or medical appointments due to cost.

Keep that fact in mind when conservatives talk about their favorite health-care idea: health savings accounts. As one HSA advocate puts it:

If Americans were given incentives toward health savings accounts, we would see health-care costs plummet. For example, if a person who is employed full time received a voucher for health insurance from their employer and placed that money into a health savings account, then that money could gather toward paying for health services. This also encourages individuals to only use health services if needed, also causing a decrease in health-care costs.

In practice “use only if needed” is another way of saying “skip medicines or medical appointments due to cost”. Because it’s usually only in retrospect that you know whether you needed care. Hardly anyone goes to the emergency room just because they’re bored. But a lot of people seek medical help when they don’t know whether they need it or not. If cost keeps them from finding out, some will develop more serious conditions and some will die.

DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas destroyed Tom Tancredo while debating healthcare on MSNBC Friday. The moderator had just brought up the Veterans’ Administration as an example of single-payer healthcare in the U.S., and Tancredo claimed that veterans would rather have vouchers to buy private insurance. Markos laughed at this, and when Tancredo told him to talk to the veterans, he said: “Tom, I’m a veteran. OK? I did not get a deferment because I was too depressed to fight in a war that I supported in Vietnam.”

Tancredo — who did precisely that — huffed and puffed and then stalked off the set. Watch.

Short Notes
Jon Stewart’s parody of Glenn Beck is one of his best pieces ever. He has Beck’s gestures, props, weird leaps of logic, and inappropriate emotional affect down pat. His take on the “war” between the Obama administration and Fox News is pretty good too.
Italy is schooling the United States on the rule of law, but we’re not listening. As part of its rendition program, the CIA kidnapped Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr off the streets of Milan in 2003, then flew him to Egypt where he was tortured.
Wednesday an Italian court concluded that kidnapping is kidnapping, even if you’re the CIA. It convicted 23 Americans of their role in the felony. The convictions were in absentia, because we refused to extradite the defendants. But the 23 had better stay in the U.S., because police in other countries might not be so understanding when an Italian kidnapping conviction pops up on their computer screens.
I don’t have any insight yet on the Fort Hood shootings, but Glenn Greenwald wrote a very interesting post on the media’s early coverage, most of which turned out to be false. (Among other mistakes, they reported multiple shooters.) He sympathizes with the impossibility of reliably separating truth from rumor in the early moments of a big story, and says that he routinely ignores all the details he hears during the first day of such a story’s coverage.

The problem, though, is that huge numbers of people aren’t ignoring it. They’re paying close attention — and they’re paying the closest attention, and forming their long-term views, in the initial stages of the reporting. Many people will lose their interest once the drama dissolves — i.e., once the actual facts emerge. Put another way, a large segment of conventional wisdom solidifies based on misleading and patently false claims coming from major media outlets.

Athenae at First Draft has the solution, if any media outlet wants to implement it:

The first day, the first hours: Cut out all the analysis, all the nonsense, and just tell us what you see. What you can prove. What you know is real. That’s what we need. That’s the best thing that can be done in this scenario. That’s the only useful thing. That’s what people need the most. That’s the job.

The networks’ impulse to get-it-fast rather than get-it-right is what the Yes Men exploited in their fake chamber-of-commerce news conference.

The economy is starting to lose jobs at a slower rate. But this late in a typical recession it wouldn’t still be losing jobs at all.

Paul Krugman discusses the anti-health-care rally that Michelle Bachman led outside the Capitol Thursday, and the overall seizure of the Republican Party by paranoid elements of the Right. For years Republican leaders have given such people only “empty symbolism” like votes in Congress on doomed prayer-in-school or anti-abortion Constitutional amendments.

Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security. But something snapped last year.

Krugman worries that the country might soon face a larger version of what is happening in California:

In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

Speaking of California, Governor Schwarzenegger’s veto of Assembly Bill 1176 contained some interesting subtext. If you read down the first column of the seven lines that make up the body of his message to the legislature, it says “fuck you”. The Governator characterizes this as “a total coincidence“.

When an Obama official called Fox News “the research arm or communications arm of the Republican Party“, maybe she had it backwards. The tail wags the dog now.

Another interesting Krugman point: Obama has no political motivation to reduce the deficit, because if he did no one would notice. Krugman quotes a study from the Clinton era:

Yep: after one of the biggest moves toward budget balance in history, a majority of Republicans, and a plurality of all voters, believed that deficits had increased.

Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams gives men this sage advice:

thinking that you can learn to make to love to a woman from watching porn is like thinking you can learn to drive from watching “The Fast and the Furious.”

AP’s science writer Seth Borenstein debunks the “global cooling” myth.

Before Fox-News-owner Rupert Murdoch bought it, the Wall Street Journal was a schizophrenic newspaper: Its editorial pages were wild-eyed wingnut crazy, while its news pages were generally factual and about as objective as newspapers get. That may be changing, and not in a good way. In this article, the WSJ starts using the term death tax on its news pages.

Death tax is an iconic example of focus-group-tested spin. In the 1990s, Republicans started denouncing “the death tax” because the correct term, federal estate tax, sounded too reasonable. Estates are something rich people own, so the federal estate tax sounds like a tax on the rich — which it is. (In 2009 an estate has to be over $3.5 million before any federal estate tax is owed.) But since everybody dies eventually, a “death tax” sounds universal. As a result, lots of poor and middle class people think they will pay a “death tax” when they really won’t.
The success of the death-tax label has led to even more aggressive spin, like the Republicans’ attempt to label the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Party” — which just sounds worse for some reason. Maybe we’ll soon be seeing that in the WSJ news columns too.
Glenn Greenwald points out that the Washington Post is filling the WSJ’s old role: Its news reporting is still generally good, but it’s editorial page has become “a leading outlet for right-wing advocacy”.
SNL lays it on Goldman Sachs for getting H1N1 vaccine sooner than many schools and hospitals.

A few weeks ago I told you about a survey of Oklahoma high school students that Strategic Vision claimed to have done, and why Nate Silver thought they made their numbers up. Well, an Oklahoma state representative had all the seniors in all the public schools in his district answer the same questions, and guess what? Their answers were much better than what Strategic Vision reported.

For example, in the SV survey, only 23% of students could name George Washington as our first president. But 98% of the actual students could. Nate is standing by his charge that SV made their results up.

Wind power became more real to me last week, when I took my familiar drive from Chicago to my hometown in Quincy, IL and passed a new wind farm off Highway 136. Later in the trip I also passed this wind farm in Mendota. People complain about the big windmills’ looks, but I kind of like them. Their slow, easy motion suits the rural landscape.
By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Military Dysfunction

October 26, 2009 – 12:55 pm
No Sift next week. Back November 9.

Cultural insensitivity is militarily dysfunctional.

— the Defense Science Board
Understanding Human Dynamics, March 2009.

In this week’s Sift:

  • Afghanistan: No Good Choices. If we stay, things probably keep getting slowly worse. Leaving might speed that process up. The NYT’s David Rohde and New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer provide a lot of insight, but no solutions.
  • Like a Fox. Mainstream pundits all seem to think that Obama’s attack on Fox News is a mistake; it will just make Fox stronger and increase the power of people like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity to define the conservative movement. But what if that was the point? (And besides, it gives us all a chance to review Fox’s most outrageous journalistic abuses.)
  • What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Liberals? The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue knows, and tells the world in his new book.
  • Short Notes. Two new videos nail congressional Republicans. What ever happened to W? Rolling Stone exposes widespread nakedness on Wall Street. Senator Vitter avoids offending his racist supporters. Rape has become a pre-existing condition. Global warming deniers are convincing people. And more.
Afghanistan: No Good Choices

As a child I had my own recurring balloon-boy nightmare: I held balloons that were lifting me upward. If I let go, maybe the fall would kill me. If I held on, I would go higher.

That seems to be the choice President Obama is facing in Afghanistan. Everything we’ve done after our initial success (in chasing the Taliban out of the major cities and establishing the Karzai government) has been counter-productive. We’ve fallen into the trap David Kilcullen outlined in The Accidental Guerrilla: Afghans are recruited into the insurgency for purely local reasons — to defend their homes and local communities from us — and then are radicalized into seeing their local struggle as part of the global jihad.

So do we get in deeper and possibly make the Taliban even stronger and more radical in the process? Or do we get out and risk that Afghanistan returns to its pre-9/11 state?

In general, I’m not afraid to make a cut-and-run argument. In 2005 I wrote this about Iraq:

We’re not fixing anything by staying. Whether we leave in a week or a year or in twenty years, Iraq will be a broken country. The only difference is this: Will 1,800 soldiers have died in vain, or thousands more?

Well, thousands more of our soldiers — 4351 total at last count — have died there. I have become a bit more optimistic that there might eventually be a stable Iraqi government, though I’m don’t know how much that better than Saddam that future stable government will be. I remain pessimistic about democracy in Iraq, for the two reasons I outlined in my Pirate Treasure essay in 2008:

  • Lasting democracy requires not just elections, but a broad consensus about all the issues worth killing and dying for. If an issue is too important to decide by voting, the losers of an election will start a civil war.
  • Countries whose wealth is overwhelmingly oil-in-the-ground are poor candidates for democracy, because oil is like pirate treasure: It has no obvious owner; if you can steal it, it will belong to you just as legitimately or illegitimately as it belongs to whoever claims it now. In an oil-rich country, ownership of the oil will always be worth killing for.
The exception-that-proves-the-rule here is Norway. It was already a democracy with strong ethnic homogeneity and a broad consensus on many issues when the North Sea oil was discovered. It already had a modern economy with many opportunities unrelated to oil. Iraq is not Norway.

Afghanistan has the advantage, democracy-wise, of having zero natural resources. But there’s not a lot of national consensus, either. It’s a country of ethnic and tribal loyalties. If somebody starts killing Tajiks, the Pashtuns and Uzbeks aren’t going to lose any sleep over it, or vice versa. If the U.S. were like Afghanistan, people in 49 states would have responded to the Balloon Boy incident like this: “Ah, those Coloradans. They live like animals anyway. Who cares what they do to their children?”

The most I could imagine is some kind of democratic Pashtunistan that eventually united a big chunk of Afghanistan with the Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan. But nobody is proposing that or working toward it.

If we’re just talking security rather than democracy, maybe some Saddam-like strongman in Kabul could control the Afghan countryside well enough to prevent them from plotting any more 9-11s out there. And maybe the Islamabad government in Pakistan could eventually make similar guarantees about its tribal areas.

Maybe. That would be years down the road, after God knows how many lives and how much money gets spent. It’s not a scenario I look forward to.

But what’s the alternative? When the Bush administration was telling us that we couldn’t pull out of Iraq, they claimed Al Qaeda would take over the country and push the jihad into all the neighboring countries, not to mention attack us here in America. That was always a bogus argument for a lot of reasons. But a similar argument about Afghanistan is not so crazy. The most likely candidate to control the country after we leave is the Taliban, which is not identical with Al Qaeda, but not so different either. And what then happens to Pakistan, which is fighting its own war against the Taliban?

Lots of good journalism is focused on Afghanistan these days. Check out the five-part series by New York Times reporter David Rohde, who recently escaped from seven months in Taliban captivity. The Times/Rohde home page also has a good video about his series, including an animation of his escape.

Rohde’s articles underline the dilemma of our mission in Afghanistan. One the one hand, Rohde makes it obvious just how counter-productive American intervention has been so far. Prior to his capture:

I spent two weeks in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, and was struck by the rising public support for the Taliban. Seven years of halting economic development, a foreign troop presence and military mistakes that killed civilians had bred a deep resentment of American and NATO forces.

After capture, he sees how our harshness justifies theirs:

When I told them I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the United States had held and tortured Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Commanders said they themselves had been imprisoned, their families ignorant of their fate. Why, they asked, should they treat me differently?

He also sees how the Taliban is radicalizing as the war goes on:

After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan. Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

So do you let these worse-than-before Taliban take the country back? Or do you risk making them even worse than this?

The other can’t-miss article this week was Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article on the Predator drones. Mayer was also interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR and by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. (Mayer appears at the 3 minute mark).

The debate over the drone attacks against the Taliban is a microcosm of a larger debate between the original Bush kill-the-bad-guys strategy and the Petraeus/Kilcullen protect-the-populace strategy. The question is whether the civilian casualties from drone strikes help the Taliban more than their insurgent-losses hurt.

Pascal Zachary of In These Times makes the get-out-now case.

Like a Fox

Opinion inside the Media Village is just about unanimous: The Obama administration is making a mistake by pointing out that Fox News is not really an objective news organization. WaPo’s Ruth Marcus puts the case like this:

The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst.

I’m going to make a wild guess that the Obama people know all that, and knew it before they raised this topic. But they also know that one of the President’s most important unstated powers is the power to define the opposition. So I think this is just like their earlier feud with Rush Limbaugh. Yes, it will build Fox up, but the people who will look small in comparison are the elected Republican leadership.

These days folks like Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell are Lilliputians next to Rush, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. And that’s deadly for the Republican Party. The elected Republican leadership desperately needs to get control of the party’s message, and to pitch something that won’t alienate 3/4ths of the country.

But Rush, Sean, and Glenn operate by a different calculus. If they can get the most right-wing 10% of the country to tune in every day, they’ll be happy. And so will President Obama.

Matt Yglesias puts it this way:

Obama-skeptics worry that Obama is failing—that his efforts to create jobs aren’t working, that his reforms of the health care system won’t improve access to quality care, etc.—whereas the conservative Republicans worry that he’ll succeed. They believe, à la Beck, that the Obama administration is pursuing a secret agenda aimed at the deliberate destruction of the United States. Focusing on this rather outlandish claim makes it difficult to get in touch with the more banal worries of the marginal voter.

The administration is also providing the rest of us an excuse to point out just how biased Fox’s alleged news coverage (not its opinion shows, its news coverage) is. Huffington Post, for one, compiled The Ten Most Egregious Fox News Distortions.

Jon Stewart contrasts Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage of the teabagger march on Washington with the less-than-four-minutes-total it spent on the comparably sized gay rights march — using footage borrowed from ABC, no less:

You didn’t even send your own camera crew? You have a Washington Bureau. Tell them to go to the window and point the camera down. Gay people aren’t vampires. They show up on camera.

Orcinus provides a list of misinformation Glenn Beck ought to correct. Salon examines how quickly elected Republicans start repeating Beck’s points.

Lest you think that only liberals notice Fox’s bad journalism, watch this piece by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute. He notes many outright falsehoods in Fox’s coverage of Congress amending and reauthorizing the Patriot Act. And then he “defends” Fox like this:

Folks on the Left would say that this is all evidence that Fox News is lying to viewers. But I don’t think that’s true. There are so many weird little mistakes in this report, so many strange random inaccuracies, that I think it just shows they don’t know what they’re talking about.

This clip from Media Matters shows the artificiality of the distinction between Fox’s news and opinion shows. In the first segment, Glenn Beck (opinion) edits a video of White House advisor Anita Dunn to make her statement seem outrageous. In the second, Brit Hume and Bret Baier (supposedly serious journalists) discuss the “news” story of the controversy created by Beck’s show — and play the same edited video.

So Fox’s opinion-makers create “news” which Fox’s news people then “cover”. This is a regular pattern on Fox. The whole teabagger march, for example, started out as Beck’s 9/12 Project. Stuff like that never happens on the legitimate news networks.

Finally, watch Rachel Maddow go meta: Fox News has distorted the Obama administration’s dispute with Fox News, and Fox commentators like Karl Rove (!) seem to have completely forgotten how the Bush administration handled the media.

It’s a mistake to compare Fox to MSNBC, because MSNBC really does maintain the news/opinion distinction, and its sister network CNBC has a conservative bias on its opinion shows. The proper comparison for Obama/Fox is Bush/Air America, not Bush/MSNBC.

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Liberals?

Catholic League President Bill Donohue sees through people like me. He realizes that all the reasons we liberals give for our positions are shams:

  • Gay people seeking marriage equality aren’t looking for social support for long-term loving relationships, and they don’t really want to adopt children or serve in the military, either.
  • Abortion rights? It’s got nothing to do with women wanting to plan their lives better, raise only wanted children, or even just avoid propagating the genes of their rapists.
  • Those of us who aren’t gay or female don’t promote their rights out of compassion or a sense of justice.
  • The reason liberal Catholics, Protestants, and Jews stay in their churches and synagogues (or even devote their lives to a career in the ministry or religious orders) isn’t that they interpret God’s call differently than conservatives do.
  • Secular organizations like the ACLU aren’t really trying to defend the Constitution or human rights.

Nope. We just made up all those reasons. And there’s no use denying it any more, because Donohue has figured out what we really want: to completely destroy the civilization we’re living in.

I’m amazed it has taken this long for somebody to see past all our subterfuge. I know I wake up every morning resenting that I had to be born into a society that more-or-less works, rather than the post-apocalyptic Mad-Max hellhole where I really belong. And that’s why I work night and day to tear down the Judeo-Christian tradition that upholds this culture and keeps us all from eating each other. I’m sure all regular Sift readers feel much the same way.

If you want to see just how totally Donohue has us nailed, check out his new book Secular Sabotage: How Liberals are Destroying Religion and Culture in America. Or read his online WaPo column. Or, for the full dose, watch Pat Robertson interview him.

Seriously — you knew I was kidding, right? — I’ve been at a loss to imagine what I would say if I met Donohue. Facts and logic seem beside the point when someone embraces such sweeping stereotypes.

I know what you’re thinking: What would Jon Stewart do? I don’t know. But here’s what Stephen Colbert did in 2006. BTW, if you clicked the Secular Sabotage link, did you happen to notice the blurb from Stephen Colbert?

Other religion news: I guess the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have had their 15 minutes of fame. So now it’s time for the New New Atheists.

By coincidence I’m in the middle of Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, which probably counts as a new new atheist book. The main difference I’m seeing is that Wright has actual insight into Abrahamic religion — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — while Dawkins and Harris just take fundamentalism at face value and then cluelessly assume that all non-fundamentalist religion is just watered-down fundamentalism. (But I’ve ranted about that before.)

Associated Baptist Press tries to answer an interesting question: Why are conservative Christians so quick to email misinformation to each other? Isn’t that covered under “bearing false witness”?

Short Notes

One comment I keep hearing about Republican in Congress is “These people are so far out there you can’t even make fun of them.” Yes we can. And this DSCC video is pretty good too. (Why do Apple commercials lend themselves to Democratic conversion?)

Or maybe they’ll tear each other up faster than we can tear them down.

Matt Taibbi has a must-read article at Rolling Stone about the market manipulations that brought down Bear-Stearns and Lehman Brothers and the people who profited from it.

It would be an easy matter for the SEC to determine who killed Bear and Lehman, if it wanted to — all it has to do is look at the trading data maintained by the stock exchanges. But 18 months after the widespread market manipulation, the federal government’s cop on the financial beat has barely lifted a finger to solve the two biggest murders in Wall Street history.

The key idea in this article is “naked short-selling” — a practice where you claim to own shares of stock that you don’t really own, and then sell them; you sell your IOU for the stock rather than the stock itself. The hardest thing to understand about naked short selling is how blatantly crazy it is. If you find yourself thinking “That can’t be right”, you’re beginning to get it.

Train of Thought examines the enduring myth (contradicted by just about every poll) that the public option is unpopular. ToT sees this as a specific case of the general myth (also contradicted by most polls) that liberal ideas are out-of-step with mainstream America. (If the white-on-black formatting hurts your eyes, the same piece is black-on-white at DailyKos.)

Whatever happened to … George W. Bush? Your whole office can find out today for only $19. At least he’s not building houses for the homeless like that loser Jimmy Carter.

MoveOn’s new ad in favor of the public option is pretty good.

Last week I ignored the story of the Louisiana justice of the peace who refuses to perform interracial marriages, figuring (i) it’s a local issue, (ii) everybody (including Republican Governor Bobby Jindal) already seemed to be reacting with the proper outrage, and (iii) I have low expectations of Louisiana anyway.

It turns out that (ii) was unjustified, but not (iii). While every other Louisianan with a political pulse quickly condemned the guy (Keith Bardwell), Senator David Vitter (of D.C. Madam fame) has dodged and hedged. At first he didn’t comment, and then when his non-comment started attracting attention he released a statement saying only that “judges should follow the law as written” without mentioning racism, interracial marriage, or Bardwell’s future as a judge.

Vitter is up for re-election in 2010. Maybe he doesn’t dare alienate the racist vote.

Another example of how profit and care don’t go together: A Florida woman was given a knockout drug at a bar and woke up later assuming she had been raped. Doctors gave her an anti-AIDS drug as a precaution. Now, with that drug on her medical record, she’s uninsurable.

The campaign to deny global warming seems to be working.

Ezra Klein outlines the possible public-option-like compromises being considered in the Senate.

I’m on the road next week. If you happen to be in Quincy, Illinois on Sunday morning, I’ll be preaching at the Unitarian Church.

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Should I Be Happy Now?

October 19, 2009 – 1:30 pm
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much
happier if it is called “the People’s Stick”.

— Mikhail Bakunin

In this week’s Sift:

  • Civil Liberties: Where Are We? Bush was bad, Obama is better. But is he better enough?
  • Hispanics Strike Back at Lou Dobbs. Should CNN spend an hour every night dissing Hispanics? And Jon Stewart wonders why CNN fact-checks SNL skits, but nothing else.
  • Short Notes. Which is scarier: Some vague number of Muslim interns who might be trying to infiltrate congressional staffs? Or four conspiracy-mongering wackos who have infiltrated Congress itself? You can argue that Obama’s Nobel was undeserved, but unconstitutional? No, people are not praying to Obama. A tip: If you’re planning to deny rape victims their day in court, don’t let Al Franken interview you. The teabaggers turn on Republican Lindsey Graham. Bonddad is getting optimistic about the economy. And more.
Civil Liberties: Where Are We?

In my mind, the #1 reason to get rid of the Bush administration — more important than wrecking the economy or starting two wars they didn’t win — was what they did to our rights and our system of government.

Teabaggers like to throw around words like tyranny, but everyone seems to have forgotten the Jose Padilla case. The Bush administration argued before the Supreme Court that the president could make an American citizen’s rights go away just by signing a memo declaring him an enemy combatant. Padilla was eventually convicted of a vague conspiracy charge, but that was only after he had been held without charges for several years in conditions amounting to sensory deprivation. During his trial, his lawyers believed his treatment by the government had driven him insane.

While all that was happening, the only legal difference between Padilla and the rest of us was that memo signed by President Bush. Padilla was quite literally a victim of tyranny, and all of us were just one signature away from similar treatment.

So, are we better off now or not? Let’s go issue by issue.

Enemy combatants. The courts largely rejected the Bush administration’s arguments, but the administration maneuvered to prevent the Padilla case from becoming a binding precedent. (Just before the Supreme Court could rule on his detention-without-charges, the administration charged Padilla with a crime and made the case moot. They did something similar in the Rasul and Hamdi cases.) So we never got the ringing affirmation of our rights that would prevent the Obama administration from making similar claims. But so far it has not done so. Unless they’re doing it secretly, the Obama administration is not holding any American citizens as enemy combatants.

Guantanamo. President Obama still has a few months to make good his promise to close Guantanamo during his first year. But the problem isn’t literally Guantanamo, it’s what Guantanamo represents: a legal black hole to swallow up the people we don’t know what to do with. Bagram prison in Afghanistan is a similar black hole, and it remains open.

Torture. Back in January, President Obama issued an executive order (i) recognizing that the Geneva Conventions apply to everyone we detain; and (ii) limiting interrogation techniques (by all agencies, including the CIA) to those listed in the Army Field Manual. In less formal statements, all the Bush-administration word games about torture seem to have ended: It’s illegal, and we’re not fuzzing things up with euphemisms like enhanced interrogation.

Where the Obama administration falls down is in its insistence that we “move on”. If torture is illegal, and if there are credible accusations that people have been tortured, then the rule of law demands that those alleged crimes be investigated and prosecuted. Attorney General Holder has opened the door to prosecuting low-level interrogators, but not to prosecuting those who gave the illegal orders. The administration is also fighting civil suits by torture victims against Bush officials.

People like Dick Cheney are claiming that torture is a “policy difference” between the administrations, not a crime. Obama is behaving as if he believes the same thing. And that means we’ll likely start torturing again during the next Republican administration — secure in the knowledge that no one is ever held accountable for such crimes.

Warrantless wiretaps. Wiretapping without warrants (and without any probable cause of wrongdoing on the part of the victims) may not have been the worst thing the Bush administration did, but it was the most transparently illegal. The Fourth Amendment couldn’t be clearer:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That list — “persons, houses, papers, and effects” — constituted everything the Founders could think of. So the bias should be to interpret the Fourth Amendment expansively rather than tightly, and the courts generally have. If the Founders had used email, mobile phones, and computer databases, they would have been on the list too.

Here’s what I’d like to see: A clear statement from the administration saying “This is what the Bush administration did. We think this part of it was legal and this other part of it was illegal. We’ve put a stop to all the stuff we thought was illegal.” I haven’t seen anything like that.

Administration officials have been cagey about saying what is legal and illegal. They’ve continued blocking the release of information about the program, and have repeated the Bush administration’s abuse of the state secrets privilege to keep information out of court.

Have they stopped the law-breaking? My pro-Obama bias says yes, but who really knows?

Signing statements. When a president signs a bill into law, he sometimes issues a signing statement. The practice goes back to President Monroe and can have a legitimate role in the executive-legislative rivalry when used in good faith. For example, if Congress gives the President permission to do something he was going to do anyway, the President can defend his prerogatives in a statement saying, “Thanks, but I already had the power to do that.”

The improper use of a signing statement is to invalidate the law, a practice that started in the Reagan administration (allegedly thought up by a young lawyer who is now Justice Alito), continued under Bush the 1st and Clinton, and then wildly expanded under Bush the 2nd. The statement can say, in effect, “For enforcement purposes, we’re going to interpret the word up to mean down.” The Constitution already provides the president with a veto (which, unlike a signing statement, Congress can override). If he doesn’t use it, he should enforce the law as written.

Here’s the tricky case: A tiny part of a large and urgent bill tells the president to do something he thinks is unconstitutional. So he signs it, but says, “I’m not going to do the unconstitutional part.” The Founders didn’t plan on that, but they also didn’t plan on Congress passing omnibus bills with thousands of individual provisions.

In March, President Obama issued a memo describing his criteria for signing statements. He leaves open the possibility of ignoring unconstitutional provisions of laws, but says he will “use caution and restraint”, grant that laws passed by Congress have a “presumption of constitutionality”, and apply only “well-founded” constitutional interpretations (presumably a slap at the self-serving unitary executive theory of the Bush administration).

Charles Savage, the reporter who publicized the Bush administration signing statements, is keeping track of Obama’s as well. So far he seems to be carrying out his stated policies in good faith.

Separation of powers. This is the issue where Obama has the best record, and he’s getting no credit for it. On major issues like the stimulus bill or health care, he has insisted that Congress write the laws. This has led to some messy public debates and probably some bills that are not as good as if administration experts had written them behind closed doors and then shoved them through Congress, as the Bush administration used to do. But it’s better democracy and healthier for our system of government.

Our media, however, has developed an affection for the imperial presidency, so letting Congress write the laws is often damned as “lack of leadership”. Sometimes Congress itself seems to resent being asked to work for a living.

Summing up: Is Obama’s civil liberty record better than Bush’s? Undeniably. But I can’t help feeling that an opportunity was missed. Obama’s inauguration was the right moment for the U.S. government to plead temporary insanity. The precedents set by the Bush administration could have been rejected root and branch. Waterboarding and legal black holes could have joined slavery, the Native American genocide, Jim Crow laws, and the Japanese internment as things we did when we were crazy, and that no one should ever suggest doing again.

Instead, Obama is treating Bush’s abuses — now I’m doing it; they weren’t just abuses, they were crimes — as if they are part of the normal back-and-forth of American politics. Obama has (for the most part) stopped the assault on our rights, and has rolled back some of the worst Bush actions. But others he has ratified.

Procedures that survive administrations of both parties start to seem normal. On the whole, then, American democracy is going to come out of the Bush/Obama years in worse shape that it was at the end of the Clinton administration.

Hispanics Strike Back at Lou Dobbs

If you haven’t listened to CNN’s Lou Dobbs in a while, you’ll be shocked when you do. He has joined Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and O’Reilly as cogs in the right-wing noise machine. No matter how meritless the latest wingnut talking points are — ACORN, Obama’s birth certificate, czars, and so on — Dobbs reliably repeats them with proper outrage.

Lou has always had a populist streak, but he used to exercise it on issues like the shrinking middle class. But illegal Hispanic immigration has become his signature issue, and it has moved him to the Right. For a long time now he has been relentlessly pushing falsehoods about the crime and disease that Hispanic immigrants allegedly bring with them. This dirty-wetback image, in turn, leads to discrimination and even violence against all Hispanics, including American citizens.

Now Hispanic-Americans are trying to strike back with a campaign to get Dobbs fired. They’re using the premier of CNN’s Latino in America as a moment to focus on this issue. Check out their video and decide whether you want to sign their petition. Or watch the coverage of the anti-Dobbs campaign on GRITtv.

Dobbs is responding to this campaign with a specious free-speech argument. The First Amendment won’t let the government put you in jail for what you say. But it doesn’t guarantee anybody a TV show, as liberals like Phil Donahue and Bill Mahr know well.

Here’s somebody else CNN might think about getting rid of: Alex Castellanos, whose consulting firm works for AHIP, the health-insurance industry PR group. Castellanos is introduced as a conservative or Republican commentator (which is fine), but viewers are not told that he is in the pocket of the health-insurance companies.

This brings back the question I asked in April 2008: Who works for you? When I watch a news channel, is it too much to ask that the commentators there — liberal, conservative, or whatever — be working for me to help me understand the world, rather than working on me for someone else?

Ditto for the liberal Richard Wolffe on MSNBC. The whole system is corrupt, not just one end of it.

Jon Stewart rips CNN for fact-checking Saturday Night Live’s sketch making fun of President Obama, but not finding time to check all the misinformation their guests spew about health-care reform. And he wonders if CNN’s crack staff has also discovered that land sharks do not deliver candygrams.

Short Notes

Florida is becoming famous for bizarre legal cases (Elian Gonzalez, Terri Schiavo). Here’s another one. As I typically do in such cases, I’ve been trying to imagine how things would play out if the religions were reversed — if Muslims were preventing a Christian family from reclaiming their daughter.

While we’re talking about the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), four Republican Congresspeople are demanding action based on a new book published by the conspiracy-mongering website WorldNetDaily (best known for its work on the burning issue of Obama’s birth certificate). The book’s author infiltrated CAIR as an intern, and has uncovered a conspiracy to infiltrate the staff of congressional committees as interns.

So having uncovered this dread conspiracy, can either the Congressional Republicans or WorldNetDaily give us the name of even one such intern? Can they name even one piece of legislation influenced by this conspiracy? Uh … no.

What scares me here isn’t the hypothetical Muslim interns — interns, as we all know, being the very chrome on the levers of power. It’s that Congress itself has been infiltrated by at least four conspiracy-theory wackos who think WorldNetDaily is a reliable source. (See Glenn Greenwald for more details on what he calls “the most despicable domestic political event of the year.”.)

The Washington Post opinion section seem to get weirder and further to the right every day. Friday they published an op-ed claiming that President Obama’s Nobel isn’t just undeserved, it’s unconstitutional. Fortunately, we don’t have to get our constitutional interpretations from the Post when Yale professor Jack Balkin is still blogging.

This is how myths start: George Will criticized Obama’s ego and vanity, citing as evidence that he overuses first-person-singular I/me pronouns. Anybody else who wants to make that point can now reference Will.

The problem: Will made the whole thing up. Mark Liberman of Language Log looked at the speeches Will was talking about, counted, and then examined comparable speeches by Presidents Bush the 2nd and Clinton. Obama actually uses significantly fewer I/me pronouns.

One more myth: The supposed clip of people praying to Obama. In some iterations of the litany, you can clearly hear the crowd saying “Deliver us O God.” In other iterations they get out of rhythm, so there seems to be an extra syllable at the end. Jaundiced ears heard that garbled “O God-od” as “O-ba-ma”. And now, in certain circles it is considered a fact — don’t tell us otherwise, we’ve seen the video — that Obama is being worshiped as a god. Probably those are the same people who think he’s the Antichrist. (I’m not sure how you fact-check somebody being the Antichrist, but Snopes says he isn’t, in case you were curious.)

In spite of all the rhetoric about Obamamania and the Obama personality cult, progressives have in general been far more critical and less worshipful of President Obama than conservatives were of President Bush. Glenn Greenwald fleshes this point out.

Bill Mahr outdid himself in this clip. It wasn’t until Bush got out of the way that comedians could give all the other ridiculous Republicans the attention they deserve. “This was truly a bizarre year for Republicans. Their sex scandals were with women.”

It’s good to have Al Franken in the Senate. Here he grills an attorney from KBR, a former Halliburton subsidiary that does government contract work in Iraq. In particular, Al is asking about their policy that all disputes within the company be handled by binding arbitration, and how that policy has applied to Jamie Leigh Jones.

I read some of your testimony to Ms. Jones. You said that the net result of the use of arbitration is “better workplaces”. … She was housed with 400 men. She told KBR twice that she was being sexually harassed. She was drugged by men that the KBR employment people knew did this kind of thing. She was raped. Gang-raped. She had to have reconstructive surgery, sir. … And then, she was locked in a shipping container with an armed guard. Now, my question to you is: If that’s a better workplace, what was the workplace like before?

Background: Mother Jones magazine (no relation) covers Ms. Jones’ ongoing legal case. Fake conservative blogger Jon Swift summarized the conservative blogosphere’s reaction to the case.

Franken’s first legislative act was to propose an amendment not allowing such arbitration clauses to cover rapes of government contractors. It passed the Senate, but Jon Stewart wonders why 30 Republicans voted against it.

The Obama administration is changing federal policy on marijuana. The feds will no longer waste their resources arresting people who are in compliance with state medical marijuana laws. This is a victory for local control and states rights and all that stuff conservatives are supposed to like. Why do I think they won’t applaud?

Studies show that many Americans (Harvard says 45,000 a year) die because they don’t have health insurance. Faced with this argument, Senator Kyl counters:

I’m not sure that it’s a fact that more and more people die because they don’t have health insurance. But because they don’t have health insurance, the care is not delivered in the best and most efficient way.

Translation: “Not gonna look. Not gonna look. Can’t make me. Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah.”

I’m sure Harvard has no answer for that.

I’ve mentioned before that the potential savings from reforming medical malpractice are trivial compared to the overall health-care budget. The Congressional Budget Office agrees.

For years there has been a gentlemen’s agreement to pretend that Fox News is a legitimate news channel rather than the conservative propaganda vehicle that conservative political operative Roger Ailes founded it to be. The Obama administration has decided not to play along any more. It’ll be interesting to see where that goes.

If you’re feeling bad about your parenting, watch this. (The baby is OK.)

The Onion reports that 93% of all newspapers are bought by kidnappers.

Conservative politicians are only beginning to realize what genie they let out of the bottle when they pandered to the teabag protests. Here Lindsey Graham gets heckled because his global warming position is “a pact with the devil” — i.e., John Kerry. One heckler yells over and over that Graham should read Article I, Section 9. I did. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Liberal economic blogger Bonddad loves graphs. He thinks they show the economy is starting to turn up.

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