Exceptional Circumstances

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. — Article 2.2 of the Convention Against Torture, signed for the United States by President Ronald Reagan on April 18, 1988 (21 years ago Saturday)

In this week’s Sift:

  • The New Torture Memos. If you’re surprised, you were probably in denial.
  • Now That You’ve Brought Up Thomas Paine … I have to point out that he was a flaming liberal. Glenn Beck should read Paine’s Agrarian Justice before he brings actors onto his show to play Paine.
  • Short Notes. Gloria, Newt, and the pirates. Satirists accept the challenge of “The Gathering Storm”. George Will denounces blue jeans. And conservatives finally begin to understand why a surveillance state is a bad idea.

The New Torture Memos

Thursday, the Obama administration released four new memos in which the Bush Justice Department interpreted away our laws against torture. I have read one of the newly released memos and summaries of the others. What is new here is the specificity. If you were in denial about the fact that the United States of American tortured people as a matter of policy (and not just by the actions of a few over-zealous guys in the field), that denial just became a lot harder to maintain. On the other hand, if you took the previous torture memos seriously and imagined what they must mean — this is about what you should have expected.

In the memo I read, Jay Bybee OK’d the CIA’s interrogation plan for suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah, in which he would be deprived of sleep, slapped, slammed against a wall, put into a small box with an insect he was morbidly afraid of, and waterboarded. Bybee objected to nothing the CIA proposed, and drew no line-in-the-sand that they dare not cross in the future, saying only that if the facts he had been given were to change, “this advice would not necessarily apply.”

In the previously released John Yoo memos, you could imagine that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel was engaged in an academic exercise about what the law conceivably might allow — doing a bad job of it and grossly exagerating the power of the president, but not directly hurting anybody. That fig leaf is gone now. Bybee was one of the last links in the decision chain about whether to torture a specific man in specific ways. He had every reason to believe that if he said yes, the torture would happen. He said yes, and it happened.

In all the accounts I’ve read of the Bush administration and torture (many of which are collected in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, which I reviewed last month) I can find no trace of a conversation at the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld level about whether torture works. They just assumed it did. Lower-level people, many of them with training and experience in interrogation, tried to raise the issue that torture was not the best approach to getting information, but they were consistently told that the question had been decided already; you were either on board or you weren’t.

Bush CIA Director Michael Hayden went on Fox News Sunday to claim that revealing these memos has made America less safe, because torture “really did work.” Of course, we have to take his word, because all the evidence is classified. And naturally, if it were true that he had sold America’s soul and gotten nothing for it, he would tell us. Right?

No one ever points out how torture costs American lives. When we’ve got terrorists cornered, whether in Tora Bora or in some isolated cabin in the Rockies, our best weapon is their knowledge that if they just surrender, they’ll be treated well. Medical care, a warm safe place to sleep, three meals a day — just surrender. Frag your commander if you have to, but surrender. You’ll be fine. But if surrender means torture and degradation, terrorists might well decide to go out shooting and take as many Americans with them as they can.

Matt Yglesias comments:

In historical terms, you don’t look back on the Spanish Inquisition or on Stalin’s Russia and say man, those guys had some crack investigators! Rather, you see that historically the function of torture has been to extract false confessions and to inspire a general climate of fear.

Perhaps the worst thing we did to the detainees is rarely discussed, and seemed to need little justification: extended solitary confinement. American citizen Jose Padilla spent three and a half years in a military brig. For much of that time he saw no one but his interrogators — not even guards — and was held in a wing with no other prisoners. At least some of that time he lived in sensory deprivation.

Former interrogator Col. Steven Kleinman (retired): “I’m not a psychologist, but if he is not profoundly psychologically disturbed from that experience then he is a stronger man than me.”

He’s not stronger. By all acounts from people who knew him, we broke Padilla. Not in the interrogation sense of breaking his resistance, but in the human sense that he can’t function in society any more.

NYT: The interrogation program Bybee approved occurred “despite the belief of interrogators that [Abu Zubaydah] had already told them all he knew” because higher-ups in the CIA had “a highly inflated assessment of his importance.” Nonetheless, Bybee’s memo summarizes information he had been given like this:

The interrogation tearn is certain that he has additional information that he refuses to divulge. Specifically, he is withholding information regarding terrorist networks in the United States or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas.

This is one of many reasons why you don’t want a bureaucracy handling torture. Bureaucracy is a constant game of telephone: Each player distorts things a little bit, and the distortions accumulate as information goes up and down the chain.

TPM collects the commentary about these memos on the Sunday talk shows.

Glenn Greenwald was struck by a Steven Bradbury memo that acknowledges:

Certain of the techniques the United States has condemned [when other countries do them] appear to bear some resemblance to some of the CIA interrogation techniques.

But in a footnote Bradbury says:

Diplomatic relations with regard to foreign countries are not reliable evidence of United States executive practice

In other words, we’re not bound by any of that high-minded stuff we preach to other countries.

The NYT wants Bybee, now a federal appeals judge for life, impeached:

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution.

A day later than Marcy Wheeler, the NYT noticed that two detainees were waterboarded a total of at least 266 times. Matt Yglesias comments that this should put to rest “the notion that some kind of ticking time bomb story lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s torture policy.” There weren’t 266 ticking time bombs, were there?

In a later post, Matt explained waterboarding:

Basically the idea is that if you would like to torture someone by holding them under water until they nearly drown, but your lawyer tells you that you’re not allowed to run the risk doing permanent physical harm to the torturee, “waterboarding” is a nifty method of producing all the relevant torture but without the chance of accidentally drowning the guy you’re torturing. The only reason anyone could ever reach the conclusion that this isn’t torture is that they (a) want to torture people, and (b) don’t want to admit that they want to torture people.

The Obama administration continues to oppose any accountability for torture, either at the interrogator level or at the policy level or at the top. Obama’s official statement says:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

That’s the White House line: insisting on the rule of law is just “emotion”. Rahm Emanuel elaborated that this is not a time for “anger and retribution.” The official statement continues:

The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals.

But this plainly is not true, as UN Special Rapporteur Manfred Nowak has pointed out:

The United States, like all other states that are part of the U.N. convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court

In other words, we have an obligation under the law to prosecute torturers. By ignoring this obligation President Obama, like President Bush, is picking and choosing which laws he will live by.

In another region of the Bush legacy: Yesterday Congressional Quarterly reported a sinister series of deals centering on Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman that allegedly happened in late 2005. (Harman denies the story and it’s based entirely on anonymous sources, but CQ is a quality publication.) The first alleged deal is that Harman would use her influence with the Bush Justice Department to support two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage; in exchange the pro-Israel group AIPAC would use its influence with Nancy Pelosi to get Harman appointed chair of the House Intelligence Committee if the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006.

That conversation allegedly was picked up by an NSA wiretap (directed at the Israelis, not at Harman), and the Justice Department began investigating Harman. Then CQ claims a second deal happened: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stopped the investigation because “Gonzales wanted Harman to be able to help defend the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about break in The New York Times and engulf the White House.”

Glenn Greenwald comments:

Jane Harman, in the wake of the NSA scandal, became probably the most crucial defender of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, using her status as “the ranking Democratic on the House intelligence committee” to repeatedly praise the NSA program as “essential to U.S. national security” and “both necessary and legal.”

Josh Marshall at TPM raises the question that popped into a lot of people’s minds, including mine: “Any particular reason people in the intel community would want to start talking to the press right now?” Maybe the NSA is reminding Obama that a lot of high-ranking Democrats are implicated in the Bush administration’s crimes.

Wednesday, the same NYT reporters who exposed the NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program in the first place reported that the NSA’s spying on Americans’ email and phone calls “went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.” Glenn Greenwald agrees with Digby: “It was so inevitable that I can’t even find the energy to get worked up about it.” Digby concludes:

I’m going to spend the rest of the night re-reading all the moving speeches that were made on the Senate floor just a year ago, talking about how we didn’t need to look in the rear view mirror and the safeguards in the bill would solve all problems.

Now That You’ve Brought Up Thomas Paine …

As Glenn Beck invokes the spirit of Thomas Paine, it becomes apparent that Beck has never read Paine’s essay Agrarian Justice. Paine’s ideas are both radical and simple, and our current political debates would advance considerably if everyone understood them.

Writing in the French Republic in 1795 (having recently escaped death during the Reign of Terror) Paine begins his essay by comparing civilized society to what he has seen of a hunter-gatherer culture:

The life of an [American] Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

In his characteristic cut-to-the-chase style, Paine puts his finger on civilization’s key problem: the system of private property, by which the rich claim the communal inheritance of humanity.

It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female, and He gave them the earth for their inheritance.

Paine doesn’t see how civilized society could function (and support its larger population) without private property. But he has a plan to rectify the inherent injustice of the property system. First, if we can no longer honor each person’s right to a share of the Earth, at least give everybody enough capital to get started in life. He proposes:

To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property:

Second, start an old-age pension.

And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

Funded how? By an inheritance tax — a death tax, if you will. Paine calculates that 10% should do the trick. No one can rightfully object to such a tax, Paine reasons, because his inheritance is already the result of usurping the natural inheritance of everybody else.

Various methods may be proposed for this purpose, but that which appears to be the best … is at the moment that property is passing by the death of one person to the possession of another. In this case, the bequeather gives nothing: the receiver pays nothing. The only matter to him is that the monopoly of natural inheritance, to which there never was a right, begins to cease in his person. A generous man would not wish it to continue, and a just man will rejoice to see it abolished.

But what of the argument often made by conservatives, that good works like this should be done by private charity, not by the government? that they should be funded by voluntary individual contributions rather than by taxes? Paine answers that the cause of poverty is inherently social, not individual. It requires a social solution.

It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. … There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.

So I thank Glenn Beck for restoring Thomas Paine to national attention. Maybe Beck could devote an hour or two of his show to explaining the Agrarian Justice program and the liberal ideas behind it.

The Beck message from Thomas Paine repeated the invocation of the mysterious and sinister they, as in Beck’s We Surround Them diatribe. According to the faux Paine (beginning at the 2:20 mark), they did a series of dastardly things we thought they wouldn’t dare do: bomb Pearl Harbor, destroy the World Trade Center, attack the Pentagon, and pass the Stimulus Bill. Yep: Democrats in Congress, the Japanese Empire, and the 9-11 conspirators all go together somehow. What might they do next if we don’t rise up and stop them?

Meanwhile, Texas Governor Rick Perry talked to a tea-party group about secession. (Didn’t they try that once before?) Blogger Occam’s Hatchet sympathizes with the encircled liberal capital of Austin, and wants to hear an updated version of JFK’s “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech:

There are some who say that Republicanism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Austin. And there are some who say in Congress and elsewhere we can work with the Republicans. Let them come to Austin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Republicanism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Let them come to Austin!

Short Notes

CNN’s Gloria Borger on Newt Gingrich’s running twitter-commentary about Obama’s handling of the pirate incident:

If Republicans can’t allow that the president did his job well in this unambiguous case, why should we believe their complaints about anything else? If they can’t pat him on the back for this one, why should we even listen to their arguments about the budget, about health care, about energy?

The anti-same-sex-marriage ad “The Gathering Storm” (that I linked to last week) might as well have yelled “Bring it on!” to satirists everywhere. Parodies abound. This one is pretty good. And this one was created without anyone needing to act or speak or even draw. (“If you can type,” they say, “you can make movies.”) And Stephen Colbert had to get into the act too.

Now somebody needs to parody George Will, who has gone into full-blown cranky-geezer mode. Having already warned us about the global-warming conspiracy, Thursday he took on a true American scourge: blue jeans. Seriously. He wrote a column in the Washington Post denouncing blue jeans. Syndicated.

A new report from Homeland Security warns local police about right-wing extremist activity and the possibility of violence. Glenn Greenwald collects comments from outraged right-wingers, but also asks where they’ve been these last few years. How many times, he wonders, were liberals told that if we’d done nothing wrong we had nothing to hide? “When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you.”

April 20, 2009 – 2:20 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Still in the Dark

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society. — John F. Kennedy


In this week’s Sift:

  • Obama Disappoints on Secrecy. In two important cases, he has reaffirmed Bush’s precedents rather than rejecting them.
  • The Gathering Storm of Conservative Victimhood. A new ad shows how the Religious Right plans to oppose gay rights going forward. But the “rights” they claim to be losing were already rejected in Greensboro in 1960.
  • Untruth and Consequences. If you report the truth and it sets off some violent whacko, that’s not your fault. But if you set off the crazies by making stuff up, then maybe it is your fault.
  • Short Notes. Why Palin will never be president. Ted’s still got it at Fenway. Will Franken ever get to occupy the senate seat he won? It’s official: protesters aren’t terrorists. My limited sympathy for Ted Stevens. Tracking the decline of newspapers. How other countries handle criminal leaders. And the ultimate small car from GM and Segway.

Obama Disappoints on Secrecy

The wars and the economy get all the headlines, but an equally important issue President Obama has inherited is executive power. The Bush administration put forward two principles (I’m stating them in my own words, but I believe I’m doing it fairly) that may sound reasonable individually, but taken together are very dangerous:

  • By making the president commander-in-chief, the Constitution gives him the power to conduct a war without interference from the other branches of government.
  • It is up to the president to decide (again without interference) what situations are part of an ongoing war.

Taken together, these principles imply that in wartime (and Congress has at least recognized and accepted that we are at war, even if war has never been formally declared), the president has unchecked power whenever he decides that he has unchecked power. It’s a roadmap for dictatorship, no matter whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat.

Many of us have hoped that President Obama would announce a new doctrine of executive power, one that would consign the Bush ideas to a “bad old days” that should never return. (Of course, the ultimate way to reject the Bush/Cheney power claim is to prosecute Bush and Cheney for war crimes. Future presidents would have to take account of that.) He hasn’t done so yet, and that has left us trying to read the tea leaves whenever he makes any decision related to executive power.

One recent leaf comes from the warrantless wiretapping issue. The Bush administration, with help from key Democrats in Congress, had managed to close off nearly every avenue for investigating this program, which on the face of it appears to be illegal. The one remaining chink in the program’s armor was a lawsuit that the Electronic Frontier Foundation had filed against the NSA. Raw Story reports:

In their filing Friday, the Justice Department argued that the case should be dismissed because information surrounding the program was a “state secret” and therefore couldn’t be litigated or discussed. It also proposed that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” under federal wiretapping statutes and the Patriot Act, arguing that the United States could only face lawsuits if they willfully elected to disclose intelligence obtained by wiretapping.

So Obama is not only trying to close the final door on accountability for illegal wiretapping, he is doing so by invoking the state secrets privilege, something he criticized the Bush administration for abusing.

Another tea leaf is the administration’s effort to make the Baghram prison in Afghanistan the same kind of legal black hole as Guantanamo was under Bush — a place where suspects can be detained without any oversight or hearing.

During the Bush administration, some on the Right thought that executive power was purely a partisan issue, and that the Left would rally around a liberal president who made the same claims. It’s not happening. On both Baghram and state secrets, Glenn Greenwald having the kind of reaction that got him the nickname Glenzilla . Keith Olbermann is having a fit (video, transcript) as well. They’re not alone.

I’m sure Glenn and Keith and all the other liberal bloggers and pundits want to root for Obama, and everyone realizes that he is juggling a lot of important issues right now. But a Democratic Congress failed in its duty to impeach Bush when he broke the law. If a Democratic president now fails to reverse his policies, the effect will be a permanent change in the relationship between the branches of government. It’s not enough for Obama to try to use the Bush powers responsibly. If he leaves them intact, some future president will use them irresponsibly.

OK, here’s one good tea leaf to read: CIA Director Leon Panetta says the secret prisons have been shut down.

And not everybody reads the tea leaves the same way. See Obama supporters here and here.

The Gathering Storm of Conservative Victimhood

One of the few conservative successes in 2008 was Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal again in California. They did it with a change of tactics, which they are now trying to take national. The first tactic against same-sex marriage was to laugh it off — the idea was absurd; people proposing it couldn’t be serious.

When it started becoming reality in places like Massachusetts (then Connecticut, Iowa, and now Vermont — by an act of the legislature, unprompted by the courts), the second tactic was apocalyptic: “The family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble,” prophesied James Dobson in 2004, “presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.”

But that message is less and less effective as it becomes clear that Massachusetts families are doing no worse than any others — better than Bible Belt families, by most statistics. Boston continues to be a center of civilization. Entire countries — Canada, for example — have married Adam to Steve with no sign of apocalypse.

Worse (from the Right’s point of view), the public is beginning to sympathize with same-sex couples, to see them as real people trying live their lives rather than as monsters intent on seeding moral chaos. The Courage Campaign’s “Don’t Divorce Us” video was a powerful weapon against Proposition 8.

And so we’re into the third round of tactics: claiming victimhood. This approach asserts that protecting gay rights means taking rights away from conservative Christians. Salon reports on a new ad called “The Gathering Storm” full of that-ain’t-right sound bites that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

For example, one of the characters in “The Gathering Storm” says: “I am a New Jersey church group punished by the government because we can’t support same-sex marriage.”

Not exactly. You should smell something fishy right away, because New Jersey doesn’t have same-sex marriage. The reference is to a the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist group in New Jersey. The LA Times explains that the OGCMA

owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs. The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public.

Most of the claims along these lines are similar. The “right” being violated is like the “right” of the Greensboro Woolworths not to serve blacks at its lunch counter. Like Woolworths in 1960, the Religious Right is arguing that it can define “the public” in such a way that some group is not part of it.

No.

Stanley Fish asks nails this one: “When a professional hangs out his shingle doesn’t he offer his services and skills to the public and not just to members of it who share his morality?”

And so I say an equal “no” to the professional photographer who won’t work at a same-sex reception, the marriage counselor who won’t help same-sex couples stay together, and the fertility doctor who won’t help lesbians get pregnant. You don’t get to define the public. That “right” can’t be taken away from you because it was never a right to begin with.

Untruth and Consequences

It’s tempting to point to all the recent shootings as evidence for my past claim that we’re going to see an upswing in right-wing violence. But it’s not quite that simple: Of the recent incidents, only Richard Poplawski’s shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers seems to be politically motivated. Poplawski was a heavily armed 22-year-old white supremacist who believed all sorts of conspiracy theories. Comments Gary Kamiya at Salon:

Poplawski’s black-helicopter and anti-Semitic ravings put him at the outer edge of the right. But his paranoid fear that Obama was going to take away his AK-47 is mainstream among conservatives. That fear, fomented by the NRA and echoed by right-wing commentators from Lou Dobbs to Limbaugh, is ubiquitous online.

A lot of conclusions might be drawn here, but this is the one that strikes me: There are consequences to making stuff up and promoting it to the public as if it were true.

In any well-informed free society, you have to live with the possibility that some nutcase might have an extreme reaction to the news. If a Poplawski sees a headline about our trillion-dollar deficit and decides he has to kill somebody, what can you do (other than try to give our officials good security)? We do have a trillion-dollar deficit, and people should know about it.

But a considerable effort goes into manufacturing hysteria on the right, by pushing stories that have no basis in fact. Such as, Obama is going to:

And not that he could do it or might do it or we’re afraid he’ll do it — he’s doing it. If you’re going to stop him you have to act now.

In addition to the Obama myths are the nefarious activities attributed to liberal groups like ACORN, which was the object of vote fraud smears during the 2008 campaign, and is part of the “rig the census” charge. (ACORN is one of 250 groups helping the government recruit the 1.4 million temporary workers the census needs.) Did you know that ACORN is going to get $4 billion from the stimulus bill? (Nope.) Or that ACORN is sending in undercover agents to disrupt the conservative “tea party” protests? (Nuh-uh. If you don’t know what a tea party protest is, you’re in the same boat as ACORN’s leaders.)

These imaginary stories are then fanned with inflamed rhetoric about taking back America and revolution. Congresswoman Michelle Bachman: “There is no free country for us to repair to. That’s why it’s up to us now.” Glenn Beck: Obama is a “bloodsucker” and can only be stopped with “a stake through the heart”.

None of these Republican politicians and conservative media celebrities is saying “go shoot somebody”. Driving a stake through Obama’s heart is — you knew this, right? — a metaphor. And talk about poisoning Justice Stevens was “just a joke”. But they have to know that the right-wing fringe includes a lot of Richard Poplawskis and James Adkissons and Timothy McVeighs. (The Left has its own nutcases, but ours are more likely to hit you with a cruciatus curse than to blow you away with an AK-47.) It’s not hard to guess what such people will do when they swallow what they’re being fed.

I’ve long believed that conservatives look on the news cycle as a kind of game, where you win by getting people to believe and talk about stories that help you and hurt your opponents. But it’s not a game. Untruth has consequences.

BTW, if you want to know why liberals can’t discuss the teabag protests without cracking a smile, DailyKos TV explains — with help from Sex and the City. That’s why Rachel Maddow can barely keep from dissolving into laughter, while Jon Stewart just seems embarrassed by it all.

I have to give Glenn Beck this much credit: In this segment, he exercises a little quality control on the lunatic fringe. He debunks the YouTube videos claiming to show FEMA’s concentration camps.

TPM readers who worked on the 2000 census are worried what might happen to census workers if they’re perceived as part of some left-wing plot.

I’m convinced that there are plenty of unbalanced people who won’t leave their houses to seek liberals to kill, but will kill a “radical leftist” (Steele’s words) who knocks on their door in a mission to “falsify the U.S. Census and manipulate elections in their favor” (again, Steele’s words).

Short Notes

Ted Kennedy doesn’t walk smoothly any more, and his attempt to throw out the first pitch at Fenway Park Tuesday didn’t go very far. But he’s still got the Kennedy smile.

Now that we’ve had a count, a recount, a review by the Board of Elections, and now a ruling by a three-judge panel, is it finally time for Norm Coleman to admit that he lost the Minnesota senate race and let Al Franken take his seat? Even many conservatives are finally urging him to give up.

Matt Yglesias makes a persuasive case that car sales have to perk up soon: At the current sales rate, it would take more than 25 years to replace the cars on the road.

Peru just convicted its former president Alberto Fujimori of authorizing a death squad against the Shining Path insurgents. The court sentenced him to 25 years. Digby comments:

It’s interesting, no? The people all believe he committed these crimes yet he remains popular because of his economic policies. And the legal system operates independently of all of that, pursuing the case on the merits. How novel.

On the other hand, we’re doing better than Zimbabwe:

President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition into granting them amnesty for their past crimes by abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists, according to senior members of Mr. Mugabe’s party.

Now that his felony convictions have been thrown out due to misconduct by the Bush Justice Department, former Republican Senator Ted Stevens is receiving an outpowering of sympathy, including Gov. Palin’s call for a special election so that he can win his Senate seat back.

Everybody needs to take a breath. You know who else is free because of prosecutor misconduct? Bill Ayers. Getting off on a technicality doesn’t mean you’re innocent.

Speaking of Palin, lately we’ve been seeing the main reason why she will never be president: She doesn’t have the temperament for it. National politicians need to have thick skins, and to know when a fight is beneath their dignity. Palin doesn’t. That’s what the Troopergate story showed: Becoming governor was just a new way to pursue a family vendetta, not a mandate to rise above it.

The recent example of this character flaw is her reaction to the media tour by Levi Johnston and his family. A savvy politician would have either ignored it or released an above-it-all statement recognizing that the Johnstons were bound to tell the story in their own way. Salon’s Rebecca Traister comments:

Not Sarah Palin! No, this wizard decided the best way to tackle the (understandably irritating) problem of her loose-lipped would-have-been son-in-law was to publicly rebuke the kid, in a grandiose statement of denial and affronted morals, the weekend before the offending interview was to air, thereby ensuring that the episode of “Tyra” would become must-see television.

She struck back again after Levi told CBS that the Palins were “snobby”. And now she’s in a public cat-fight with a family that feels it has to deny being “white trash”.

The RNC 8 are would-be protesters who face felony charges because of their “conspiracy” to “disrupt” last September’s Republican Convention in Minneapolis. The good news: terrorism charges against them have been dropped. You can watch their arrest in September.

You can track the ongoing demise of the newspaper industry through the blog Paper Cuts. Salon has an article about the effort to fund investigative journalism through non-profits. It also contains this interesting observation:

Long before the current recession and radical cutbacks, many newspapers had lost their community watchdog function, no longer bothering with the expensive and time-consuming work of investigative reporting. A 2005 survey by Arizona State University of the 100 largest U.S. dailies found that 37 percent had no full-time investigative reporters, and the majority of the major dailies had two or fewer.

As if to illustrate the point, a Daily Kos post takes apart a NYT article on the well-paid global warming nay-sayer Marc Morano. After reading the Times’ article, you know what lots of people claim, but no objective facts that could help you assess those claims.

If only it were someone’s job to uncover those facts, or to check people’s statements rather than just quote them. That would be worth paying for.

Finally, DailyKos founder Kos points out that a lot of investigative journalism gets done outside of newspapers.

GM and Segway combine on a vehicle that looks very cool, but you have to wonder about the crash tests.

April 13, 2009 – 12:32 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Still Crazy After All These Years

It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong. — Martin Fischer

In this week’s Sift:

Republican Budget: The song remains the same

One reason to read the Weekly Sift is that I do a lot of disagreeable things so that you don’t have to. This week I read the 62-page House Republican Budget Alternative, which is supposed to prove that Republicans are not just the Party of No; they have ideas of their own.

They do have ideas — Ronald Reagan’s ideas from nearly 30 years ago, put forward as if the last few decades have nothing to teach us. They propose cutting both taxes and spending. As always, they’re very specific about which taxes they’re going to cut (rich people’s), and very vague about what they’re going to spend less on. It’s worth noting that whenever Republicans have been in power, the vague spending cuts have failed to materialize, and the tax cuts went straight to the deficit.

Taxes. The tax cuts are a laundry list of everything the rich and powerful want:

  • the top tax rate goes from 35% to 25%
  • the corporate tax rate goes from 35% to 25%
  • the Bush tax cuts are made permanent rather than expiring in 2011
  • capital gains taxes are eliminated in 2009 and 2010. (Notice: This is the same “temporary” trick as the Bush cuts. As soon as it passed, Republicans would start complaining about the “tax increase” scheduled for 2011. Also: this cut goes almost entirely to the wealthy. Lots of middle-class people have a few hundred dollars of capital gains in a good year, but capital gains are a major portion of the income of the wealthiest Americans.)
  • the estate tax (a.k.a. the “death tax”) is eliminated. (Again, this goes entirely to the wealthy. Currently, only estates larger than $3.5 million pay the estate tax.)

The one part of their plan that helps ordinary people is to raise the standard deduction to $12,500 ($25,000 for couples) and the personal exemption to $3,500. So a family of four would pay no tax on the first $39,000 of income. All other personal deductions are gone.

Spending. The spending cuts are just decrees that there shall be spending cuts. No actual programs are picked out for reduction or elimination, other than repealing the stimulus bill. So the hard part of budgeting — telling people that they’re going to lose their jobs or that their child won’t get a liver transplant or that their bridge won’t get maintenance again this year — is punted down the field.

For example, the report says this about entitlements:

Total mandatory spending increases by an average of 3.9 percent per year for the next 10 years. This is slightly slower growth than projected in the Congressional Budget Office baseline and the Obama/Democratic budget.

It’s an old Republican budgeting trick to talk about capping spending growth rather than cutting benefits. But if there’s inflation and an increase in the number of people eligible for benefits (more old people, say), then the only way to cap spending growth is to cut per capita spending. Benefits for each individual go down, in other words, even though total spending on the program may go up.

More money is saved by giving states “more flexibility for their Medicaid recipients.” In other words, someone else — governors, most of whom are Democrats — will have to tell poor people that they won’t be getting as much health care.

Spending on defense and veterans is allowed to increase, but all other discretionary spending “is assumed to be level-funded through fiscal year 2014 before growing at a moderate rate through 2019.” Again, this means that the hard choices are somebody else’s problem. If you want to increase spending on, say, modernizing the electrical grid, you’ll have to find something else to cut — maybe college scholarships or food stamps.

This approach makes sense only if you assume that the federal budget is full of bridges to nowhere — programs that can be eliminated without hurting anybody. But whenever Republicans try to identify some, they embarrass themselves. Examples: Sarah Palin talking about “fruit flies” in the fall campaign and Bobby Jindal ridiculing volcano monitoring in his response to President Obama’s joint-session-of-Congress speech. This document doesn’t risk getting that specific. But I have to wonder: If the government really is full of wasteful programs, is it too much to ask them to name one?

In fact, wasteful spending is fairly hard to find, the scale of it is nothing like the trillions of dollars in Republican tax cuts, and most of it consists of unnecessary weapons systems and pointless favors to big business — not scientific research, welfare fraud, foreign aid, or most of the other things Republicans complain about.

Having decreed that spending shall not rise, the document then has some multi-color graphs showing spending not rising, and the national debt increasing more slowly than under Obama’s budget. Of course, they could just as easily have decreed that spending would go to zero and then made a graph of that.

Energy. They do go into some detail about energy.

Despite abundant domestic resources, the Federal government has adopted policies that largely prevent domestic production of oil and natural gas.

Abundant is relative. We have proven oil reserves of 21 billion barrels, which sounds like a lot until you realize that we consume nearly 21 million barrels a day. So our proven oil reserves are about a three-year supply. If we explore more, we might find more. But people have been looking for oil in the U.S. for more than a century. If some new Saudi-scale oil field were down there, we’d have found it by now.

In order to more efficiently recover our “abundant” resources, the Republicans call for “streamlining of environmental laws and regulations.” Because the environment is doing great, I guess, and we’ve been way too zealous about protecting it. And offshore drilling … what could possibly go wrong with that?

To be fair, the document does admit that “Increasing domestic oil and gas production alone will not end U.S. dependence on foreign oil.” And it does say that we’ll have to transition more of our transportation to run on electricity. A lot of that electricity will have to come from “the most abundant and lowest cost of domestic energy resources” — coal. Coal is also our dirtiest energy resource, but the Republican document cleans it up by calling it clean coal. (As the TV spot puts it: “Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word clean.”)

But they’re not relying on coal alone, because “increasing nuclear power generation is the most effective strategy at reducing emissions”. Emissions of what? They’re not saying. The term global warming (which is controversial in Republican circles) does not appear in the document.

Health Care.

The budget reforms the health care marketplace by making quality health care coverage affordable and accessible for every American regardless of pre-existing health conditions.

How? I have no clue. Maybe by harnessing the awesome power of the words affordable and accessible.

Wait, they do provide one clue: “Medicare and Medicaid themselves contribute in their own way to medical inflation.” So over the long term (not affecting people currently 55 or older), their proposal privatizes Medicare so that the government subsidizes private insurance premiums instead of paying for care. I guess some kind of magic-of-the-marketplace (which hasn’t worked up until now — private alternatives to Medicare currently cost the government more per person than Medicare does) is going to create massive savings.

The truth here is simple, and runs exactly counter to what the Republicans claim. The main reason we spend more for health care than other countries and get worse results (see graph below, taken from here) is that we waste massive amounts of effort arguing about who is going to pay for care. In a single-payer system, that question is answered and the system can focus on providing care.

One more thing. The Republican budget repeats a talking point that has been bugging me at least since the 2008 primary campaign:

[Our proposal] reinforces the decision-making of patients and their doctors, not government bureaucrats

That focus-group-tested phrase sounds great. But if you’ve ever been seriously ill or injured, you know that this “patients and their doctors” thing is a fairy tale. Major medical decisions are made by insurance-company bureaucrats — people whose companies profit by providing as little care as possible. If our fates are going to be decided by a bureaucracy, you can have the insurance companies and I’ll take my chances with the government.

Social Security. The Republicans continue the alarmist rhetoric President Bush used when he tried to privatize Social Security.

Social Security as currently structured is going bankrupt and cannot fulfill its promises to future retirees.

Social Security has been “going bankrupt” since FDR created it in 1935. Every now and then the tax or benefit rates have to be rejiggered to make the numbers work out. The last time it got rejiggered (in the 1980s), the system was within a few months of having the checks bounce. As currently structured, it’s good through 2041 under slow-growth assumptions and longer if growth matches the historical averages. As Paul Krugman says: “There is a long-term financing problem. But it’s a problem of modest size.”

The solutions the Republicans propose are technical and I can’t figure out what they would actually affect. But there are no tax increases, so any shortfall is taken out of benefits.

Connecting the Dots Between Guantanamo and Your Safety

Rachel Maddow is turning into the liberal conscience of cable TV. Smart, calm, rational, and often even funny — she manages to say the things that need saying without being nasty about it.

Friday, she connected the dots between prosecuting Bush administration officials and regaining our standing in the world. North Korea is holding two female American journalists from Current TV, and is rumored to be charging them with the vague crime of “hostile acts” — which could land them in a North Korean prison camp for many years. Asked about their fate, North Korean officials reportedly laughed and said, “We’re not Guantanamo.”

Rachel sums up how our bad behavior can boomerang back at us in cases like this:

We inquire about how long they’re going to be held, and they shoot back, “Well, it’s been seven years plus that you’ve been holding hundreds of foreigners at your offshore prison at Guantanamo.”

We inquire about charges: “What is this ‘hostile acts’ ridiculous charge?” And they shoot back, “Well, at least we’re bothering to charge them. How many of the prisoners at Guantanamo and Baghram and the CIA prisons have had charges brought against them?”

We inquire about how well these women are being treated, and they shoot back by — what? — quoting to us from the list of approved enhanced interrogation techniques, maybe? Quoting to us from the transcripts of Dick Cheney on TV saying waterboarding ain’t no thing? [She plays a clip of Cheney’s ABC interview, where he says that none of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, went too far.]

There is a new president in place now, one who has very, very, very, very different ideas about interrogations and prisons than Bush and Cheney do. But to a certain extent the damage has been done. We would never want Americans to be subjected to imprisonment for years in some foreign country without charges. We would never want Americans to be tortured. And if we’re going to get back the power to stop Americans from being subjected to things like that, don’t we have to make it clear that America believes no one should get away with treating people like that?

I know that Washington apparently has no appetite for Senator Leahy’s truth commission, but maybe the need to fix this is bigger than the appetites of Washington politics. Maybe this stretches 13 time zones, into every corner of the world where Americans might find themselves in trouble and need some help.

There is another way to look at this, of course: That we should just stomp on any country that would treat Americans the way we treat citizens of other countries. It could work, I suppose. But we should be honest about what this is: a might-makes-right approach to the world. It means giving up completely on the idea that the United States of America represents something higher and better than what big powers have been in the past.

There are lots of appropriate labels for people who hold this view. But don’t call them patriots.

Short Notes

For years, German police had been finding the same woman’s DNA at crime scenes all over the country. But strangely, the crimes seemed to have no other connection. Finally they tracked her down: She works for the company that makes the cotton swabs forensic teams use.

Irish police mounted a equally successful manhunt to catch the notorious scofflaw Prawo Jazdy, a Polish man who had racked up traffic violations all over Ireland, but escaped justice by somehow inducing police to record a different address each time. Eventually an ingenious detective figured out that prawo jazdy is Polish for “driver’s license”.

Huffington Post names the five greatest April Fools pranks of all time.

Once again, Jimmy Kimmel demonstrates that anything sounds nasty if you bleep enough of it.

Ever since Glenn Beck started weeping on camera about how much he loves his country, a lot of us have been wondering what satirist Stephen Colbert could possibly do in response. Had Beck passed into a you-can’t-top-this realm beyond satire? Clearly not.

I’m betting a bunch of Wall Street Journal readers didn’t realize that Thomas Frank’s recent op-ed was tongue-in-check. He’s responding to a recent case in Pennsylvania, where two judges took kickbacks ($2.6 million) in exchange for sentencing kids to a for-profit juvenile detention facility. But Franks’ combination of conservative get-tough-on-criminals rhetoric with pro-privatization rhetoric fits right in on the WSJ opinion page.

Today the do-gooders revile those efforts as “kickbacks,” but before long we will see them as legitimate tools of justice. Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

The public will get to see their neighbors’ kids go to jail, the judge who sends them there will be able to afford a nice condo in Florida, and the company that satisfies the public’s desire for punishment will make a handsome profit. It will be a win-win result for everyone.

Same-sex marriage is for those way-out liberal states like … Iowa?

Another important legal decision: Three prisoners at our Baghram prison in Afghanistan can appeal to a U.S. court. The Obama administration had continued making the Bush-administration case that the courts shouldn’t interfer with Baghram because it’s in a war zone. They lost because these three prisoners were captured outside of Afghanistan and moved there.

The court is right and Obama is wrong. Yes, the executive branch has to have leeway to operate in special situations. But when they start gaming the system by moving people into those special situations, specifically so that they can take advantage of those special powers, they’ve got to be held accountable somehow.

Things continue to get worse in Pakistan.

Interesting and more-or-less optimistic article about the future of news in the internet era. Steven Berlin Johnson uses a ecological metaphor, and advises basing predictions on the “old growth” areas of internet news coverage: technology and politics.

The Washington Times (the Moonie newspaper) reports that 12% of Americans still believe President Obama is a Muslim — maybe because media outlets like the Washington Times keep finding ways to put Obama and Muslim in the same headline.

Following up on my article on the Employee Free Choice Act two weeks ago, here’s an account of the tactics used at one company whose workers were trying to join a union.

It took four years to figure out that a Pakistani died in a New Jersey immigration detention facility. The NYT wonders: how many other deaths in detention have gone unrecorded?

Metaphor meets reality: Boats need a bailout.

Correction from last week: In my discussion of David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla, I noted that his preferred term for al Qaeda terrorists is takfiri rather than jihadi or mujahid. But I got wrong what takfiri means. There’s a longer discussion of the word in Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, and I think I get it now.

Takfir is a declaration that someone who claims to be a Muslim actually is not. A takfiri is someone who makes such declarations, particularly someone who makes sweeping declarations that lots of people aren’t really Muslims. Al Qaeda does this, following the lead of its “ideological godfather” (Cole’s term) Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by Egypt’s secular Nasser government in 1966. To Qutb, anyone who believed that humans can make their own laws (rather than receiving laws from God) was not really a Muslim.

Cole agrees with Kilcullen that this is a position held by a small minority of Muslims, and has been denounced by the most reputable and influential scholars. (It also ticks off ordinary people, the same way that Christians get ticked when some small group claims to be the only real Christians.) “Mainstream political Islam,” says Cole, “roundly rejected [Qutb].” So labeling al Qaeda types takfiri calls attention to the way they differ from the majority of Muslims, while jihadi or mujahid are terms that al Qaeda embraces because ordinary Muslims view them favorably.

April 6, 2009 – 12:36 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Knitting the Afghans Together

A government that is losing to an insurgency is not being outfought, it is being outgoverned.
— attributed to Bernard Fall in The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen

In this week’s Sift:

  • Obama’s New Afghanistan Policy. I read The Accidental Guerrilla to get a handle on the ideas behind it.
  • Looming Right-wing Violence II: Bachman Overdrive. Did you know that Obama is about to replace the dollar with a global one-world currency? That we need a revolution if we’re not going to lose our country? That the American people should be armed and dangerous? That we have to make a stand here, because there are no other free countries in the world? Me neither, but Congresswoman Michelle Bachman knows these things. And she’s taken seriously by the right-wing media.
  • Short Notes. A not-so-happy anniversary for the labor movement. Trash-talk about Michelle Obama. Big Agriculture wants pesticides on the White House garden. Cool British names. An AIG executive’s appeal for sympathy. And more.
Obama’s New Afghanistan Policy

For years, the Afghan War has been like a godmotherless Cinderella. This is the deserving war, the one whose connection to 9/11 was more than just propaganda. And yet our effort in Afghanistan has had to scrimp along with whatever resources we had left after showering everything on its undeserving step-sister, Iraq.

Now the Obama administration is trying to change course in Afghanistan, using many of the same counter-insurgency ideas behind the Surge in Iraq. It’s way too early to tell how well this will turn out, but in an effort to understand at least what it’s trying to accomplish, I’ve been reading the new book The Accidental Guerrilla by counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen.

Kilcullen, an Australian on loan to the U.S. military, doesn’t pigeonhole neatly as a liberal or conservative. For example, he writes things like this:

Iraq represents a cautionary example of exactly the type of conflict we need to avoid if we wish to successfully defeat the threat of takfiri* terrorism. … The Surge worked: but in the final analysis, it was an effort to save ourselves from the more desperate consequences of a situation we should never have gotten ourselves into.

*[takfiri is Kilcullen’s chosen label for al Qaeda’s beliefs. Literally, it refers to the willingness to change another person’s religion by force. He prefers this term to jihadi or mujahidin because those words have positive connotations in Muslim culture — just as crusader has a positive connotation in the West. But Takfirism is recognized as a heresy by most Muslims.]

The easiest way I can think to explain Kilcullen’s approach is to describe what he thinks we’ve been doing wrong in the Global War on Terror so far.

Killing Bad Guys Instead of Protecting the People. Kilcullen refers to our previous strategy as the “enemy-centered” approach. The problem: Smart enemies lead you on a merry chase through vulnerable areas, and you get blamed for the trail of destruction left behind. The people turn against you, and the enemy is able to recruit far more fighters than you’ve been able to kill. (Kilcullen’s “accidental guerrillas” are the people whose concerns are local or personal, but who get swept up into the global insurgency by the course of events.)

What’s more, insurgents only need occasional access to a village in order to intimidate its leaders into cooperation. Local leaders will side with the central government over the insurgents only if they are convinced that the government can protect them 24/7. So rather than sending troops out on search-and-destroy missions, Kilcullen wants them close to the villages where people can see them as protectors rather than raiders.

Helping the Enemy Unite. When we lump all the “bad guys” together, as the Bush administration did with its war-on-terror rhetoric, we give our enemies a unity that otherwise they would be hard pressed to achieve. Bin Laden is the one who wants to make One Big War out of the Chechan conflict, the Palestinian insurgency, the struggle for Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Danish Mohammed cartoons, the French headscarf controversy, and so forth. Al Qaeda wants to convince every Muslim with a grievance against his local government that he is a victim of American/Zionist/Western imperialism. We should be trying to dis-aggregate these conflicts, and separate the al Qaeda global insurgency from the local and personal issues (“they killed my cousin”) that cause the masses to take up arms.

Even worse than the Bush administration are the right-wingers who argue that Islam is the enemy. (More extreme version here.) Muslims haven’t been united since the era of the Arabian Nights, but we might be able to unify them if we declare Islam to be the enemy. Heck, why stop there? Why not declare Allah to be the enemy?

Using Firepower Instead of Troops. This is the classic imperial mistake. When you aren’t willing to commit enough troops to fight an insurgency, it’s very tempting to compensate by blowing more stuff up. When you outnumber the insurgents, you can take them out at relatively close quarters, and maybe only kill the people who are actually shooting at you. But if they outnumber you, you’re more likely to call in an air strike against a sniper and maybe kill a few dozen innocents — all of whom have relatives who may decide they now are now honor-bound to take revenge on you.

Believing the Lines on Our Maps. Here’s one thing Afghanistan and Iraq have in common: The British drew the border, and it signifies nothing. The dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan (around 40% of the population) is the Pashtuns, and the border with Pakistan (the Durand Line, named for the Brit who drew it) cuts right through their territory. So you’ve got 26 million Pashtuns in Pakistan and 13 million in Afghanistan, more or less.

Kilcullen argues that the Taliban is not so much an Afghan or Pakistani or Muslim insurgency as it is a Pashtun insurgency. We overthrew the Taliban in 2001 by backing the Northern Alliance, made up mostly of Tajiks and Uzbeks. (You can visualize the situation by looking at Wikipedia’s demographic map of Afghanistan: the Tajiks and Uzbeks are in the north, the Pashtuns in the south, next to Pakistan.) So the quest for an Afghan solution is hopeless without a Pashtun solution that includes the 26 million in Pakistan.

You can see all these ideas represented in one way or another in the Obama plan: more troops, a regional Afghan/Pakistani framing, more talk about protecting the population. I find myself convinced this far: If you’re going to fight the Afghan War at all, this is how you have to do it.

The problem is that it’s a long hard slog. The enemy-centered strategy projected the mirage that we might kill all our enemies quickly and be done. (Seven years after capturing Kabul, we’ve killed a lot of people, but we’re no closer to being done.) Kilcullen’s counter-insurgency provides no similar short-term hope. Ten years from now, maybe well-functioning Afghan and Pakistani governments have won their people’s trust and can survive on their own. But how much blood and gold should we be willing to spend on that outcome? What’s the alternative if we don’t?

Juan Cole doesn’t like either Obama’s new plan or the argument he makes for it. My Kindle has Cole’s new book Engaging the Muslim World on it, and I’ll report soon.

This bit of news from Iraq is really bad, and has implications for our counter-insurgency strategy in general: Forces of the (Shia-dominated) Iraqi government are clashing with the Sunni militias of the Iraq Awakening.

The Surge of 2007 took advantage of a developing split between al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Iraqi Sunni tribes. (In Kilcullen’s terms, it separated the global insurgents from the accidental guerrillas.) Before 2007 they had been on the same side, fighting an insurgency against the US invasion and the new Shia government in Baghdad. But there had always been a tension between them. The tribes want local autonomy and the ability to live by their own traditions. AQI wants a global caliphate enforcing sharia law. (By analogy, imagine scripture-based Christian fundamentalists in, say, Guatamala dealing with a culture where Catholicism has absorbed local pagan traditions.) When several issues boiled over into violence, the tribal leaders started believing that AQI was a bigger long-term threat to them than the Americans were.

Short-term, flipping the tribes from AQI’s side to ours gave us the local allies we had always needed in the Sunni areas, and went a long way towards racheting down the violence in Iraq. But the broader political settlement between Sunni and Shia has never happened. (That subtlety gets lost in those arguments about whether the Surge “worked”.) Our improved relationship with the Sunni tribes has not developed into an improved relationship between them and the Baghdad government, as it was supposed to.

If this goes back to civil war, as it might, we’re in the difficult position of arming both sides.

Looming Right-wing Violence II: Bachman Overdrive

Two weeks ago I wrote about how the Right responds to despair with fantasies of violence while the Left responds with fantasies of escape. Case in point: Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (the one who in October called for an inquisition into whether other congresspeople were pro-American or anti-American). A week ago Saturday, she talked in a radio interview about wanting the American people to be “armed and dangerous” because

Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing. And the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country.

OK, a spokesman walked that back a little, saying she was talking metaphorically about being armed with information about outrages like Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal to combat global warming. (So, we’re going to “lose our country” if we have to reduce our carbon footprint?) Then Wednesday she’s talking to Sean Hannity and goes off again. More about “revolution” against Obama’s “economic Marxism.” Escape? No way:

Do we get into an inner tube and float 90 miles to some free country? There is no free country for us to repair to. That’s why it’s up to us now.

If you’re a right-wing loony, that’s the problem in a nutshell: Every other country that isn’t a hellhole is more liberal than we are. Bachman’s state borders Canada — she could get there without an inner tube. But if liberalism means slavery, then Canada, Denmark, New Zealand … they’re not free countries. There’s no place to run. America is the Alamo.

Bachman’s spinmeisters can reinterpret her however they want. But when it becomes clear that they’re not getting their way, people who really believe what she’s saying are going to get violent.

Let there be fear. Bachman was one of several Republicans fear-mongering this week about a conspiracy to replace the dollar with a “one world currency”. ThinkProgress notes not just Bachman, but also Senator Jim DeMint, Glenn Beck, and Karl Rove pushing the story. Numerous claims have been made that somebody — Tim Geithner, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. — are advocating a one-world currency. But when you chase down the references, no one is proposing anything of the kind. Like the God of Genesis, the conservative noise machine has created this story from nothing. Matt Yglesias explains.

Another manufactured story recently made the trip from right-wing-talking-point to the mainstream media: something about Obama and teleprompters. Bob Cesca summarizes the non-issue, and DailyKosTV demonstrates how widespread the non-story suddenly is.

Let’s think this through: A teleprompter is a way for a speaker to deliver a prepared text; it replaces papers on a lecturn. Making an issue out of Obama’s teleprompter is supposed to frame him as a mere mouthpiece for whoever is writing the text.

But does Obama rely on prepared texts more than other recent presidents? In fact, the exact opposite is true. Unlike Bush, Obama exposes himself to uncontrolled interactions. Bush only appeared in front of friendly audiences, and only hand-picked people got to ask him questions in public. In press conferences, Bush would repeat the same talking points over and over, because that was all he knew. But President Obama can answer reporters’ questions with a detailed exposition of his point of view, and holds town-hall meetings that people get into on a first-come first-served basis. (The crowds are mostly pro-Obama because those are the kinds of people who will wait in line all night to see him, not because they’ve been hand-picked.) That means he sometimes has to answer hostile or wacky questions — something Bush would never do.

Short Notes

The next time somebody tells you that workers don’t need unions or governments to protect them, because industry can regulate itself — don’t argue with them, teach them some history. Wednesday was the 98th anniversary of one the pivotal events in the American labor movement: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City. 146 of the 500 employees died — mostly young women, mostly from Jewish or Italian immigrant families, some as young as 15. Many of the factory’s exit doors were routinely locked to keep workers from sneaking out early. They stayed locked during the fire. Cornell University’s online archives tell the story.

No one should kid themselves that this couldn’t happen again today if workers had only their bosses’ goodwill to protect them. The Kader Toy Factory Fire in Thailand in 1993 was even worse. There, rural Thai girls new to the big city made stuffed animals for delivery to American companies like Disney and Mattel. (You may own one.) Piles of stuffing were everywhere, and they went up fast. Again, exit doors were locked. Don McGlashan wrote a song about it.

Just in case your blood pressure is still too low, listen to this 2-minute clip from Tammy Bruce, who was the guest host on Laura Ingraham’s right-wing talk-radio show. She starts by ridiculing a tape of Michelle Obama talking to kids in a D.C. classroom, and concludes with “We’ve got trash in the White House.”

Bruce went on to defend herself here, claiming that the “trash” comment was mild compared to what Democrats said about President Bush — like calling him a “war criminal”. Let me explain two differences. First, this is the president’s wife, not the president. If the Left ever abused Laura Bush like this, I missed it. Somebody’s going to have to play me a tape before I’ll believe we did.

Second, I’m one of the people who called President Bush a war criminal, which I admit is a seriously negative thing to say about a person. I said it — and continue to say it — because he has claimed responsibility for authorizing specific acts (waterboarding three Guantanamo detainees, for example) that are recognized internationally as war crimes. So, “Bush is a war criminal” is an assertion about facts, which opponents can dispute by citing other facts, if they have them. I’d love to see Bush dispute the claim in court.

Calling Michelle Obama “trash”, on the other hand, is just a gratuitous insult. It serves no purpose other than to raise hate. Is that clear enough?

Another place where Michelle is drawing fire: She has broken ground on an organic garden to supply fresh produce for the White House kitchen. Seems harmless at worst, right? Well, not to Big Agriculture. A trade group has started a letter-writing campaign to convince her to use pesticides, or “crop protection products” as the industry now calls them.

She’s the Limit. British people just have cooler names than we do. After 9/11, I envied the UK for having a foreign secretary whose name sounded like the plucky hero of a fairy tale: Jack Straw. (Now he’s Lord High Chancellor Jack Straw. How cool is that?) And then there’s their attorney general, Patricia Scotland — that’d be like us appointing Captain America or maybe Joe Montana. But the latest great name I’ve run across is the British woman who is General Odierno’s political advisor in Iraq: Emma Sky.

Speaking of Lady Scotland — I’m still trying to picture a U.S. attorney general named Lord Vermont or something — she has asked police to investigate charges that British officials colluded with the U.S. in torturing a British citizen at Guantanamo. Apparently the British have something they call “the rule of law” that forces them to investigate things that look like crimes — even if the government would rather not. Weird. And Spain is part of this rule-of-law fad as well: It’s thinking about indicting several Bush officials.

I wonder: Will Dick Cheney’s book tour make any stops in London or Madrid?

Oh, and this just in: More reports that torture didn’t accomplish anything.

John Shimkus, the Republican Congressman from the Illinois district just south and east of where I grew up, on why he opposes limiting carbon emissions: “So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?” He’s serious.

Portfolio magazine has an interesting article on how Governor Palin has bungled the natural-gas pipeline she bragged about during the campaign. Apparently, she has a tendency to do things that sound good without thinking them through. Who could have guessed?

Glenn Greenwald argues that decriminalizing drugs is working in Portugal.

The “sexting” controversy — teens using their cellphone cameras to send naked pictures of themselves to their friends — is getting even weirder. Now sexting teens are being prosecuted for child pornography. In other words, the law that was supposed to protect an underage girl from exploitation is now being used to prosecute her for exploiting herself. But if we start using the laws that way — if anything that would be illegal for somebody to do to you is also illegal for you to do to yourself — then I think a lot of us committed sex crimes in our teen years.

Apparently the ACLU isn’t happy about this either.

A longer article on the economy is overdue, but got squeezed out again this week. (I try to keep the Sift’s length down.) In the meantime, Jake DeSantis’ resignation letter from AIG — which was at the top of the NYT’s most-read articles list all day Tuesday — underlined the cultural divide between the financial community and the rest of us.

DeSantis is bitter about being villainized for receiving a bonus. He wasn’t involved in the activities that destroyed the company. He has lost money in the collapse of AIG stock. He works very hard. He agreed to work for $1 a year in expectation of a bonus. And now he’s being pressured to return the $742K he got. He’s so bitter he’s going to quit and give the after-tax portion of his bonus to charity.

He was doing great until he mentioned the amount. Ordinary Americans understand that innocent people suffer when a company goes under. We feel bad for them. But we don’t feel $742K worth of bad for them. Lots of hard-working people don’t get that much in a decade. DeSantis and the folks who forwarded his article to all their friends don’t seem to understand that.

March 30, 2009 – 2:48 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Short Notes Extravaganza

Good things, when they are short, are twice as good. — Baltasar Gracian

In this week’s Sift:

  • Does the EFCA Threaten Life As We Know It? The rhetoric about the Employee Free Choice Act (or “card check” as its opponents call it) has gotten way out of hand, to the point that it’s hard to find out what the bill would actually do. I try to sort it out.
  • Short Notes. Way, way more short notes than usual, including a bunch that readers have sent in. (You know who you are.)
Does the EFCA Threaten Life As We Know It?

One of the founders of Home Depot calls it “the demise of civilization,” and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has apparently compared it to Armageddon (though I’m not able to find the original link). Business interests are spending tens, maybe hundreds, of millions to campaign against it. The mere possibility that it might pass was enough to cause a Citibank analyst to downgrade WalMart’s stock. What is this approaching apocalypse? It’s the Employee Free Choice Act, which its opponents refer to (in typical conservative “death tax” fashion) as the “card check” bill.

I’d love to link to a level-headed, fact-based discussion of this issue and be on my way, but it turns out to be remarkably hard to find one. What everybody seems to agree about is this: The EFCA would change the way workers at non-union companies decide whether or not to unionize, and would make it easier for unions to win these battles.

Most discussions of the EFCA begin with one side saying the bill would do X, then the opponents saying it wouldn’t, and before long people are calling each other “corporate shills” and “union thugs” and other nice names. I want to start somewhere else. To understand the EFCA, you first need to understand this: The process for organizing a union in this country is seriously screwed up, and something needs to be done about it. Only then does it make sense to ask whether the EFCA is the right thing to do.

How Things (Don’t) Work Now. On paper, the current unionization process sounds fairly reasonable: A union demonstrates its support by getting at least 30% of a company’s workers to sign a card saying they want the union to represent them. Then the company has a choice: It can either recognize the union and start negotiating a contract, or it can call for a secret-ballot election. The election is held a couple months or so later, and is overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, which has strict rules about what the two sides can and can’t do during the campaign. If more than half the workers vote for the union, it’s in.

Anti-EFCA articles present this process as if things really happened that way. But in practice, they don’t. The NLRB election rules are not exactly fair, and what’s worse, many companies have decided that the penalties for violating the rules are less than what a union would cost them. Lawsuits to extract those penalties can drag out for years, delaying the secret-ballot election indefinitely.

For example, when workers at a St. Louis nursing home tried to unionize, management illegally fired a number of union supporters within weeks and harassed pro-union workers in a variety of other ways, some legal, some not. After a year of litigation, the fired workers got their jobs back, but the union election still hadn’t happened.

A report by Human Rights Watch says this isn’t a unique case:

Enforcement is so lax, remedies are so weak, and delays are so prolonged that many employers become labor scofflaws who see action by labor law authorities as a routine cost of doing business, worth it to destroy workers’ self-organizing efforts.

Even within the rules, the company has total control of the environment. University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer writes:

Anti-union managers are free to campaign to every employee, every day, throughout the day; but pro-union employees can campaign only on break time. Furthermore, management can post anti-union propaganda on bulletin boards and walls — while prohibiting pro-union employees from doing the same. By law, employers can force workers to attend mass anti-union propaganda events. Not only are pro-union employees not given equal time, but they can be forced to attend on condition that they not ask any questions. Recent data show that workers are forced to attend between five and 10 such one-sided meetings. If, during the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democrats could have forced every voter in America to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 (or if the Republicans could have forced everyone to watch the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth video), with no opportunity for response from the other side, none of us would have called this “democracy.”

Management can’t legally threaten to close or move the business if the union wins the election, but if they just predict or speculate about it, that’s OK. And what if they don’t fire union supporters outright, but just give them crappy assignments and hours, and hope that they’ll quit during the indefinite delay before the election? That’s OK if it doesn’t go too far, and even it does, not much can be done about it. And there’s no policing what management might say in one-on-one meetings. The Human Rights Watch report quotes an unidentified worker at Nebraska Beef:

The main plant manager is Mexican. He knows who are the undocumented workers. He called them in one-by-one to his office and told them that if they voted for the union they would be deported. People were scared the company would find out how they voted. In Mexico the vote is not secret. They thought it was like that here.

Now suppose that even with all these disadvantages, the union wins the election. The law says the company has to negotiate with the union then, but what if it doesn’t? Well, that’s a whole new legal battle. Or, the union can strike, the company can use illegal strike-breaking tactics, and then the union can sue about that. And so on.

You get the idea: Even if workers overwhelmingly want union representation, they might not get it for many years, during which they might just give up. The process has to change.

What the EFCA Does. The most publicized piece of EFCA is the “card check” provision. If more than half of the workers sign cards saying they want a particular union to represent them, that’s it. No campaign, no election. (30-50% still brings on an election.) EFCA opponents raise two issues here:

  • Intimidation. Now it’s the union organizers who might have the one-on-one (or many-on-one) meetings. Management-types portray this as union thugs showing up at your door and refusing to leave until you sign a card, but it’s hard to say how realistic that picture is. Threats of violence would be illegal, of course, but now the enforcement shoe is on the other foot; the devil would be in the details, which I don’t know. More likely (and probably more effective) than violence would be peer pressure, salesmanship, and other totally legal methods of getting a signature out of somebody who might vote No on a secret ballot. Whether or not that’s bad depends on your point of view.
  • Uninformed workers. In theory, the whole union-organizing process could happen without management — or even all the workers — knowing about it. Instead of having months or years to make its anti-union case to the workers, a company might just be informed out of the blue that it has to start bargaining with a legally-recognized union. Two thoughts in response: (1) If management is that far out of touch, the workplace really needs a union. (2) How to be represented is the workers’ decision to make; if they don’t respect management’s opinion enough to ask for it, that’s their choice. Jane Hamsher doesn’t beat around the bush: “People are capable of deciding what information they need to make a ‘fully informed choice.’ Just because you don’t get to peddle your bullshit first doesn’t make it ‘uninformed’.”

Another change is that illegal union-busting tactics (like firing organizers) would have real penalties, rather than continuing to be “a routine cost of doing business.” Instead of just giving fired workers their jobs back or throwing out the results of a tainted election, courts would be able to impose punitive damages on companies that break the law.

After the union is recognized, the EFCA would allow 120 days for union and management to work out a contract. Otherwise, either side could request a government mediator, beginning a process that could result in binding arbitration. So companies would have real motivation to bargain in good faith, rather than just thumb their noses and dare fledgling unions to strike. Business interests protest that this gives government power over private industry, but management can avoid that outcome by reaching an agreement with the union. What really is lost is management’s complete autonomy over the workplace. They have to negotiate with somebody, either the union or the government. Again, whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view.

Summing Up. That doesn’t sound much like “the demise of civilization” to me. I think the rhetoric about the EFCA has become so heated because it’s a proxy for a larger issue: Are unions good or bad? People who feel strongly one way or the other on that question tend to support any set of rules that gives the result they want.

But that’s the wrong issue, because Congress shouldn’t be deciding whether or not workers unionize. If workers want to negotiate with their employers collectively through a union, or if they don’t, they should be able to make that choice themselves. Currently, the deck is stacked in such a way that many workers who want a union can’t get one. The law should provide a fair process and then get out of the way, not dictate a result.

My take on the EFCA comes down to this: It’s a legitimate attempt to solve real problems with the current process. There might be a devil in the details somewhere, but if so, the opposition should point out the problems and propose amendments. The current process is grossly unfair, so just defeating the EFCA and leaving things the way they are should not be an option.

Short Notes

Every week people send me things I should mention on the Sift, and I hardly ever do. I guess I have a found-it-myself bias. Well, this week I’m going the other way. Several of you will recognize this stuff.

To start with, my sister-in-law (who is responsible for more than a few of the links that follow) sent me this video, of comedian Louis C. K. on Conan O’Brien’s show. Louis speaks for a lot of us older folks, who are amazed by the things that younger people take for granted. About people who complain about air travel, he says: “You’re sitting in a chair in the sky.”

I try not to get caught up in the media-firestorm-of-the-day, figuring that you already know as much about that as you want to. Occasionally, though, something gets out-of-hand to the point that that becomes the story. The AIG bonus outrage is getting there; I’ll watch it for another week and maybe try to sort the legitimate stuff from the hyperbole next time.

But I can already tell you that I think Frank Rich (who I usually like) went over-the-top by wondering whether this would be Obama’s “Katrina moment”. Inky99 on DailyKos responded by posting a few pictures of dead bodies from Katrina. So no, the AIG bonus outrage does not constitute a Katrina moment. It’s also not a Holocaust moment, a killing fields moment, or a Noah’s Flood moment.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff for Colin Powell, wrote a great article about Guantanamo. He makes the charge that most of the detainees there were innocent and top American officials knew it. I’m not surprised. McClatchy published similar conclusions last June.

The underlying logic of the situation was laid out by Iraq interrogator Tony Lagouranis in Fear Up Harsh, which I recommended last June. At every level, the pressure was not to let any terrorist get away. There was no comparable pressure to let the innocent go. So the “safe” thing to do was to detain everybody, and to keep pushing them up the chain until they wound up in Abu Ghraib or Bhagram or Guantanamo.

Wilkerson, I think, has just become the highest-ranking former Bush official to apply the adjective this policy deserves: evil.

Pope Benedict on AIDS in Africa :

“You can’t resolve it with the distribution of condoms,” the pope said aboard his plane to Cameroon. “On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

The logic here is basically the same as when people claim that sex education increases teen pregnancy: If we make promiscuity as dangerous as possible, then people won’t do it. In the history of the world, has that ever worked?

The Bellows provides two revealing charts that break down unemployment by industry. Matt Yglesias summarizes:

not only is the total unemployment rate in finance low, but the increase in unemployment there has been distinctly modest compared to construction, mining, agriculture, manufacturing, retail & wholesale, and even transportation. It’s a reminder that endlessly fascinating as the financial snarl may be, you’re mostly look at a collapse in demand. People in general are buying less stuff, leading to fewer jobs in the fields of making stuff, moving it around, and selling it.

The transcript of Dick Cheney’s interview with CNN’s John King is here. (The only way I can stand to watch Dick Cheney these days is in Scott Bateman’s animation.) The interview is not 100% softball — King does play the “We’ll be greeted as liberators” clip — but it’s pretty soft. The word torture only appears when King asks whether Obama’s admission that waterboarding is torture will make us less safe. And that definitely is a softball question.

In general, Cheney has his say on a subject, and then King moves on without any challenging follow-up. I’m reminded of what Glenn Greenwald asked after King interviewed John McCain in 2008:

if McCain’s actual Press Secretary … had conducted this “interview,” how would it have been any different?

Ariana Huffington had the same thought I did: What if it had been Jon Stewart interviewing Cheney?

I believe it does me good, every now and then, to read something I think is totally wrong-headed. So thank God the Washington Post published this: Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) explains why it would be awful if America became more like Europe. The gist (and don’t trust me on this, because it’s hard to summarize something that doesn’t make sense to you) is that Europeans don’t make lots of babies or go to church much, and they work to live rather than live to work. So it follows that their lives are meaningless. Oh, and I forgot this part: Any day now science is going to get around to proving that European lives are meaningless, or that equal opportunity is a bad idea, or something like that. Read it yourself. It’s good for you. (Nicholas Kristof thinks it’s good for you too.)

The WaPo was on a roll Sunday. They also marked the 30th anniversary of Three Mile Island with 5 Myths On Nuclear Power. The article leaves me with this logical conundrum: If you take a half-truth and say that it’s false, is your statement also a half-truth?

While I’m ragging on the Post, I have to give them credit for this: They allowed Chris Mooney to point out that George Will has been spouting nonsense about climate change. Matt Yglesias, though, believes that Mooney didn’t come down nearly hard enough.

Digby makes an interesting point: With all the conservative attempts to label Obama a “socialist” — to the point that a NYT interviewer asked him about it — why is it that no actual professing socialists are ever consulted? I mean, I’ve seen gobs of libertarians on TV over the years. Why no socialists?

Happy 20th birthday to the World Wide Web. Little-known fact: Tim Berners-Lee and I used to go to the same church and have several friends in common, but I don’t believe we’ve ever actually had a conversation.

I’ve mentioned Sandra Day O’Connor’s “Our Courts” project before, but it continues to evolve. She introduces it with a 4-minute video explaining that she wants to give Civics “a makeover”. I wouldn’t have thought of that metaphor, or this one:

The Founders of our Constitution and our government created three equal branches of government. Like super heroes, each branch of government has special powers, but each one also has certain weaknesses.

Just in case we need it again someday, I’m still looking for Executive Kryptonite.

I wandered over to Our Courts from Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, a blog where a woman who used to work for O’Connor is chronicling her year-long exploration of every conceivable theory of happiness. It’s a thought-provoking site. I imagine a lot of Gretchen’s female readers are provoked to have this thought: “I’d be happy if I looked like that.”

I had my own small-scale Happiness Project once: I led a reading course comparing Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness with the Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness. Oddly, even though the once-a-week course was led by a man and men wrote both books, only women signed up. My wife referred to it as “Doug’s night out with the girls.”

Another journalism experiment: Patch, a collection of local-news web sites.

President Obama sent a video message to the people of Iran as they celebrate their new year. (Happy 1388!) In it, he made the bold move of calling the Iranian government by its actual name: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Bush administration usually referred to the Iranian government as “the Iranian regime” or some other disrespectful name. It’s the same thought process that causes Republicans to refer to “the Democrat Party” rather than “the Democratic Party”. It took me a while to figure this out, but apparently the Bushies thought it was a sign of power to demonstrate that you can call things by whatever name you want.

One more reason to be glad their era is over.

March 23, 2009 – 3:28 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Fight vs. Flight

I may run for president of Texas. — Chuck Norris

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Looming Right-wing Violence. When liberals would despair a few years ago, we fantasized about leaving the country. But recent conservative despair-fantasies are about killing people.
  • Stewart vs. Cramer. Mainstream journalism today is a little like King Lear — only the Fool is telling the truth.
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look at The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker. It will change the way you look at economics. But you probably want to skip Part III.
  • Short Notes. Maybe the Boomers will have to start those communes after all. McGraw-Hill propagandizes children. The AIG bailout is really a Goldman Sachs bailout. The UN gets ready to investigate our secret prisons. Fewer Christians, more secularists, different Catholics. And what would Watchmen look like as a Saturday morning cartoon?
The Looming Right-wing Violence

Back in the darkest days of the Bush administration, a lot of us on the Left worried that things could reach a point of no return, from which it would be impossible to vote the Bushies out. Maybe they’d rig the voting machines, or manufacture an emergency and claim that holding elections or transferring power right now was “too risky”. Or something.

When we had those dark fantasies — whether on liberal blogs or in conversations over beer late at night — sooner or later the discussion would turn to this question: What will be the sign that it’s time to leave the country? We talked a lot about the Jews in Nazi Germany, most of whom missed the sign — whatever it was — that it was time to get out. We didn’t want that to happen to us.

Well, the Right is going through similar despair now, but with a disturbing twist: Their fantasy isn’t escape, it’s violence. At what point, they wonder, is the political situation so hopeless that it’s time to start killing people?

The rhetoric on conservative blog Free Republic has gotten so bad recently that Jim Robinson, the guy who runs it, had to post a message warning people against “salty talk” that the Secret Service might have to investigate as a threat against the president. (The comments on this thread — more than 500 at last count — give you some idea where the community is.) In his warning — his attempt to calm things down, mind you — Robinson says that protecting Obama

places an enormous strain on our Secret Service agents. It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that Obama is an enemy of the constitution. So should the SS defend the constitution or defend the anti-constitution commie? … And even though your visiting agent may agree politically, and may take his oath to the constitution seriously, he’s still sworn to protect the officeholder and it’s his duty to take all threats seriously.

Abortion clinics are reporting an uptick in violent threats and expecting worse to come. As I write this, the most popular post on the conservative web site Pajamas Media (Could Americans’ Discontent Turn Violent?) says: “Americans don’t go John Galt. We go postal.” NRA president Wayne LaPierre told the CPAC conference: “Freedom is nothing but dust in the wind until it’s guarded by the blue steel and dried powder of a free and armed people.” People for the American Way has more.

Former Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes calls President Obama “an alleged usurper”, questions whether the military is obligated to obey his orders, and predicts “chaos, confusion, and civil war”. Fox News commentator Glenn Beck is predicting war in the streets — claiming to be terrified but sounding strangely gleeful. During an interview with Chuck Norris, Beck called for a military coup:

I mean this sincerely: I would love to have General Petraeus go up to Washington and clean that hornet’s nest out. I’d like him to set up a military tribunal and call them in one by one, okay, going to have a little interview with you. Find out if they’re guilty or innocent of being involved in, you know, all kinds of the scandals that are going on and kick them out.

And Norris replied with a fantasy about taking justice into his own hands:

I want to go with General Petraeus myself and be next to him and when he finds out who’s guilty and, you know, dishonest, then I will take care of it for him.

Later in the interview Beck says “parts of the country will rise up”, which leads to Norris’ talk about running for president of Texas. Thursday, Beck speculated that the cause of the Alabama shooting spree might be “political correctness” and wondered how his listeners can avoid “turn[ing] into that guy.”

My best guess is that people like Keyes and Beck and Norris will be hiding under a table if violence does break out, so why does this talk worry me? Because every group has some far-out folks who read the tea leaves more fearfully than everyone else. For a handful on the Left, the point-of-no-return signal really did arrive sometime during the Bush administration, and they moved to Canada or Australia or France. We can laugh about it now, because no harm was done. Maybe they like it there.

But think about the comparable people on the Right. Something — maybe a new immigration law or national health care or some made-up story about ACORN — will signal to them that America can’t be saved by politics. And then they’ll start killing people.

If you’re wondering when that will start, it started last July when James Adkisson took a shotgun into the Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville and interrupted a children’s performance by killing Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, wounding six others. As he explained in a letter :

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

It could get worse. Before he died in a domestic dispute in December, Neo-Nazi James Cummings was gathering materials for a dirty bomb.

And you might think that seeing his book as a hit list would give Bernard Goldberg pause, but it hasn’t. It’s not fair to mention Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly fantasizing about beating up a NYT editorial writer with a baseball bat at this point, because Adkisson’s letter hadn’t been released yet. But not only didn’t Adkisson come up during Goldberg’s March 2 interview with Beck, Goldberg had the gall to say this: “The haters, the big haters are on the left these days.”

I hear a lot of over-simplified right-left comparisons. Rush Limbaugh is just like Michael Moore was, and so on. But the differences — like escape versus violence — are important. I recently heard Newt Gingrich talking about the people on the Left who said they wanted George Bush to fail (as Limbaugh has said of Obama). But if that ever happened, I’d like to hear a quote.

Here’s how I remember it. When I looked into the future and imagined Bush’s policies failing, I did get a feeling of satisfaction. It’s very human, I think, to get a rush from fantasizing that you’ll be proven right and your opponents wrong. But the difference between Right and Left comes down to this: I was ashamed of those feelings. I think we all were. The temptation to root against my country was like the temptation to cheat on my wife or steal money — something I didn’t want to encourage because I didn’t want it to affect my actions.

But Limbaugh is not ashamed. He’s rooting for the leader of his country to fail, and he’s proud of it. And a crowd at the CPAC conference cheered him for it. That never happened on the Left, not with Moore or any popular liberal. If you think it did, try Googling up a reference.

Stewart vs. Cramer

Last week I linked to a series of videos where Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart took on the business network CNBC. Well, this week it turned into a media “war” between Stewart and Jim Cramer, the frenetic host of CNBC’s “Mad Money”. (Does anybody else remember when “mad money” was the cab fare a woman took on a date in case she had to get home on her own?)

It culminated Thursday when Cramer (to his credit) came to Stewart’s “Daily Show” for an amazing interview. (Parts 1, 2, and 3 — without the bleeps.) I half-expected Stewart to play it for laughs and engineer some sort of kiss-and-make-up. He didn’t. Instead he demonstrated the kind of hot-seat interview that CNBC might have done with all those negligent or criminal CEOs.

Amid rumors that NBC wasn’t letting its networks cover the smackdown, CBS News not only covered it, they got it right. Unsurprisingly, so did Glenn Greenwald , who summed up the complaint against CNBC like this:

They would continuously put scheming CEOs on their shows, conduct completely uncritical “interviews” and allow them to spout wholesale falsehoods. And now that they’re being called upon to explain why they did this, their excuse is: Well, we were lied to. What could we have done? And the obvious answer, which Stewart repeatedly expressed, is that people who claim to be “reporters” are obligated not only to provide a forum for powerful people to make claims, but also to then investigate those claims and then to inform the public if the claims are true.

As Glenn notes, this isn’t just about Cramer or CNBC or the financial crisis. This is a microcosm of what’s wrong with mainstream journalism. The system revolves around access to newsmakers — if they’ll talk to you, appear on your show, and return your calls, then you’re major leaguer. But the price is too high. In order to get and keep access, reporters repeat uncritically whatever the newsmakers say. If the CEO of Lehman Brothers tells you they’re not in trouble, then that’s what you tell your viewers. If Dick Cheney tells you that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, you print it like gospel. Otherwise they’ll stop talking to you.

A comedian like Jon Stewart is an unlikely journalistic hero. But for years he has been willing to pull out the tape and show us the contradictions between what powerful people say and what they had said before. (Example: his interview with Cheney biographer Stephen Hayes.) That has been a vacuum in mainstream journalism, and a comedian filled it because no one else would.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …

… look at The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric D. Beinhocker. Maybe. It’s a fascinating book, but its various parts are written at different reading levels, some of which are much more difficult than the books I usually recommend. Part I is at about the level of Newsweek, Parts II and IV more like Scientific American, and I recommend skipping or skimming Part III unless you’re an economist.

Part I is an excellent (and easy to understand) history of economics, explaining why it is the way it is. What’s wrong with traditional economics is so obvious people make jokes about it. Here’s one: An economist and an engineer are trapped in a deep pit with slick walls and no tools. The engineer wracks his brains for a way out, but eventually falls into despair. The economist thinks for a while and then brightens up: “I know how to get out,” he says. When the engineer asks how, the economist raises his index finger. “Step 1. Assume a ladder.”

Here’s another (from the book): A young economist and an old economist are walking together when young economist bends down to pick a $20 bill off the sidewalk. “What are you doing?” asks his elder. “That’s obviously counterfeit.” The young economist examines the bill, can’t find anything wrong with it, and asks why it’s counterfeit. “Because,” explains the old economist, “if there were a real $20 bill on the sidewalk, somebody would have picked it up.”

In other words, traditional economics makes unreasonable assumptions and sticks to them even when the real world is saying something different. The reason for this turns out to be historical: Back in the late 19th century when economists were trying to make a science out of their profession, they borrowed the ideas and techniques of the most advanced science of that day: physics. So the economy was modeled as a system that was seeking equilibrium, but never quite getting there because of external shocks. (Imagine a tank of water in the back of a truck on a bumpy road.) In order to make the theory work, the economists had to assume some strange things: that information was perfectly and instantaneously distributed and that people reacted to it with perfect rationality. (I ran into an example of this kind of thinking during the debate over the stimulus bill. An economist was claiming that government borrowing and spending wouldn’t stimulate the economy, because people would anticipate higher taxes in the future to pay the debt. So, he claimed, individuals would save exactly what was necessary to balance the government borrowing. Who, I wondered, actually behaves that way?)

They’ve continued to build on that unsound foundation ever since, even though physics has moved on to incorporate all sorts of new models and ways of thought. Like the Earth-centered model of the solar system, equilibrium-based economics has had enough bells and whistles added to it over the years that it more-or-less corresponds to what we see most of the time. But the fundamental assumptions are just wrong.

Part II introduces some ideas from what Beinhocker calls complexity economics. The basic idea is that the individuals who make up an economy are fairly simple creatures with limited information, and the complexity of an economy comes from their interactions. (It’s an emergent property, in technical language.) I first ran into this way of thinking when I read about how the special-effects people made the computer-modeled flock of bats in the first Batman movie. They didn’t have a single “flock of bats” model. Instead, they modeled each bat individually, and gave it some very simple motivations: stay with the group, don’t run into anything, don’t run into other bats. Then they fiddled with the weights attached to those urges until the flock looked like a flock. The complicated ripples that passed through the flock emerged from the simple individual behaviors.

The examples from Part II are fascinating, because they show how the kinds of behaviors we see in the economy (but not in standard economic models) can occur in very simple artificial systems. In chapter 4, a simple computer-generated economy (the Sugarscape) is built up step-by-step, with new large-scale properties emerging with each additional feature added to the simple agents that make up the economy. To begin with, the agents wander around the game-board seeking the sugar they need to survive. Then the agents are programmed with slightly different talents from each other. Then they can reproduce, with mutations in their descendents’ behavior programs. Then a second product, spice, is introduced, and agents are allowed to make sugar-for-spice trades with each other. Then they’re allowed to make loans. The Sugarscape develops an interest rate and an exchange rate — both of which gyrate in ways that real markets do, but traditional market-models don’t. Behaviors evolve (spontaneously) so that some agents become traders, others bankers.

In another chapter, you learn about the Beer Game, a simple demonstration that when people act on imperfect information, markets can boom and bust even without external shocks, just by reacting to themselves.

Part III is a theoretical explanation of what wealth is in the new way of thinking; this is way harder and less interesting than the rest of the book.

Then Part IV discusses how the new economics might affect public policy. A number of things are interesting here, but I’ll limit myself to one: In the new view, economies may have multiple stable points rather than evolve towards one optimal structure. For example, there seem to be two stable relationships between public trust and productivity. There are high-trust, high-productivity economies and low-trust, low-productivity economies, but economies don’t stay for long in either of the other two quadrants. Low-trust is an example of a poverty trap, where it’s not in any individual’s interest to start trusting others, even though the economy as a whole would do better if everyone had more trust. Here’s the interesting tidbit: Measures of public trust have been falling in the United States in recent decades, to the point that we’re in danger of dropping into the unstable low-trust, high-productivity quadrant — from which we will either develop more trust or slide into poverty.

Short Notes

A bunch of people all at once have noticed that Baby Boomers are going to have to change their plans, because — after the housing bust and the stock market tanking — we’re collectively a lot less wealthy than we thought we were. Best article on the topic I’ve seen so far is on AlterNet, where they’ve noticed that the number of Boomers looking for housemates has gone way up. Economic necessity may bring back those Woodstock-era commune fantasies.

Ever wonder what the Saturday-morning-cartoon people would do with Watchmen?

McGraw-Hill’s news site for students is blaming the financial crisis on “good intentions” like laws encouraging minority home-ownership. The refutation of this is simple: If government regulations had caused the mess, the corporate dominoes would have fallen in the opposite order — the highly regulated banks first and other financial institutions later. In fact, it was the relatively unregulated investment firms (like Bear Stears) and mortgage companies (like Countrywide Financial) that went down first.

TPM reports an amazing coincidence: McGraw owns Standard & Poors, whose AAA ratings for worthless CDOs played a key role in things falling apart. I wonder when McGraw will tell the kids about that?

New survey on religion in America: Compared to 1990, fewer people call themselves Christians and more claim to have no religion. The most interesting dynamics are among Catholics: White ethnics in the Northeast are leaving the church, but Hispanic immigration in the West is keeping membership stable.

19 famous people answer: What should Obama be reading? Try to imagine a similar article about Bush.

Before all of our medical records become electronic, somebody needs to solve the security problem.

I pointed out last week that AIG is a conduit of federal money to other firms. Today we find out that the #1 recipient of the government money put into bailing out AIG is Goldman Sachs, former employer of Bush treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin.

Fahreed Zakaria:

The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement.

Finally, somebody is going to investigate Bush’s secret prisons — the UN. Martin Scheinin, UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism: “Before a page can be turned, we have to know what’s on it, in order to move forward.” Will Obama cooperate?

March 16, 2009 – 12:14 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Secret Laws

I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. — George W. Bush, June 26, 2003.
Ninety-nine percent of what we do is legal. — Scooter Libby, quoted by Jane Mayer in Chapter 12 of The Dark Side.

In This Week’s Sift:

  • Secret Laws: Nine Bush Memos Declassified. If the Bush administration had really believed in its theory of presidential power, it wouldn’t have been classified.
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. It’s the best summary of the Bush administration war-on-terror story.
  • Tigerhawk. I develop sympathy for a maligned conservative blogger.
  • Short Notes. A couple scoops from the Onion. Thomas Friedman’s biggest mistakes. Atlas Shrugged as prophesy. Is Tim Geithner starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld? Jon Stewart vs. CNBC. And more.
Secret Law: Nine Bush Memos Declassified

By now you’ve probably heard of the nine Bush administration memos that got declassified and released by the Obama Justice Department last Monday. I’ve skimmed a couple of these memos, but haven’t gone through them all in detail, so I am relying on people who have: Scott Horton, Glenn Greenwald, and Jack Balkin. (Back in April, I went through the Yoo torture memos line-by-line, so I’m not surprised by anything I’m reading now.)

The memos, prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) shortly after 9/11, say that the president can order military operations within the United States, and that the Bill of Rights would not apply to these operations. Also, according to the NYT:

the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

The newly released memos have gotten a lot of coverage in the press, but I think one point is so basic that it’s in danger of being missed: Why on Earth should legal opinions be classified in the first place?

In my previous life as a mathematician for the MITRE Corporation, I had a clearance and occasionally ran into classified documents. Usually, the classified pages in a document were very specific and technical — the exact specifications for some radar or communications system, for example. But you wouldn’t classify an abstract discussion of radar or communications. Those theories are in textbooks.

These secret memos, by contrast, don’t reveal detailed government plans that would be useful to our enemies. They put forward an abstract legal theory that Jack Balkin sums up like this:

The President, because he is President, may do whatever he thinks is necessary, even in the domestic context, if he acts for military and national security reasons in his capacity as Commander in Chief. This theory of presidential power argues, in essence, that when the President acts in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, he may make his own rules and cannot be bound by Congressional laws to the contrary.

If that theory is true, then it shouldn’t be classified, it should be in Civics textbooks. We should proudly teach our children that our rights exist by sufferance of the president, who could revoke them all if he so decided.

Secret law — and when an “interpretation” stands the written law on its head, in essence it becomes a new law — runs against our entire legal tradition. As far back as the Roman Republic, the West has believed that laws should be written down and displayed in clear view.

Why did these memos have to be classified? Because they’re absurd. You never need to classify the fact that 2+2=4. But if you want the government to operate under the assumption that 2+2=5, then you do have to classify it, because your government will be a laughing stock otherwise.

Background. If you’ve been reading the Sift for a while, you have run into the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) before. It is the highest legal authority inside the executive branch of government. Unless and until the courts directly contradict it, the OLC’s interpretation of the law is official. So if lawyers from the Navy disagree with lawyers from the State Department, an OLC opinion settles the matter in the same way that a Supreme Court opinion settles disagreements between lesser courts

Like the Supreme Court, the OLC can be extremely powerful if it falls into the wrong hands. It can declare that black is white, and (so long as the issue stays out of the courts), the rest of the government is forced to go along with the assumption that black is white.

Bush defenders frequently ask some version of this legitimate question: Shouldn’t the president be able to respond to whatever comes up, even if the law or the Constitution didn’t foresee this exact situation? If you get into one of those ticking-nuclear-bomb scenarios, you don’t want the president waiting for an act of Congress before he does anything about it.

In such a situation, the president should act more-or-less the way Lincoln did: Do what you need to do, then go confess your sins to Congress. At that point Congress can either retroactively approve your actions or start impeachment proceedings. Instead, the Bush administration made up bogus legal theories about why they didn’t need anybody’s permission or approval. Consequently, we (and Congress) still don’t know most of what they did.

The Obama administration doesn’t want former enemy combatant Jose Padilla to be able to sue John Yoo for his mistreatment.

Glenn Greenwald looks at Britain’s reaction to the allegations that Binyam Mohamed, a British resident recently released from Guantanamo, was tortured there with the knowledge and assistance of the British government. He finds their public discussion strikingly different from ours.

the tacit premise of the discussion is that credible allegations of criminality — even if committed by high government officials, perhaps especially then — compel serious criminal investigations. Imagine that. How shrill and radical.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …

… look for The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer.

Mayer has been covering civil-liberties issues for the New Yorker all through the Bush administration. I find I agree with the WaPo review by Andrew Bacevich: This book’s “achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces.”

I’ve read a lot of the Bush administration books and articles, and reviewed some of them here on the Sift, so few of the specific events in the book were new to me. But seeing them all laid out in order from 9/11 to last April provided a new depth and perspective. If you’ve been reading reviews of the various war-on-terror books and thinking you should get around to reading one someday, put those aside and read this one.

Seeing the whole story in one place deepened my feel for the characters. Mayer’s Dick Cheney, for example, is not a one-dimensional Dr. Evil. Instead, he seems like a man afraid to admit that he’s out of his depth. Cheney came to office with no background in terrorism, the Muslim world, counter-insurgency, interrogation, constitutional law, or any of the other issues that instantly became central after 9/11. Suddenly, the country needed a strong vision from its leadership, and no one else was in a position to provide one — certainly not President Bush, who hated briefings longer than five minutes.

The emergency post-9/11 mentality was in part an overreaction to the administration’s neglect of terrorism pre-9/11, coupled with an administration-wide character flaw that didn’t allow them to admit or learn from their mistakes. The true story of 9/11 is that collectively the government had all the information it needed to prevent the attack, it just didn’t route those bits of information to people who could have put them together and acted on them. 9/11 was a failure of management, not of power. But the administration was congenitally incapable of telling the story that way, even to itself. Instead, 9/11 was always invoked to support the government’s push for more power: the power to spy, to torture, to invade.

Much of the book follows the lawyers of what became known as “the War Council” — essentially a shadow government consisting of the major players’ legal counterparts: David Addington (Cheney), Alberto Gonzales (Bush), Jim Haynes (Rumsfeld), and John Yoo (who technically was under Ashcroft, but was really a loose cannon). Addington (like Cheney) dominated the group, while Gonzales (like Bush) was a lightweight who never really wielded the power he had on paper. It’s doubly interesting who was left out of the group: Ashcroft, as well as the top lawyers of the FBI, the State Department, or the military judge advocate generals (JAGs).

this insular, unelected, self-reinforcing group, with virtually no experience in law enforcement, military service, counterterrorism, or the Muslim world, was in position to make many of the most fateful legal decisions in the post-9/11 era. … “Addington spoke authoritatively about what the President decided in 2002, but he wrote the document, and it was probably his decision,” a former White House official said later.

The War Council’s lack of relevant experience led to some major mistakes. For example, the original Guantanamo military tribunals were based on tribunals convened by FDR — ignoring the subsequent Uniform Code of Military Justice established in 1951. Any military lawyer could have told the War Council that the JAGs would consider this a return to the Bad Old Days — but no military lawyers were present when the decision was made.

The torture policy was based on a similar lack of experience. This story is worth repeating in its entirety:

The FBI had an embarrassing firsthand reminder of why such tactics are illegal when, immediately after September 11, they coerced an Egyptian national who had been staying at a hotel near the World Trade Center into falsely confessing to a role in the attacks. Abdallah Higazy, like the other hotel guests, fled when the hijacked planes smashed into the towers. Soon after, the hotel told the FBI it had found in his closet a radio communication system for air pilots. The FBI took Higazy into custody. According to Higazy, an FBI agent told him that if he didn’t confess that the equipment was his, and that it connected him to the Al Qaeda attacks, his family in Egypt would be tortured. After first denying the charges, Higazy confessed under the pressure. Luckily for him, an airline pilot who had also been a guest at the same hotel soon returned to ask for his radio back.

Again and again, torture led to false testimony. (Colin Powell was convinced to make his famous presentation to the UN after he was unknowingly given false testimony produced under torture.) That was entirely predictable: The enhanced interrogation techniques came from the SERE school whose purpose was to train American soldiers who might face torture if captured. Ultimately their techniques were copied from the KGB, who intended to produce false confessions.

The program and their claims were never subjected to any independent analysis. They always went back to the same people who were running the program at the Agency to ask if it was working, and they always said it was.

My takeaway from The Dark Side is to be more convinced than ever that President Bush himself needs to be put on trial. The only motivation lawyers have to tell their clients things they don’t want to hear is to keep those clients out of jail. If presidents can’t go to jail, no matter what they do, no one will ever tell them No.

I haven’t gotten around to reading David Kilcullen’s new book about counter-insurgency yet, but Andrew Bacevich has.

Tigerhawk

Sometimes I don’t understand my own liberal-blogger tribe. A minor conservative blogger named Tigerhawk put up a video explaining that well-to-do professionals like him (the over-$250,000 folks whose taxes Obama wants to raise) work extremely hard and are not the villains of this financial crisis. He recommends that Obama come to them with more of a your-country-needs-your-help message than a you-haven’t-been-paying-your-fair-share message.

Reasonable stuff, as far as it goes. (I’m sure lots of minimum-wage people work hard too, when you lump their three part-time jobs together.) But I wouldn’t have found this video at all if the liberal blog Sadly, No! hadn’t picked it out as an example of rich people’s whining arrogance. I didn’t react that way at all. In fact, wandering around Tigerhawk’s blog, I realized this was gold as far as I’m concerned: a conservative blogger who seems to have some standards about facts and logic. No ranting about Obama’s birth certificate or how we need to have an armed insurrection to keep the country from going Communist. (I think it helps that we’re both Big Ten fans raised in the Midwest. The “hawk” part of his name comes from the Iowa Hawkeyes.)

I’ve recommended a lot of liberal blogs, but I think it’s important that we not become an echo chamber. So I’m adding Tigerhawk to my bookmarks and I’ll drop in now and then to see how things look from the other side. Catching up a little: Tigerhawk’s take on the financial crisis is pretty interesting. It’s reassuring to know that a (self-described) conservative CFO from a medical device company tells the story pretty much the same way I do. And his questions for health care reformers are pretty good, if somewhat affected by the whole medical-device-company thing.

Short Notes

If you needed any more proof that pundits don’t belong to a meritocracy, Vanity Fair summarizes the most outrageous predictions of Thomas Friedman.

The Onion reports that American blacks are being “creeped out” by all the positive responses they’re getting from white strangers now that Barack Obama is president: smiles, pats on the back, offers to fist-bump or high-five. “To be honest, you people are kind of terrifying when you’re happy,” says one. And another adds: “I know you mean well and all, but seriously, knock it off. You’re giving my children nightmares.”

Another Onion scoop: A school-board member in Arkham, MA wants the curriculum to reflect a really old-time religion, preparing students for the apocalyptic return of the Elder Gods.

This one isn’t from the Onion, it just sounds that way. Republican Congressman John Campbell:

we’re living through the scenario that happened in Atlas Shrugged, The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

Speaking as somebody who was a huge Ayn Rand fan in my misguided youth, this is deeply weird. Picture it: Somewhere there’s a guy who has the next Google or Microsoft in his head, but when he sees the capital gains tax going up to 20% he thinks: “Why bother? I’d only get to keep 80% of those billions. I’m not going to take that kind of punishment.” How likely is that?

Tigerhawk provides an interesting datum: On March 3, Atlas Shrugged was up to #38 on Amazon’s sales list. I just checked, and it’s still at #54. Not bad for a book published in 1957.

California’s Proposition 8 saga continues. The ballot initiative to make same-sex marriage illegal again (and give involuntary divorces to thousands of same-sex couples) passed in November. Now the state’s Supreme Court is hearing a case challenging Prop 8’s legitimacy.

The issue here sounds technical: Is Prop 8 a constitutional “amendment” (as it claims to be) or a “revision”? Amendments are narrow and can be passed by majority vote, while revisions are more sweeping and require either 2/3rds of the legislature or a constitutional convention. It’s an important distinction, because California’s amend-the-constitution-by-majority-vote provision is insane without some strict limitations. Otherwise, a simple majority could proclaim Schwartzenegger dictator-for-life.

Congress may become a branch of government again: It looks like Karl Rove and Harriet Myers are finally going to have to testify about the US atttorneys scandal.

Al Rodgers on DailyKos collects a few Daily Show clips that prove a point: Jon Stewart is more on top of the financial crisis than the so-called “serious” reporters are. My favorite moment comes during his conversation with NYT financial reporter Joe Nocera (about the 4:25 mark in the third clip), when Jon nails CNBC’s fawning interviews with the very people who turned out to be at the center of the disaster.

It’d be like the Weather Channel interviewing Hurricane Katrina and saying “You know, there’s a report that you have high winds and flooding.” And Katrina’s like, “No, no, no — I’m sunny.” And they’re like “All right” and they walk away.

This clip from Tim Geithner’s testimony to the Senate is disturbing, because he doesn’t answer Senator Cantwell’s question about the AIG bailout. In essence AIG is a conduit: It insured bad debts for other financial institutions, so as the debtors default, the federal bailout money is flowing through AIG to those other institutions. Cantwell is trying to get Geithner to say who the insured institutions are and how much they’re getting, but he provides no specifics.

The worrisome thing is that Geithner seems to be taking the same attitude towards Congress and the bailouts as Donald Rumsfeld took towards Congress and Iraq: Your job is to keep writing the checks. We’ll decide what you need to know about where the money is going.

It started out as one of the more bizarre stories that the Republicans made up about the stimulus bill: Harry Reid was setting aside $8 billion to build a mag-lev train from Disneyland to Las Vegas. Now the story is getting even better, as stories unconstrained by reality often do. In the new version, the train goes from Disneyland to a particular Nevada brothel, which in the real world is nowhere near Las Vegas. And Fox News is reporting it all as fact.

The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande has an interesting take on the health care system: We should build on what we have. I was skeptical, but then he retells the history of how other countries got their health care systems.

March 9, 2009 – 2:50 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

Tagged , , |

Eight Days a Week

Eight days a week is not enough …

— the Beatles

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not getting soft.
All I want is a couple days off.

— Huey Lewis and the News

In This Week’s Sift:

  • One Obama-Week. Compared to that vacation-happy white guy, this Obama fellow seems to work pretty hard.
  • Why the Banks Are Bankrupt. Wired claims that the Wall-Street disaster comes from mis-applying a mathematical formula. It’s the best theory I’ve heard so far.
  • Kindle and the Conquest of Space. Will a new book-reader change my life? Or at least let me stay in my apartment? And what about online comic books?
  • Short Notes. Maybe Santelli’s rant wasn’t so spontaneous. None-the-Wiser Pence calls for a spending freeze. Colbert King wonders about the other missing people. Lakoff interprets Obama. Maybe Canada knows what it’s doing. And why should Obama get a poster and not you? Or me?
One Obama-Week

I’m not sure what to do with a president who doesn’t spend half his time cutting brush at his fake ranch. This week:


1. President Obama gave addressed a joint session of Congress on Tuesday. [text, video] Great speech, but Bill Kristol was disappointed, because (by focusing on the economy, energy, healthcare, and education) Obama left out the issues Americans really care about: “This was not the speech of a man who even contemplates the possibility
of using force within the next year to prevent Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons.” [Bill: How about you enlist in one of the wars we’re already fighting before you start another one?]

I like this piece of Obama’s speech: “Dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American.” Under Bush, patriotism meant war. But Obama is making patriotism three-dimensional. There are many, many ways that we either build our country up or tear it down.

2. On Thursday, he introduced a budget with new priorities. It does away with the accounting tricks that made the Bush deficit look smaller than it actually was, starts the healthcare-reform process, institutes a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, and does exactly what candidate Obama promised about taxes: ends the Bush tax cuts for those making $250,000 or more and cuts taxes for everyone else. Obama’s weekly address on Saturday was calmly confrontational towards the oil, insurance, and banking interests who will want to torpedo parts of this budget. OpenLeft likes what it hears.

3. Friday, he produced an Iraq plan. We finally have a plan and a date: “by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” But we’ll still have a “transitional force” in Iraq that could be 50,000 troops. Complete withdrawal takes longer and is less definite: “I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.” Is this the real deal or yet another way to continue the war? Juan Cole is optimistic.

4. Along the way, he made some major rule-of-law decisions. I anticipated some of this last week, and this week continued to be a mixed bag. We’re going indict Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been held without charges as an “enemy combatant” for more than seven years. That’s good, because al-Marri was in the US legally and has never had a day in court. He’ll get one now. But it’s also bad, because now we’re probably not going to get a decisive the-president-can’t-do-that ruling from the Supreme Court. So Obama or some future president might re-assert the power to jail people without due process.

And the Obama administration is continuing the Bush effort to keep the warrantless wiretapping program out of court. The program is blatantly illegal, but its very secrecy keeps people from suing, because you can’t prove you’re a victim. Accidentally, however, the Bush administration released some classified documents showing that a particular Islamic charity was spied on, so there is a test case. Like Bush, Obama is trying to obstruct the suit. The administration lost a ruling this week, but has filed more motions to block the case. Glenn Greenwald has the details.

I’m sure I missed something. Has Obama announced yet where he’s going to vacation when he finally gets around to taking one?

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s Republican response [text, video] to Obama’s speech was so bad it became a sensation. Conservative columnist David Brooks called it “possibly the worst response to a Democratic speaker in the history of democracy.” Multi Medium said Jindal sounded “like Mr. Rogers pitching an infomercial.” So many people compared his delivery to Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock that NBC’s Jimmy Fallon decided to give Kenneth a chance to respond to Jindal’s response.

Content? Well, Jindal told a Hurricane Katrina anecdote (which appears not to be true) to make the point that we can’t depend on government. That’s conservatism in a nutshell: Govern incompetently and then offer your failures as evidence that government doesn’t work.

Another Republican hopeful, Mike Huckabee, says of the Obama economic program: “a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born. … Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.” Steve Benen recalls the grief Senator Durbin took when he compared Guantanamo to a gulag, but doubts Huckabee will pay any similar price: “In Republican circles, there’s no such thing as excessive rhetoric.”

The Obama administration is circulating a proposal to reverse Bush’s last-minute regulation that protected healthcare workers who refused to provide care for reasons of conscience. I’ve explained before why these “conscience” rules are a bad idea.

Why the Banks are Bankrupt

The cover article of the latest Wired, Recipe for Disaster: the Formula That Killed Wall Street, answers one of the most mystifying questions of the economic crisis: How could so many smart people be this stupid?

Here’s the story: A guy developed a new formula for computing the correlation between any number of risky events. That’s important on Wall Street, because if your risks are uncorrelated, that means your portfolio is diversified — any piece of it might crash, but the portfolio as a whole won’t. The formula was based on certain assumptions, but in the end it was just a formula, so people who didn’t understand it could put it in a spreadsheet and use it to produce numbers. Then the obvious thing happened. Spreadsheets don’t keep track of assumptions, so the numbers got used in situations where the assumptions didn’t hold. Those numbers convinced Wall Street traders that pools of mortgages (or other investment pools) were safer than they really were, because all the mortgages wouldn’t go bust at the same time.

If you’re geeky, the reason it told them that is kind of interesting. First, the formula treated correlation as a constant, and second, it provided a way to read that constant off of a market price, rather than from an intrinsic analysis of the risks. For example, consider two mortgages, one in San Francisco and another in Miami. What’s the risk that they both default at the same time? It turns out that a certain credit default swap market had implicitly been estimating that risk for about twenty years. So without knowing anything about real estate or about San Francisco or Miami, you could pull that number out of market data.

Here’s what went wrong: The correlation between the two risks isn’t a constant; it depends on events. And just because there hadn’t been any nationwide real estate crashes during the last twenty years, that didn’t mean such a thing couldn’t happen. So when a nationwide real estate crash started, suddenly the risks were highly correlated, even though the misapplied formula had said they couldn’t be.

So, in short, it’s another example of that old computer programming adage: Constants aren’t. Variables don’t. [Translation from the Geekish: Just because you represent some quantity with a constant or a variable, that doesn’t mean that it actually stays constant or actually varies. You’ve got to match your data types to the world, not vice versa.]

Another so-this-is-what-happened article is the NYT’s explanation of how AIG lost so much money and why we can’t afford to let them go bankrupt. Short version: Because the credit default swap market was completely unregulated, AIG didn’t have to set aside any loss reserves when it insured other people’s debts. So it didn’t. So its limited capital didn’t put any limit on how much debt-insurance it could sell. When the bankrupcies and defaults started, AIG was on the hook for vast amounts of money — but no money had been set aside. And if AIG defaults, nobody knows when the dominoes will stop falling.

The New York Times takes a look at the claim that TARP-receiving banks will suffer a “brain drain” if they can’t pay multi-million dollar bonuses. Conclusion: “So if a few masters of the universe threaten to leave, where are they going to go? … [G]iven the tumult in the industry, it’s a buyer’s market right now.”

Ben Bernanke’s childhood home was auctioned off in a foreclosure sale last month.

Kindle and the Conquest of Space

I’m a big fan of the downtown-apartment-in-a-small-city lifestyle. Our heating bills are low and we can walk to many of the restaurants, bars, and shops that other people have to drive to. But a middle-aged couple in an apartment constantly struggles for space. Unused stuff has to go. For us, the church rummage sale is the culmination of a rigorous annual culling process.

My biggest space problem is that — thirty years later — I still collect the stuff I collected as a student: music, books, and comic books. Thirty years worth. So while my comic books used to fit comfortably in a stack on a shelf in the dorm, now they take up more than half a dozen of those long comic-book-store boxes. And books — the last time we moved we finally gave up on the idea of displaying our books attractively on shelves. They live in boxes that are indexed in a database. Almost fifty of them, at last count. Even a three-bedroom apartment is hard-pressed to contain them.

MP3 and iTunes solved the music problem. This month I’ve embarked on a couple of experiments to see if there’s a similar solution for books and comics: I subscribed to Marvel’s online repository of digital comics and I bought a Kindle from Amazon. Both still feel like new toys, so it’s too soon to say if they’ll totally solve the problem. But so far, so good.

Marvel. The economics of digital comics are great: A typical paper-and-ink comic costs $3, while an annual subscription to Marvel’s web site costs $60, so if it stops me from buying two comics a month, it’s a win.

Marvel solves the file-sharing problem like this: Instead of letting you share a copy with infinitely many friends, your browser downloads the comic you’re reading (so it doesn’t blink out if you suddenly lose your internet connection), but throws it away when you’re done. Doubtlessly some hacker has a way to retain the files, but I don’t want to go there. If (like me) you only read comics in places with an internet connection (like home), it works fine.

Before signing up, I worried about the reading experience, but I’m happy with it. (You can check out some free online comics here.) Those rare two-page spreads are a little hard to grok, but on the whole I think comic art looks better on a computer screen than on paper. Superheroes want to be bright.

My main complaint is the incompleteness of the collection and the lag behind what’s in the stores (about six months, similar to the trade paperback versions of comics). In the first few days after subscribing I zoomed through all 30 issues of 4, a limited Fantastic Four series from a few years back. But there are still frustrating gaps in the collection, which Marvel seems to be trying to fill in.

Now if only DC will imitate them.

Kindle. My Kindle 2 book reader arrived Friday.

The first objection everybody makes to the idea of an electronic book-reader is that they can’t imagine staring at a screen long enough to read a whole book. I just finished reading my first book (Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side — more about that next week) on the Kindle and I can report that it’s not a problem. The Kindle’s screen is like a high-tech Etch-a-Sketch. The little dark particles re-arrange themselves electronically, but nothing on the screen glows. You read it with ambient light, just like a book. Plus, the Kindle is easier to one-hand than a book, because it’s light and isn’t constantly trying to shut itself. I think it’s a pleasant experience.

The convenience is amazing. It’s bigger than a phone, but fits in a large jacket pocket. So Saturday I was able to take the Kindle out for a night on the town without anybody noticing. During intermission, I could read Mayer’s account of extraordinary rendition instead of the ads in the theater program.

You buy books from Amazon, which the Kindle connects to wirelessly, wherever cell phones work. I thought it would be a financial hazzard to live in a virtual bookstore, able to buy books anywhere at any time. But in fact I think it will work the other way. If books are available 24/7 and you can start reading one a minute after you order, there’s no reason to buy a book until the instant you’re ready to start reading it. So much for my stack of I’ll-get-to-that-someday books.

Looking at the last fifty books I’ve read — yes, I have a list, that’s the kind of guy I am — about half of them were available for Kindle. Prices are similar to paperbacks, even if the book is new. (Mayer’s book cost me $9.99.) Out-of-copyright classics are ridiculously cheap: the collected 200 works of Charles Dickens go for less than $5 total. (But I’m not ready to start reading them right away, so I haven’t pulled the trigger on that purchase yet.) I picked up a Bible for free.

There are provisions for highlighting, saving quotes, making notes — and downloading it all onto your computer. You can make the type any size, click on any word to get its definition, or look up any subject in the Wikipedia. It will hold and play MP3s, but that’s an afterthought — Amazon didn’t give it a good music-player interface. The 1,500-book (1.5GB) capacity is an illusion; it’s essentially infinite. Because Amazon keeps track of what you’ve bought, you can purge something from your Kindle and restore it later for free (with all your highlights and notes still in it, they claim). You can email text files to Amazon, and they’ll convert them to Kindle format for you. The converted pages don’t come out looking as good as the e-books you buy, but they’re adequate.

Will the Kindle completely replace paper in my life? No. But I think that’s a silly standard to judge it by. In addition to the books, magazines, and newspapers you just can’t get on the Kindle, you can’t loan Kindle-files to your friends, and you can’t borrow them from the library. Paper books will continue to have their place. I’ll just have fewer of them.

Given that I already have paper versions of all the classics I really want, cheap e-books won’t make up for the Kindle’s $350 cost anytime soon. (For a college student, they might.) But given that I rent a storage locker and don’t want to rent a bigger one, it’s worth money to me to own fewer physical objects. That, and the sheer coolness of carrying 1,500 books with me to the coffee shop.

Short Notes

Indiana Republican Congressman Mike Pence knows just what to do in these times when nobody but the government is spending: “Freeze federal spending immediately!” I’m speechless.

Every time the media goes 24/7 about some missing-person case — Hayleigh Cummings, Caylee Anthony, Jon Benet Ramsey, Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy, or some other cute white girl or pretty white woman — I have a reaction similar to Colbert King’s: Why does this person deserve so much more of our attention than all the other people who go missing? So many of them, in King’s words, “are just black or brown blurs” as far as the media is concerned. Or they’re male or ugly or fat or old — so who cares?

I almost wrote about Rick Santelli’s rant last week, but decided it had gotten plenty of publicity without me. This week an interesting counter-charge was made: That Santelli’s apparently spontaneous eruption on CNBC was actually the well-planned kick-off of an “astroturf” (fake grassroots) campaign.

Friday, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine (describing themselves as “veteran Russia reporters” who “spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape”) charged on Playboy’s web site that Santelli’s rant

was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America

For now, their article suggests and implies more than it proves. But re-watching Santelli in the light of their theory, everything looks different. His gestures seem practiced, his phrases a little too clever. It will be interesting to see if this story develops as more people look into it.

The EPA is likely to start regulating carbon dioxide emissions.

Texas is the flagship state for abstinence-only sex education. It’s also a leading state for teen pregnancy, STDs, and misinformation.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff interprets the larger structure of Obama’s message . Let me reframe his frame on framing: It’s not about changing the outcome, it’s about changing the game.

Fahreed Zakaria notices that Canada is coming through this crisis better than we are — largely because their government has tried to be sensible.

You can produce your own lovely imitation of the Obama Hope poster.

March 2, 2009 – 2:27 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

That River in Egypt

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair

In This Week’s Sift:

  • Still in Denial About Global Warming. Every time the debate seems to be over, the same bogus arguments rise again. Maybe it’s because energy companies have hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.
  • Will Obama Really Give Up Bush’s Tyrannical Powers? After a good start, the Obama administration has backtracked, and is making noises about not wanting to “weaken the institution of the presidency”. But don’t we need to weaken the presidency to restore the constitutional balance?
  • Not Your Father’s Recession. To see why this economic crisis is different, look in your fridge. But don’t worry, hard times are good for you.
  • Short Notes. Obama’s elf. Bristol’s interview. Neocons never existed. Iraqis are cool about having their homes blown up. Christians discover poverty. And more.
Still in Denial about Global Warming

There was a brief period last year when I thought the debate about global warming was over. Al Gore had his Nobel Prize. John McCain was telling Republican primary voters that global warming was real, and they were voting for him anyway. Even the foot-dragging of the Bush administration seemed to be losing conviction. Maybe, I thought, we can finally get down to figuring out what we’re going to do about it.

Lately, though, the fog has been spreading again. Once again I’m seeing the pseudo-scientific arguments that global warming is all some big mistake, illusion, hoax, or scam. The most enterprising new tactic — maybe I just didn’t notice it before — is to skip the pseudo-science entirely and baldly claim (as if all well-informed people already knew this) that the global-warming deniers have been proved right.

Take Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard. As he tells it, the anti-global-warming case is so widely accepted that he can use it to condemn other stuff by analogy. This was his comment on Obama’s defense of the stimulus bill:

Obama sounded like Al Gore on global warming. The more the case for man-made warming falls apart, the more hysterical Gore gets about an imminent catastrophe. The more public support his bill loses, the more Obama embraces fear-mongering.

Zachary Roth at TPM questioned Barnes on the claim that “the case for man-made global warming falls apart”, and got the response that Barnes had a reference, but he wasn’t telling what it was. Seriously. I last heard that argument in fifth grade.

I wrote that off as an isolated incident, but then George Will went even further. His February 15 column is full of easily checked falsehoods that he and the Washington Post apparently didn’t check. I was going to list them all and their refutations, but Wonk Room did it for me. (I’ll limit myself to this: Will referenced the Arctic Climate Research Center as the source for one of his “facts”, and the ACRC web site contradicted him — by name — within hours. The WaPo didn’t think that merited publishing a correction.) The column repeats some of the errors he propagated in a 2004 column, which were pointed out at the time here and here.

When you hear some apparently reputable people say “A” while other apparently reputable people say “not A”, the natural conclusion is that the truth is complicated and unclear. But when the subject is global warming, a lot of people say obviously false or wildly misleading things, and outlets as reputable as the Washington Post publish them.

So what’s going on? If the science is clear, why are there so many global warming deniers? I see three basic motives:

  • Money. At the base of the pyramid are researchers and publicists paid by the energy companies to produce confusion. They don’t need to convince anybody; they win if they just make us all unsure enough that we won’t call for action. Remember the Tobacco Institute fogging up the dangers of smoking? The main difference is the scale: Energy companies have hundreds of billions at stake rather than just billions. (As so often happens, the deniers try to turn this issue around by making a big deal out of environmentalists’ financial motives, as if it weren’t obvious where the big money really is.)

    The poster boy here is Steven Milloy, the “junk science” commentator on Fox News. He’s an organizer of demanddebate.com and other groups that receive Exxon-Mobil funding. He also apparently works for the tobacco industry, for whom he obfuscates the second-hand-smoke issue.

  • Ideology. 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.
  • Partisanship. It becomes a Republican/Democrat thing both for ideological reasons and because the energy industry has more influence in the Republican Party. Once it’s a partisan issue, positions freeze. As the evidence comes in, Republicans can’t admit that they were wrong and the Democrats were right. (John Murdock tried on the New Majority blog, but the commenters weren’t going to stand for it.)

As with tobacco, a few facts misstated or taken out of context can build a controversy out of nothing, and the media’s obsession with “balance” always makes the sides sound equal. The best place to chase down these arguments is at Real Climate, a blog by climatologists. The responses are conveniently collected in the How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide.

I’ll just discuss one, to give you a flavor of how this works. A common argument (it appears in the Will column and many other places) is that there has been no global warming “since 1998” or “in the last decade”. Yearly temperature measurements fluctuate, and even though the long-term trend is clearly up, 1998 was a spike year — it stand out above the curve. So starting your analysis there is a like starting your analysis of hurricanes in 2005, the Katrina/Wilma year, the worst year anyone can remember. Hurricanes are down since 2005 — does that make you feel safe? A more complete article about the 1998 claim is here, including a graph that makes it all clear.

This video by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (no idea who they really represent) shows what you can do with images and music and enough money to buy air time: Fossil fuels are good and life-affirming, while the proposal to regulate CO2 is a threat to all you hold dear.

Will Obama Really Give Up Bush’s Tyrannical Powers?

It’s easy to point out the excesses of executive power when you’re not the executive. When you are, giving up power is always fraught with problems. Your unchecked powers seem harmless because you know you will only do good things with them.

That’s why civil libertarians have been watching President Obama carefully ever since he took office. The signs from the first few days were good. In his inaugural address he said:

we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

One of his first executive orders committed him to closing the prison at Guantanamo, and he suspended the prosecutions that were pending under Bush’s military tribunals. His attorney general and CIA director ended the word games about torture. He restricted the CIA to the interrogation techniques listed in the Army Field Manual.

Since then the signs have been more ambiguous and occasionally ominous.

  • The administration has stood by the Bush claim that enemy combatants can be held indefinitely without charges at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan — including four men brought there from outside Afghanistan. The ACLU’s Jonathan Hafetz: “”They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law.”
  • While the Justice Department is reviewing all the court cases where the Bush administration claimed a state secrets privilege, the privilege was re-asserted in a civil lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary accused of involvement in renditions. The state-secrets privilege has been recognized since the Eisenhower administration, but Bush’s expanded interpretation allows the executive branch to dictate what information courts can and can’t consider. If it stands, the courts are not an equal branch of government.
  • The Obama administration is continuing the Bush effort to dismiss lawsuits concerning the “missing” Bush administration emails.
  • Obama hasn’t committed one way or the other on Karl Rove’s claim of “absolute” executive privilege, which allows him to ignore congressional subpoenas. Particularly worrisome is the statement of White House counsel Greg Craig that Obama “is also mindful as President of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency.”

But doesn’t the institution of the presidency need to be weakened, after eight years of steroid injections? How else can we re-establish the constitutional checks and balances?

If (like me) you want to believe in the Obama administration’s basic good intentions, you can blame a lot of this on its methodical character: They’ll change a policy when they’ve figured out what the right policy should be, and not before. They’ve been left a huge mess, and they don’t want to make a lot of fast, sweeping decisions that have more consequences than they realize.

Still, if new policies don’t come out soon, they’ll be harder and harder to make at all, because they’ll have to reverse not just Bush, but a bunch of their own actions as well.

We’ll know a lot more in a few weeks, because a number of key decisions are coming up.

  • Attorney General Holder has to decide whether to release a report that his predecessor blocked. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility looked into the process that resulted in the famous “torture memos” by the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Because the OLC is the official interpreter of the law within the executive branch, those memos gave torturers the highest possible assurance that they were acting legally. Rumors about the report say that “OPR investigators focused on whether the memo’s authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted.” That could lead to disbarment for former OLC lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, and could have criminal implications both for them and for co-conspirators in the Bush White House.

  • By March 4 the administration has to file its brief on executive privilege. Clearly, Obama will want to retain some kind of executive privilege. But the Bush interpretation of executive privilege allowed (and continues to allow) his aides to ignore congressional subpoenas completely, rather than refuse to answer specific questions. If that stands, Congress is not an equal branch of government.

  • Obama has to decide what to do with Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari who was living in Peoria (under a legal visa) when he was declared an “enemy combatant”. He has been held in isolation in a military brig for more than five years, with no charges filed and no opportunity to contest his imprisonment or the evidence against him.
Not Your Father’s Recession

There continues to be no sign of a bottom: Not in the stock market, in jobs, or in ominious statements from financial leaders like George Soros or Paul Volcker.
Paul Krugman explains why this is different (and scarier) than other recent recessions :

Your father’s recession was something like the severe downturn of 1981-1982. That recession was, in effect, a deliberate creation of the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates to as much as 17 percent in an effort to control runaway inflation. Once the Fed decided that we had suffered enough, it relented, and the economy quickly bounced back. Your grandfather’s recession, on the other hand, was something like the Great Depression, which happened in spite of the Fed’s efforts, not because of them.

But if you want real gut-level evidence that this one is different, stat guru Nate Silver has it: Beer isn’t recession-proof any more. Looking back to 1959, Silver documents that alcohol sales are uncorollated with the overall economy — until now. Take-home alcohol revenue (i.e., not bar sales) was down an unprecedented 9.3% in the fourth quarter, with beer down 14%.

Conservatives have been Pollyannas about the economy at least since Larry Kudlow enthused about “the Bush boom” late in 2007. But now Michael Gerson is taking it to a new level. Even if we are going into a depression, that might be good for us. It can “lead to the rediscovery of virtues that make sustained prosperity possible — and that add nonmaterial richness to our lives.” Evangelical megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs is pushing a similar message: Thank God for hard times. (The first depression had such an uplifting influence on the Germans, after all.)

Well, at least we’re drinking less.

Recent events have taught Tom Toles a lesson about regulation.

It’s weird that we’re still arguing about the New Deal 75 years later, but we are. And Republicans are wheeling out their most reliable weapon against FDR: They’re making stuff up.
Short Notes

Worst pun ever? As lucky as Barack Obama has been these last two years, it’s not surprising that his elf is exhausted and ready to quit.

Last week I reported that the mercenary corporation Blackwater has changed its name to Xe. But I didn’t do it with quite the panache of Harper’s Scott Horton: “Xe? It looks like the obvious alternatives, SPECTRE and THRUSH, were unavailable.”

I don’t usually cover sports here, but if you want to raise your understanding of the game of basketball, read this piece on Shane Battier. Oh, and the New Yorker’s A-Rod cover is fabulous.

Conservatives who make fun of liberal Obama-worship have conveniently forgotten what they were like back in the mission-accomplished days. Here’s a little memory jog. And another. And a bunch more.

Bristol Palin’s interview on Fox News had a number of interesting moments. “It was my choice to have the baby,” she says (with about 6 minutes to go). Bristol seems very genuine and likable. She is still engaged, but it sounds like marriage is a long way off — finishing school and getting a job are higher priorities. At the beginning of the interview she waxes about how fulfilling it is to be a mom, but later on (2:45 to go) she comments on teen pregnancy in general: “I think everyone should just wait ten years. … It’s not glamorous at all.” The real surprise comes near the end: “Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.” (No kidding. I think anyone who advocates abstinence-only sex education should be tested to see if they remember anything from their teen years.)

Salon’s Rebecca Traister does a play-by-play of Bristol’s interview, including recalling this Daily Show piece from September: Samantha Bee discussed Bristol’s situation with folks at the Republican Convention, who tripped all over themselves trying not to say the word that Bristol says very openly: choice.

Brain pacemaker. The FDA has approved a device to be implanted in the brains of people with extreme, unresponsive obsessive-compulsive disorder. Like a pacemaker for the heart, it stimulates OCD-related parts of the brain with electricity. The device is also being tested for severe depression.

I love it when something that we all know turns out to be only sort-of true. Everybody knows that America has had a high rate of incarceration since the Reagan years. But it turns out this pattern goes back a lot further. Back in the 50s we had just as high a percentage of our people locked up, but more of them were in mental hospitals and less in prisons. We emptied the mental hospitals in the 70s and filled up the prisons in the 80s. So what is it about American society that makes us want to put so many people away?

Top neo-conservative Richard Perle is touring the country saying that neo-conservatives shouldn’t be blamed for the failures of the Bush foreign policy because (1) there’s no such thing as a neocon and (2) Bush never listened to them anyway. WaPo’s Dana Milbank is skeptical.

And speaking of neocons, here’s Surge-architect Fred Kagan Wednesday: “when the insurgents dig in and we root them out, the Iraqis don’t on the whole say ‘darn it, you shouldn’t have blown up all of our houses.’ They sort of accept that.” Yeah, I’ll bet they just laugh that stuff off, the same way we would if foreigners blew up our houses.

In another 2000 years, who knows what they might accomplish? Conservative Michael Gerson and liberal Jim Wallis are forming a bipartisan Christian alliance against poverty. This kind of project would be much easier if Christianity had ever had an influential founder. Preferably someone who spoke out about poverty. Maybe on a mount.

When Glenn Beck moved from CNN to Fox News, I thought: “Great. That’s where he belonged all along.” Little did I know that he had been reining himself in for CNN. Now that he’s at Fox, he’s wacko even by their standards. Witness this.

February 23, 2009 – 1:47 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Things that just ain’t so

It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble, it’s the things we do know that just ain’t so.
— Artemus Ward

In This Week’s Sift:

  • Myths. The stimulus lets government overrule your doctor, $30 million for mice, the unpopularity of investigating Bush, and the plot to get Rush off the air. Those are just a few of the baseless assertions that pass for facts these days.
  • Republican Watch: Newt’s Energy Policy. It sounds great, but it boils down to oil and nuclear.
  • Some Brains Should Drain. Even the Obama administration is being taken in by the Wall Street brain-drain fear. But I just can’t credit the idea that the architects of the current mess have a better job waiting somewhere else.
  • Short Notes. Porn star for Senate. Take your gun to church. Blackwater is no more. Planned Parenthood thanks Sarah Palin. Deregulation restores your right to have salmonella in your peanut butter. And more.
Myths

The Right has gotten very good at introducing false “facts” into the public debate. Typically, one of these “facts” begins its life in a memo or an email at some think tank or Republican congressional office. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Matt Drudge release it into the wild, where it gets repeated by Fox News and major Republican politicians. At that point, it’s “news” and starts showing up on CNN and the broadcast networks. Once it gets that far, usually the best you can hope for is that it gets reported as a “controversy” rather than a fact. (“Next, our panel of experts debates whether up is down.”) The major networks have such a fetish about “balance” that they will never come out and say “This is just false.”

A common technique here is the “refused to rule out” story. Liberals are plotting to do something unless they rule it out to the satisfaction of conservatives, who will refuse to be satisfied.

Anyway, here’s a sampling of recent myths.

Stimulus Myths. When the Republicans decided to go all-out against the stimulus bill (it passed with the support of three Republican senators and no Republicans in the House), they started telling horror stories about the specific programs “hidden” in the bill.

I have to conclude that the Democrats did a pretty good job of combing silly programs out of the stimulus, because the Republicans were quickly reduced to making stuff up. (A good summary of what is really in the bill is here.) The stimulus bill produced an amazing collection of mythology, almost all of which found its way into this single speech by Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia. I’ll limit myself to two myths:

The government will overrule your doctor. This one started with an article by Betsy McCaughey, former Republican lieutenant governor of New York who now works at the conservative Hudson Institute.

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective.

McCaughey then made a tour of the cable talk shows, repeating the point that the Democrats had hidden a Big-Brotherish takeover of medical decision-making in the stimulus bill.

This is such a misreading of the text that it almost has to be intentional. It’s got the information flow backwards: the system is supposed to make information easily available to your doctor, not to make your doctor’s decisions easily reversible by the government. (Also, it’s not a new bureaucracy; it was established by the Bush administration in 2004.)

CNN’s medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen asked McCaughey to show her where the bill does what she claims, and came to the conclusion that it “doesn’t exactly say that”. When challenged, McCaughey retreated to the position that the bill’s language “could allow” what she describes — in other words, the bill doesn’t rule it out to her satisfaction.

The Wonk Room observes that McCaughey played a similar role — cherry picking phrases out of a bill and making them sound alarming — in the campaign against the Clinton health plan in the 1990s. Keith Olbermann notes that the Hudson Institute has funding from drug companies. McCaughey’s response to Olbermann doesn’t deny that, but claims that her position at Hudson is unpaid.

Pelosi’s mouse. Many, many Republican congresspeople (Congress Matters quotes 18 of them) told this story: The stimulus bill contained $30 million for “Pelosi’s mouse” — the salt marsh mouse, which has a habitat in Nancy Pelosi’s district in California.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line has the real story: It starts with an email circulated by the staff of the Republican House leadership, claiming that people at an unnamed federal agency had told them they would spend $30 million of their stimulus money on “wetland restoration in the San Francisco Bay Area — including work to protect the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.”

The Republicans have not revealed the names of the people they talked to, the agency, what line in the bill produces the $30 million, or how much of the alleged $30 million is directly devoted to the mouse habitat.

“There are no federal wetland restoration projects in line to get funded in San Francisco,” Pelosi spkesperson Drew Hammill said. “Neither the Speaker nor her staff have had any involvement in this initiative. The idea that $30 million will be spent to save mice is a total fabrication.”

The American people don’t want to see Bush investigated. We hear this over and over again from political pundits who think their own affection for people like Karl Rove is shared by the public. But then pesky data starts to show up. Gallup polled the public about three issues: politicizing the Justice Department, spying on Americans illegally, and torture. In each case, the plurality (from 38% to 41%) was for a criminal investigation and another 24-30% wanted an investigation by an independent panel, making 62-71% favoring some kind of investigation.

Interestingly, rather than headlining this poll “2/3rds of Americans want Bush investigated,” Gallup decided to lump the independent-investigation folks together with the don’t-investigate folks and headlined the piece: “No mandate for criminal probes of Bush administration“. That’s your “liberal media” at work.

Democrats are planning to destroy conservative talk radio by bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine is an FCC policy that was thrown out by the Reagan administration. It said that federally licensed TV and radio stations (i.e., not cable or internet) had to present controversial issues in a balanced way. If reinstated, it might require radio stations that carry Rush Limbaugh to balance his show with a liberal show. Some stations might decide it was easier just to drop Rush.

Unless you pay attention to talk radio or other conservative media, you probably have heard nothing about the attempt to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. That’s because there is no attempt. There is no pending legislation, other than a Republican bill to strip the FCC of the power to reinstitute a Fairness Doctrine. (Democrats who don’t support that Republican bill are refusing to rule out the Fairness Doctrine. Those schemers!) During the campaign Obama said he did not support the Fairness Doctrine. None of the major liberal media-watch organizations is pushing for it. It’s got zero support on the liberal blogs. (We love Rush. We want to make him the poster boy for the Republican Party.)

But this issue is a bugaboo on the right, where they talk about it at great length and interpret every Democratic head-fake as the start of a major campaign. (I think they expect us to do it because they would if the situation were reversed.) Typical is this article from the conservative Gateway Pundit, which accuses liberal Media Matters of pushing the Fairness Doctrine. But the link supporting that claim is just an article criticizing conservative talk radio; the Fairness Doctrine is not mentioned. Or this one from conservative NewsBusters, where a Huffington Post article laughing at conservative paranoia about the Fairness Doctrine is interpreted as part of the plot to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Most recently, Politico over-interpreted David Axelrod. When Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Axelrod if he would “rule out reimposing the Fairness Doctrine”, Axelrod refused to announce policy over the head of the new FCC chair. (It looks like this is one of the operating procedures of the Obama White House, and the media is having trouble adjusting to it. Policy announcements more often come from the experts lower in the administration, and top White House people — including Obama — are discouraged from anticipating what they will say.) Politico’s Michael Calderone thought Axelrod’s non-statement was worth writing an article about, because he didn’t rule anything out.

Republican Watch: Newt’s Energy Policy

Newt Gingrich in the Moonie Times wants to end “Bush-Obama” big government policies and instead stimulate the economy by tax cuts, including “Rep. Paul D. Ryan’s proposal to eliminate the capital-gains tax.”

It’s fascinating to watch conservatives distance themselves from the unpopular word Bush, while continuing to promote tax cuts for rich people and all the other Bush policies. Did any of them say a word against President Bush in 2002-2003 when he was popular? Did any of them propose policies different from Bush when they ran in 2006 and 2008? Not that I noticed. But the word Bush — they’ve totally distanced themselves from it. Us big-government liberals are responsible for Bush now.

Newt goes on to say that his American Solutions think tank will soon produce an energy policy

that will turn American energy assets (including clean coal, ethanol, more production of oil and natural gas, new technologies from hydrogen to wind and solar and a vastly expanded nuclear-power program, as well as a dramatic modernization of the electric grid and an expansion of conservation) into money that stays here at home.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except:

  • No one has any idea what “clean coal” is. Perpetual-motion machines sound good too, but that doesn’t mean we know how to make them.
  • Ethanol (at least the corn-based kind we’ve been producing) requires so much energy to produce that the energy gain is minimal. Remember Granny Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies making corn moonshine by cooking something in her still? Scale that up and you start to understand where ethanol comes from.
  • Hydrogen is a method for transporting and delivering energy, not an energy source. There’s no hydrogen well that you can stick a pipe into. Instead, you need to use energy to produce hydrogen; then you move the hydrogen somewhere and burn it to get back slightly less energy than you put in.
  • “More production of oil and gas” is the whole drill-baby-drill thing from Sarah Palin’s campaign. You can drill all you want, but the world’s remaining oil and gas — if you could burn it all without cooking the planet — is almost all somewhere else.
  • “new technologies” like wind and solar, and “a dramatic modernization of the electric grid and an expansion of conservation” is some of that wasteful spending that Republicans hated in the stimulus bill. When conservative flagship National Review listed “50 of the most outrageous items in the stimulus package” they denounced “money-losing technologies that have not proven cost-efficient despite decades of government support” (presumably wind and solar energy) and “programs [that] would spend lavishly on technologies that are proven failures.” Also included among their “outrages” were the $4.5 billion for the grid, the $6.2 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program (conservation), and a number of other programs they described as “green sugar”.

So Newt’s list boils down to this: flim-flam, more subsidies for Big Oil, stuff Republicans overwhelmingly voted down when it was actually proposed, and “a vastly expanded nuclear-power program.”

I wonder why he didn’t just say that?

I tend to think of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as the far right, but in fact there are regions of right-wing craziness that go far beyond Rush and Sean. (A good site for keeping track of them is Public Eye.) Recently I took a look around the web site of the anti-immigration group VDARE. VDARE’s Peter Brimelow thinks that anti-immigrant hostility is a wave that the Republican Party can ride back to power.

The key, says Brimelow, is for the party to recognize that white people are its base. McCain beat Obama 55-45 among whites, and if he could have captured Ronald Reagan’s 65% of the white vote, he’d be president. Yes, the non-white portion of the electorate is going up, but look at Alabama:

[In] Alabama, like the South in general, whites are only 65 percent of the electorate, whereas in the US at large they cast about 77% of the vote. So the GOP is in much worse shape in Alabama than in America generally. But still the GOP won overwhelmingly in Alabama—because it got 88 percent of the white vote in this last election.

Yep, that’s the message Republicans should be pushing: White people, unite! Today Alabama, tomorrow the USA! Brimelow continues:

I think that whites, that is to say Americans, will organize. They will ultimately throw off the leadership they currently have. I think immigration will become an issue, and the issue will become an important part of that self-organization process, with your help

Porn star Stormy Daniels is being recruited to run as an independent against Louisiana Senator David Vitter. Commenting on Vitter’s role in the D.C. Madam scandal , Davis said to CNN: “I might be a porn star, but I haven’t done anything illegal. The big question is not just ‘Why is David Vitter still in office?’ but ‘Why he isn’t in jail?'” Huffington Post collects some of her recent interviews (with political journalists).

If this works, maybe we should recruit some dominatrix types to run against the senators who support torture.

Some Brains Should Drain

The stimulus bill contains a broader pay cap on TARP-receiving executives than the Obama administration wanted. Their reason for objecting to the pay cap goes like this:

“These rules will not work,” James F. Reda, an independent compensation consultant, said on Friday. “Any smart executive will (a) pay back TARP money ASAP or (b) get another job.”

(Like getting the TARP money paid back is something we should worry about.) An unnamed source in the administration supposedly warned Congressmen against causing a “brain drain” in the TARP-receiving firms.

Here’s how I read this story. As head of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve these last few years, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has been contaminated by the information bubble surrounding the top Wall Street executives. People inside that bubble still believe that they are financial geniuses, and can’t see what is obvious to the rest of us: They are failures. They’re collectively responsible for the biggest economic disaster in many, many years. And even to the
extent they weren’t individually responsible, it was their job to see something like this coming and maneuver their firms around and through it. They failed.

So, is it really true that other firms are eager to hire away, say, the top execs at Citibank? (1) I doubt it. (2) Let them. A new management team at Citi or one of the other insolvent banks is only a disaster if you think the current team is uniquely brilliant. Other than possibly the execs themselves, who believes that?

One more thing I notice about this argument: Nobody ever makes a similar case for blue-collar folks. I mean, at least some of GM’s assembly-line workers must be very good at what they do. It’s not their fault the company is going under. Why don’t we worry that, if pay gets cut, GM’s best workers will be hired away by some other factory? It’s exactly the same logic. But no, when a manufacturing company is in trouble, we take for granted that the workers should have to tighten their belts to save their jobs. Why not bankers?

Short Notes

A 64-year-old diabetic veteran describes the nitty-gritty of getting healthcare from the Veterans’ Administration. It’s not a horror story and nothing awful happens to him, but in some ways the very ordinariness of his account makes it worse. I can easily imagine millions of people dealing with this kind of hassle and expense on a regular basis.

Planned Parenthood has Sarah Palin to thank for more than $1 million in donations. But Sarah isn’t saying “You’re welcome.”

When your name becomes toxic, change it — preferably to something unpronounceable. Blackwater is now Xe. Soon, I figure, Jeb Bush will change his name to some non-alphabetic symbol, like Prince did.

A lot of us have wondered what the heck Bernake and Paulson said behind closed doors last fall to scare Congress bad enough to pass the original TARP bill. We’re starting to find out.

More like Rome every day. Now we’re going to start trading citizenship for military service.

In God we trust. But just in case … in Arkansas, you may soon be able to take a concealed weapon into church with you.

Department of Poetic Justice. It’s hard to raise money in this bad economy — especially if you’re the guy responsible for it. Fund-raising for the George W. Bush Presidential Center at SMU is going slowly.

Wonder why there’s salmonella in our peanut butter and mercury in our corn syrup? The number of food inspections by the FDA has been going down since about 1972. Food safety turns out to be one of those things that the free market doesn’t do very well without government “interference”.

I hadn’t heard anything about this until a friend mentioned it to me, but lots of companies have stopped matching 401(k) retirement-plan contributions. (According to kiplinger.com: Eastman Kodak, General Motors, Motorola, Sears, FedEx, and maybe soon Starbucks.) It’s a way for a company to cut its employee costs without changing people’s take-home pay. But you have to wonder about the long-term effects, both on retirement savings and on the stock market. For a trend that affects so many people, this has gotten surprisingly little coverage.

18,000 couples are trying to save their marriages. They’re same-sex couples, and they’ll be divorced against their will if Proposition 8 is unheld in California. The Courage Campaign has put together this “don’t divorce us” video.

February 16, 2009 – 3:14 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment