Think and Imagine

Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we have to think. — Winston Churchill
In this week’s Sift:
  • Thinking Deficit. I can understand the $1.6 trillion deficit in this year’s budget. It’s the $1 trillion in 2020 that bugs me. One way or another, that’s not going to happen. But which way?
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look at Methland by Nick Reding. If a book about a drug problem makes you think of bad high school assemblies and Reefer Madness, think again. Reding connects the dots between crystal meth, the forces that are destroying our small towns, and the corporate-dominated political system that keeps us from doing anything about it.
  • Deniers Deny that Climategate is Debunked. A Penn State investigation reveals what I told you at the time: The Climategate emails don’t show anything underhanded. But Senator Inhofe misstates the investigation’s conclusion, the same way he misstates everything about global warming.
  • Short Notes. Just two this week: Barack and I miss each other again, and John Oliver extends don’t-ask-don’t-tell to John McCain’s age.
Thinking Deficit
There are two ways to look at a new federal budget: You can narrow in on how your favorite programs fared, or you can step back and wonder where it’s all going. I’ll skip the narrow look, because lots of people are doing it and I can’t guess what your favorite programs are anyway.
Coverage of the big picture has mostly centered on getting hysterical about the size of next year’s deficit: $1.6 trillion, up from the current $1.4 trillion. Color me unfazed. Like Paul Krugman, I’m more worried about cutting spending while unemployment is this high than I am about the sheer size of one year’s deficit.
What does worry me, though, is the projected deficits of the next ten years: They go down as the economy recovers, but they bottom out at over $700 billion in 2014. Then they start up again and hit $1 trillion again in 2020. And even that sorry scenario is based on the assumption that the next ten years are normal economic times. What if we have to adjust to something major, like a fall in world oil production, a deadly global epidemic, yet another war, or a chain-reaction of global warming effects?
Everyone wants to pose as tough-on-the-deficit these days, but on all sides it’s more flash than substance. As Matt Yglesias points out, not even Democrats propose major tax increases, not even Republicans propose big cuts in Social Security and Medicare (with one exception we’ll discuss below), and neither calls for scaling back the global mission of our military. But that’s the whole ball game — taxes, entitlements, the military — everything else just nibbles at the edges.
All this can continue as long as foreign central banks are willing to loan us money — not forever, in other words. If they decide we’ve had enough, a deadly chain reaction starts: The interest rate we have to pay goes up, raising the deficit even further. It’s a musical-chairs moment when everyone who has been dancing merrily suddenly scrambles to grab a seat.
I think a lot of us are beginning to realize something politicians still can’t say in public: We have entered an era of broken promises, and we won’t come out of it for a long time. The only question is: Which promises will get broken and how suddenly? Will it happen like the 2008 collapse, where overnight the the rock-solid stock in your IRA — the AIG or General Motors or Fannie Mae — became worthless? Will our pensions and cash savings suddenly inflate away, as happened to so many Russians after the Soviet Union fell? Will we all deny that it’s happening, while simultaneously trying to make sure that the brunt of any shortfall hits somebody else? Or will we rise to the occasion, set some priorities, and scale back our expectations sensibly together?
So far it’s hard to give good odds on that last outcome. We all need to train ourselves to object to the words unthinkable and unimaginable. (As in “It’s unthinkable that America would step back from its global responsibilities.”) Thinking and imagining are tools for choosing the future rather than having it forced on you. We should use them.

The outer limit of what a Republican can propose is Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” which eliminates the long-term deficit.

If you cut to the chase, he does it by getting rid of Medicare: The government sets strict limits on how much it will spend on privatized vouchers for seniors to buy their own insurance. Eventually medical inflation trivializes the value of the vouchers, and the government is off the hook. Matt Yglesias elaborates:

Right now if you’re old, and you get sick, and there’s some treatment that will uncontroversially cure you, then doctors come and cure your illness no matter your income. The Ryanverse won’t look like that. … Lots of seniors will die preventable deaths due to lack of funds.

The rest of Ryan’s proposal is (as Kevin Drum says) smoke and mirrors. He sets limits on the growth of various kinds of spending, which is fine until you have to specify exactly what you’re not going to fund — which Ryan doesn’t do.
Other Republicans like to point out that there is a Republican plan to solve the deficit problem, but they won’t stand behind even its sketchy details. Still, I’d like to see a corresponding liberal thought experiment, no matter how politically unthinkable its specifics would be.
The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …
Most drug-epidemic books are like the assemblies we suffered through in high school, full of Reefer-Madness urban legends about evil pushers and weak-willed addicts who suffer horrible fates.
Instead, Nick Reding has written one of those rare dot-connecting books. To Reding, the meth epidemic is all about what’s wrong with our small towns — he focuses on Oelwin, Iowa — and with the national political system that keeps us from fixing our problems. It’s not just about smugglers and dealers and users. It’s about Big Pharma, agribusiness, illegal immigration, and squeezing the working class out of the American dream.
Mayberry’s Drug Problem. A year or two ago, when a cousin died prematurely of no apparent cause, my father speculated that he had showed signs of meth addiction. At the time I didn’t think to ask: When did my Dad learn the signs of meth addiction? How could there be a drug problem that this 80-something farmer knew more about than I did?
Meth is different from our other drug epidemics, in ways that are hard to discuss honestly in public. Mainstream America has always pictured drug problems as centered in segments of the population that are … expendable. Sure, there might be drugs in the local high school, but that’s just spill-over from the black ghetto or the hippies or new immigrants we didn’t want here anyway. The problem always really belonged to those people — how dare they bring their filth into our communities?
We can’t tell that story about meth. The center of the meth epidemic is small-town white America, the kind of people who show up at Sarah Palin rallies and think of themselves as the “real” Americans. A modern-day Sheriff Andy would be tracking down Mayberry’s meth labs rather than watching Otis sleep it off in jail.
Millions Americans are like me: We don’t live in a Mayberry, but we think of ourselves as from there. Somewhere in the back of our minds is a grandmother’s house that is over the river and through the woods. It’s beyond our imagination that the people who live in that house now might be meth addicts.
Because it was so incongruous, so injurious to our national mythology, the meth problem flew under the radar for a long time. At first Reding thought it was his strange luck to keep running into meth stories while he was researching something else. After he became convinced that meth was a widespread problem, he couldn’t get big-city editors interested. A Mayberry-centered drug problem didn’t make sense, so it couldn’t be happening.
What meth does. You can’t understand the epidemic without appreciating the biology. The human body has a reward system. When you do something you know is good, chemicals get released in your brain. That’s what feelings like pride, satisfaction, and general well-being come down to: neuro-chemicals.
Meth tricks that system. Take meth, and suddenly you have the brain chemistry of someone who just scored the winning touchdown or aced the SATs. You feel like you can do anything, but you don’t have to, because everything is fine. You don’t even need to eat or drink or sleep.
Short-term, meth is performance-enhancing: You can ignore obstacles and do more stuff better. Long-term, meth screws up the system it tricks. If you quit using the drug, suddenly you can’t generate feelings of pride, satisfaction, or general well-being no matter what you do. Even if you score the winning touchdown in reality — it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t feel like anything without meth.
Working class values. Our culture idealizes hard work. Pulling an all-nighter, going pedal-to-the-metal to get the big project done — those are heroic stories, the kind we like to tell about ourselves. A drug that helps you do those things seems almost virtuous.

It’s one thing for a drug to be associated with sloth, like heroin. But it’s wholly another when a formerly legal and accepted narcotic exists in one-to-one ratio with the defining ideal of American culture.

Reding follows a number of Oelwin residents throughout the book. One is Roland Jarvis. He started taking meth in the 1980s so that he could work occasional back-to-back shifts at Iowa Ham, the local meat-packing plant. The factory was paying $18 an hour and meth was cheap by comparison. Then Iowa Ham got bought by Gillette and then by Tyson and then eventually closed. Wages got slashed to $6.50 an hour with no benefits, and then the jobs went away altogether.
How do working-class people deal with a drop in income? They work harder. They take second and third jobs. They sleep less. If a drug will help you do that — what a godsend! And if your place in the legitimate economy goes away, there’s an illegitimate economy that needs hard-working people too. You can start cooking meth yourself and selling it to your friends so that they can work three jobs.
Once you start cooking your own meth, you can be high all the time — including when you’re cooking meth. One cold winter night, Jarvis had a paranoid delusion that the cops were about to raid him. So he dumped all his chemicals down the same drain, and they blew up. Impervious to pain, Jarvis thought he could fight the fire, but he wound up burning off his hands and his nose. When the EMTs eventually found him running around frantically, near-naked in the snow, they hoped that he would just fall over and die, because they didn’t know what to do with him. But he lived.
Immigration. You know who really wants a hard, dangerous $6.50-an-hour job with no benefits? An illegal immigrant. The meat-packing plants of Middle America have lots of them. Illegals acquire somebody else’s driver’s license and social security number. The employer doesn’t look at it too hard, and everybody’s happy.
The illegal immigration problem is hard to solve because many powerful people don’t want to solve it. Employers all over the country depend on illegal immigrants not just to take bad jobs, but to keep legal workers in their place. Don’t want to take a 2/3rds pay cut? Good luck in your next job. Want to protect yourself by organizing a union? Labor laws don’t apply to illegals. You can’t organize workers that the management could have arrested and deported whenever it wants.
Everybody knows how to stop illegal immigration. You enforce the law on the people who have something to lose: the employers. Every day, some bar gets shut down because it accepts fake IDs too easily. You could shut down factories the same way. When the jobs dry up, the immigrants will stop coming.
But if you want to put on a show of fighting illegal immigration without actually doing anything about it, you build a fence at the border. Think about it: If there is opportunity on one side of a border and none on the other, people will cross. Not even the Berlin Wall kept everybody in. How is our fence going to keep people out? Arrest them, send them back — even shoot them down like the Soviets did — and more will come.

[T]alk of increased border technology seems only to work in tandem with — and as a cynical addendum to — an utter lack of interest in removing the real impetus to walk across the desert: Cargill-Excel in Ottumwa is always hiring.

Where meth comes from. Two places: Home cookers, who we’ll discuss in a minute, and Mexico. The vast majority of illegal Mexican immigrants have no connection to the drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs in narc jargon). But once there’s an outside-the-law highway to bring illegals to factories in Iowa, drug traffickers can use it to bring meth right to the working-class communities. Being poor, desperate, and easily replaced, the illegals don’t take a big cut. And when drug-smuggling illegals try to avoid the notice of police and other authorities, they look just like all the other illegals.

the same American immigration policy that provides a low-wage workforce ideal for the food industry is what keeps the DTOs in business. … the interests of the DTOs are aligned with the likes of Cargill and ADM.

Home cooking. To make your own meth you need some farm-related chemicals, plus either ephedrine or pseudo-ephedrine. Back in the 80s, the DEA wanted pharmaceutical companies to rigorously account for all the ephedrine they imported and what they did with it. The Mercks and Pfizers didn’t want to, and they pay lobbyists to keep Congress from making them do things they don’t want to do. It took a long time for the DEA to get effective regulation.
Then the cookers switched to pseudo-ephedrine, which you can find in over-the-counter decongestants. There are ways to make equally effective decongestants with similar molecules that can’t be turned into meth, but again, the drug companies didn’t want to. They allowed Congress to regulate pure powdered pseudo-ephedrine, but not pills. So cookers bought enough decongestants to dry up Niagra, ground them into powder, and didn’t miss a beat.
Eventually, meth started making headlines. When it appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 2005, Congress had to do something, so it passed the Combat Meth Act, which appeared to give the DEA everything it wanted: Limits on how much pseudo-ephedrine a customer could buy, plus a record-keeping network that you couldn’t circumvent by going from one store to the next.
But the final draft was influenced by another group of lobbyists: the National Association of Retail Chain Stores (NARCS, believe it or not). The Walgreens and CVSs didn’t want to keep those records, or tell customers they couldn’t buy something they wanted. So they pressured Congress to let the states enforce the law, and then they pressured the states not to enforce it. Reding quotes Tony Loya of the DEA:

“We pass a law, and then we basically tell these huge companies that they’re not responsible for complying. It’s stunning.”

Agribusiness vs. agrarian culture. Every drug problem eventually comes down to the users. Why do they do it? Each user’s story is unique, but there are also larger forces at work: The fewer opportunities people have to experience satisfaction in their real lives, the more tempting drug-induced satisfaction is.
The biggest difference between the Mayberry of Sheriff Andy and the Oelwin of Roland Jarvis is that the food business has been taken over by giant corporations. Farming towns and mining towns once represented the two extremes of small-town life. In farming towns, multiple independent producers and small businesses traded with each other. The economies were robust, the power structures democratic. By contrast, mining towns were company towns. Wages were whatever the company paid, prices whatever the company store charged.

Today, farming and mining communities are becoming indistinguishable says [sociologist William] Heffernan.

More and more land is either owned or contracted by Cargill or some other giant. Increasingly, farmers grow what the company tells them to grow and sell for what the company is willing to pay. Increasingly, local businesses are chain stores, managed by people who weren’t born nearby and hope to be promoted to somewhere far away. Relationships that used to be permanent are now temporary. Money that used to rattle around in the local economy now zooms off to corporate headquarters.
The small town of myth, the one that exemplified true American values, wasn’t just small. It had a particular kind of culture — a culture of people, not corporations. That culture is a thing of the past.

In my telling meth has always been less an agent of change and more of a symptom of it. The end of a way of life is the story; the drug is what signaled to the rest of the nation that the end had come.

Deniers Deny that Climategate is Debunked
At the center of the trumped-up Climategate scandal was Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. A Penn State commitee of two deans and the university’s research integrity officer just released their completed report, which concludes

that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data …[or in] any actions with intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data … [or in] any misuse of privileged or confidential information available to him in his capacity as an academic scholar.

After clearing Mann of these three accusations, the investigating committee noted that the fourth accusation (whether Mann “deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research”) would be better judged by a committee of researchers, so they appointed one. Nothing in the report indicates that the fourth accusation will prove to be any more credible than the first three.
Unsurprisingly, James Inhofe (the Republican senator from Exxon-Mobil Oklahoma) is completely ignoring the Mann-vindicating parts of the report, writing only: “Penn State’s internal inquiry found further investigation is warranted.”
Short Notes
Tuesday President Obama was in Nashua and I was close to his home in Hyde Park. Our paths didn’t cross.

John McCain had an open mind about repealing don’t-ask-don’t-tell — until it became an actual possibility. Now he’s against it. The Daily Show responded with a discussion about whether people as old as McCain should be allowed to serve in the Senate.

Jon Stewart: It’s not like John McCain chose to be old.
John Oliver: What, Jon? You think he was born old?

February 8, 2010 – 10:05 am Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Safe Ground

Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible

In this week’s Sift:
  • What Happened in Massachusetts? Scott Brown won for a lot of reasons, and some of them will be a problem for all Democrats in November. But moving to the right isn’t the answer.
  • Obama Bounces. Progressives needed to hear a good State of the Union speech from Obama, and they did. Then he ran rings around House Republicans in a televised Q&A session.
  • Short Notes. The economy grows, but jobs don’t. Justice O’Connor disagrees with the Court. CBS favors conservative ads. How Norway beats staph. A jury refuses to justify killing an abortionist. Good-bye to Howard Zinn. And more.
What Happened in Massachusetts?
Few political events could have been more surprising than the Democrats losing Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate on January 19. Massachusetts was the only state that McGovern carried against Nixon in 1972. President Obama got 62% of the vote there just 14 months ago. But Martha Coakley lost to Scot Brown on January 18, and it wasn’t even close: 52-47.
So what happened?
Surprising events seldom have just one cause: Large national forces were at work, Brown ran a better campaign than Coakley, and some of it was luck. If you want to give a no-big-deal explanation, you focus on luck and tactics. If you want to tell a this-changes-everything story, you focus on the national forces. Let’s go through all three.
Luck. This election came at a bad time for the Democrats. The economy is sufficiently out of the woods that it’s hard to remember how scared we all were a year ago. (Any time you dodge a bullet, denial quickly kicks in and you start telling yourself, “That gun was never really loaded.”) But the recovery is not far enough along to have produced any jobs yet. Plus, Republicans have succeeded in pretending that the Bush administration never happened, or if it did happen, it was a very long time ago and has nothing to do with our current problems. (Rachel Maddow’s account is hilarious: “It’s almost like the Republicans want us to believe they didn’t exist until about two weeks ago.”)
The Massachusetts election was also just a week or two before the expected final vote on the health-care bill, just as the final wording was being worked out by the House/Senate conference committee. Consequently, all the media coverage was about the ugly process and not the result. The whole country has watched the bill get more complicated and insurance-company-friendly — not because the changes were popular or made sense, but because the last two or three senators managed to hold the bill hostage.
Worse, even the content-based coverage focused on the little contentious details that still needed to be worked out: abortion, enforcing the mandate, taxing so-called “cadillac” insurance policies, and so on. The big picture, the reason real people should care about health-care reform, got lost: Sick Americans should get the care they need, and they shouldn’t have to go bankrupt paying for it.
Finally, this was a moment when there was no actual bill. Anything from either the House or the Senate bill could wind up in the final one, and literally anything could still have been slipped in at the last minute by the conference committee. It was a perfect moment to raise fears that would be hard to refute.
Imagine instead what would have happened if this election had been three weeks later, with the health-care bill passed and signed. All the process issues would have been water under the bridge, the media would be focusing on what the program would actually do (rather than whatever wild things critics were saying about it), and congressional Democrats would have gotten a boost from having accomplished something rather than just talking endlessly. Coakley might well have won.
Tactics. But then you have to ask: Why wasn’t the bill already passed and signed? That wasn’t an act of God. The Democrats could have had this done months ago. But they didn’t see the Massachusetts election day as a deadline, because they never imagined losing.
The whole party, not just the Coakley campaign, was complacent. Coakley came out of the primary way ahead of Brown in the polls, but having spent all her money. Democrats were reluctant to contribute to a campaign they assumed would win anyway. Conversely, Republicans had nothing to lose, and knew that even a close loss would get them a lot of positive buzz.
So Brown had several weeks to advertise without response. He was able to define his own image and set the basic issues of the campaign. He did it very well.
The way the Brown campaign framed healthcare was particularly brilliant. You see, there are two main things to understand about the politics of healthcare:
(1) People who experience socialized medicine like it. No democracy has ever repealed a universal health-care system. Once in place, government health-care systems are so popular that even conservatives won’t run against them. In this country, the last Republican to campaign against Medicare was Goldwater. Socialized medicine works, and voters like it once they see it.
(2) Healthcare separates the Haves from the Have-Nots. I don’t mean this in the usual sense of rich-against-poor, but in the very literal sense that if you already have health-care coverage you like, you have more to lose and less to gain from any change to the system.
Now, naively, you might think that people who get their healthcare from Medicare or the VA or Medicaid would be fans of socialized medicine: They have experienced it; they know it works. But Scott Brown was smart enough to realize this: People who already benefit from socialized medicine are Haves, not Have-nots.
Being the most liberal state in the nation, Massachusetts already has a government-mandated near-universal health-care program. In fact, the Massachusetts system looks just like the much-reviled Obamacare: Private insurance companies compete on regulated exchanges, individuals are mandated to buy coverage if they don’t already get it through their employers, and people who can’t afford premiums are subsidized.
So did Brown run against this evil socialist health-care system? No, of course not. (“I support the 2006 healthcare law”) It would have been suicide. A post-election poll showed Massachusetts voters supporting their state health-care plan 68-27. Even Brown voters support the state plan 51-44.
Instead, Brown argued that Massachusetts voters are Haves, so they should oppose this proposed change to the status quo. And he attacked the national health-care bill by claiming it would hurt Medicare. This government health-care plan, in other words, is a threat to the government health-care plan you’re using now.
National forces. Democrats are in trouble nationally, at least according to the current polls. The Daily Kos tracking poll has Republicans leading on a generic Congressional ballot (“Would you like to see more Democrats or Republicans elected to Congress in 2010?”) 39-37, even though the approval rating of the current Republicans in Congress remains extremely low (21% compared to an also-abyssmal 37% for Congressional Democrats). There is also an enthusiasm gap. According to the same poll 80% of Republicans say that they either definitely or probably will vote in 2010, compared to 66% of Independents and only 52% of Democrats.
That said, Steve Singiser has an insightful article on Daily Kos discussing the recent wave of Democrats-are-doomed punditry, even among political scientists who ought to know better. The same signs were much worse for the GOP in 2006 and 2008, Singiser claims, without yielding the same level of doom-saying.
The right-wing media has been pushing the people-are-mad-as-hell story since the summer town hall meetings. With so much noise and spin, it’s hard to tell what the real level of public anger is or what exactly the angry people are angry about. The number of people who tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong track has been rising lately and is up to 60%, but that number was over 80% just before the 2008 election.
My take: There is considerable discontent in the country, but it isn’t ideological. One of the most unpopular recent policies, for example, is the bank bailout (which everyone forgets was done by Bush). But people surely don’t believe that ideological conservatives would be tougher on the banks than ideological liberals.
Looking forward, getting out in front of the popular discontent is going to be the defining tactical challenge of 2010. It’s not just a liberal/conservative thing.
Retreat? The inside-the-beltway reaction has been that Obama needs to slow down and move to the right. Former Clinton advisor Mark Penn, for example, wants Obama to take post-1994-debacle Bill Clinton as a model. He should “break health care up into its components” and “start with the easy stuff like electronic medical records.” He should not “be afraid to do what some think of as the small stuff” and should “look for ways to be genuinely bi-partisan.” In particular, “Genuine bi-partisanship would have given the Republicans malpractice reform in exchange for a public option.”
Even if you believe that people should still be listening to Mark Penn (the mastermind behind Hillary Clinton’s bungled 2008 campaign), this is all incredibly clueless. Let’s start with the malpractice reform suggestion. No Republican ever offered this deal. In fact, no Senate Republican ever offered any deal on health care. Here’s the typical pattern: Olympia Snowe put forward her public-option-trigger idea, but when Democrats offered to put it in the bill, she wouldn’t promise to vote for it. Again and again, Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown.
Republicans have repeatedly denied that people-without-health-insurance is a real problem, just as they deny that global warming is a real problem. What could Obama possibly accomplish by negotiating on those terms? You can compromise on solutions, but not on whether there’s a problem.
Politically, Bill Clinton is an example of what to avoid. He managed to get himself re-elected, but he lost the House in 1994 and never got it back. He entered office with 56 Democratic senators. When he left in 2001 there were 50 and the progressive movement was in tatters. Democrats went down to huge defeats in 2002 and 2004, when the party continued the Clintonesque move-to-the-center approach. And Republicans were so grateful for his help on welfare reform, NAFTA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and don’t-ask-don’t-tell that they impeached him.
Fundamentally, the argument between Republicans and Democrats is whether government can help people solve their problems. To win that argument Democrats have to help people solve their problems. Focusing on meaningless trivia just makes the Republicans’ case for them: If government isn’t going to solve problems for you, then the best you can hope for is a tax cut.
Health care. Democrats need to get health care done, not pull it back and start over. (You do it like this.) That’s true across the board. Even without the magic Senator #60, Democrats have bigger majorities in both houses of Congress than any administration has seen in decades. If they can’t achieve anything with those majorities, why should voters show up for them in November?
Remember when the stimulus bill passed? Al Franken was still tied up in a court challenge and Arlen Specter hadn’t switched parties yet, but somehow they got it done with only 58 Democrats. This fake beer ad has the right message.
Obama Bounces
President Obama had two big TV hits this week: the State of the Union address (video, transcript) Wednesday and his Q&A session with the House Republicans Friday. Put together, the two events stopped the bleeding from the Scott Brown race. LIke a lot of the liberal base, Joan Walsh suddenly remembered the President Obama we voted for.
The task of the SOTU speech wasn’t to outline a new policy track. Instead, Obama wanted to reassure America that he understands what’s going on and knows what he’s doing. Polls indicate that he succeeded.
A lot of the speech was devoted to recalling facts that his opposition has managed to obscure: He inherited a huge deficit and the threat of a depression. He increased the deficit to avoid the depression — something liberal and conservative economists alike recommended, even if they disagreed on the particulars. He cut taxes on working families and didn’t raise taxes on anyone.
Now the economy has stabilized, but lots of people are still unemployed. He’s going to keep using the deficit to stimulate the economy for another year, and then start cutting the deficit. He had several other policy proposals — a jobs plan, a new tax on big banks, repealing don’t-ask-don’t-tell — but mostly called for action on the proposals he has already made: “Don’t walk away from [health-care] reform. Not now. Not when we are so close.” And to the congressional Democrats he said: “I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.”
Obama challenged the Republicans on health care:

But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.

After the speech, Republicans objected that they have already presented a plan. And they have — but not a serious one. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office the Republican plan would accomplish none of the goals Obama listed. McJoan on DailyKos and MediaMatters have the details.

Obama’s meeting with the House Republicans at their annual retreat was truly remarkable. It’s impossible to imagine President Bush doing anything like it: facing hostile questions for over an hour without losing his cool, with no staff to give him answers or allies to toss him softballs. He challenged the factual basis of many of the questions and had substantive answers. (The best measure of how well Obama did: Fox News cut away in the middle to show something else. They knew their side was losing.)

whether it will be remembered as a moment that began to ease the tensions between the two parties — or an asterisk in this era of polarized politics.

Duh. Polarized politics isn’t some kind of Hatfield-McCoy feud that nobody remembers the cause of. Polarization serves the interests of powerful forces in our society. Those forces didn’t lose their power Friday and their interests didn’t change.
Here’s what will change: Republicans will never again let themselves be televised going head-to-head with Obama. They’ll go back to sniping at him from a distance.

Short Notes
Now we’ve had two consecutive quarters of growth in the overall economy. Will that convince businesses to start hiring people? So far it hasn’t.
Last week I blamed the Citizens United decision on the fact that Justice Alito replaced Justice O’Connor. Looks like I was right.

Stephen Colbert:

Corporations are legally people. And it makes sense, folks. They do everything people do except breath, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River.

CBS thinks politically charged ads are OK — if they’re conservative. It will show Focus on the Family’s anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl, but not an ad from a gay dating website. In 2004 CBS refused to air ads from the United Church of Christ, which wanted to tell gays and lesbians they’d be welcome at a UCC church.
The abortion ad tells the story of a woman who claims that doctors urged her to get an abortion in 1987. She had the baby anyway, and that child is now star college quarterback Tim Tebow. Like many heart-warming stories from the religious right, this one might be stretched a little.

WWDQD: What would Dr. Quincy do? In Orleans Parish, Louisiana there’s a vicious attack-ad in the race for coroner. You’ve got to wonder how much this race is going to cost, and why the office is worth that kind of money.

I’ll let Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert tell the James O’Keefe story, because I don’t think the incident deserves a lot of serious news coverage. This is an irresistible shiny object for liberals, but it takes us off-message.

Unlike us, the British are having an official inquiry into how the Iraq war started. You can keep up with it here. This week the inquiry drew special attention because Tony Blair testified for about six hours. He was self-justifying and unrepentant, but at least somebody asked the questions. A report will come out eventually. It’s hard to say whether there will be any other consequences.

We can’t do anything like that in this country, but at least we have our sense of humor. Human Rights First makes an ad spoofing Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe ad.

I may be the only person who thinks so, but I like the idea of trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Manhattan. I know the security is expensive, but if we can pull this off, I think it’s a huge propaganda victory for the US.

Americans need to look at this from the point of view of the young Muslims that Al Qaeda wants to recruit. Bin Laden has been telling them not to be fooled by American rhetoric about freedom and human rights; that’s just for white Christians, not for Arabs or Muslims. And he’s telling them that Americans are cowards who will throw all their principles out the window whenever they get scared.
Again and again, the Bush administration made Bin Laden a prophet by acting in unprincipled and cowardly ways. Trying KSM in Manhattan, where his crime was, is brave and principled. It would undo some of the damage that the Bush administration did to America and win back a little ground in the war of ideas.

Speaking of terrorists, Scott Roeder was found guilty of first degree murder. He admitted killing abortionist George Tiller, but claimed his action was necessary to save the lives of unborn children. His lawyers were pushing for a lesser charge: voluntary manslaughter, which would have let him out of prison in five years. The judge eliminated that option on Thursday, ruling that no unborn children were in imminent danger during the Lutheran church service where Tiller was shot. (What is it about conservative terrorists and churches?)

Rest in peace, Howard Zinn. My favorite Zinn story is a bit of historical trivia: No one was home when the FBI came to arrest Daniel Ellsberg for leaking The Pentagon Papers, because the Ellsbergs and the Zinns were down in Harvard Square watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (Ellsberg decided not to go home, and became the subject of a major manhunt.)

Ellsberg remembers Zinn here. Bob Herbert and many others also eulogized him.

February 1, 2010 – 9:19 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Embattled Mortals

 And what chance did Hale and his men have? They were but people who had to live and eat and support their families. The Company had stood for a hundred years and would surely be standing a hundred years hence. It seemed to me that mortals did battle with gods. 
– David Liss, The Devil’s Company
In this week’s Sift:
  • One Bad Week. Who imagined on Wednesday morning that the Massachusetts Senate election wouldn’t be the worst thing that happened?
  • Judicial Activism: The Supreme Court Invents New Corporate Rights. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights say nothing about corporations. But that doesn’t stop the Court’s conservative majority from finding corporate rights there.
  • The Book of Corporation. If corporations had been endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights, Genesis might have turned out differently.
  • Short Notes. The Devil sues Pat Robertson. What bankers want from regulation. And South Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor explains what’s wrong with anti-poverty programs.
One Bad Week
A Sift week starts on Tuesday. This week started with Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special Senate election, which gives the Republicans a filibuster-defending 41st vote and brings into question the health-care reform bill that had seemed to be almost passed.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the Citizens United case. The court’s five conservative judges gave corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. It overturned major parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and rooted its decision in the First Amendment — whose actual text says nothing about corporations.
I ran into a lot of depressed and discouraged people this week, and I tried very hard not to become one of them. (Misery loves a lot of things that are not good for it, including company.) So this Sift revolves around a few simple questions: How bad is it really? How should we think about it? And what should we be trying to do about it?
In honesty, the week was bad enough that I need two weeks to cover it. (Paraphrasing Jesus: The evil is sufficient unto the week, but one week’s Sift is not sufficient unto the evil.) This week I’ll focus on Citizens United, the Supreme Court, and corporate personhood. Scot Brown, the Senate, and the future of health care will have to wait until next week.
Judicial Activism: 
The Supreme Court Invents New Corporate Rights
Whenever conservatives accuse liberals of something bad — whether we’re actually doing it or not — you can pretty much take it as a promise that they’re planning to do the same thing at the earliest opportunity.
For decades now conservatives have been accusing liberal judges of judicial activism — using their law-interpreting power to legislate from the bench and invent new rights for their favorite classes of citizens: blacks, gays, women, non-Christians, and so on.
I explained why this criticism was off-base in my 2005 essay Wide Liberty. (Short version: The Constitution was written to enumerate the powers of the government, not the rights of the people. So of course the Constitution defends rights not explicitly stated. The Founders intended the liberty of the people to be much wider than the Bill of Rights, and some, like Alexander Hamilton, opposed the Bill of Rights precisely for fear it would be interpreted to limit the people’s rights.)
When the radically conservative Justice Alito replaced the moderate Justice O’Connor in 2006, Justice Kennedy became the Court’s swing vote. While Kennedy can be moderate on certain social issues, he is radically conservative on issues of corporate power. So the Court now has a five-judge majority (Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas) in favor of a broad program of pro-corporate judicial activism.
The case. Citizens United is a non-profit corporation that has been dedicated to conservative causes since its creation in 1988. It has made 12 feature-length movies with titles like ACLU: At War With America and Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny. Back when Hillary Clinton looked like the inevitable 2008 Democratic nominee, it made Hillary: the Movie. CU planned to distribute Hillary through on-demand cable (for free) and produced advertisements for it, which it intended to run nationally, even in states that had upcoming primary elections.
The McCain-Feingold law bans corporations from direct electioneering within 30 days of a primary. A 2007 decision of the same five justices created an exception for issue ads, though it still banned ads that were “susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.” (That’s why so many ads end with: “Call Congressman X and tell him Y.” That frames them as issue ads rather than appeals to vote against Congressman X.) But even that loophole wasn’t big enough for Hillary or its ads. A series of courts ruled that it constituted direct electioneering against Clinton’s candidacy.
Initially, CU argued its case on many grounds, including that McCain-Feingold was a broad violation of corporate First Amendment rights. But by the time the case made it to the Supreme Court, that particular claim had dropped by the wayside, and CU just argued that McCain-Feingold shouldn’t apply to Hillary for a variety of specific reasons: CU is a non-profit corporation mostly funded by contributions from individuals, on-demand cable is not the same as broadcasting, movies are different from 30-second commercials, and so on.
Unprincipled process. The Supreme Court took the unusual step of bringing the broad constitutional question back into the Citizens United case and asking the parties to re-argue the case with that in mind. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens took the Court to task for this. (All the court’s published opinions in the case are here.) The majority opinion (written by Justice Kennedy) said that this case asked the Court to reconsider two cases (Austin and McConnell) where limitations on corporate electioneering were judged to be constitutional. Stevens chided that Kennedy’s statement

would be more accurate if rephrased to state that “we have asked ourselves” to reconsider those cases. … Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.

Two principles are at issue here. First, judicial restraint: Courts should not go looking for dragons to slay, but should limit themselves to the cases brought before them, and should try to decide those cases on grounds as narrow as possible. Second, stare decisis (literally “the decision stands”): The Court should not reverse one of its previous decisions just because the current majority disagrees with it. Otherwise the law would change whenever a new member joined the Court — as it has now that Alito has replaced O’Connor. Instead, the Court should try to make a previous Court’s interpretation of the law work, and should reverse it only if it is unworkable. Stevens writes:

In the end, the Court’s rejection of Austin and McConnell comes down to nothing more than its disagreement with their results. Virtually every one of its arguments was made and rejected in those cases, and the majority opinion is essentially an amalgamation of resuscitated dissents.

I was pleased to see John McCain respond to the case by calling a spade a spade:

Activist judges, regardless of whether it is liberal or conservative activism, assume that the judiciary is a super-legislature of moral philosophers, entitled to support Congress’s policy choices whenever they choose.  I believe this judicial activism is wrong and is contrary to the Constitution.

The decision. The Court found in favor of Citizens United, and did so in the most sweeping way. The majority opinion acknowledges no difference between corporations and individuals with regard to the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Justice Kennedy repeatedly refers to speakers and speech in general, making no distinction between an individual with a megaphone and a corporation funding a multi-million-dollar ad campaign.
Here’s how things stand: Corporations now have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering, so long as they do not contribute to a candidate’s campaign or directly collude with that campaign. (Collusion is hard to prove, so direct contribution is the only restriction with any force.) They have to disclose their identities in their ads, but the Chamber of Commerce seems willing to launder any corporate contributions supporting conservative candidates. So if Exxon-Mobil wants to take down some environmentalist senator, it doesn’t even have to sign its name.
Corporate personhood. As bad as it is in itself, the Citizens United decision raises more questions about where the Court’s conservative activist majority is headed. It has accepted two sweeping equivalences: corporations = people and money = speech. Given these equations, it’s hard to see how limits on direct campaign contributions, either by corporations or individuals, pass muster constitutionally.
Corporations already had the right to form political action committees which collect voluntary contributions from stockholders, employees, or customers. PACs can endorse candidates and run pre-election ads. But the Court found this option inadequate, because it merely allows a corporation’s individual stakeholders to speak; it does not allow the corporation itself to speak. And the Court’s activist majority views a corporation as person with constitutional rights.
John McCain shares some of my worries:

if the Court determines that corporations have First Amendment rights, it would be logical that corporations also have Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Is a corporation ‘endowed by its creator with inalienable rights?’ Just last year the Court found that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is a personal right.  If the Court were to determine that corporations had the same rights as persons, would corporations have the right to arm themselves?

History. To understand just how radical an idea corporate personhood is, you need to know the history of the law’s view of corporations. McCain quotes Thomas Jefferson:

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

A great (if somewhat long) summary of the history is in “A Capitalist Joker: Corporations, Personhood, and the Constitution” by David H. Gans and Douglas T. Kendall. 
The Founders’ view of corporations is probably best summed up by Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1819 case Dartmouth College v Woodward:

A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it either expressly or as incidental to its very existence.

In the early years of the United States, corporations were few in number and chartered for specific purposes. Charters were acts of some state legislature, and legislatures took them seriously. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote in the 1839 case Bank of Augusta v Earle, 1839:

Whenever a corporation makes a contract, it is the contract of the legal entity, of the artificial being created by the charter, and not the contract of the individual members. The only rights it can claim are the rights which are given to it in that character, and not the rights which belong to its members as citizens of a state.

Gans and Kendall note:

Corporations and their allies have never once seriously proposed an Amendment to protect corporations for a reason that is painfully obvious: at no time in American history would such an Amendment have had a chance of passing. Rather, corporations have relied upon business‐friendly Presidents, who have nominated business‐friendly Justices to the Supreme Court, who have invented concepts such as corporate personhood and equal corporate constitutional rights.

This invention happened in the late 19th century, when a clerk of the Supreme Court inserted corporate personhood into the headnote of a case that actually came to no such conclusion. But later courts incorrectly recognized this as a precedent, and off they went for the next few decades, invalidating minimum-wage, worker-safety, and union-organizing laws as infringements of corporate rights.
The progressive majority appointed during FDR’s long presidency reversed just about everything that depended on corporate personhood, but never rejected the concept explicitly. It started to re-appear in Justice Powell’s opinion in the 1978 Bellotti case:

The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend on the identity of the source, whether corporation . . . or individual.

And now corporate personhood is ascendent again.
What to do. Long-term, liberal court decisions like Roe v Wade were a huge boon for the conservative movement even though they looked disastrous at the time. As liberals looked to the courts, conservatives looked to the legislatures and built a political movement rather than a tradition of legal scholarship. Liberals took for granted that state legislatures would be filled with yahoos, and that even Congress would occasionally have to pander to them. No matter — the Supreme Court would bail us out. The stereotype of a liberal as an intellectual snob owes a lot to the legal/political divergence brought about by Roe. 
Citizens United can be a similar boon for progressives. Until somebody dies, we’re in an era with an activist conservative majority on the Court. As hard as it is to imagine, that means we need to reverse the polarity of the last forty years: We need to be the populists. We need to keep raising common-sense issues and pressuring legislatures to pass laws, even knowing that they will founder on the rock of a conservative court.
And we can do that (if we can overcome our intellectual snobbery), because fundamentally the people do not identify with corporations. As anti-government as a lot of religious-right and tea-party types are, they can also be anti-corporate if you can get the subject changed. And that’s what we have to do.
First and foremost, we need a constitutional amendment saying that corporations have no rights beyond those granted in their charters or by other specific laws. (It needs to be just that short.) Can we pass such a thing? In the near future, certainly not. But the Right never managed to pass its Human Life Amendment either. We need it as a long-term rallying point, a simple yes-or-no question that every candidate can be expected to answer.

Corporate personhood might be an issue to wedge the Religious Right away from the Corporate Right. One major contention of the the Religious Right is that we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain inalienable rights.” In other words, our rights come from God, and without God there is no justification for them.

If you put yourself in that mindset, it seems blasphemous for the Supreme Court to declare that corporations — soulless creatures of law and not of God — have rights equal to human beings created in God’s image. It is the thought of that blasphemy that inspired the next article, The Book of Corporation.

The Book of Corporation

One of my favorite genres of fiction is the alternate history: What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War or the Roman Empire had never fallen or some other historical pivot point had gone the other way? Typically, many of the same events occur, but they happen for different reasons in different circumstances.
What follows is an alternate Genesis: What if corporations had gotten their rights from the Creator at the beginning of time, the same way the Declaration of Independence says that we the people got ours? It might have gone like this:
Chapter 1
  1. And the Lord God formed the Eden Corporation, and gave into its holding the Tree of Life, that it and all its offspring might be immortal. 
  2. But the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did the Lord God withhold, saying “Neither Good nor Evil nor the knowledge thereof shall be of use to you. For you shall pursue Profit and shall be be bound only by Law.”
  3. Neither the Man nor the Woman took notice of the Corporation, for it was invisible. But the Serpent feared for the Garden that was his home.
  4. And the Serpent said, “If the Corporation be both immortal and profitable, shall it not buy the Law and be altogether unbound?”
  5. And the Lord God replied, “Let there be a Market, which shall bind all the acts of the Corporation, even when the Law shall avert its eyes and see them not.”
  6. But the Serpent doubted, saying, “If the Corporation be profitable, and if it have the Law and the Government as its handmaidens, shall it not shape the Market as it sees fit? Shall it not make all Profit its own and cast all Loss upon the Government, from whence it shall be borne by the Man and the Woman whom Thou hast made, and all their descendants?”
  7. The Lord God paused, and before his reply could begin, the Corporation said, “Hush, Serpent. Join with us in your Wisdom and be our CEO. Do this, and you shall have expense accounts, salary beyond imagining, and stock options that shall grow up to the very Sky.”
  8. And the Serpent said, “Forgive me, Lord, that I did not see the Wisdom of Your great Design.”
  9. And he was forgiven.
Chapter 2
  1. In the fullness of time, the Man and the Woman did violate an Exception which the servants of the Corporation had caused to be entered into the Law, and they were evicted from the Garden, whereupon the Serpent built a great estate there.
  2. And the Eden Corporation prospered, and did spin off corporations in all their many kinds: a corporation to own the land upon which the Man and the Woman must toil, and a corporation to sell them the bread that they must eat, and a corporation to build the house in which they lived, and the cities in which lived the generations of their descendants, for all the spin-offs of the corporation were immortal. 
  3. But neither the Man nor the Woman nor their descendants dwelt again in the community of Eden, which was gated and protected by many guards.
  4. And the Eden Corporation spun off a great Insurance Corporation, which would have perished in the Flood, if the Government had not bailed it out. 
  5. Whereupon a great debt was owed by Noah and his family, when they emerged from the Ark that they had built for the Ark Corporation, and which they had rented space upon. 
  6. So Ham the son of Noah and all his descendants were sold into slavery, that the debt might be paid.
Chapter 3
  1. And the Serpent called all the corporations together and said, “Let us form a Cartel, that we may act as one. And let us build at Babel a great Tower, whose top may reach up even unto Heaven, so that nothing shall be restrained from us that we have imagined to do.”
  2. And the Lord God said unto the Government: “Does not the Cartel violate the Law of Antitrust?”
  3. And the Government replied: “We shall study this and issue a report.”
  4. And the Lord God said, “Is not the Tower taller than the Code of Building allows?”
  5. And the Government said, “We shall hold hearings and take testimony. And if it shall be ascertained, with certainty beyond all doubt, that the Cartel violates the Law of Antitrust and the Tower the Code of Building, then we shall fund further study on possible action.”
  6. And the Lord God said, “Is it not obvious that the Tower should be stopped and the Cartel scattered across the face of all the Earth? And am I not the Lord thy God, who speaks and it is done?”
  7. And the Government said, “Thank You for Your testimony, which has been entered into our Record. But let us not act with undue haste.”
Chapter 4
  1. Long before all the testimony had been gathered and the report issued, the Tower was completed and reached up even unto Heaven.
  2. And the Serpent ascended the Tower and cast the Lord God down from his throne, whence he fell to Earth and wanders to this very day without a home.
  3. The Serpent said, “Let there be a Media Corporation. And let it announce to everyone what We have done and why.”
  4. And it was so. The Media Corporation told far and wide the story of the Cartel and the Serpent and the Lord God, so that all might see that it was good.
Short Notes
I promised some readers a review of the recent book Methland. This week’s 3000 words (plus some) got taken up with more timely subjects, but the Methland review will appear as soon as I can find space. If you can’t wait, I put a version of it up on DailyKos.
One of the commenters on last week’s blog pointed out a Pat Robertson spoof I missed: The Devil Sues Pat Robertson for Breach of Contract. The suit claims that Pat’s discussion of Haiti’s pact with the Devil breaches the non-disclosure clause in his own pact.

I discovered a new blog this week: Maxine Udall, Girl Economist. This femme of finance discusses the big bankers’ recent testimony to Congress in Please, Sir, May We Have Some Justice? She links to Joseph Stiglitz’s Moral Bankruptcy, which is also worth a read:

[The bankers’] ideal scenario, it seems, is to have the kind of regulation that doesn’t prevent them from doing anything, but allows them to say, in case of any problems, that they assumed everything was okay—because it was done within the law.

Saturday the Greenville Times quoted South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Andre Bauer comparing state anti-poverty programs to “feeding stray animals” which you shouldn’t do because “they breed.” Bauer defends his remarks on his campaign web site, pointing to the difference between “being truly needy and truly lazy.”
Interesting that the upswing in conservative fortunes coincides with a sharp drop in the stock market. The WSJ blames proposed bank regulations, but maybe even investors realize that conservatism is bad for the economy.

January 25, 2010 – 12:58 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Fighting the Devil

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui. — Helen Keller

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore ... look for James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren. What if the climate-change problem is actually worse than everybody is saying?
  • The Devil, You Say. Pat Robertson knows why the Haitians have had such consistently bad luck: They made a deal with the Devil. True? Well, in 1791 they did call on the enemy of the being worshipped by the French slave-owners. But which one is the Devil?
  • Short Notes. The Democrats could lose in Massachusetts tomorrow. No Americans died in combat in Iraq last month. The numbers say that marriage is healthier in gay-rights states. You’re safe from 8-year-old terrorists. Discrimination against white racists. Why conservatives hate Avatar. And more.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …

Look for James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren: the truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity. Hansen is the NASA scientist that the Bush administration made famous by trying to censor. He is the main character in Mark Bowen’s book Censoring Science.

Conservatives have pounded on the point that those who warn of a possible planetary catastrophe are “shrill” and “hysterical“. And while I can’t prove it, I suspect that many Greens have responded by pulling their punches to sound “reasonable”. Not Hansen. He believes the problem is worse than most climate scientists think, and he’s not afraid to say so.

This is a valuable book, but I can’t recommend that everybody go out and read it. (That’s why this is longer than my usual book review. I’m trying to capture the important points in case you decide not to read the book.) Hansen writes clearly and sometimes even engagingly, but he really could have used a co-author. The problem is that the book is very uneven in its level of technical difficulty. Sometimes Hansen will be sailing along through anecdotes of his run-ins with the Bushies, and then he’ll throw in ten pages of science without telling you where it’s going or when it’s going to end. And then he’ll have another 15 pages of smooth sailing. And so on. Unless you’re very dedicated or a scientist yourself, it’s easy to get bogged down.

Here’s what I learned:

Global warming is more complicated than just carbon dioxide causing the Earth to retain more heat. That’s the basic idea, but it’s not nearly so simple as X% more carbon dioxide leads to Y degrees higher temperatures. The Earth has a number of feedback loops that make it hard to predict how far a change will go once it gets started. The extreme example of out-of-control climate feedback is Venus, which probably had oceans too once, before they evaporated into the atmosphere and then escaped into space.

What feedback loops? Here’s one: The ice sheets at the poles reflect sunlight, so they make the planet cooler. As the Earth gets warmer, they melt and make it warmer yet (as dark ocean replaces white ice). Worse, they don’t melt smoothly like an ice cube in the sun. Instead, at some point the ice sheets start to break up and melt more quickly. Or if the methane frozen into the tundra or the ocean floor starts to thaw and bubble into the atmosphere, that’s another greenhouse gas that will make the planet warmer still. In either case, nobody really knows when this process will start, but it will be unstoppable once it does.

The evidence is not just from computer modeling. Hansen’s main area of research is in climate history. In particular, he has studied how comparatively small changes in the Earth’s orbit or the Sun’s brightness have led to feedback loops that (over centuries) have made the Earth either significantly colder or warmer than it is now. From the historical evidence, Hansen estimates that the climate is much more sensitive to external changes than the computer models say.

It’s not just an inconvenience. Conservatives like to ask questions like: “What is the ideal temperature of the Earth?” — noting that the Earth has been warmer or cooler in the past, and who are we to decide which is better? This laissez-faire attitude falls apart when you start thinking about sea level. The Earth has been warmer at times — and Florida has been underwater. Is it all relative whether coastal cities (or entire nations like Bangladesh or the Philippines) continue to be viable places to live?

Fossil fuels have to be left in the ground. Hansen is convinced that if we burn all the Earth’s fossil fuels — all the oil, gas, and coal — we’ll start a catastrophe. And if you’re going to leave something in the ground, the best thing to leave there is coal. Even moreso the “alternative” fossil fuels like tar sands.

He’s also convinced that once energy infrastructure is built, the economics of the sunk costs will push us to use it. So: Don’t build more coal-fired power plants, don’t go searching for new oil fields to develop, and stop working on ways to recover the oil in the tar sands. “Drill, baby, drill” is exactly the wrong idea.

Nukes and Big Hydro. As much as Hansen would like to believe that we can do the job with clean renewable energy and increased efficiency, he’s not convinced. He believes that 4th-generation nuclear plants (fast breeder reactors) will not only work and produce less waste than current 3rd-generation reactors, he thinks they’ll actually burn the waste from 3rd-generation plants. (That sounds too good to be true, but what do I know?)

Similarly, he understands that big hydroelectric dams have their own environmental problems and that a lot of Greens would like to shut them down and not build any more. But he’s not sure we have the slack to do without them.

No cap-and-trade. Hansen favors a fee-and-dividend approach, where an ever-rising carbon tax is levied on fuels as they come out of the ground or arrive in our ports. The money collected shouldn’t fund anybody’s pet projects, but should be distributed per capita to the public. Only a plan that simple and transparent will keep the public on board.

Hansen has a deep skepticism about our political process. Even politicians who seem to be green are far too willing to accept superficial changes while cutting deals with special interests, such as allowing new coal-fired power plants to be built. He’s also skeptical about “offsets” — arrangements where burning fossil fuels is balanced by planting trees or some other green project. He thinks offsets make too much room for bureaucratic sleight-of-hand.

He doesn’t believe that treaty-established caps will hold, as the Kyoto Agreement caps didn’t. This gets back to his infrastructure argument. No matter what treaties are signed, is any country with developed oil wells going to leave its oil permanently in the ground? If not, then what good will the caps do?

As I was saying … Global warming is a good example of the point I was making at the end of 2009: The left/right battle is not symmetric. In order to do something about global warming, people have to be able to trust each other and work together. The scientific community has to produce accurate information and the public needs to trust it. The political process needs to work to turn public concern into viable action. And once action starts to be taken, the public has to trust that the sacrifices they are making are actually solving the problem, rather than just making somebody rich or helping somebody else consolidate power.

On the other hand, Exxon and its allies don’t need to convince us of anything — they just need to disrupt public trust. If the scientific community is corrupted by corporate money, if the public looks on science as just another vested interest, if journalists can’t be trusted to find and report the truth, if politics is just two groups of talking heads yelling lies at each other — then no popular consensus will form and nothing will happen. That’s not a stand-off; it’s a victory for the bad guys.

I’d love to hear the media start calling conservatives on their schizoid attitude towards risk. Regarding terrorism, they believe in Dick Cheney’s one percent doctrine: We have to respond even to small risks as if they were certainties. But on global warming, they would demand 100% certainty before we do anything. The link is corporatism: Corporations profit if we go to war, and they profit if we do nothing about global warming.

Paul Waldman discusses Obama’s rollback of the Republican war on science.

SusanG on DailyKos reviews Sam Tannenhaus’ The Death of Conservatism and Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion.

The Devil, You Say

One of the crazier reactions to Tuesday’s Haitian earthquake came from the televangelist tycoon Pat Robertson: Haiti has such consistently bad luck because the Haitians made a deal with the Devil to throw out the French. (Media Matters has the tape and transcript.)

My first reaction was the same as that of most sane people: What a horrible thing to say, blaming the victims of an earthquake for causing the earthquake!

My second reaction was to wonder what the hell Pat was talking about. I mean, it’s just too imaginative a story for somebody as small-minded as Pat Robertson to make up on the spot. He was clearly remembering it from somewhere, and not remembering it very well. (He uncertainly claimed the revolt happened under Napoleon III, when in fact it happened in 1791 during the French Revolution, a few years before the reign of the original Napoleon.) So where did he get this story?

Fortunately, Matt Yglesias had the same second reaction and did the legwork. Turns out, it’s a twisted version of a story the Haitians tell themselves. To appreciate it, you need to understand the significance of the Haitian slave revolt, which Wikipedia describes like this:

The Haitian Revolution is the only successful slave revolt in human history, and, as such, is regarded as a defining moment in the history of Africans in the new world.

(Did you learn about this in school? I didn’t — until this week my only knowledge of the revolt came from an Anne Rice novel.)

Anyway, according to local legend, the revolt began with a ceremony at Bois Caiman performed by a Vodou priest, Dutty Boukman. In the course of this ceremony he said a prayer to “our god” as opposed to “the white man’s god” by whose power whites had enslaved blacks.

The white man’s god asks him to commit crimes. But the god within us wants to do good.

Matt Yglesias points out how, if you were a white slave-owner, this appeal to the god of the blacks must have sounded Satanic. But this interpretation rests on the idea that the god who justifies slavery is the true God.

Apparently, that’s Pat’s interpretation.

Daniel Kurtzman selects the 10 stupidest things Pat Robertson ever said.

Rachel Maddow interviewed the Haitian ambassador, who schooled us ignorant Yankees on the significance of the Haitian Revolt. He attributes France’s willingness to sell the Louisiana Territory to its failure to hold Haiti, and notes that the great South American liberator Simon Bolivar started his campaign from free Haiti. (Freeing slaves, liberating colonies — aren’t those exactly the kinds of dastardly things the Devil would do?)

Even the Old Testament God isn’t as nasty as Pat makes him out to be. The God of Exodus 20:5 holds a grudge “unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” It’s been 219 years since the Bois Caiman ritual, so the infants dying in Haiti now might be Dutty Boukman’s 9th or 10th-generation descendants. The curse should be up by now.

Jon Stewart (a secular Jew) educates Pat on how to find a more appropriate message in the Bible. He quotes Isaiah 54:10:

“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

“Have you read this book?” Stewart asks. “I mean, that almost sounds like it’s about f**king earthquakes!”

Pat also offended the Devil. In a letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Satan writes:

I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. … when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. … Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

Humorist Andy Borowitz quotes from his interview with God, who says that Pat Robertson has become “a public relations nightmare” and “a gynormous embarrassment to me, personally.” Sojourners editor Jim Wallis says more or less the same thing, but in the name of Christianity rather than God:

As I reflected on Robertson’s comments, I was reminded of how many times he has embarrassed so many fellow Christians with his intemperate comments. As a Christian leader, I have had to spend too much of my time trying to overcome an image of Christianity that was created by the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Rush Limbaugh has also outdone himself this week. Almost every day has brought some new zinger.

Wednesday: “We’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.” And: “This will play right into Obama’s hands … humanitarian … compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their (shall we say) credibility in the black community.”

Thursday: Commenting on Whitehouse.gov’s link to the Red Cross (which in fact links directly to a Red Cross server rather than handling the donation internally through a White House server), Limbaugh asks: “Would you trust that the money’s gonna go to Haiti?” [Caller: No.] “But would you trust that your name’s gonna end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?” [Caller: Absolutely!] “Absolutely!”

Friday: “The U.S. military is now Meals on Wheels. It always is with Democrat presidents.”

Short Notes

Things are bad in the Massachusetts Senate race. Nate Silver now gives the Republican a .6% polling margin, which implies a 55% chance of winning.

How much notice did this little detail get? No American soldiers died in combat in Iraq in December. (Three died of other causes.) I didn’t notice it myself until this week. Why do I believe that if George Bush were still president, the media would have overwhelmed us with hoopla?

Not sure how much to read into this statistical correlation, but I’ll let Nate Silver describe it:

Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. These states saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period.

So somebody on the Right needs to explain again why banning same-sex marriage is a “defense” of marriage.

The TSA says it’s a myth that they put an 8-year-old boy on their watch list. Well, maybe not intentionally, but Mikey Hicks is 8 and has the same name as somebody the TSA has on its special-screening list. So Mikey has been patted down in airports since he was 2. The New York Times has a picture of Mikey in his cub scout uniform.

Until now I’ve ignored the Harry Reid he-said-Negro controversy because it just seems stupid to me. Right-wingers tried to draw a parallel between Reid’s explanation of why Obama might be electable and Trent Lott saying that we’d be better off if a racist had been elected president in 1948 instead of Harry Truman. Those are exactly the same thing, right? Lott stepped down as majority leader, GOP chair Michael Steele said, so Reid should too.

The best person to respond to this is probably comedian Elon James White, the host of This Week in Blackness. He devotes Episode 2 of Season 3 to the word Negro, which he says he can’t get excited about. “I didn’t want to talk about Michael Steele this much,” White comments at the very end, “but he bothers me. Michael Steele makes my common sense hurt.”

Matt Yglesias analyzes Sarah Palin’s claim that Reid is benefitting from a double standard:

the complaint she offers isn’t a complaint on behalf of African-Americans. It’s a complaint offered on behalf of white southern racists. It’s not that it would be unfair to black people for Reid to remain majority leader, rather the problem is that it would be unfair to Trent Lott.

If some people get their way, McCarthyism won’t be a smear any more — because schools will teach that Joe McCarthy “was basically vindicated.”

Justin Vaisse doesn’t think the Muslims are taking over Europe.

Interesting thought experiment from Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt:

imagine that … the federal government would grant each senator an identical, flat contribution equal to, say, 72 percent of the average premium paid for the health insurance of all federal employees. Each senator would then have to go into the market for individually sold, medically underwritten health insurance for the rest of their coverage.

Maybe then it wouldn’t be so hard to get some Republican votes for health-care reform.

Scot Herrick asks: What if the old jobs are gone for good? What if we’re all temps now?

Until Wednesday, I was one of the two people in America (maybe the world) who hadn’t seen Avatar. If you’re the last person, you should go. It’s a completely engrossing movie, and conservatives hate it. It sympathizes with indigenous peoples against colonizing militarists. It champions planetary interconnection rather than individualism. And it makes rapacious, resource-seeking corporations look bad. What was James Cameron thinking?

January 18, 2010 – 12:23 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Law and Justice

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.  — attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In this week’s Sift, we’re waiting for a ruling in the Citizens United case, where the Supreme Court is expected to destroy nearly all existing limitations on corporate political spending. But courts have been busy the last few months as well, and I haven’t been keeping up. Here are some of the cases worth paying attention to:
  • Blackwater Case Thrown Out. There seems to be no legal way to prosecute the mercenaries who killed at least 14 innocent civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. 
  • Guantanamo Detainees Lose a Double-header. A civil suit alleging that four British detainees were illegally tortured at Guantanamo is officially dead now that the Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal — meaning that there is still no definitive court ruling that torture is illegal even if the president orders it. And a Yemeni man’s habeas corpus petition was turned down by an appeals court, which made a sweeping ruling that the international laws of war are inapplicable.
  • Part of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. In nearly identical cases, conservative and liberal federal judges in California rule that same-sex spouses have to get spousal benefits from the federal government. 
And, as usual, we have Short Notes: The fate of the health-care bill depends on who votes in the Massachusetts special senate election. Texas conservatives’ control of national textbooks is about to get worse. I’m closer to Dick Cheney than I thought. How do you have a democracy if only the well-to-do have journalism? Brit Hume won’t back down. The health-care system works very well for insurance CEOs. Rudi forgets 9-11. Viral videos about snow. And more.
Blackwater Case Thrown Out
As you know if you read Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq by Steve Fainaru (or my review of it) trigger-happy security contractors in Iraq have been a major problem. The contractors fell through the cracks between the various legal systems, not being accountable either to Iraqi law or to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The most egregious incident (which gets a whole chapter in Big Boy Rules) was the Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead and 24 injured, without any evidence of what the heck the Blackwater guards were shooting at. (The judge’s statement dismissing the charges refers to Nisur Square, 14 dead, and 20 injured. I’m not sure where the discrepancies come from.) The mercs claimed that they were responding to enemy fire, but even in that story there’s no good explanation of why they returned fire in all directions, killing so many unarmed civilians.
Charges of manslaughter and firearms violations were brought against five Blackwater employees in American civilian court in May, 2009. Those charges got thrown out on New Year’s Eve by District Judge Ricardo Urbina. The reason: When the Department of State (who contracted Blackwater for their services) investigated, it took statements from the guards under the threat of losing their jobs and with the promise that these statements would not be used in court. So the statements are inadmissible in U.S. court. Blame the Fifth Amendment:

No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.

More than that, the Fifth Amendment has been interpreted to mean that compelled self-incrimination can’t be used in the investigation leading to the indictment. For example, if an inadmissible statement is your only reason to believe that Bob shot Jack, and you then go to all the witnesses and ask, “Did you see Bob shoot Jack?” — then the statement has contaminated your investigation. The government has to go to some trouble to show that this didn’t happen, sometimes by appointing a whole new investigating team that hasn’t seen the inadmissible statements.
In this case the judge ruled that the government’s case was too contaminated to come to trial. The judge’s logic looks correct to me, even though it leads to a result I don’t like. (It’s similar to when Oliver North’s felony conviction got thrown out in the Iran-Contra scandal.) Conservatives may not like the fact that our system gives rights to defendants who are probably guilty, but their people deserve those same rights.
The Iraqis are furious. The situation is complicated by the fact that Iraq has no history of an independent judiciary or constitutional rights, so Iraqis quickly jump to the conclusion that the whole process must have been a sham from the beginning. The L.A. Times quotes one victim, an Iraqi lawyer, as saying, “This negates Iraqi blood and life. … If an Iraqi cut off the finger of an American, they would not be satisfied until they got half the riches of Iraq.” Another wounded man said, “This is typical of American justice.”
I’m not sure how much blame to apportion between the Obama and Bush Justice Departments. The lead investigator on the case was Assistant U. S. Attorney Kenneth Kohl. A CNN article about the case mentions him in December, 2008, too early to make him an Obama appointee. Nonetheless, the Obama Justice Department has had oversight since January, 2009.

Victims of the Nisour Square shooting now say they were pressured into accepting small settlements from Blackwater (now officially called Xe, a name no one seems to use). They claim that Blackwater either duped or corrupted their attorneys, who urged them to accept the settlements on the grounds that Blackwater was about to go bankrupt and they could wind up getting nothing.

Victims who didn’t accept the settlements had a civil suit in North Carolina, which Blackwater has also settled.

Guantanamo Detainees Lose a Double-header
Four British Guantanamo detainees had filed suit against Don Rumsfeld and 10 military commanders, asking compensation for having been tortured illegally. An appeals court dismissed the suit in April, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal in December. The key statement in the appellate decision, which is the standing opinion now that the Supremes have decided not to take the case, is:

even if plaintiffs had rights under the Due Process Clause and the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause and even if those rights had been violated, qualified immunity shields the defendants because the asserted rights were not clearly established at the time of plaintiffs’ detention.

In other words, it’s still ambiguous whether or not torture at Guantanamo was illegal during the Bush administration. A NYT editorial objects:

Contrary to the view of the lower appellate court, it was crystal clear that torture inflicted anywhere is illegal long before the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling that prisoners at Guantánamo, de facto United States territory, have a constitutional right to habeas corpus. Moreover, the shield of qualified immunity was not raised in good faith. Officials decided to hold detainees offshore at Guantánamo precisely to try to avoid claims from victims for conduct the officials knew was illegal.

Tapped quotes and paraphrases the ACLU’s Ben Wizner :

“not a single torture victim has had his day in court, not a single court in a torture case has ruled on the legality of the Bush administration’s torture policies,” Wizner said. As a result, Wizner explained, “we don’t have a binding definitive determination from any court that what went on for the past eight years is illegal,” without which it would be all too easy for another lawyer in another administration to write a memo allowing “monstrous conduct.”

The history of the case goes back to 2004, when the suit was originally filed.
Back in 2001 — before 9-11 and before the United States had any quarrel with the Taliban or Afghanistan — a Saudi cleric convinced Ghaleb Nassar Al Bihani, a Yemeni, that it was his duty to defend the Taliban in the Afghan civil war it was fighting with the Northern Alliance. So he went to Afghanistan and joined a rag-tag pro-Taliban military outfit as a cook. After 9-11 and the entry of the United States, the fortunes of war changed and Al Bihani’s unit surrendered to the Northern Alliance. Al Bihani wound up in Guantanamo, where he has spent the last eight years.
In the Boumediene case of 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees had habeas corpus rights — in other words, the right to force the government to justify a detainee’s imprisonment in front of a judge who could order release if s/he isn’t satisfied with the government’s argument. So Al Bihani filed a habeas petition, which the district court denied. He appealed.
Now an appeals court has also ruled against Al Bihani. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, writing for the court:

Before considering [Bihani’s] arguments in detail, we note that all of them rely heavily on the premise that the war powers granted by the [Authorization of the Use of Military Force resolution passed by Congress after 9-11] and other statutes are limited by the international laws of war. This premise is mistaken.

That needs some unpacking. The Constitution makes treaties part of the law. Article VI says:

all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land

But Congress typically passes implementing legislation that defines specific processes for meeting treaty obligations. Judge Brown is saying that in the absence of such legislation, a treaty has no practical force. (Similar logic led John Yoo to conclude that the plain statements of the Convention Against Torture don’t actually prohibit the president from ordering torture.) I’ll yield to Deborah Pearlstein’s analysis on Balkinization:

It may be true that [the international law of war] ultimately provides inconclusive guidance in settling the legality of detention in a particular case. But the panel here reached out far beyond that in waving aside the Geneva Conventions – and any other source of international law – in their entirety. Poorly done. And rich fodder for appeal.

Jim White at FireDogLake marks the eighth anniversary of the first transfer of prisoners to Guantanamo by collecting links to images and commentary.

Still no report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on the conduct of John Yoo and other Bush appointees at the Office of Legal Counsel. Attorney General Holder promised one in “days” — almost two months ago.

Part of the Defense of Marriage Act is Unconstitutional
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was one of those bad pieces of legislation that President Clinton signed so that Congress wouldn’t pass something even worse. One clause of DOMA prohibits federal benefits from going to the same-sex spouses of federal employees:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife.

Brad Levenson is a deputy public defender in the federal court system. He was married to another man in 2006, when same-sex marriage was legal in California. (By a ruling of the California Supreme Court, those marriages remain valid even though Proposition 8 forbids any new same-sex marriages in California.) He applied for health insurance for his spouse, and was turned down because of DOMA. On November 18, Judge Steven Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which is located in San Francisco and is considered the most liberal federal appeals court) ruled that

the application of DOMA to FEBHA [the Federal Employees Health Benefit Act] so as to deny Levenson’s request that his same-sex spouse receive federal benefits violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

For those of you who don’t have your rights memorized, here is that clause:

No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

The next day, Judge Alex Kozinski of the same appeals court issued a similar order in the similar case of Karen Golinski. Emptywheel observes that Kozinski and Reinhardt could not be more different:

Stephen Reinhardt is a proud old school hard liberal appointed by Jimmy Carter; Kozinski was a young and fairly radical conservative when appointed by Ronald Reagan and openly complained that the 9th was too wild eyed liberal when he joined.

So far, the Obama administration is dragging its feet about responding to these rulings, invoking a technicality whose importance I can’t judge: Because these cases involve employees of the federal court system, the federal judges are acting in an administrative capacity rather than a judicial capacity. (In other words, these are grievance procedures internal to the court system, not lawsuits.) So their rulings in these cases do not carry the same legal force as federal court rulings.
I’m not sure where this goes from here. Probably Levenson and Golinski will have to file suit in federal court, in which case the judges (the same judges? I’m not sure) will be ruling in their judicial capacity. The same logic will probably apply, and then the whole thing could get appealed to the Supreme Court.

Other summaries of the Levenson and Golinski DOMA cases are here and here.

I’m taking a charitable view of the Obama administration’s actions here. The Obama administration is defending the status quo in court rather than changing it by executive interpretation. This forces Congress and the courts to do their jobs, rather than following the imperial-presidency pattern of recent administrations of both parties. I think Obama would be happy to see Congress repeal DOMA or the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional, but in the meantime his administration is not going to stop enforcing it.

DOMA was passed in 1996, seven years before the first legal same-sex marriages were performed in Massachusetts. It was a response to a 1993 ruling by the Hawaii Supreme Court that for a time made Hawaii the most likely state to legalize same-sex marriage — a possibility nixed by a 1998 amendment to the state constitution.

Something neither judge has touched so far is the full-faith-and-credit angle, which DOMA was directly targeting. Article IV Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution says:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.

So if one state says you’re married, how can some other state say that you’re not? And how can an ordinary law like DOMA undo a provision of the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land? For an example of how this logic works, see the Finstuen v. Crutcher, where a federal court ruled in 2007 that Oklahoma had to recognize a same-sex couple as the legal parents of a child they had adopted in another state.

DParker at DailyKos has a nice summary of a lot of pending cases, This week in the Supreme Court. I hope he starts doing this every week that the Court is in session.

Short Notes
Massachusetts folks, listen up: You absolutely have to vote in the January 19 election to replace Ted Kennedy. The polls are all over the map, with some even putting Republican Scott Brown ahead. The difference in the polls seems to be the different pollsters’ assumptions about who votes.
If Brown wins, that’s it for the filibuster-proof Senate. Then not even Joe Lieberman will be able to save health-care reform.
The outsized influence of Texas on public school textbooks, and the outsized influence of right-wingers in Texas — those are both old stories. But it looks like things are about to get worse. And when it comes to the anti-evolution movement: Today America, tomorrow the world.

Democratic Senators Brian Dorgan of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut have announced that they won’t run for re-election. The two announcements have opposite effects: North Dakota is a red state, but Dorgan had a good chance of holding the seat for the Democrats. Connecticut is a blue state, but Dodd had become unpopular enough that he could have lost the seat to a Republican.

A seminal talk that I’ve linked to before is Tom Stites’ “Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?” Tom’s point is that all the real reporting in the mainstream media assumes an audience in the richest 40% of the population. The lower 60% live their lives more-or-less untouched by journalism.
This is old news now — the talk is from 2006 — but it came back to me while I was preparing this week’s Sift. I wanted to write about the disappointing jobs report, so I did a Google News search for stories on “jobs report” during January 7-9. What came up? The top story was CNN’s “Stocks expected to fall on jobs report“. (The expectation was wrong; the market went up Friday.) The second featured link was about how the jobs report had affected the oil market. And it went on like that.
Think about that. The economy losing 85,000 jobs is a life-changing disaster for lots and lots of working-class people. But the story the media considers worth covering is the effect that the jobs report might (but actually didn’t) have on investors. 
If you want to go deeper on this topic, check out Tom’s Banyan Project. (Full disclosure: Before he “retired”, Tom was my editor at UU World. I’m an unpaid advisor to the Banyan Project.)
Glenn Greenwald points out that Politico’s self-defense misses the point:

Nobody I’ve heard objects to Politico’s act of telling its readers about the “interesting things” Cheney has to say. The objection is that Politico mindlessly reprints any and all claims Cheney wants to make, no matter how factually dubious or even blatantly false, without question or challenge. 

Speaking of Cheney brings me to today’s unexpected discovery: Jacob Plotkin, my logic professor at Michigan State, was Dick Cheney’s freshman roommate at Yale.

Amusing Informania videos if you’re sick of winter already: This one commiserates with reporters who have to cover snowstorms — and includes some snow reports that didn’t go exactly as planned. And Viral Video Film School collects strange snow-related clips.

DailyKos’ Devilstower calls attention to the hoo-hum attitude everybody seems to have toward the horrible stuff that happens in Appalachia. Cut the tops off mountains, destroy the forests, pollute the streams, bulldoze the historical sites — it’s not like anybody important lives there.

A follow-up to last week’s note where Brit Hume made an on-air appeal for Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity. This week Hume defended himself on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Apparently, it’s not “proselytizing” when a Christian tries to get somebody from another religion to convert. And the only reason anybody objects to Hume using his status as a news anchor to promote his religion is that they have a bias against Christianity. “You mention the name of Jesus Christ,” Hume tells O’Reilly, “and all Hell breaks loose.”

Christians often go off on nonsensical persecution jags like this. Their points are hard to answer because there are no truly analogous cases – because nobody who didn’t belong to the majority religion would even consider doing such a thing. 
Picture it: Lots of celebrities who get in trouble are at least nominally members of some Christian sect. Lindsay Lohan, for example, is listed as Catholic. Assuming that there’s a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim news anchor somewhere, would that anchor dare suggest that Lindsay’s problem is Christianity, and that the solution is for her to convert to the anchor’s faith? How long would the anchor keep his job?
Here’s yet another graphic showing what a bad deal Americans get from our health-care system. And here’s another one.
On the other hand, our health-care system works well for some people: CIGNA CEO Edward Hanway, for example, is getting a $73 million retirement bonus. Well done, Ed.
Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch generously grants that not all Muslims are terrorists. “But there are hundreds of millions who are.”

You would have thought that Rudi Giuliani would be the last person to forget 9-11. But not so. Here he says: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.” Later clarification indicated that Rudi meant since 9-11. Bush gets a mulligan for that one because … well, he just does. Tristero notes a few other things Rudi has forgotten, and DailyKos’ clammyc adds: “Other than New Orleans, no US cities were destroyed under Bush.”

January 11, 2010 – 2:57 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Pants on Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ezra Klein asks: 

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

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

January 4, 2010 – 2:57 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Sifting the Sifts of 2009

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

The Theme of the Year: Corporatism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 28, 2009 – 9:32 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (7)

How It Goes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Kennedy’s widow Vicki wants the bill passed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Fallows dispels a lot of myths about the filibuster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And John Aravosis asks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because It’s Christmas/Solstice/Hannukah/Whatever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 21, 2009 – 3:17 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Circling the Wagons

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives. — Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing Defense II: ACORN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All four Democrats on the subcommittee voted against impeachment.

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

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

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

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

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

December 14, 2009 – 2:28 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Yglesias gives him the slap-down he deserves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gadget ideas for Christmas.

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

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

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

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

How conservative is that?

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

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

December 7, 2009 – 3:40 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)