The Weekly Sift

“In the space of a week,” writes Scott Horton, “the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed.”

The instrument of that transformation is the Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody report that the Senate Armed Services Committee released on Tuesday.

If you’ve been following this story on the Sift over the last year or so, and clicking the links out to reporting by people like Phillippe Sands and Jane Mayer, you may wonder what is so remarkable — because the story told by the Senate report is not new. But the significance of the Senate report is its authority and authenticity. Until now, if you didn’t want to believe that torture of detainees was a real problem, you could point to the anonymous sources in Sands’, Mayer’s, and Seymour Hersh’s reports and say they were making it all up; it was just a bunch of left-wing propaganda from the Bush-haters.

You can’t do that any more. The Armed Services Comrmittee included Republicans like John McCain, John Warner, Elizabeth Dole, and Lindsey Graham. (The report was finished by the previous Senate, in November.) It reviewed “more than 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents” and interviewed over 70 individuals, some under subpoena. This the most authoritative document on torture we currently have.

And — together with the testimony of newly emboldened officials who are saying in public what they previously said only off the record — it absolutely destroys the layers of disinformation that the Bush administration laid down to protect itself. Let’s take those layers one by one.

It’s not torture. President Bush said it outright in 2007: “This government does not torture people. We stick to U.S. law and our international obligations.” And Dick Cheney said in December: “We don’t do torture. We never have.” For the longest time, simply saying the word torture marked you as part of the liberal fringe. It was OK to talk about enhanced interrogation or to use euphemisms like “the gloves came off,” but not torture.

As long as the techniques were not described in detail, you could tell yourself it wasn’t really torture. Rush Limbaugh minimized it like this: “If a few terrorists get slapped around or sprinkled with water or lack air conditioning to protect us from further attacks, we can live with it.” Joe Lieberman said waterboarding was “not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies.” (Like that’s the standard.)

Well, the not-torture argument has fallen apart. In a report written in February 2007 but just leaked a few weeks ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross repeated what it had heard from 14 detainees — descriptions that now closely match the techniques OK’d in the Bybee memo — and said that this treatment “amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The Senate report quotes a CIA lawyer as saying in 2002: “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

Now that the American people have heard about slamming people’s heads into walls, stuffing them into boxes, soaking them in cold water and leaving them to shiver in chilly cells, and waterboarding them as much as 183 times in a month — and from Bush administration memos, not liberal reporters — you can’t make those mental images go away with Orwellian Newspeak like enhanced interrogation.

Even House Republican leader John Boehner said the newly released memos outlined “torture techniques”. (His spokeman tried to back away from those words later.) George Will (full quote to come) somewhat apologetically referred to “torture, if you will”. Increasingly, refusing to call these techniques torture marks you as part of the conservative fringe.

Even if it is torture, it’s not policy. This is the “few bad apples” defense that the Bush administration used after the Abu Ghraib photos came out. The Senate report:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. … Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.

Even if it is a policy of torture, it’s legal. This was the gist of the John Yoo memos: The president’s power as commander-in-chief trumps all treaties, laws, and even the Bill of Rights. So if the president wants to order torture, fine.

As long as Yoo’s memos were secret, people in the government could vaguely tell each other that the lawyers said the techniques were OK. You could almost imagine that some legal wizardry really did squeeze them into the letter of the law. But when the memos started coming out in 2004, the low quality of Yoo’s reasoning was obvious to everyone. Jack Balkin called them “arguments that make you ashamed to be a lawyer.” NYT reporter Anthony Lewis wrote:

The memos read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to skirt the law and stay out of prison.

There was, in fact, no other reason to classify the Yoo torture memos. They didn’t mention any specific interrogation techniques or contain any other information that would help our enemies. The “secret” was the sheer brazenness with which Yoo declared the law to be whatever the President wanted it to be.

We’ve found out since that competent lawyers were working for the government as well, and that circumventing their accurate analysis required all of David Addington’s bureaucratic cleverness. The military judge advocate generals (JAGs) were uniformly opposed to torture. Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora tried to get the torture tactics rescinded, and thought for a while that he had succeeded. State Department lawyer (and 9-11 Commission executive director) Philip Zelikow wrote a memo dissenting from the Bush administration torture memos. He reports: “The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.”

Why would they do that? The Anonymous Liberal explains:

The only reason to collect and destroy all copies of this memo would be in order to preserve, for as many Bush administration officials as possible, a potential defense against later prosecution. If the extent of these activities ever became public and investigations were commenced, the White House wanted to be able to argue that everyone involved relied in good faith on the advice of counsel. That defense would be severely undermined if it could be shown that these officials were warned, by a lawyer of Zelikow’s caliber and rank within the administration, that the legal arguments they were relying on were poorly reasoned and unlikely to be sustained by a court.

Attempting to destroy all copies of Zelikow’s memo, in other words, is evidence of bad faith. They knew they were wrong.

Even if it’s illegal, it’s necessary. This is the “ticking time bomb” argument. Michael Scheuer (the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit) made that argument yesterday in the Washington Post. (I feel bad about Scheuer. I learned a lot from his 2004 book Imperial Hubris, but he’s been getting wiggier and wiggier ever since.)

Here’s the problem with that argument: There has never been any reason to believe that torture is an effective interrogation strategy. The Senate report makes it painstakingly clear that our torture program was never even designed to be an interrogation strategy. The torture techniques come from the SERE school, which mimicks a Chinese program designed to get false confessions. (That same Chinese program is the root of the classic Cold War novel The Manchurian Candidate. It’s about brainwashing, not getting information.) SERE trains our own soldiers to withstand a Chinese-style brainwash. But it was always a school for the potential victims of torture, not a school for interrogators. The SERE techniques were brought into interrogations largely over the objections of trained interrogators.

Unsurprisingly, then, the McClatchy newspapers report:

The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

Even more damning was an article by FBI interrogator Ali Soufan published in the New York Times on Thursday.

For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding.

Using only standard FBI interrogation tactics, Soufan and another agent questioned Abu Zubaydah, the suspected terrorist whose interrogation became the subject of a Jay Bybee memo. Bybee wrote: “The interrogation team is certain that he has additional information that he refuses to divulge.” Quite the opposite, Soufan writes that Abu Zubaydah was cooperating.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified.

Even if it’s illegal and unnecessary, it only hurts people who deserve it. Karl Rove was making this point in 2005 when he said: “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to … offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” No politician wants to go before the voters as a defender of terrorists’ rights.

But until detainees have been through some kind of legal process, they’re just suspects. And sometimes they turn out to be innocent, like Maher Arar, the Canadian we arrested while he was changing planes in New York and shipped off to Syria to be tortured. Our mistake cost him a little more than a year of his life. Or like Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen we abducted in Macedonia and held for four months in Afghanistan. (He had just argued with his wife, who — when he seemed to vanish into thin air — assumed he had left her and their four children.) In The Dark Side, Mayer reports: “Almost from the first moments that the CIA took custody of him, some Agency officials suspected that Masri was innocent. Yet for months they subjected him to unsparing abuse anyway.”

Finally, this story: A soldier in Iraq killed herself after refusing to participate in abusive interrogations. The Army covered it up.

Even if it’s illegal, unnecessary, and hurts innocent people, it doesn’t hurt ordinary Americans. Soufan points out one of the ways that torture makes us all less safe: It reconstructed the wall between the CIA and the FBI that the 9-11 Commission tried to tear down. Because the FBI’s purpose is to send criminals to prison under the law, an FBI investigation needs to be untainted by techniques that would get the whole case thrown out of court.

Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him. … Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security.

The Senate report is very clear about how we’ve been hurt by our abusive interrogation tactics:

Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

This judgment about our “moral authority” flies in the face of another standard argument, made often by Dick Cheney and as recently as last Sunday by George Will:

Rahm Emanuel said that the terrorists use our enhanced interrogation — torture, if you will — as a rallying cry. [But] before we had this enhanced interrogation, we had the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the attacks on the East African embassies. We had the bombing of the Cole. The terrorists weren’t waiting to be incited.

Where to start with this? First, note the hidden assumption that prior to torture America had done nothing to incite anyone. We were just minding our own imperial business, and then 9-11 happened out of the blue. But in The Accidental Guerrilla, counterterrorism expert David Kilcullen makes the opposite argument: Most of the enemies we face are “accidental” — they were the ones minding their own business when we blundered into their territory chasing terrorists.

Even if it’s illegal, unnecessary, hurts innocent people, and makes us all less safe, no one should be held accountable. This is the point that is still under argument. For example, Senators Graham, McCain, and Lieberman have issued a statement asking the administration not to prosecute the lawyers who wrote the torture memos:

Providing poor legal advice is always undesirable, and the Department of Justice is currently conducting an internal ethics review of the OLC memos, but that is a quite a different matter from making legal advice with which we may disagree into a crime.

This line of defense is no more credible than any of the others. In fact, no one is saying that bad-but-honest legal advice or bad-but-honest policy advice of any kind should be criminal. In order to prosecute someone like John Yoo or Jay Bybee, you’d need to show bad faith: that they knew they were giving bogus advice that facilitated the administration’s law-breaking. Bad faith is hard to prove, but the fact that the administration destroyed memos and lost emails is awfully suspicious. Who knows what we’d find if we did a serious investigation?

Jim White of Oxdown Gazette nailed this argument back in February:

there would be no need to “criminalize policy differences” with the Bush Administration if the policies themselves were not crimes. Torture is not a policy difference, it is a crime. Wiretapping without a warrant is not a policy difference, it is a crime. … To complete the inversion of logic here, now note that since there are indeed crimes that have been committed by the Bush Administration, when there is a call not to prosecute because Bush was the President and he and his minions were acting “for the good of the country”, this is actually a call to inject a political consideration [my emphasis] into the decision of whether to prosecute.

The way to keep politics out of the legal process is to do what Colin Powell’s former chief of staff wants: appoint a special prosecutor and let him or her follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Even over at Fox News, support for torture is starting to unravel: During the “Freedom Watch” segment Wednesday, Shepard Smith completely lost it on the air. After listening to a colleague make the point that torture helps keep us safe, Smith repeatedly slaps the desk for emphasis as he says:

We. Are. America. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America! We do not fucking torture! We don’t do it.

we were focused on trying to establish a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful … The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate resuIts.

This is the real nightmare scenario — torturing people until they say things to support the torturer’s delusions. It’s lose-lose in every direction.

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Short Notes

The new kids on my block. My apartment building is right next to Mine Falls Park (pictured), so one couple in my neighborhood is a mating pair of swans. They tell me that it’s nesting season, and that they expect to hear the splish-splash of little cygnets any day now.

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If you’ve never seen a straight steal of home, you weren’t watching the Red Sox and Yankees last night.

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

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:

• replace the dollar with an international currency
• take away our guns
• shut down right-wing talk radio by reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine
• or shut it down through local content rules (“Christian radio stations will be saddled with local Muslim ‘advisory boards’ demanding equal time and getting it.”)
• gut the military (in fact Obama proposes an increase in the defense budget as Stephen Colbert explains)
• use your tax dollars to build a train from Disneyland to a brothel in Nevada
• send American young people to mandatory “re-education camps” to be “trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward”
• rig the census (in the words of RNC Chair Michael Steele) “to create permanent liberal control of the federal government”

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.

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:

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

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:

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:

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.

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?

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.

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’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.

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.

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?

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

Apparently the ACLU isn’t happy about this either.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.]

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.

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.

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.