Chaos Descending

The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of ‘dissemination of information’ or even one of crafting and delivering the ‘right’ message. Rather it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none — the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam. — Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication

In this week’s Sift:

  • Pakistan. You can’t appreciate Musharraf’s resignation without knowing the story so far. Ahmed Rashid’s Descent Into Chaos tells it.
  • Don’t Trust the Polls. Those margin-of-error estimates don’t even begin to tell you how far off the polls might be — in either direction.
  • McCain’s House Problem. If this means that the media is going to start covering what McCain actually says, that’s big news.
  • Short Notes. Humorous things I found to distract myself from the polls. The Post continues to spin for McCain. Food gets political. Gorbachev defends Putin. And more.

Pakistan

By some combination of luck and foresight, I finished reading Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos just a few days before Pervez Musharraf resigned as president of Pakistan. Rashid is a Pakistani journalist, and he has written a Pakistan-centered version of what’s been going on in central Asia (especially Afghanistan) for the past couple decades. It’s a view that the American public hasn’t been getting.

First, let’s start with what Pakistan is and where it comes from. When Britain gave independence to its Indian colony in 1947, Muslims didn’t want to be a minority in a unified India, so they formed Pakistan. Separation was bloody, and India/Pakistan has been a cold war ever since. They’ve also fought several hot wars: India helped East Pakistan become Bangladesh in 1971 and Pakistan has tried several times to acquire India’s Muslim-majority province of Kashmir. (The most engaging way to get an understanding of Kashmir is to read Salman Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown.) They both have nukes, which undoubtedly are targeted at each other.

Like many countries, Pakistan makes no ethnic/cultural sense. (See the ethnic map.) The northwestern border is the Durand Line, drawn by the British in 1893 to separate Afghanistan from their India colony. The line cuts the Pashtun tribes in half. Pakistan’s big cities (Lahore and Islamabad, in the eastern Punjab region, and the port of Karachi in the Sindhi region) are like a Muslim version of India’s cities: They have a sizable class of educated professionals who know English and are steeped in the British legal tradition. They have an on-again/off-again tradition of democracy, but they’ve been cursed with corrupt politicians who keep giving the army excuses to take over. The professional-class families (one of the characters in Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World comes from such a family) see the economic boom in India and know that they could be getting rich too if they could just establish a stable democratic government. They’re Muslims, but in a Westernized way. They pray and go to the mosque, but don’t see why they should launch jihads or blow themselves up. (A gross simplification, but not bad as gross simplifications go.)

The army has a different set of interests. They hate India; they want Kashmir; they want to stay in power. The army was originally formed on the secular British model, but Musharraf’s predecessor as military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, saw the usefulness of Muslim extremism. Now the officer corps and the ISI (Pakistan’s CIA) are divided between radical Muslims and secularists (like Musharraf) who think radical Muslims are useful.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the United States also saw the usefulness of radical Muslims like Bin Laden. We funneled money through the ISI, and they supported Afghan guerrillas fighting the Soviets. (They also siphoned off some money to arm Kashmiri guerrillas fighting India). This is where Al Qaeda comes from. After the Soviets left, the various guerrilla leaders set themselves up as warlords, and made Afghanistan such a hell that Afghans largely welcomed the ISI’s next creation, the Taliban. The Taliban made Afghanistan an international training ground for Muslim terrorists, including Al Qaeda, Kashmiris, Chechans, and others.

Then 9/11 happened, and Musharraf worried that the U.S. would turn on him. So (in exchange for billions in aid, mostly for the military) he “helped” us in Afghanistan, but also turned a blind eye while the ISI helped the Taliban. After the U.S. established the Karzai government in Afghanistan, Musharraf continued playing a double game. He tracked down just enough non-Afghan Al Qaeda leaders to keep Dick Cheney happy, while helping the Taliban reform in the Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan. Today it’s an open secret that the Taliban’s government-in-exile operates out of the Pakistani border town of Quetta. Bin Laden is thought to be hiding in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), maybe near Peshawar.

As you (but apparently not Musharraf) would expect, the extreme Muslim groups have not been content to be pawns of the Islamabad government. Instead, Pakistan has its own Muslim insurgency now, which has attempted to assassinate Musharraf. The army is now fighting its own creation.

Another piece of Rashid’s book is the story of the Bush administration’s cynical relationship with democracy in central Asia. We invaded Afghanistan ostensibly to bring democracy. But outside of Kabul we re-established the power of the much-hated Afghan warlords, probably because they were easier to deal with than a democratic government. (That, along with Pakistan’s aid, is why the Taliban is making a comeback — many Afghans prefer them to the warlords.) In Pakistan we showed no interest in pushing Musharraf towards democracy until his government was starting to falter anyway, and then we cooked up a plan to co-opt a re-established Pakistani democracy by having Musharraf share power with the popular Benazir Bhutto.

The really unnecessary tragedy, though, is in the ex-Soviet Muslim countries: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. These countries had little previous relationship with America, and (at least as Rashid tells the story) people in this region had high hopes that an increased American presence in the region meant that democracy was coming. Instead, we supported whichever dictators would give us bases for our war in Afghanistan. As a result, the American brand in central Asia is ruined for generations, and one of these countries might well become the next Afghanistan.

Or maybe Pakistan will: After Bhutto was assassinated, the elections went ahead anyway. The new parliament set up to impeach Musharraf, and he resigned in hopes of staying out of prison. (Al Jazeera’s English channel has a discussion of this that puts our news channels to shame. Part 2 is here.) There’s a democracy of sorts now, but the army and the ISI still have considerable power and could take it all back in an instant. The new leaders might open up the potential of Pakistan’s educated, English-speaking middle class, or they might follow the example of previous democratic leaders: loot a bunch of money, move it out of the country, and go into comfortable exile. If they do, it’ll be the Taliban against the army, with a bunch of double-agents in the ISI and the officer corps. And the prize for the winner is Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

If you’d rather take your medicine with a spoonful of sugar, check out the (slightly out of date) music video parody “Hooray for Pakistan“.

Don’t Trust the Polls

The Russia-Georgia conflict gave McCain a bump in the polls, and brought the race to a dead heat. I figured this was a blip, and then there was the combination of McCain’s gaffe about his houses (see below) and the Biden announcement, so I figure Obama will bump back, at least until the Republican convention starts. Anyway, this is a good time to point out one of those under-covered stories: Nobody knows how to poll this election.

Pollsters have a bunch of simultaneous problems. The biggest: Nobody knows who’s going to vote. That’s true in all elections, but moreso in this one. Whenever a poll says that it represents “likely” voters, somebody has made assumptions about who’s going to vote. But nobody knows what assumptions to make about these issues:


The Democrat/Republican/Independent mix has shifted in the Democrats’ favor. One of the ways you normalize the data in a poll is to adjust the party mix. If, say, 45% of your sample identify themselves as Democrats, but Democrats are usually only 35% of the electorate, you figure you’ve accidentally oversampled Democrats and adjust the data to compensate. But after you make that same adjustment for several polls in a row, you wonder if maybe the number of Democrats has just gone up. Different polls handle this situation differently. (That’s why Obama consistently runs worse in Gallup.)

Young people voted in the primaries. Ordinarily, pollsters discount the sample of young people, because they are less likely to vote. Back in January, I was skeptical of the Obama campaign’s prediction that a record turnout of young people would give it a victory in Iowa. But the youth turned out, and Obama won. How many young people will vote in November? Nobody knows. 18-24-year-old participation was up in 2004, though still not as high as other age groups. And age is a major factor in this election: Young people go overwhelming for Obama, old people for McCain. (WaPo characteristically describes this as “Obama’s age problem” rather than “McCain’s youth problem”.) The most interesting theory I’ve heard: Young-voter participation is up because social networks like Facebook increase the peer pressure that politically active young people can put on their apathetic friends. (Follow young liberal voters via the Future Majority blog.)


Nobody is polling the voters who register late. The first question a pollster typically asks is “Are you registered to vote?” If you say “no” the interview is over. But there’s still plenty of time to register in most states, and Obama is putting an unprecedented level of effort into registering new voters. That’s why Obama and McCain have about the same number of commercials, even though Obama is raising and spending much more money. Obama is spending money on field organization, while McCain is relying on the usual Republican Party organization. (If there’s a dispute about this election, it probably won’t be about voting machines or hanging chads. It will be about who voted and who was prevented from voting.)

Nobody is polling the cell-phone-only households. Most polls call people over land lines. But a significant number of people just have cell phones. Mostly these are young, single people who probably favor Obama, but nobody knows how to estimate their impact.

The Bradley Effect. Polls tend to overestimate the vote of black candidates. Maybe if you’re ashamed to admit why you’re voting against a candidate — like because he’s black — you tell a pollster that you’re undecided. The Bradley effect is erratic, and even its existence is debated, because there’s always some other plausible explanation for the unexpected result. Take the New Hampshire primary, for example. The polls had Obama winning by high single digits, but instead Clinton won. Was that a Bradley effect, or did female voters have a last-minute reaction against the media’s attempt to bury Clinton after her Iowa loss?
Conclusion: A lot of factors make this election hard to poll, and they pull in different directions. So you should run hard for your candidate right up to the minute the polls close. Don’t give up. Don’t get complacent. Nobody knows what’s going to happen.

McCain’s House Problem

The McCain Houses Gaffe has been like watching your arch-rival’s quarterback grab his knee at the end of a play. It’s a shame these kinds of things are so influential, but isn’t it nice to see it happen to them for once?

In case you missed it, here’s the story: Politico asked McCain how many houses he and Cindy own, and he said he’d have his staff get back to them. That touched off a huge media frenzy, which the Obama campaign stoked with this ad and then this one. The McCain people started swinging wildly to make it stop, complaining that Obama is rich too, attacking Obama with a sleazy ad about Tony Rezko (like all the Rezko stuff, it’s innuendo not backed up by an accusation — what exactly are they claiming Obama did?), playing the POW card yet again, and generally flailing around in all directions.

Like all these things, from Mike Dukakis in a tank to Obama’s “I have become a symbol” misquote, it’s overblown in any literal sense. As I listen to the interview, it doesn’t sound like McCain is having a senior moment or even that he’s out of touch. He’s just doing what he so often does: dodging a question he doesn’t want to answer and relying on the media not to call him on it, because question-dodging doesn’t fit his Straight Talk Legend.

The interesting thing is that it didn’t work. The media didn’t cover for McCain this time. And when the campaign tried once again to use his POW experience as an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card, this time everybody pointed out how irrelevant that response was. They even made the comparison to Giuliani’s “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

And that may be the true significance of the story. Up until now, McCain has been covered according to the Liberty Valance Principle: “Print the legend.” If that’s starting to change, it’s a big deal. I wonder if the mainstream media will take the next step, and knock down the myth that it’s the campaign’s fault, and McCain himself only reluctantly talks about his POW experience. In fact, he’s been trading on it since his first campaign in 1982 and seldom goes for long without bringing it up.

To follow up on last week: McCain produced a witness, fellow POW Orson Swindle, to verify that he told the cross-in-the-dirt story before 1999. FireDogLake is unimpressed, pointing out that Mr. Swindle is a pro-McCain lobbyist who specializes in the corporate fake-grass-roots campaigns known as astroturf. (Not a guy you want to take at his word, in other words.) Andrew Sullivan observes that Swindle was telling a different story in May. And No More Mister Nice Blog adds that McCain’s memories of Christmas in Hanoi were covered extensively in a 1995 book — with no cross-in-the-dirt. Finally, I am feeling smug for refusing to attribute the story to The Gulag Archipelago until somebody could give me a page number. Apparently, evangelical writers attributed the story to Solzhenitsyn’s book even though it’s not there. If McCain stole the story, he stole it from them, not from Solzhenitsyn.

One more thing: If the McCain campaign wants to continue claiming the Vietnamese tortured him, they should denounce the Bush administration policy on detainees. If you buy the Bush definition of torture, McCain wasn’t tortured.

Short Notes

I don’t think I need to tell you that the Democratic convention is starting today and Obama chose Joe Biden as his vice president. I am neither thrilled nor horrified by Biden, so I won’t use up a lot of words. I’ll just point out that if you say Obama-Biden really fast, it sounds like it ought to mean something in German. obamabiden would be the infinitive form of a verb, maybe meaning something like: to pray that the darkness ends soon.

While I was bumming about McCain’s post-Georgia rise in the polls, I watched amusing political videos. 23/6 took Fox News’ hour-long documentary on Obama and reduced it to 1 minute. I think I don’t need to watch the original now. The Onion News Network pundits discuss the 430 key demographics that will decide the election, like “cordoroy-wearing homosexuals” and “people who eat artisanal sandwiches”. I found several political music videos, like a parody of “Hey there, Delilah” by an Obama fan who wants to be VP. I think he’s making fun of Obama and his supporters, but I like it anyway. And there’s this adaptation of the “Shaft” theme to Obama. Finally, the Funny or Die team brings us a commercial selling the Republican Party as if it were an antidepressant drug. (“Warning: Excessive use of the Republican Party may lead to recessions and needless wars or quagmires.”)

The funniest typo of the season: AP refered to Joe Lieberman as “the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.”

Mikhail Gorbachev defended Russia in a NYT op-ed about the Georgian situation. And Thomas Friedman’s interpretation doesn’t make anybody look good. Neither does the view from Human Rights News.

The latest WaPo/ABC poll has Obama up 49-43 among registered voters and 49-45 among “likely” voters (whoever the heck they are). So how does the Post spin it? Neither the headline (“Support for Each Candidate Holds Steady”) nor the Faulknerian 55-word opening sentence says which candidate is ahead. Instead we hear how close the race is and that people continue to think McCain would be a better commander-in-chief. Only readers who persevere find out that Obama is winning. If the numbers were reversed, I’m sure we’d see a nice simple headline like “McCain Maintains Lead”.

Other Sifts: This week I noticed another, more focused weekly sift of the news: This Week in Tyranny on the blog Pruning Shears (“Pruning back the power of the executive branch”). It appears every Sunday. RFK Jr. and Brendan DeMelle had been doing a weekly entry on Huffington Post called Unearthed: News of the Week the Mainstream Media Forgot to Cover. But I haven’t seen one since August 1. Hope they haven’t given up on the idea.

The safety and healthfulness of the food system is one of those under-the-radar issues. Candidates and pundits rarely mention it, but more and more people are seeking out locally grown food, organic food, unprocessed food, and so on. (The Nashua Farmer’s Market is visible from my window on Sundays.) Books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Deep Economy are finding an audience. Well, now there’s an advocacy web site that keeps track of the politics of food: Recipe for America. Here’s an interview with Jill Richardson, one of the founders.

The McCain ads just get worse. This one starts out with the usual Obama-fans-are-mindless meme, but gradually shifts to a lock-up-the-white-women implication. A guy at the end says “Hot chicks dig Obama.” A swiftboad-type group not officially part of the McCain campaign is putting $2.8 million into an ad linking Obama to the ex-Weather Underground education professor William Ayers. The ad appears to violate McCain-Feingold. Fox News announced that it wouldn’t run the ad, but then showed it twice anyway.

For what it’s worth, I think of Ayers as the liberal equivalent of Oliver North. Both committed politically motivated crimes a long time ago. Both got off on technicalities. Both have gone straight since. Conservatives pay no price for North, and Obama shouldn’t pay one for Ayers. If anyone objects to this comparison, make them defend selling weapons illegally to the Iranians, as North did.

August 25, 2008 – 1:30 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Unstacking the Matryoshkas

Great fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite ’em.
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
And so, ad infinitum.

— Augustus De Morgan

In this Week’s Sift:

  • Matryoshkas. The media has been trying to tell the Georgia/Russia War as a story of Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. Actually, there are more than two guys, and they look a lot the same, except that one is very big, the next one a little smaller, and so on.
  • Will the Media Even Try to Keep McCain Honest? At the Saddleback Forum Saturday, McCain told a very moving story about his POW days. Why does it sound so much like a Solzhenitsyn story? And will the media connect this question to all the times McCain has fudged in the past?
  • Short Notes. Obama is still losing the racist vote. Clinton stars in a McCain commercial. Our military is taking this “Onward Christian Soldiers” thing way too seriously. Young voters actually did come out in 2004. And I punt Musharraf’s resignation to next week.
Matryoshkas
A lot of nonsense has been written about Russia, Georgia, and the rebellious Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Last week I was just trying not to add to it, but this week I’d like to beat the nonsense back a little.

There’s one temptation we should all try to resist: the idea that this story is really some other story. That it’s Good Guys vs. Bad Guys, or David against Goliath, or Hitler trying to dismember Czechoslovakia. All of those stories (and a lot more) can throw light on some aspect of the Georgia situation, but they all cover up as much as they make clear.

Historical background. Centuries ago, this whole region (the Caucasus) was a bunch of tiny kingdoms you’ve never heard of. (The regions on the Rusisian side of the border are on this map. Georgia and its breakaway provinces/republics are here.) One-by-one they got conquered by the Czars, and later were absorbed wholesale into the Soviet Union, sometimes after after a second conquest during the Revolution. The Communists tried for decades to produce “the Soviet man” whose identity transcended all the divisions of language and culture and history, but it never really took.

Russia and Georgia were two Soviet republics that became independent when the USSR fell apart in 1991, but it’s a mistake to think of them as nations in the cultural-identity sense. There certainly are a lot of people who think of themselves as Russians or Georgians, but on both sides of the border you can also find a lot of people who think of themselves as something else — Ossetians, Chechens, and so on. Russians and Georgians play a role similar to white English-speakers in America; they’re the largest group and they define the national stereotype, but they’re not the whole country. Some of the minority nationalities tried to claim their own independence in the chaos following 1991, but the old Soviet borders have more-or-less held. The bloodiest of these conflicts was the Chechans’ attempt to get free of Russia, which resulted in two wars and a continuing insurgency.

Ossetia wound up being split into North Ossetia (part of Russia) and South Ossetia (part of Georgia). The South Ossetians have been fighting for independence since 1991, with a ceasefire (but not a resolution) in 1992. Abkhazia fought a 1992-93 war for independence from Georgia, with a second flare-up in 1998. Abkhazia is more-or-less independent, and has done an ethnic cleansing that resulted in 250,000 ethnic Georgian refugees. But Georgia recognizes a government-in-exile and the situation was considered unresolved at the beginning of the recent Ossetian war.

Who’s David? In short, it’s a mess. If you’re a Georgian refugee from the Abkhazian ethnic cleansing, you’re David and Abkhazia is Goliath. If you’re an Abkhazian or Ossetian separatist, you’re David and Georgia is Goliath. To Georgia, Russia is Goliath — unless you can convince the US or NATO to come in and be Goliath on your side. It’s like those stacking Russian dolls, the matryoshkas. Little fleas have lesser fleas, ad infinitum.

And that’s the answer to a question I’ve wondered about ever since I first heard about India and Pakistan fighting over Kashmir: Why do all these countries want to hang on to regions that don’t want to belong to them? It’s hard for Americans to remember that we did the same thing in our Civil War, and in much of the world there’s an even better reason: None of these borders make sense, and if nations start letting this region or that one break away, there’s a chance the whole thing could unravel, to the point that individual villages and families could end up proclaiming their sovereignty and fighting a massive battle of all-against-all. (I have tried in vain to hunt down a cartoon I remember from the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia: barbed wire divides two yards. In one the banner of the Republic of Bob is flying, while the other sports the flag of the Grand Duchy of Frank.)

This, by the way, is the problem with the plans to break Iraq into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish zones. What happens to the Turkmen or Assyrians in Kurdistan? Iraq is just the outer matryoshka; the next one — Kurdistan — is just the same, only smaller.

It’s hard for Americans to wrap their minds around this situation. The majority of us — all but the Native Americans and the descendents of slaves — are volunteers or the descendents of volunteers. We’re Americans because somebody in our line decided that they wanted to be Americans. And if we didn’t like it, we could go somewhere else. But the rest of the world is not that way. They are what they are because somebody conquered somebody else a long, long time ago.

And they remember, which drives us nuts. During the Kosovo crisis, I was on a mostly American email list that had one zealous Serb. We were unable to have anything resembling a dialog. The Americans kept talking about democracy, but the Serb was oblivious to the fact that something like 80% of the Kosovars were ethnic Albanians now. Kosovo could never be anything but Serbian, and Serbia couldn’t truly be Serbia without it. Kosovo was the site of the celebrated battle against the Ottomans in 1389, which the Serbians lost, but pledged never to forget. You couldn’t erase that just by moving in a bunch of Albanians who breed like rabbits. Similarly, here’s what the New York Times is reporting about the current situation:

The Georgians said that they were “always there,” that Abkhazia was a Georgian kingdom, and that only by expelling the ethnic Georgians at the end of the war did the Abkhaz make themselves a majority in the province. The Abkhaz said that they are the descendants of a “1,000-year-old kingdom,” that they were the victims of a massive campaign of Russian deportation in the 1860s, and then that Stalin forced them into the Georgian yoke.

Do you want to get into the middle of that? I know I don’t.

Who’s the Hitler-du-jour? A lot of the current nonsense comes from American conservatives, for whom it is always 1938. Putin is Hitler, just like Ahmadinejad was Hitler last week, Bin Laden was Hitler the week before, and Saddam was Hitler a while before that. Any time you hear the word appeasement, somebody is claiming that it’s 1938, that somebody is Hitler, and that our leaders have to choose whether they want to be Chamberlain (bad) or Churchill (good).

The big problem with the 1938 frame is that it sweeps a lot of details under the rug. All local issues are just noise. “Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia?” neocon Robert Kagan asked last Monday. “Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.” The bigger drama is world conquest, and the 1938 frame assumes that eventually we will either have to fight or surrender — so isn’t it obvious that we should fight now, before we lose any more allies?

Of course, there are other frames that sweep other details under the rug and lead to equally obvious (but opposite) conclusions. Maybe it’s not 1938, maybe it’s 1914, when (as Bismarck had predicted) “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” escalated into a big-power war that none of the big powers actually wanted. (In fact, the reason 1938 became 1938 was that Chamberlain didn’t want it to be 1914 again.)

What’s Putin thinking? Putin has his own frames. Maybe it’s 1999, when NATO used a local ethnic struggle to break Kosovo off from Russia’s ally Serbia. Breaking Abkhazia or South Ossetia away from Georgia, then, is just an example of turnabout-is-fair-play. Maybe it’s 2003, when the Bush adminstration claimed again and again that it didn’t need UN authorization to invade Iraq. In the 2004 campaign, Republicans ridiculed John Kerry’s suggestion that the U.S. work within international structures and international law: “We will never seek a permission slip to defend the United States,” Dick Cheney asserted.

So Putin doesn’t think he needs a permission slip either. Might makes right, after all. We can’t claim that principle for ourselves and then try to deny it to others. Nations will laugh at us. They are laughing at us. They ought to, because we are laughable. (“In the 21st century,” says John McCain with a straight face, “nations don’t invade other nations.” And President Bush proclaims: “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”)

One illuminating (and fairly harsh) interpretation of what Putin is up to is by Vladimir Socor of the Eurasian Daily Monitor. The ultimate goal, in this interpretation, is to make NATO realize that accepting Georgia into membership would be more trouble than it’s worth. The New York Times gives a good background summary, and a Russian intern at the Washington Post gives a more Putin-favorable interpretation of events.

Two sides. Fox News viewers got a surprising reminder that there are two sides to this story when a 12-year-old girl they brought on to dramatize the horrors of the war instead started thanking the Russian soldiers who rescued her. Her aunt blamed the Georgian government for everything, and a panicked Shepherd Smith broke for a commercial. One of my friends is a Russophile who watches Russian TV over the internet. He tells me the Putin-controlled media is full of similar testimonials. Georgian TV, I suspect, has different testimonials.

My take. I advise caution. We’re in enough wars already, and the American public should try to remember how it was stampeded into Iraq. As for what we should hope for, here’s what I’d like to see in all conflicts: An end to fighting, and the right of all refugees to either go home or be compensated for their losses and resettled permanently elsewhere. The administration is trying to commit us to a bigger idea: “Georgian territorial integrity”, which is a fancy way of saying that Georgia is the right matryoshka, and that how it treats the smaller Ossetia and Abkhazia is nobody else’s business. Somebody could convince me that’s the right solution, but I’m not going to grant it without a good reason. And I’m certainly not willing to risk war with Russia for it unless somebody makes a much better case than I’ve heard so far.

McCain Makes Things Up. Will Anybody Call Him on It?

A damaging charge against John McCain’s honesty has been propagating through the blogs since Sunday, and it will be interesting to see whether the mainstream media picks it up. Saturday night, during the candidate forum that mega-church-minister Rick Warren set up and moderated for his flock, McCain told a story about his POW experience. He has repeated this story many times during the campaign, and it appears in his book Faith of My Fathers. (I saw it in a Christmas mailing he blanketed New Hampshire with. He also put it into a TV ad.) The details vary (that’s one of the problems with the story), but it always culminates in a compassionate North Vietnamese guard drawing a cross in the dirt, as a sign of Christian solidarity. It’s a moving story, and (if you’re cynical) sounds a little too perfect.

Sunday afternoon about 12:30, rickrocket on DailyKos pointed out that a similar story has been told about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (It’s been attributed to The Gulag Archipelago, but nobody has reported finding it there yet.) Checkable references to the Solzhenitsyn story predate Faith of My Fathers, which seems (at least so far) to be the first place McCain mentioned it.

By 3 o’clock dday on Hullabaloo had picked up the story, and by evening it was on Raw Story and Political Insider, which was then linked from Huffington Post. The next logical place for it to turn up is TPM, which didn’t have it as of about 11 a.m. today. If this were a charge against Obama, it would get picked up by Fox News sometime today. Then the rest of the media would feel obligated to cover it, and by tomorrow the Obama campaign would have to respond to the charge somehow. Will the media treat McCain the same way? Wait and see.

One reason to believe McCain did steal the story from Solzhenitsyn (who he claims to have read) is that McCain does this kind of thing. His first statement on Georgia, for example, lifted pieces from Wikipedia without attribution. Several of the “Cindy’s recipes” section of the McCain web site (now scrubbed) came word-for-word from the Food Network, and the cookie recipe Cindy submitted to Parents Magazine actually came from Hershey’s.

If McCain did steal the cross-in-the-dirt story, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d blown smoke about his POW experiences. In Faith of My Fathers McCain said that when his interrogators asked for the names of his squadron mates, he gave them names from the starting line-up of the Green Bay Packers. But when he told the story to a Pittsburgh TV station, the names came from the Steelers, not the Packers. These kinds of shifting details make you wonder whether there is any core truth to the story. Maybe it happened in a movie McCain saw, and not in Hanoi at all.

In addition to plagiarizing and stretching the truth, McCain tells whopping lies. Like this one where he says “I have not missed any crucial votes” on alternative energy sources. ThinkProgress points out that his vote would have made the difference on a number of votes, including an effort to extend tax credits for renewable energy last December. Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope wrote:

I have just listened to carefully coached staff members for Senator John McCain lie repeatedly about the Senator’s failure to show up and vote on the first Senate economic-stimulus package, which included tax incentives for clean energy. I am in a state of shock not because of the Senator’s vote, although that disappointed me, nor over his desire to avoid public accountability for that vote — that’s politics. But to carefully coach your Senate staff (I assume the Chief of Staff, not the Senator, was the author of this shameful performance) in how to mislead callers in such depth is appalling, and surprising, because it was almost certain to be found out.

But found out by whom? That was February — did you hear about it until now? McCain is the straight talker; the media says so, and they seem to have no interest in finding out anything different. The Carl Popes of this world can jump up and down all they want, but who is listening?

Now, the stolen recipes and the football fibbing don’t have anything to do with policy. But Al Gore was constantly hounded by such stories in 2000, with much less substance behind them. He was a “serial exaggerator” and you couldn’t write anything about Gore without mentioning that he claimed to have invented the internet or that Love Story was really about him.

This time around, the media will raise obscure connections between Obama and Louis Farrakhan and question him about baseless rumors that Michelle denounced “whitey” in public. Will they raise the question of whether McCain stole the cross story? Will they tie it together with his long pattern of exaggerations and lies? Somehow I doubt it.

Short Notes

According to the Borowitz Report, a new poll by Duh Magazine shows Obama trailing among racists. “In a head-to-head match-up, likely bigots chose Sen. McCain over Sen. Obama by a margin of one thousand to one, with a majority of racists saying they ‘strongly disagree’ with Sen. Obama’s decision not to be white.” … Duh editor Plugh says the poll indicates that Sen. Obama ‘has his work cut out for him’ if he is going to make up lost ground among racists.

As soon as Hillary Clinton said, “I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House, and Senator Obama has a speech that he gave in 2002” — we all knew it would turn up in a McCain commercial. It has. The ad also contains pro-McCain statements from other major Democrats, like Howard Dean and John Kerry (both look younger than they do now). But no one else specifically denigrates Obama in comparison to McCain. There’s a reason: One of the unwritten rules of the primary campaign — which all the other candidates lived by — was not to give Republicans that kind of fodder. If Clinton were the nominee, the Republicans would not have a McCain-is-better-than-Clinton quote from Obama or any of the other Democratic candidates. Thanks, Hillary.

Chris Rodda on DailyKos lifts the lid on yet another example of the Christianization of our military.

Interesting graph over at Matthew Yglesias’ new blog. Kerry’s effort to get young voters to the polls actually worked, just not well enough.

Pakistan’s President Musharaff resigned rather than face impeachment. More on this next week. For now I’ll point you to this interview with Ahmed Rashid, author of a very good book, Descent into Chaos.
August 18, 2008 – 3:05 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (5)

Saving Each Other

We all save one another. It’s the way of the world. — Benazir Bhutto

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Way of the World. Ron Suskind’s new book reads more like a novel than a history.
  • “The One” … from Satan? McCain’s ad couldn’t really be referring to the rumors that Obama is the Antichrist. Could it? (Plus other election notes.)
  • Look! A Bright Shiny Sex Scandal! Yes, I supported Edwards. No, I don’t care whether he’s the kid’s father.
  • Short Notes. Bush as hurricane. A good place to start understanding the health care problem. Big government seems to work in Denmark. And the Wall Street Journal declares victory in Iraq.
The Way of the World

Ron Suskind’s new book The Way of the World has been all over the news the last couple weeks, but the stories about it really don’t prepare you for what it is.

Most of the coverage has focused on the specific charges the book makes. Like this one: Saddam’s head of intelligence (Tahir Jalil Habbush, the Jack of Diamonds in the Coalition’s deck of cards ) was a British informant. Before the war, he met a British agent in Jordan and told him the straight truth: Saddam’s games were all about keeping the Iranians from realizing that he had no WMDs. (Saddam didn’t take our invasion threat seriously. “Why would the Americans want to take over this country?” Habbush reported him saying. “It would be a nightmare.”) The British passed that report on to the Bush administration, which ignored it along with a similar secret interview with Saddam’s foreign minister Naji Sabri. Instead, they hid Habbush in Jordan after the invasion, and used him to forge evidence of a false Saddam/Al Qaeda connection.

From stories like this, I was expecting a journalistic tome, with fifty pages of dense references. Instead, The Way of the World is written like one of those portrait-of-an-era historical novels, maybe Doctorow’s Ragtime. Suskind follows a cast of just-outside-the-headlines characters as they make their way through Bush’s America: a young Muslim from an influential Pakistani family, working in D.C. and living with his college buddies (a straight Christian and a gay Jew) in a “sit-com worthy” apartment; the pro-bono lawyer for a Guantanamo detainee; an ex-CIA guy now a Blackwater executive; an Afghan exchange student trying to cope with America; and a bureaucrat trying to get the rest of the government to think seriously about how terrorists might get nuclear weapons.

Their stories weave around a big, messy novel-like theme: that moral authority is the only thing powerful enough to keep the world from spinning out of control, and you get it by doing the right thing without asking for anything back. Force and cynicism seem like the safe path, but ultimately they lead everyone to destruction. The title comes from a casual comment by the soon-to-die Benazir Bhutto:

They think they’re saving you, and you think you’re saving them. That’s where the trouble starts. Someone says, “I saved you, now here’s what I want.” And it’s the same with big countries and little ones, religious leaders and their followers, even husbands and wives. When things really work, though, it’s because people realize that this is a lie, that, really, we all save one another. It’s the way of the world. Things work out for the best when everyone makes it, together, when we manage to save each other.

Who heard that statement and wrote it down? No clue. Suskind has obviously done mountains of research, but the book has no references at all. Sometimes he quotes specific people, but usually he just tells stories and paints scenes. You trust him or you don’t.

The L.A. Times thinks the book doesn’t work, but I couldn’t put it down. It depends on what you’re expecting, I guess. Reading The Way of the World as a journalist or historian has got to be frustrating. You sit there wondering, “How does he know that?” From a novel-reader’s point of view, though, it works fine. The characters are well-drawn and fascinating. The challenging theme pulls it together without getting in the way.

“The One” … from Satan?

When McCain’s attack ad “The One” came out a couple weeks ago, I thought: “Wha?” Why would a major-party presidential candidate waste his money promoting images of crowds wildly cheering his opponent?

Well, Time’s Amy Sullivan has an explanation: It’s a dog whistle to the extreme religious Right, that … no, I can’t say it, I have to let Sullivan say it:

It’s not easy to make the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign seem benign. But suggesting that Barack Obama is the Antichrist might just do it.

Yep, that’s it. “The One” is supposed to feed speculation that Obama is the Antichrist. Seriously. The point, according to Sullivan, is to motivate evangelicals (who otherwise aren’t excited by McCain) to get out and vote.

Sullivan notes similarities between the ad and the Left Behind series of novels about the End Times (70 million sold), where the Antichrist is “a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia.”

Carpathia is a junior Senator who speaks several languages, is beloved by people around the world and fawned over by a press corps that cannot see his evil nature, and rises to absurd prominence after delivering just one major speech.

And Sullivan goes on to claim this:

Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign’s red-white-and-blue “O” logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.

My first reaction was that Sullivan was probably making a lot out of not much. The Conservatives for McCain web site certainly thinks so. (At the very least they’re correct that Sapp’s Daniel reference is weak.)

Then I hit a YouTube link off of some pro-McCain video and there I was in Obama-is-the-Antichrist land. (Enjoy your stay. Visit our souvenir stand.) I followed links from one video to the next: here, here, and here. You can keep going for a very long time by checking the Related Videos list. Some of the videos only have about a thousand viewings, but this one has almost 30,000 and this one 87,000

And while religious-Right heavyweight Hal Lindsey (author of the 35-million-copy seller The Late, Great Planet Earth and other apocalyptic hits) won’t say Obama is the Antichrist, he does point out that Obama is like the Antichrist:

Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him – a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib and seemingly holding all the answers to all the world’s questions. And the Bible says that such a leader will soon make his appearance on the scene. It won’t be Barack Obama, but Obama’s world tour provided a foretaste of the reception he can expect to receive. He will probably also stand in some European capital, addressing the people of the world and telling them that he is the one that they have been waiting for. And he can expect as wildly enthusiastic a greeting as Obama got in Berlin. The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance.

OK, I know how this game works. When someone like Lindsey declares “the Bible says …” it really means “the Bible provides some mysterious phrases and images that an imaginative person can run with.” But let’s play along. Does this even work within the worldview that takes end-times prophesies seriously? Back in March, CNN’s conservative talk show host Glenn Beck asked noted apocalyptic expert John Hagee about Obama being the Antichrist “because I receive so much email on this, and I think a lot of people do.” Hagee said no. And in 1999 Jerry Falwell said “If he’s going to be the counterfeit of Christ, he has to be Jewish.” That’s the one major religion I haven’t heard attributed to Obama. (Wait, I spoke too soon. Typing “obama is a jew” into Google got me this article.) So, no. A serious student of the end times would not conclude that Obama is the Antichrist.

But what conclusions should we draw about McCain and his ad? First, the McCain campaign didn’t start the Obama/Antichrist meme, which has been out there for nearly two years. But they surely know about it and realize they’re exploiting it. Second, “The One” is not anything as direct as a scene-by-scene allegory. It’s a suggestion, not a statement. It’s deniable. And some of its appeal mirrors the sharp-but-harmless sense of humor of liberals who put “Republicans for Voldemort” stickers on their cars.

Except that nobody seriously believes in Voldemort, while some people not only believe in the Antichrist, but might be willing to act on that belief. And that’s where this story passes freaky and goes all the way to scary: A number of the videos I watched referred to the prediction — I’m guessing this is from Left Behind, because it’s not in any Bible I’ve ever read — that the Antichrist will be shot in the head and survive. People mention this as if it would be the sure sign.

After hearing that, doesn’t any decent candidate step back and say “We’re not touching this”?

Obama started hitting back in the last two weeks, with the ads “Pocket“, “Low Road“, “Original“, and “New Energy“. They’re all issue-oriented, and none paints McCain as anything much worse than George Bush’s successor. An Obama supporter does a 3-minute YouTube piece that is a little sharper. And Obama’s deputy economic policy director takes 3 minutes to go point-by-point through a deceptive McCain ad.

Paris Hilton also hit back against the McCain “Celebrity” ad. (“See you at the debates, bitches.”) And the news-comedy site 23/6 does an edition of their ongoing series “If they IM’d” with McCain and Hilton.

Exhibit #46913 in the case that the Washington Post is not liberal: Sunday’s Post has an article headlined: “Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit, Analysis Finds“. Only the readers who make it to paragraph 10 learn that John McCain’s tax plan balloons the deficit even worse. Much worse, in fact, unless there are “massive spending cuts” that McCain has never specified.

Exhibit #46929: When McCain was making scurrilous charges and Obama had yet to respond, WaPo columnist David Broder didn’t think the negative tone of the campaign was worth mentioning. But almost the instant that Obama started hitting back, there’s Broder with an “even-handed” column wishing we could get “back to the high road” that McCain was never on to begin with.

Broder presents the low-road campaign as if it were some kind of star-crossed tragedy, attributable to no one in particular … except maybe Obama. Because this would never have happened, Broder assures us, if Obama had accepted McCain’s offer for ten joint town hall meetings: “Since the idea of joint town meetings was scrapped, the campaign has featured tough and often negative ads and speeches.” In Sunday’s follow-up, Broder ends with: “McCain’s offer of weekly joint town meetings still stands. It is not too late for Obama to change his mind and take up this historic offer.”

So basically, WaPo’s even-handed David Broder is playing the good-cop role for McCain. McCain throws a few below-the-belt punches, then a sympathetic Broder comes into the room and says, “It wouldn’t have to be this way, Barack, if you’d just cooperate.”

Amy Silverman of the Phoenix New Times gives her long-term perspective as someone who has been covering the McCains locally for a very long time. And Progressive Media Research tears down McCain’s claim that he has never sought pork-barrel projects for his state.

Look! A Bright Shiny Sex Scandal!

I’m a little surprised by my own reaction to the John Edwards affair: I don’t care. I haven’t read his statement or Elizabeth’s. I’m not curious about the details. I don’t care if he’s the child’s father or not.

Now, I recognize all the reasons why people are upset: What was he thinking, either when he had the affair or when he decided to go ahead and run for president anyway? It’s scary to imagine what would be happening now if he had won the primaries and this story was coming out just weeks before the convention that was supposed to nominate him. Or if Obama had already named him VP.

But none of that happened. Edwards’ political career is pretty much over now, at least for the foreseeable future, and that seems like an adequate public punishment. As for the price he will pay or deserves to pay in his private life … it’s impossible to see into other people’s marriages, even though we all imagine that we can.

I voted for Edwards, said nice things about him online, and gave money to his campaign. I did all that for reasons that remain valid: He had the first and best health care plan among the major candidates. He made poverty an issue. More than any of the other candidates, he “got it” — that Democrats have to figure out how to stand up to the Right rather than find new and better ways to imitate them. It’s a shame something from his personal life has blown all that away.

And why was I surprised by what followed? Pundits immediately started sparring over whether the scandal hurts Obama (because Edwards endorsed him) or McCain (because he’s had an affair). It’s sad. We’re fighting two wars; our civil liberties, the transparency of our government, and the separation of powers have all seriously eroded during the past 7 years; our financial system is in trouble; unemployment is rising; our health care system is badly broken; and the 2009 budget deficit is now estimated at $490 billion. McCain and Obama have very different ideas about how to deal with these problems. Are people really going to base their votes on a sex scandal about somebody else? I’m with digby:

we use this natural fascination with private sexual behavior in the United States these days as some sort of proxy for the public character of our politicians, as if this tells us something so important about them that it supersedes anything else we might know about them. But it’s a fallacy, since we can’t know enough about their marriages or their inner lives to be able to accurately judge these behaviors. So we end up with some sort of cookie cutter morality that leads us to reject a politician who steps out on his wife, allegedly because he’s shown a propensity for “reckless behavior” or lying, while we accept someone who has lied repeatedly in his public life and shown a propensity for recklessness with public policy, because they are harder to understand. But the truth is that private behavior is not a good guide to leadership. There have been too many examples of fine leaders who led complicated personal lives and too many examples of bad ones who never strayed.

Short Notes

The funniest thing I saw this week: the Onion’s “Bush Tours America to Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency“. The story is framed as if Bush’s presidency were a hurricane. Kansas is described as “one of the fifty states in the direct path of the presidency.”

Slate pulls together a bunch of good links on what’s wrong with the health care system and how to fix it.

Like most Americans, I had trouble finding the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia on a map. (It’s northwest of Azerbaijan, if that helps.) Now they’re at war with Russia over a place I had never heard of: Ossetia, whose northern half is in Russia and southern half is in Georgia. Anything more I could write at this point would only add to the ignorance, so I’ll settle for linking to some background here and here.

Mission Accomplished II: Guess what? “The war in Iraq is over. We’ve won.” So says the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens. That’s the kind of scoop the WSJ never used to get in the bad old days before Rupert Murdoch bought it. Unfortunately, the four U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq in the five days following Stephens’ announcement will not be attending the victory parade.

You have to admire the courage of someone like Stephens. If he turns out to be wrong … it will never be mentioned again and he will go on being a pundit. That’s how things work.

Thomas Friedman describes how Denmark became energy independent by the artful use of taxes and government regulations.

Here’s another of those graphs showing exactly how big the gap between the very rich and the rest of us is getting.

On FireDogLake Blue Texan annotates Bush’s message to the Chinese, which is a good lesson in what has happened to America’s moral authority over the past seven years. And Julia pulls together comments on the Hamdan case.
August 11, 2008 – 11:49 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Recalling the People

Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Priestley, 1802. (Jefferson, who was president at the time he wrote this, was referring to the unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts of the Adams administraton.)

In This Week’s Sift:

  • The Rule of Law Struggles to Re-assert Itself. A variety of just-below-the-radar developments in a wide range of Bush administration scandals.
  • Election notes. McCain goes hard negative. McCain 2000 vs. McCain 2008. A badly reported Obama quote touches off a media frenzy about his “arrogance”. The race card. And maybe McCain really isn’t against global warming after all.
  • Other short notes. The Knoxville shooting is terrorism. Al Gore is really Jor-El. Pakistan might not be on our side. The housing crisis has a ways to go. And more.
The Rule of Law Struggles to Re-assert Itself

This week saw a number of developments on the various fronts where the Bush administration has been flouting the rule of law. These days you need a good diagram to keep all the issues straight.

A number of scandals revolve around this point: Three kinds of people work for an administration

  • political operatives, who work for the president and/or his party.
  • political appointees like the cabinet and the U.S. attorneys. Awarding these jobs to political allies and people who share the president’s values is entirely legal, traditional, and even appropriate. Nonetheless, once in office these officials have well-defined and long-established duties to the United States that should supersede their loyalty to the president and his party.
  • career government employees. These folks are supposed to be non-partisan. They continue in office after the administration changes and their jobs are not supposed to be political spoils.You don’t want FBI agents or IRS auditors or TSA airport security people asking you who you voted for.

The essence of the Department of Justice scandals is that the administration ignored these distinctions. In the U.S. attorney scandal they tried to make political appointees act like political operatives, and fired ones who wouldn’t play ball. The Siegelman case is about prosecutors who would play ball, prosecuting a Democratic governor to get him off the political stage. The Goodling scandal is about treating career positions as political appointments.

Let’s start with Goodling. Last Monday the Department of Justice’s inspector general issued a report about Monica Goodling’s hiring practices while she was one of the top DoJ officials. Here’s the conclusion:

Our investigation found that Goodling improperly subjected candidates for certain career positions to the same politically based evaluation she used on candidates for political positions, in violation of federal law and Department policy.

When interviewing candidates, Goodling asked questions like “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” The problem: Career Justice employees don’t serve George W. Bush. They serve the United States of America. Or at least, they do under the rule of law.

dday on Hullabaloo culls through the inspector general’s report for the details. The sleaziest story was how Goodling apparently got rid of a Justice Department prosecutor because she was rumored to be a lesbian.

If we’re lucky, the worst that comes out of Goodling’s misdeeds is that the career employees at Justice will be skewed towards religious and political conservatives for years to come. But dday makes a more ominous speculation: If these people think of themselves as political appointees, whose real career path is in the conservative/Republican political establishment, then they will essentially be moles in any future Democratic administration.

[Y]ou are going to see all kinds of whistleblowers and martyrs coming out of the woodwork in an Obama Administration, telling lurid and probably false tales accusing them of exactly what the Bush Administration put into practice and more. And they will be held up on the right as shining examples of patriots who understand how the rule of law must be respected at all times.

Moving on to the next scandal, federal Judge John Bates (a Republican who worked with Kenneth Starr on the Whitewater investigation of Clinton, appointed a judge by President Bush) rejected the adminstration’s claims that former administration officials Harriet Miers and John Bolton should be exempt from congressional subpoena to testify about the firing of the U.S. attorneys. Marty Lederman analyzes the ruling here, and provides links to the text.

Karl Rove is offering the same excuse for his refusal to testify to the House Judiciary Committee about the Siegelman case. The committee voted to recommend that he be charged with contempt of Congress, putting him on the same path that Miers and Bolton went down. The Bush Justice Department — being a political operation and not a department of justice — refused prosecute the charge against Miers and Bolton, and presumably won’t prosecute Rove either. The congressional investigation into the Siegelman case was requested by bipartisan group of 44 former state attorneys general.

Now, administrations have claimed executive privilege before, but these cases take it to a whole new level. A proper claim would be on a question-by-question basis: If Congress asked Rove or Miers or Bolton about their conversations with the president, they might well claim that those conversations are privileged. But refusing to show up at all, before knowing exactly what the committee will ask — well, it’s stunning, and Judge Bates found it “entirely unsupported by existing case law.” And if Rove and the president were not involved in the Siegelman case (as Rove claims), then it’s hard to imagine how executive privilege legitmately comes into play at all.

So Miers and Bolton, and presumably Rove down the road, have a court order telling them to submit to a congressional subpoena. It used to be that in America you didn’t need to wonder what would happen next — they’d show up. But under the Bush Imperium, who knows?

Leaving the Politics Department Justice Department, you probably thought that Hurricane Katrina malfeasance stories were over by now. But no, there’s still one more: FEMA has warehoused a bunch of victim supplies ever since, and has now declared them to be government surplus — without ever asking anybody in Louisianna or Mississippi if they wanted the stuff.

And finally, Valtin on DailyKos argues that the timeline on torture goes back to December, 2001 — more than half a year earlier than previously thought. By July, 2002, (which is currently believed to be when the torture story starts) a number of presidential findings and other legal fig leaves were in place. But if the story starts sooner, Valtin claims, the war crimes charges are harder to dodge.

Election Notes
Trash Talk Replaces Straight Talk. During the last two weeks, during and after Obama’s successful foreign tour, the McCain campaign has gone full frontal negative, complete with some subtle but definite racial overtones. They threw around some false charges about Obama’s cancelled visit to a military hospital in Germany, blamed Obama for rising gas prices, said Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election, and then did some negative ads they claim are humorous: Celebrity and The One, which poke at the adoration Obama gets. (Seems like sour grapes to me. McCain would think it was great if he could draw huge, enthusiastic crowds. But he can’t, so it’s bad.)

It amazes me how many people can’t see the Obama-and-slutty-white-women theme in the visuals of the Celebrity ad. Or the racial odor to the whole he’s-not-one-of-us theme or the he-doesn’t-know-his-place theme in the other attacks. (David Gergen gets it. So does Bob Herbert.) (Here’s a parody of Celebrity. The official catalog of McCain ads is here. )

Other comments on the low road McCain is taking: the Washington Independent, Time’s Joe Klein, the Economist, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, Salon’s Joe Conason, New York Magazine, and David Kiley of that well-known liberal bastion Business Week. Kiley writes:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch.

Not the man he used to be. The word is starting to get out that if you liked McCain in 2000, you need to take a second look because he has changed.

You can tell that a meme is catching on when a bunch of independent commenters use the same words. Thursday I was reading David Ignatius’ WaPo column about how McCain should return to his “true voice” — that of his 1999 autobiography Faith of My Fathers. WaPo lets you leave comments, so I started mine “The McCain of 1999 is long gone.”

By coincidence, my comment appeared right after two others: “The John McCain you write about is long gone …” and “McCain is no longer that man …” Now, sometimes stuff like that happens because a bunch of dittoheads repeat the same Rush Limbaugh line. But since I am one of the people doing it this time, I know that I believed I thought of those words myself.

Here are some specifics: McCain 2000 had a conflicted opinion on abortion and expressed concern about the “illegal and dangerous operations” that women would suffer without Roe v. Wade. McCain 2008 is unequivocal: “Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned.” McCain 2000 criticized the proposed Bush tax cut by talking about the “lucky millionaire” who would get a much bigger break from Bush’s plan than McCain’s. McCain 2008 wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and make more cuts that will benefit the wealthy. McCain 2000 denounced religious right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance” and decried “the evil influence that they exercise over the Republican Party.” McCain 2008 gave the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University and sought the endorsement of an even nuttier agent of intolerance, John Hagee.

Fox News is making McCain look younger by sneaking in video from his 2000 campaign.

This kind of stuff never happens to Republicans. WaPo reporter Dana Milbank blogged a second-hand, unsourced Obama quote that made him sound puffed-up: “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for. … I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” TV pundits picked this up and ran with it, echoing the Republican talking points that Obama is “arrogant” and “presumptuous”.

Except … it turns out the quote was way out of context, and the context turns it completely around. WaPo’s The Trail blog eventually got around to publishing the preface to the quote: “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol.”

The LA Times “On the Media” column comments: “It all would be quite funny if many people didn’t seem to be inhaling this multimedia stink bomb as if it were fragrant truth.”

Naturally, no apologies from anyone involved, and the narrative about Obama’s uppity nature rolls on. The lesson — which we should have learned in 2000 and 2004 — is that gaffes aren’t required. Once a narrative is in place, supporting evidence can be manufactured as needed.

Another tale of manufactured outrage begins (if you tell the story properly) here: On June 27, the McCain campaign released an attack ad that featured, among other images, Barack Obama’s face on a dollar bill. Obama then said this:

what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.

And the McCain campaign responded: “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.”

But the McCain ad that started this exchange isn’t mentioned by anybody in the media, so Obama’s dollar-bill comment seems to come completely out of the blue. As a result a poll shows that 53% of the public buys the line that Obama is injecting race into the campaign.

Meanwhile, zenbowl on DailyKos shows some of the places where “the race card” has already been played.

Bob Cesca jumps on the Obama-isn’t-one-of-us theme:

The Republicans … set the tone of the debate. The corporate media accepts their terms, their rules and their frames as a given and the Democrats are expected to jump and dash and explain themselves based upon those givens, irrespective of how ludicrous they happen to be.

Prove to us that you’re one of us. Prove to us that you support the troops. Prove to us that you’re patriotic. Prove to us that you’re not an effete snob. Prove to us that you can talk to a gathering of bumpkins in a diner like a plainspoken Republican can. Prove to us that you’re not the enemy. Prove to us that you’re not presumptuous.

McCain, meanwhile, wears $500 Italian shoes, married an heiress who has $225,000 of credit card debt she’s too rich to pay attention to, and he’s never had a non-government job. But for some reason he never needs to prove that he’s one of us.

I’ve been ignoring the endless VP speculation on the blogs because it’s a waste of time. But I want to get my Republican prediction on record: Mitt Romney.

A Washington Post editorial makes the connection between Republicans’ vague, trumped-up charges of vote fraud and attempts to “scare new voters away from the polls”.

Global warming is supposed to be the signature issue that proves McCain is different from Bush. But it seems to depend on the audience. While talking to CNN’s conservative pundit Glenn Beck, McCain adviser Steve Forbes made McCain’s cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse gases sound like window dressing: “I don’t think those things are going to get very far as people start to examine the details of them.”

Short Notes: Not election

I’ve been wondering what to say about the shooting at the Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville. (The most complete set of links is at the UUA web site.) I’m a UU myself, and have to confess that it’s unsettling to think of someone intentionally targeting members of my faith, even if it is just one lone bozo.

What I find missing from the general media coverage is the word terrorism. If this were a Sunni shooting up a Shia mosque in Baghdad, we’d all instantly recognize it as terrorism. When the Earth Liberation Front burns down a house, the New York Times calls it terrorism. But not here. White conservatives can’t be terrorists, it seems.

But the next time someone tries to tell me there haven’t been any terrorist attacks in America since 9-11, I’m going to mention Knoxville.

The pattern continues: Iraq casualties down, Afghanistan casualties up. In July, 13 coalition troops (all Americans) were killed in Iraq. (I almost wrote “only 13”. It’s easy to get into that mindset, and forget that you’re talking about people’s lives.) 30 killed in Afghanistan; it’s harder to tell from the way the web site is laid out, but at least 20 of them were Americans.

Sometimes a piece is just funny, even if you like the guy it’s making fun of. The Onion inserts Al Gore (or Gor-Al) into the Jor-El role of the Superman myth: Al Gore Places Infant Son in Rocket to Escape Dying Planet. It makes Gore look ridiculous, but the parallels really are striking.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get your letters to the editor published, author John K. Wilson explains how. He wrote this on the same day he got a letter published in the New York Times, so he must know what he’s talking about. (I’ve also gotten a bunch of letters published, and agree completely with what he’s saying, especially Rule 9: Make One Point.)

Remember how Pakistan was supposed to be on our side? Well, maybe not. The ISI — Pakistan’s version of the CIA — might have been behind the bombing of the Indian embassy in Afghanistan, which killed 54 people. If so, then they’re working with an ally of Al Qaeda.

In an interview in the current issue of Barron’s (no link without subscription), NYU economist Nouriel Roubini predicts bad loans from the housing bubble could eventually mount to $2 trillion. Bank write-offs so far are “only” $300 billion.

We are in the second inning of a severe, protracted recession, which started in the first quarter of this year and is going to last at least 18 months, through the middle of next year. A systemic banking crisis will go on for awhile, with hundreds of banks going belly up.

Insiders in the industry know that the debate about offshore drilling is largely moot, at least in the short term. Consider this paragraph from the most recent annual report of Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company:

Our ultra-deepwater, deepwater and harsh-environment fleet is almost fully committed in 2008, with little availability in 2009 and 2010. We also have a large number of long-term, forward-start contracts, some of which provide fleet commitments beyond 2014. Similarly, few of our midwater rigs have availability in 2008, with a substantial portion of our midwater fleet contracted well into 2009. In addition, our jackup fleet is more than 80 percent committed in 2008. Our significant contract backlog gives us confidence that we will continue to see strong financial performance in the years ahead.

In other words, the bottleneck in the industry is a shortage of rigs, not places to drill. Releasing more land to offshore drilling would probably not increase the number of wells drilled between now and 2011.

Here’s a great graphic, illustrating that the U.S. isn’t as healthy as the other rich countries. Our death rate for children under 5 is about the same as Cuba’s and way below Sweden’s.

August 4, 2008 – 3:02 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Changing the Current

The Old Order Amish of Pennsylvania, who live a life poor in appliances but rich in community, had a depression rate about one-tenth that of their neighbors. … We don’t need to become Amish, but we do need to start building an economy that works for our current needs, rather than constantly readjusting our lives to serve the growth of the economy. — Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

In this Week’s Sift:

  • How Reasonable is Gore’s Challenge? It’s easy to find opinions about Al Gore’s speech challenging the U.S. to get all its electricity from renewable sources in ten years. But it’s much harder to pull together credible information about how ready renewable energy sources are to meet that challenge.
  • Media Bias: In Whose Favor? The networks cover Obama more than McCain, but they say more bad things about Obama while ignoring McCain’s mistakes. The “liberal media” may be the biggest myth the conservative media ever sold us.
  • Short Notes. The length of the Gore article has pushed this Sift up to my self-imposed length limit. Short Notes will be back next week.

How Reasonable is Gore’s Challenge?

Last week I promised an article about Al Gore’s challenge to produce 100% of our electricity from renewable sources in ten years.

Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down. Feeding Al Gore’s name into Google News gets you a wide range of opinion and analysis. Penn & Teller did an episode of their TV show “Bullshit” on Gore, global warming, and the idea of buying carbon credits. (My reaction: They ridicule some sources and give an uncritical platform to others for no apparent reason beyond what they seem to want to believe.) Real Clear Politics’ Jack Kelly is also a skeptic. And Mark Davis in the Dallas Morning News asks: “Who are we to assert that we know the planet’s ideal temperature?”

If you want to read upbeat reviews of Gore’s speech, check out the Toledo Blade, the Hartford Courant (which also published this critical reader response), or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

That’s the kind of stuff I was finding last week: people who agree or disagree, but nobody who was telling me anything to help me make up my mind. That’s why I punted to this week’s Sift, so that I could dig a little deeper.

Framing the message. In terms of political strategy, I think Gore has it exactly right. There are two main ways to push policy in a more environmentally sound direction. One is a “Repent, sinners!” approach that emphasizes the wasteful and extravagant nature of the American lifestyle. This case is easy to make — we use something like 1/4th of the world’s oil with less than 1/20th of the world’s population — but it’s not a very effective political message. Ronald Reagan once summed up conservation as being hot in the summer and cold in the winter. That’s not a campaign promise anybody can run on.

Gore, on the other hand, is saying that a new era is coming and the United States can lead the world into it. That’s an optimistic, patriotic message. It asks people to be willing to sacrifice to achieve a greater goal, but loses completely the dour, preachy implication that comfort is bad and suffering is good. The parallels with JFK and the space program help a lot. If the national debate gets framed as the environmentalists’ futuristic vision versus the desire of conservatives to keep the old oil economy going just a little bit longer, the environmentalists win.

Gore is also on the mark that ten years is the right time frame:

a political promise to do something 40 years from now is universally ignored because everyone knows that it’s meaningless. Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.

Ten years also is long enough to get us past a course that Gore criticizes as “incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction.”

So yes, I’m totally on board with the shape of Gore’s proposal: A bold goal to be achieved in ten years.

Now, what goal should that be?

Other Plans. In 2003 Howard Dean proposed to generate 20% of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020. But he wasn’t trying to be radical, he just wanted to bring the U.S. up to the standard already being set by Denmark and Holland. (Two weeks ago I linked to this New Yorker article about an island in Denmark that already generates all its own power from wind.) It was a stop-falling-behind vision, not a lead-the-world vision. That it seemed bold at the time says something about the state of American politics.

Last December’s issue of Scientific American published a plan that its authors clearly considered bold. It called for massive solar arrays in the Southwest, storing excess daytime energy as compressed air in underground caverns for use at night, and a long-haul DC transmission network to get power from the Southwest to the rest of the country. (The power would be converted to AC before use; they’re not talking about rewiring the whole country. DC power travels better for reasons I don’t understand.) The authors estimate their plan would generate 69% of America’s electricity by 2050. They call for $420 billion in government subsidies during 2011-2020 to get things rolling, with the program paying for itself thereafter. By 2020 (about the time frame of Gore’s plan) they foresee the DC transmission backbone in place and 84 gigawatts of solar generating capacity, compared to the 3,000 GW they foresee by 2050.

Those numbers are purely solar, and mainly the gigantic array in the Southwest. So the total national renewable-energy capacity, including residential solar panels and wind turbines, would be higher.

If you have a more vigorous imagination, picture putting solar arrays in space, where cloudy days are never an issue. Then you beam the power down to receiving stations on Earth in microwaves that are also not blocked by clouds. The government could launch the first power arrays by 2016, and then hope for private industry to take over, producing 10% of our electrical needs by 2050. The president of the Space Power Association says, “The challenge is one of perception,” which is my nominee for Understatement of the Year. The paranoia potential is immense — “Death Rays From Space” and so forth. Political practicality aside, former NASA executive O. Glenn Smith promoted the idea this week in the New York Times. A detailed report from the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office is here.

Israel is a natural place to look for leadership in renewable energy. They have a concentrated population, a high-tech research infrastructure, a sun-soaked desert, and a national security interest in ending the Age of Oil as fast as possible. And sure enough, they are planning the world’s largest solar plant to be built in the Negev desert by 2012. It’s supposed to supply 500 megawatts of power, or about 5% of Israel’s needs. The director of Ben Gurion University’s Solar Center has predicted that Israel could go totally solar by 2036. I’m not sure whether or not those calculations include the power necessary to convert Israel to electric cars, which is also on the drawing board.

And what could you do if you had infinite amounts of money to play with and could build a city from scratch? The United Arab Emirates intend to find out. They’re planning a zero-carbon-emission city of 50,000 just outside of Abu Dhabi.

Maybe you’ve seen T. Boone Pickens’ recent TV commercials. The clearest explanation of Pickens’ plan is a five-minute video of Pickens in front of a white board; he does a great job, with a little extra help from patched-in graphics. The difference between Pickens and Gore is that Pickens worries only about the impact of imported oil on the U.S. economy, and apparently not at all about global warming or any other environmental issue. For Pickens, the problem is that $700 billion is leaving America each year, “the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.” His solution: Instead of using our domestic natural gas to run power plants, use it to run vehicles, replacing gasoline from foreign oil. Then use wind power to replace the 22% of our electricity that currently comes from natural gas. Like Gore, he sees his plan as a ten-year vision. (Also like Gore, he invests in companies that are doing the stuff he says needs to be done. For some reason I can’t grasp, this supposedly makes Gore a hypocrite, but not Pickens.)

From a global environmental perspective rather than a national economic one, Pickens’ plan is kind of wacky — as explained by Grist’s Joseph Ramm. The craziest environmental thing we currently do is generate half our electricy from coal. Pickens’ plan leaves that intact, because coal is a domestic fuel. (Foreign = Bad; Dirty = OK.) As fossil fuels go, natural gas is our cleanest way to generate electricity. And an electricity-generating plant can burn natural gas at 60% efficiency, while a natural-gas-burning car operates at 15-20% efficiency. So Pickens has us do this massive turn-over of our infrastructure (cars that burn natural gas; stations that distribute it) and the result is that we wind up still burning fossil fuels in our cars and generating our electricity with coal. Ramm says: Build the wind farms, and use the electricity either to phase out coal or to fuel plug-in hybrid cars.

I did learn one important thing from Pickens’ video: The best place for wind farms is in the Great Plains, in a north-south strip that sits just to the east of the prime solar territory. Politically, this is huge. Local special interests could get middle-of-the-country senators from Arizona to North Dakota — mostly Republicans currently — to back an alternative energy plan.

That’s what currently happens with ethanol, which (along with other biofuels) gets a mixed review from National Geographic:

Biofuels as currently rendered in the U.S. are doing great things for some farmers and for agricultural giants like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, but little for the environment. Corn requires large doses of herbicide and nitrogen fertilizer and can cause more soil erosion than any other crop. And producing corn ethanol consumes just about as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces. Biodiesel from soybeans fares only slightly better.

But the same article claims ethanol from sugar cane (the way Brazil does it) has an 8-to-1 energy payoff, compared to 1.3-to-1 for corn ethanol. So biofuel is not a total chimera. And energy from bio-byproducts makes a lot of local sense. You’d never start raising cows just to get methane from their manure, but if you already have a dairy it’s an obvious win. Ditto for running vehicles on used cooking oil, as my local fried-chicken-delivery place does. Ditto for co-generation, where the waste heat of some industrial process is captured. What kind of national impact idiosyncratic projects like these can make is hard to estimate, but I’ll bet the current estimates are too low.

Summing Up. So what have I concluded from my week of alternative-energy web-browsing? I think the most important thing Gore (with independent help from Pickens) has done is move the Overton Window, the range of ideas that Serious People are willing to talk about. Getting up to 20% renewable power by 2020 seemed pie-in-the-sky when Dean proposed it in 2003. But Pickens is proposing that much power from wind alone, and nobody is laughing. If President Obama’s inaugural address contains a proposal for 50% renewable power by 2020 and 100% by 2050, it will sound reasonable. Building a political coalition behind it will be easier than most people think. There’s a culture clash to overcome, but a skillful president could get Pickens-style nationalists working with Gore-style environmentalists.

Second, there are some common elements in everybody’s plans. For example, an upgraded electricity transmission grid, with some kind of DC long-haul capability. We need it, and a lot of corporations stand to make money building it, so the politics should work. (I just bought stock in General Cable Corporation, which should profit from such a plan. Does that make me a hypocrite like Gore or a patriot like Pickens?)

Right now, if you’re somewhere with a prevailing wind, wind power works. Solar is at an earlier stage, but it works if you’re in a sunny place and can use the power immediately not too far away. (I noticed this week that those portable signs announcing road construction are solar-powered now.) The main economic problem with each is the up-front money; once you’ve got the wind turbine or the solar panel in place, you don’t have to pay for the wind or sun. But that’s the kind of financing problem governments have been solving since the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos subsidized olive tree planting in 500-something BC. (The trees wouldn’t be productive for 15 years. That’s why the olive branch became a sign of peace: there’s no point planting olive trees unless you think you can go 15 years without having your fields burned.) It’s mainly a question of political will, not technology.

But do I believe that Gore’s goal is feasible as stated? Not yet. Maybe a Kennedy-like man-on-the-Moon research project would yield some startling breakthrough like near-perfect-efficiency batteries or large-scale economically-viable superconductors. But things like that are hard to predict and can’t be counted on. And if we go to plug-in cars, that moves the goal posts for the electricity-generating problem.

But even though I don’t expect to see the result Gore called for, I’m glad he did it. That such an idea is out there and being talked about changes the political dynamic for the next proposal.

Media Bias: In Whose Favor?

All three network anchors decided to accompany Obama on his recent foreign tour, and the result was predictable: numerous statements-of-fact that the mainstream media is “in the tank” for Obama. (See a collage of Fox News repeating this talking point here.) A blog called the Tyndall Report got a lot of press when it appeared to make this point quantitative:

In the seven weeks since the primary season ended (04jun08-23jul08), John McCain has logged 67 minutes on the three broadcast networks’ weekday nightly newscasts, Barack Obama 166.

But (and this wasn’t mentioned by most of the folks who quoted Tyndall) that same Tyndall post doesn’t say the media is biased in Obama’s favor. Instead, it makes a case for obsession, not favoritism:

Obama gets more positive coverage, more negative coverage and more trivial coverage. Who else has stories filed about them on how he shakes hands with his wife?

Think about that three weeks of non-stop Jeremiah Wright coverage in the spring: Obama certainly dominated the news, but hardly because the media was trying to get him elected. The Center for Media and Public Affairs did the math and found that in fact it’s John McCain who gets the advantage from media bias:

when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative. Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative

I think even that understates matters, because the most important measure of bias is whose talking points get repeated. And there I think McCain is the clear winner. I don’t have numbers, but you can probably verify this from your own experience: Compare how many times Obama is asked whether he was wrong about the Surge to the number of times McCain is asked whether he was wrong to want to invade Iraq in the first place. The link in the last sentence is the first time I’ve heard anyone ask McCain that question, while I’ve heard Obama confronted with the Surge countless times, starting at least back in January.

A second measure of media bias is what happens to candidate gaffes. Compare the coverage of Obama’s “bitter” remark to any of a number of more serious McCain gaffes — including the one where he describes the way Social Security has run since FDR set it up as “an absolute disgrace“. And McCain made a huge mistake during a recent interview with Katie Couric: He said the Surge caused the Anbar Awakening, when the proven chronology runs the other way. This isn’t a minor flub like when he says “Czechoslovakia” instead of “the Czech Republic”, it’s evidence that even on the issues that he builds his campaign around McCain doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So what did CBS News do with this major gaffe? They edited it out of the interview. Keith Olbermann’s people unearthed it from the unedited transcript on the CBS News web site.

McCain’s screw-ups, according to the mainstream media, just aren’t news. Obama’s are. The NYT’s Bob Herbert finally gets this point into his supposedly liberal newspaper. And one other Herbert point: Negative coverage of Obama is supposedly justified by the excuse that the voters don’t know him well enough yet. But how well do we know McCain? All we know is what he wants to tell us: “The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy.” Is that true? Does he have views on other issues? Does he tell the same views to every audience? Nobody wants to poke at that story too hard.

I’ll give two other people the last words. RKA on DailyKos:

But isn’t it kind of cynical that the media gives Obama’s trip a lot of coverage and simultaneously talks incessantly about how they are giving Obama too much coverage? If the media were truly in Obama’s tank, there would be no navel gazing about their own coverage decisions. They would just slant the coverage and get on with it. But they don’t. They offer themselves up as whipping boy to help John McCain turn lemons into lemonade.

Drew Westen:

But it’s easy to confuse biased reporting with accurate reporting about a candidate who inspires voters. Reporting on that inspiration, or simply showing crowd response, is no less “objective” than reporting on voters who aren’t convinced that he shares their values or is enough like them to vote for him … [P]eople connect with Barack Obama in a way they don’t with John McCain. He draws crowds that dwarf McCain’s, and he excites enthusiasm both at home and abroad that McCain simply can’t excite. And that’s the news.

July 28, 2008 – 3:15 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Re-telling Bush’s Story

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. — Al Gore

In This Week’s Sift:

  • The Election’s Central Issue. Is George Bush a bad president who coincidentally happens to be conservative? Or are his administration’s failures the culmination of decades of conservative policies?
  • Gore’s Moon Shot. I’m still trying to figure out what I think about Al Gore’s call for 100% carbon-free electricity in ten years.
  • What Real Conservatives Want. The Texas Republican platform demonstrates how radical the party’s base is. Democrats should make McCain and all other Republicans say whether they agree with it or not.
  • Short Notes. What Michelle means to black professional women. Who’s still in high school: bloggers or mainstream media pundits? We’re #12! Snuggly the Security Bear explains FISA. And same-sex marriage is on its way to becoming no big deal in Massachusetts — just like I said it would.

The Election’s Central Issue

This election has many individual issues — the wars, health care, the economy, global warming, civil liberties, etc. — but behind them all lies one simple question: How will the American people tell the story of George W. Bush?

It’s not whether he has been a good president or a bad president. That’s been decided. Bush has one of the lowest approval ratings ever (23% at last count), and has been unpopular for a long time. His approval has been below 40% in Gallup’s survey (which is more favorable to Bush than most, currently 29%) since January, 2006. By comparison, at this point in his presidency Bill Clinton (already impeached-but-not-removed by then) had a Gallup approval number double Bush’s, 58% vs. 29%.

My personal suspicion is that these numbers underestimate Bush’s unpopularity. At 23%, you’re down to the people who feel like they have to defend you. I’ll bet a poll coupled with a polygraph would net a much lower number. As soon as Bush is off the stage those 23% will never invoke his name again, just as no Republican brings up Nixon today. (Gallup showed Nixon with 24% approval just before he left office. I wonder how many people would admit to belonging to that 24% a year or two later.)

The unresolved question, though, is: Why was Bush such a bad president? The Republicans can win this election if they can sell the story that Bush’s problems are personal, that he made some bad judgments another conservative Republican wouldn’t make. This is the line McCain pushes on Iraq: Bush listened to Rumsfeld and invaded without enough troops, then didn’t employ a good counter-insurgency strategy. But Rumsfeld has been fired, the strategy has been fixed, and we’re finally on track for the victory that we should have had in 2003. Bush bungled Katrina, but that was just bad management — and management is a non-partisan skill. On the economy, Bush just wasn’t conservative enough: He didn’t control Congress’ runaway spending. (The fact that Congress was controlled by Republicans during most of the Bush years is conveniently forgotten.)

The Democrats need to tell a different story: The Bush presidency’s failures are the natural result of three big conservative ideas that go back to Ronald Reagan: Don’t tax the rich, don’t regulate business, and wave a big stick at the rest of the world. Replacing Bush changes nothing if we don’t reject those ideas.

The last 28 years — Clinton stalled the trend but didn’t reverse it — has been a more-than-fair test of this conservative philosophy, which we now see doesn’t work. If you cut rich people’s taxes, they get a lot richer, the government borrows a lot of money, and the benefits never trickle down. If you de-regulate corporations, you don’t get reasonably priced health care for all, you get Enron, MCI, and the mortgage crisis.* If you take a might-makes-right approach to other countries, they won’t cooperate. You’ll spend trillions sending troops all over the world, until you have no more troops to send.

Which of those failed conservative policies do McCain or the Republican Congressional candidates reject? Maybe they’re ready to stop denying global warming** — some of them, sort of, maybe. But McCain proposes more tax cuts targeted at the rich.*** He promises more wars. The center of his health care plan is a tax deduction plus a proposal to de-regulate health insurance companies, and he makes this vacuous promise, which is unsupported by any specifics whatever:

John McCain understands that those without prior group coverage and those with pre-existing conditions have the most difficulty on the individual market, and we need to make sure they get the high-quality coverage they need.

In other words, if you have a pre-existing condition, John McCain feels your pain. Kind of.

So here’s the story Democrats need to tell to the 77% of Americans who say the country is on the wrong track. It’s not on the wrong track because President Bush made some bizarre wrong turn. He just went eight years further down the road laid out by Ronald Reagan, and this is where it leads. John McCain and the Republicans running for Congress want to keep going further down that road. Obama and the Democrats don’t. If Democrats can convince the country to tell Bush’s story that way, they’ll have a landslide in November.

* I’m reminded of the commercials that John Houseman made in the Eighties for Smith Barney, which is now part of Citibank. “They make money the old-fashioned way,” he asserted forcefully. “They earn it.” The folks running Enron made money the really old-fashioned way — they stole it. That’s what big executives do when they know no one is watching them. Want more Enrons? Keep de-regulating.

** I haven’t read the entire 2004 Republican Platform, but I know it doesn’t contain the words warming or climate. The 2008 Platform of the Texas Republican Party says: “We oppose taxes levied and regulations imposed based on the alleged threat of global warming.” If McCain tries to put something about global warming into the national platform, there’s going to be a nasty fight. I’m betting he doesn’t.

*** On his web site the plan to eliminate the Alternate Minimum Tax is promoted as a tax cut for “middle class families” with no mention of the rich. But the AMT was originally targeted only at the rich. Now it hits some families in the upper half of the middle class, because Bush lowered the non-AMT tax rates and left the AMT alone. Even so, in 2010 90% of the AMT will be paid by households with incomes over $100,000. McCain also proposes a cut in the corporate tax rate. Millions of middle-class Americans own some small amount of corporate stock, but the overwhelming majority of the benefit from a corporate tax cut goes to the very wealthy. He’ll tell you it will trickle down, but it never does.

Gore’s Moon Shot

“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years,” Al Gore said Thursday. (Here’s the text and video of Gore’s speech.) He compared this challenge to JFK’s pledge to put a man on the Moon, which seemed far-fetched at the time but actually came in ahead of schedule.

I’m looking for thoughtful commentary about how realistic Gore’s goal is, and I’m finding darn little of it. If you see something I should look at, either append a comment on the blog or email me. I’ll return to this story next week.

What Real Conservatives Want

In most states the Republican Party has to wear a mask of reasonability. But in Texas they get to let it all hang out. The 2008 Platform of the Texas Republican Party is worth a read. In fact, I’d recommend that Democrats distribute this platform nationwide and make it as well known as possible. Here are some highlights:

The embodiment of the Conservative Dream in America is Texas. … This platform is indeed the heart and soul of our Party.

We reaffirm our belief in … eliminating the Endangered Species Act. … We oppose taxes levied and regulations imposed based on the alleged threat of global warming. … we oppose subsidizing alternative fuel production

We believe the Minimum Wage Law should be repealed.

We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax.

Life begins at the moment of fertilization and ends at the point of natural death. All innocent human life must be protected. … We are resolute regarding the reversal of Roe v. Wade. … We oppose sale and use of the dangerous “Morning After Pill.” … we urge Congress to withhold Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom, and the Bill of Rights.

We believe [affirmative action] is simply racism disguised as a social virtue. … We demand abolition of bilingual education. … We have room for but one language here and that is the English language. … We urge immediate repeal of the Hate Crimes Law.

We further call on Congress to pass and the state legislatures to ratify a marriage amendment declaring that marriage in the United States shall consist of and be recognized only as the union of a natural man and a natural woman. Neither the United States nor any state shall recognize or grant to any unmarried person the legal rights or status of a spouse. … We urge the Legislature to rescind no–fault divorce laws. … We oppose … adoption by homosexuals.

We oppose any sex education other than abstinence until heterosexual marriage. … We urge Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development. … We urge the Legislature, Governor, Commissioner of Education and State Board of Education to remind administrators and school boards that corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas. … We support objective teaching and equal treatment of strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories, including Intelligent Design. … We pledge our influence … toward dispelling the myth of separation of church and state.

We believe the Legislature should enact legislation: allowing: Concealed Handgun License holders to carry concealed weapons on publicly owned institutions of learning

No extraordinary medical care, including organ transplants or body part replacement, should be performed on prisoners at taxpayer expense.

The Internal Revenue Service is unacceptable to U. S. taxpayers! We urge that the IRS be abolished and the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution be repealed. We further urge that the personal income tax, alternative minimum tax, inheritance (death) tax, gift tax, capital gains, corporate income tax, and payroll tax be eliminated. We recommend the implementation of a national retail sales tax

There is no substitute for Victory! We commend and support the Bush Administration’s current policy regarding our military operations fighting the War on Terror and confronting radical Islamist terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries around the world. … There should be no “time-table” applied to the withdrawal of our forces. … We oppose any plan to close Guantanamo

Our [Israel] policy is based on God’s biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel … We should not reward terrorism by allowing a Palestinian state carved out of historical Israel.

We demand Congress stop funding the IMF and any other international financing agencies. … We … urge our Texas Senators to unalterably oppose any agreement or treaty that seeks to establish an International Criminal Court (ICC) … We urge Congress to evict the United Nations from the United States and eliminate any further participation.

These statements are scattered throughout the document, but aren’t taken out of context in any way. The ellipses (…) are honest. I’m picking a few items from long lists, and grouping related items that may not be next to each other in the original. But the subjects and predicates really are intended to go together.

One reason Democrats lose is that we consistently allow Republicans to tell one story to their extremist base and another to the swing voters. Not just John McCain, but Republicans all over the country need to be asked about statements like the ones above. Do they repudiate the extremist Republican base, or do they support it?

Short Notes

Sophia Nelson writes a black professional woman’s perspective on Michelle Obama for the Washington Post. Obama’s treatment from the media comes as no surprise to Nelson, who presents a world in which stereotyping is the norm. If you’re noticed at all, then you’re seen as either a vixen or as angry. “This society can’t even see a woman like Michelle Obama.” To Nelson, Obama represents the have-it-all vision: “an accomplished black woman can be a loyal and supportive wife and a good mother and still fulfill her own dreams.” Nelson reports that 70% of black professional women are unmarried, and that they’re five times more likely than white women to be single at 40. From that point of view, Michelle really is a revolutionary.

Netroots Nation — the annual gathering of liberal bloggers that was called YearlyKos last summer — happened in Austin this week. (I wasn’t there.) The Washington Post coverage dripped with condescension. “If the Netroots can be compared to high school …” it said in the first paragraph, and continued the metaphor throughout the story. If you want to make your own judgments, the online video is here.

Media Matters turns that metaphor around while discussing the mainstream media’s attempt to create an issue around Obama’s “likability” or his ability to “connect with regular people” when polls consistently fail to find any such problem. The MSM pundits are like the middle-school in-crowd telling you who it’s OK to like. “Like cliquish teens, the D.C. pundit class is all too happy to make up a reason why you should dislike a candidate if a real reason fails to present itself.”

Frank Rich is one of the few mainstream journalists giving McCain’s statements any scrutiny at all:

In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.

I just finished George Soros’ short new book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. Basically, Soros has One Big Point he’s been trying to make ever since he wrote The Alchemy of Finance in 1987, and every few years he writes a book interpreting the current crisis in terms of that Point. The OBP: If you’re inside the system you’re modeling, and if your ideas are going to take off, then your model needs to account for its own effects.

The mortgage crisis really is a good example. The people who created the complicated packages of mortgages (that are blowing up now) were counting on two facts about the real estate market: (1) It was generally stable, and (2) each local market had its own cycle. So a package of geographically diversified mortgages should have been super-stable, stable even if the individual mortgages that made it up were a little shaky. It didn’t work because the mortgage packages themselves linked and destablized the local real estate markets. They created a flood of cheap financing that produced an unsustainable across-the-board boom, and made a path by which problems in one local market could propagate to the rest.

Why am I not reassured by this? The ultimate domino that could fall in the mortgage crisis — after the U.S. government eats the sins of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, who ate the sins of various mortgage lenders — is that foreigners might stop wanting to own dollars or buy our government bonds. The argument that this won’t happen is that just as the government considers Fannie and Freddie too big to fail, the foreign big-money types consider the U.S. too big to fail. They’ll keep loaning us money because the alternative is too dire.

We’re #12! A consortium of foundations has computed the “human development index” of the fifty states and the U.S. as a whole. The HDI was designed by the UN to boil a lot of development statistics down to one big number, as a general evaluation of the progress of developing countries. But what if you apply it to the developed countries? Turns out the U.S. is 12th in the world for 2005, the most recent year for which numbers are available. In 1990 we were second. But because we’re fat and uninsured, our life expectancy — one of the component numbers of the HDI — has slipped to 42nd in the world, behind places like Costa Rica. We also lead the other 30 richest nations in children-in-poverty and people-in-prison.

The BBC posts a state-by-state map of the HDI. It bears a striking resemblance to our political map: The Northeast and California are highly developed, the South poorly developed. It’s no wonder Colorado and Virginia are getting bluer, they have high HDIs compared to the neighboring states.

This week’s internet animation: Snuggly the Security Bear explains the FISA compromise. Scott Bateman animates and anotates Bill O’Reilly talking with Karl Rove about defying a congressional subpoena — it’s really no worse than turning down an invitation to appear on O’Reilly’s show.

Interesting piece in the NYT by Gail Collins about how uncontroversial same-sex marriage is becoming in Massachusetts. The state senate just approved a bill allowing out-of-state same-sex couples to be married in Massachusetts — by voice vote, without objection. Collins comments: “There is no greater force against bigotry than the moment when something becomes so routine that you stop noticing it.”

All of which leads up to my I-told-you-so moment. One of the first things I ever blogged about was the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage in November, 2003. The final paragraph of that essay was:

Personally, I expect the same-sex marriage issue to follow the same course as interracial marriage. After a few years of Chicken-Little panic, the vast majority of Americans will recognize that the sky has not fallen, and that the new rights of homosexuals have come at the expense of no one.

July 21, 2008 – 1:20 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

A Government of Men, Not Laws

I think it might, in fact, be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would say that, that we have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law. — Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University

In This Week’s Sift:

  • FISA Wrap-Up. The good guys lost on this one. And when the key moment came, Obama wasn’t one of the good guys.
  • Another Shoe Drops. A few months ago the government had to bail out Bear Stearns. Now it’s bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Who’s next?
  • Stop Whining, Everybody. McCain’s top economic adviser thinks the American people are a bunch of whiners. But I thought it was us elitest liberals who were supposed to look down on ordinary folks.
  • Bad Day in a Bad Place. Nine American soldiers died in Afghanistan Sunday. And that’s not the worst of it.
  • Short Notes. A Chinese bullet train. The Times and Post cover something other than the news. The New Yorker has a controversial cover. Florida still can’t get elections right. Plus a bunch of other stuff.

FISA Wrap-Up

Thursday President Bush signed the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which passed the Senate the previous day with Barack Obama voting for it. Some Obama supporters are willing to give him a pass on this, but I’m not. I’m still going to vote for him, but I’m not going to make any excuses for him on this issue.

Wikipedia has a good summary of what’s in the bill. Glenn Greenwald comments:

The most overlooked fact in the entire FISA debate — the aspect of it that renders incoherent the case in favor of the new FISA law or even those who dismiss its significance — is that virtually nobody knows what the spying program they’re immunizing entailed and towards what ends it was used — i.e., whether it was abused for improper purposes. Even those who acknowledge that the warrantless spying program was illegal like to assert that it was implemented for benign and proper counter-terrorism purposes (see Kevin Drum making that claim here) — but they have absolutely no idea whether that is true. None. Zero.

The lawsuits against the telecoms were just about the last chances to get an independent judgment about what happened, and they have now been shut down.

Obama makes his case here. He points to two good features of the bill. First:

The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any president or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court. In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people. But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited. As I’ve said many times, an independent monitor must watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people. This compromise law assures that the FISA court has that responsibility.

The problem here is that the original FISA law already asserted exclusivity. The issue wasn’t the FISA law, it was President Bush’s belief that his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief can’t be limited by Congress. Bush still believes that, and a McCain administration will likely be populated with a lot of other people who believe it. emptywheel already identified what she called a “pre-emptive signing statement” in Attorney General Mukasey’s letter to Harry Reid back in February. Bush (or some future authoritarian president) just has to say that he’s going to interpret the law to be consistent with his powers under Article II of the Constitution, and exclusivity goes away.

Second, Obama is counting on the inspector general reports authorized by the bill to tell us what we need to know about past and current spying programs. I’m not optimistic about that, either.

emptywheel does a lessons-learned piece for the coalition of people who came together to fight this issue. Jane Hamsher sees this as one battle in a long war to regain democracy:

But I hope [the FISA vote] abolished once and for all the idea that our leaders are going to “lead” on this issue without encouragement to do so. Barack Obama and others will be great on this stuff when there is a reason for them to be great — when the public comes together in a meaningful way and provides the political climate where it becomes the wise thing to do. We’re not there yet. To make it happen, we need to reward those who were with us. We need to punish those who stood against us. We need to recruit and support primary challengers, and help those people with the tools they need to run winning races that don’t rely on being in the good graces of the political establishment.

Another Shoe Drops

This morning the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve announced a plan to keep the semi-public mortgage insurance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in business. This is the biggest government intervention in the financial markets since the Bear Stearns bailout in March, and is part of the same issue: the popping of the real estate bubble.

I haven’t had time to study the details or figure out who has, but I will note this: Once again, private investors profit when things go well, but the taxpayers are left holding the bag when things go badly. If the subject is jobs moving overseas, the big-money types talk about “creative destruction” and the wisdom of the market. But when one of their own gets wounded they want the government to stop the game.

Last April, after the smoke of the Bear Stearns disaster had started to clear, Michael Lewitt of Hegemony Capital Management made this prescient remark about how the mortgage market was being cleaned up:

Does anybody really think it’s a good idea … for Fannie and Freddie to leverage their balance sheets further? All of these actions are going to have to be unwound at some point, which means that the day of reckoning is simply being delayed.

Delayed until today, when a new bailout is needed to push the day of reckoning off a little further. Long-term, it’s obvious what needs to happen: The U.S. government needs to decide exactly what is too big to be allowed to fail, insure it, collect fees sufficient to fund the insurance, and regulate the hell out of it, so that private companies don’t take advantage of their government insurance to stick the taxpayer with speculative losses. Lewitt again:

HCM often hears the argument that too much regulation will force business offshore and render the U.S. financial industry less competitive. Our response to that argument is that institutions and fiduciaries in the end will gravitate to the system with the strongest and wisest regulatory protections. Moreover, we should be pushing the most reckless practices out of our markets and into other markets. We should be creating global competition over best regulatory practices, not worst ones.

One more thing you might want to pay attention to: If your retirement plans involve owning some large chunk of stock in the company you work for, you need to think about what is happening to the employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Stop Whining, Everybody

John McCain’s top economic advisor Phil Gramm thinks the recession is “mental” and that “we have sort of become a nation of whiners.” McCain is trying to distance himself from Gramm, but TPM has the video of how McCain has tied himself to Gramm when he needed to establish his economic heft. (When you see the video of Gramm’s statements — also in that TPM clip — it’s worse than just reading the text. His voice and expression are full of contempt.) On the weekend talk shows conservatives tried to defend Gramm’s point. George Will, for example, said “we are the crybabies of the western world.”

Now, here’s a thought experiment: Imagine if us pointy-headed liberal elitists were calling the American people whiners and crybabies. We’d never hear the end of it. But it’s conservatives doing it, so the media will forget in a day or two. Matthew Yglesias reminds us of other stuff that has blown over:

John McCain doesn’t know how to use a computer. John McCain doesn’t know when he last pumped gas or what it cost. John McCain owns seven homes and forgot to pay taxes on one of them for the past four years. But at least he’s not an elitist like Barack Obama.

Unless you read the conservative press regularly, it is easy to forget the extent to which they live in their own version of reality. Sunday’s Washington Times editorial page, for example, wanted to give a gentle correction to Gramm. But they couldn’t do it without first bowing at the altar of the Bush economic record. “After seven years of unprecedented strength,” they began, “the U.S. economy …” Not just strength, unprecedented strength, economic strength such as the United States has never seen before. The Moonie-owned newspaper continued:

It is a given that President Bush presided over one of the strongest economic periods in history, with staggering job creation of 2.6 million jobs, record minority home ownership and a market flush with investment.

“Given” is a well-chosen word here, because it is very hard to establish this point if anyone bothers to contest it. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities assembled statistics comparing the 2001-2007 expansion to the average period of economic expansion since World War II, and found that the Bush expansion is above average in only one area: corporate profits. If you weren’t a corporation, the Bush expansion was pretty anemic. And that “staggering” creation of 2.6 million jobs? Compared to 22.7 million under President Clinton, the only staggering thing is that the WT dared to bring the number up at all. And the Dow closed at 10588 the Friday before Bush’s inauguration in 2001; it was at 11101 last Friday — up a grand 4.8% or well below 1% a year. Flush with investment indeed.

Bad Day in a Bad Place

Nine American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan Sunday. Fifteen wounded. That’s bad enough as it stands, but how they were killed makes it worse. Usually when we lose a bunch of soldiers at the same time, it’s because some lucky shot took out a helicopter. Not this time. These nine died because the Afghan insurgents attacked a NATO base. That’s a level of tactical boldness that we haven’t been seeing from the insurgents in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and it sends a message about their confidence. Juan Cole comments: “the evidence is that the Afghan insurgents are getting better at fighting the US.”

Cole’s article is a “friendly critique” of Barack Obama’s plan to send more troops to Afghanistan:

Obama keeps talking about intensifying the search and destroy missions being carried out by US troops in the Pushtun areas of southern Afghanistan. As we should have learned from Vietnam, search and destroy missions only alienate the local population and drive it into the arms of the insurgency.

Another way we alienate the locals is that we keep killing civilians by accident, and then we compound the problem by claiming they were militants. This fools the American public, but the Afghans on the scene know better. A commission appointed by President Karzai concluded that’s what happened in a bombing in Nangarhar July 6.

The commission is headed by Senate deputy speaker, Burhanullah Shinwari whose constituency is in Nangarhar province. He told the BBC: ”Our investigation found out that 47 civilians (were killed) by the American bombing and nine others injured. There are 39 women and children” among those killed, he said. The eight other people who died were “between the ages of 14 and 18”.

Apparently this was a wedding party, not a terrorist encampment. We keep making this mistake, as Tom Engelhardt reminds us. Cole leaves Obama with this advice:

Stand up Karzai’s army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. “Al-Qaeda” was always Bin Laden’s hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Short Notes

Finally people are starting to say the obvious out loud: McCain’s promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term is a fantasy. The Washington Post goes through the numbers.

The New Yorker tells the story of a Danish island that decided to become energy independent.

I’m a little late with this one, but Salon’s Joseph Romm shines a light on the global-warming deniers in Congress.

Florida still hasn’t solved its vote-counting problems. In an election in West Palm Beach in June, 14% of the votes didn’t get tallied until somebody noticed that the totals couldn’t possibly be right. But it was a light turnout, so that was only 707 missing votes. Such a small number couldn’t make a difference in a state the size of Florida, could it?

No News Here. The New York Times dutifully reports the perpetual rumor that we’re about to start pulling troops out of Iraq. I agree with Atrios’ reaction: NA GA HA PEN. The official announcement of the rumored pullout is always about three months away, and it’s going to happen because everything’s turning out so well. It never happens. The only time Bush actually pulls troops out of Iraq is when the generals tell him there are no more troops. The Times analyzes:

Any troop reductions announced in the heat of the presidential election could blur the sharp differences between the candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, over how long to stay in Iraq. But the political benefit might go more to Mr. McCain than Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain is an avid supporter of the current strategy in Iraq. Any reduction would indicate that that strategy has worked and could defuse antiwar sentiment among voters.

Ditto for rumors about reductions. Anonymous administration sources start such rumors to defuse antiwar sentiment and help McCain. They’ll do it over and over again between now and November. And the Times will print the rumors because all those anonymous administration sources stop talking to you if you stop being a useful propaganda tool.

No News There. Just before 9-11 the media was consumed with a bunch of missing-pretty-girl stories. The biggest one was Chandra Levy, who had some kind of connection to Rep. Gary Condit. For a while 9-11 forced people to cover real news, but this week the Washington Post is back with a 12-part series on the Levy case. Armageddon wouldn’t get a 12-part series out of the Post, but this 7-year-old missing-person case does. JonBenet Ramsey — who has been dead nearly twice as long as she was alive — is also making headlines again this week. I guess that means that all the post-9-11 problems are solved now. Note to Bin Laden: If you want to get back into the papers, kidnap a pretty girl.

A lot of bloggers are upset by the New Yorker cover depicting every anti-Obama smear simultaneously — he’s a Muslim, Michelle’s a leftist revolutionary, and the flag is burning in the Oval Office fireplace under Bin Laden’s portrait. Maybe I’m being too sophisticated here, but I thought the joke was on the people spreading these wild tales, not on Obama.

Matthew Yglesias nails a point often ignored these days. McCain makes a big deal about how he criticized the Bush administration on Iraq way back when. But his differences with Bush have always been entirely tactical. He thought and still thinks that the invasion was a good idea. (If you agree, you should vote for him.) Matt also spotted this “I’d Rather Be Waterboarding” t-shirt for sale on a conservative site. Whatta sense of humor those guys have.

Speaking of waterboarding, Philippe Sands’ book Torture Team is out. This is the source of that Vanity Fair article “The Green Light” that I talked about in April.

Iran tested missiles Wednesday, and the price of oil went up. Has anybody noticed that Iran makes money when this happens? The ideal thing for Iran is to keep tensions high, but not so high that war breaks out. Ditto for Saudi Arabia and all the other Persian Gulf oil producers.

We spend our money on bullets, while the Chinese spend theirs on bullet trains. Who’s getting the better deal?

July 14, 2008 – 1:56 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

True Americans

The ideal of a God-given liberty and God-given equality have been posited from the beginning of our experiment in democracy as a standard that we will never achieve but will always, at our best, aspire to. … So what we should not be at times when we’re disappointed with our country is anti-American. We should be true Americans, and we should go back to those ideals and revitalize them, and hold the nation accountable for what its founders dreamed to be possible. — Forrest Church, speaking at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly on 27 June 2008

In This Week’s Sift:

Nationalism vs. Patriotism. Should we love our country and try to improve it? Or just worship it no matter what it does?

Silly Season on the Campaign Trail. Did you hear the terrible thing Wesley Clark said? Probably not, because he didn’t say it.

Wars and Rumors of Wars. Will Bush attack Iran before he leaves office or not? Seymour Hersh paints a disturbing picture of an attempt to gin up an incident that will make the public accept another war. Also, the problem with the Surge suddenly becomes obvious.

Short Notes. Fat States of America. A 235 MPG car. Africa’s worst dictator isn’t who you think. Justice O’Connor goes gaming. And an archdruid coins a new term.

Nationalism vs. Patriotism

Everyone talks about patriotism near the Fourth of July. Obama did it better than most, but not even he put a name to the main threat to American patriotism: its rival, nationalism. Patriots love their country and want it to be as good as it can be. Nationalists make an idol of their country and demand that all kneel before it. The nationalist’s country is great and good by definition, not because it lives up to its ideals.

In recent years authentic patriotism has been losing out to nationalism. In order to fight back, patriots need to start doing two things: First, always call nationalism by its true name; don’t let the nationalists get away with calling themselves patriots. And second, we need to understand — and make the public understand — that nationalism is not just bad politics, it’s bad religion. A nation, even one with the power and accomplishments of America, can only be a false god.

This week’s clearest example of how nationalism has usurped the place of patriotism is the column Obama’s Real Patriotism Problem that National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg wrote for Tuesday’s USA Today. Despite his superficial denial, the “patriotism” he promotes is pure and simple nationalism:

Definitions of patriotism proliferate, but in the American context patriotism must involve not only devotion to American texts (something that distinguishes our patriotism from European nationalism) but also an abiding belief in the inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation. We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is.

No matter what our country does, it has “inherent and enduring goodness” and is “good as it is.”

Goldberg goes on to charge that Obama, like liberals throughout American history, can’t manage this kind of patriotism. He recalls a series of articles a liberal magazine published in 1922 in which “smug emissaries from East Coast cities chronicled the ‘backward’ attitudes of what today would be called fly-over country.” Someone even had the gall to suggest “that Dixie needed nothing less than an invasion of liberal ‘missionaries’ so that the ‘light of civilization’ might finally be glimpsed down there.”

Umm, Jonah, I don’t know how to break this to you, but that’s exactly what happened. The South in 1922? Jim Crow, remember? The liberal missionaries were the Freedom Riders and all the other civil rights activists of the fifties and sixties. If we follow Goldberg’s definition, though, the real patriots were the people who thought the Jim Crow South was “fundamentally good as it was” — not disloyal liberals like the Freedom Riders or Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.

In May I was at the Newseum in Washington, the brand new journalism museum. They display a piece of the lunch counter from the Woolworth’s in Greensboro where civil rights sit-ins began, and show a filmed interview with one of the original Freedom Riders, whose name escapes me. He explained that they didn’t stage events for the press, but that if they expected trouble, they made sure reporters knew about it. “If you’re going to beat us up,” he said (or words to that effect; I’m pulling this quote out of memory) “don’t beat us up by the dark of night. Beat us up where everybody can see.”

Bunch of anti-American wimps, eh, Jonah? They just couldn’t see the goodness of America as it was.

I suppose Goldberg must find Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech from 1852 to be extremely unpatriotic. Douglass pointedly refused to tell his white audience that America was good as it was:

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

Douglass had to contend with people who thought he should argue more calmly and reasonably against slavery, as today we have to contend with people who want us to do a cost/benefit analysis of torture. What, Douglass wondered, would such an argument be? Should he attempt to prove — to those not already convinced — that the slave is human? That humans have rights? Douglass refused:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Would that my country had more such people today. Because those are the words of a man truly loyal to the ideals that America represents, someone who wants his country to be as good as it can be. That’s the patriotism of a true American.

Silly Season on the Campaign Trail

I was happy to see the L.A. Times recognize how silly all the recent campaign controversies have been. As Paul Krugman notes:

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service. … Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

TPM put together everything you need to know about the Clark incident — the simple true statements Clark made, the way they were blown into something Clark never said, and the indignant way the media shot down those overblown statements of their own creation. It’s a good lesson in how political media works, and is pretty clear evidence that the media bias still tips towards McCain.

The other tempest in a teapot was Obama’s alleged flip-flop on Iraq. Obama said that in pulling troops out of Iraq he would “take facts on the ground into account.” If you had imagined that Obama’s plan was for our troops to throw down their weapons and run full speed for the Kuwaiti border, then this was a significant change. But anyone who has actually been listening to Obama, like TPM’s Josh Marshall or Tim Starks of Deutsche Welle’s Across the Pond blog, wasn’t all that shocked. Jed Lewison analyzes CNN’s attempt to manufacture an issue here.

Like a lot of people, I’m disappointed that Obama isn’t taking a strong stand against telecom immunity. And I’m even more disappointed that it looks like the FISA bill is going to pass. I expect to say more about this next week.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Iran. The biggest question of 2008 isn’t the election, it’s whether Bush will attack Iran before he leaves office. Seymour Hersh says yes, as he has been saying for some while now. Mostly using his usual collection of anonymous sources, Hersh paints a picture of a bureaucratic wrestling match between Dick Cheney, who wants to attack, and the Pentagon, which doesn’t.

The most disturbing part of Hersh’s article is the allegation that covert ops are already in progress, aiming to exploit ethnic tensions among the Ahwazi Arabs (Iran is predominantly Persian, not Arab) and religious tensions among the Baluchis, who are Sunnis. (Iran is predominantly Shia). He quotes former CIA officer Robert Baer:

The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.

Hersh notes that 9-11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a Baluchi. Afghanistan in the eighties is where Al Qaeda came together.

While polls show the American public opposed to yet another war in the Middle East, an incident in January convinced the administration that the public might support — or even demand — a military reaction if it appeared that the Iranians had shot first. One of Hersh’s anonymous sources told him that

a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

Neocon columnist Bill Kristol, who has been pushing for an attack on Iran about as long as Hersh has been predicting it, said on Fox News that Bush might attack Iran “if he thinks Obama is going to win.” Under that Bizarro-world logic, I guess, hawks should root for Obama and doves for McCain.

Commentary’s Max Boot thinks that Hersh’s article “is a combination of innuendo, hearsay, and opinionizing that detracts from the sum total of public knowledge” and that Hersh “is partly a victim of his anti-Bush worldview and partly a victim of his sources.” Of the alleged meeting in Cheney’s office he says, “That’s the kind of meeting which only takes place in the fevered imagination of Hersh and his leftist cohorts.” However, Boot brings no facts or sources (even anonymous ones) to the table, just his own intuition about how the administration works.

Afghanistan and Iraq. In hindsight, the real problem with the Surge has become obvious: You should never commit your last reserves until the decisive battle. If you’re about to win or about to lose, throw in everything. But otherwise, you need to keep the enemy guessing.

For the second straight month, coalition deaths in Afghanistan set a record, and were higher than coalition deaths in Iraq. 46 coalition troops died in Afghanistan in June, 31 in Iraq. (If you only care about American troop deaths, Iraq wins 29-28.) The Pentagon would like to send more troops to Afghanistan, but there aren’t any. “I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq,” says Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen. The Taliban knows this, and can escalate attacks without fear that we’ll escalate in response.

In Iraq, the insurgents and militias know we can’t maintain this troop level, so why not lay low and wait? That’s the real reason casualties and violence are down. We haven’t disarmed or defeated the insurgents, and the Malaki government hasn’t made peace with them. They’re just waiting.

Strangely, the administration has fallen into the trap that they so often warned about whenever a timetable for withdrawal was proposed: If the enemy knows you’re leaving, they can wait you out. Well, the Surge brigades are starting to leave now, and we don’t have any brigades to replace them. The Iraqis know this. Look for violence to ramp up again after the November elections, when the Surge is completely over and Iraq starts to become the next president’s problem.

Or maybe this isn’t so strange. Maybe the point of the Surge wasn’t to improve the situation in the long term, but just to kick the can down the road. For the rest of his life Bush will say, “We were winning when I left office.” The mess he leaves his successor will not be his fault, because nothing is ever his fault.

Short Notes

I spent last week at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, where I kept a blog and wrote some articles for the UUA web site. You can find the links to them on my Free and Responsible Search blog.

538 still predicts a solid Obama win, but the margin has shrunk to a 309-229 electoral vote split, closer than the 339-199 projection two weeks ago. Real Clear Politics, which has always had a more conservative estimate of Obama’s lead, has a similar 304-234 projection. My prediction: The race will drift closer until the conventions, when the nation compares Obama’s acceptance speech to McCain’s. Then the margin will grow, and the debates won’t help McCain close it.

Slate’s Peter Maass argues that the worst dictator in Africa is somebody you’ve probably never heard of: Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “whose life seems a parody of the dictator genre.” Maass explains why the American media hasn’t bothered to cover Obiang. Yes, he’s crushing the spirit of his nation, and yes, he’s stealing all the oil money and leaving his people in poverty. But hey, the oil is flowing, ExxonMobil is happy, the Bush administration considers Obiang “a good friend,” and the victims are almost all black. So what’s the big deal? Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

Speaking of oil, Andrew Leonard’s How The World Works column at Salon explains Why $140-a-barrel oil is no surprise

a tipping point has been reached. Enough people now believe that the era of cheap oil is over to ensure a significant, and ongoing, adjustment upward in the real price. Modern civilization as we know it is dependent on cheap oil, and cheap oil is becoming scarce. Voilà — time to panic. And a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic kicks in. The higher the price of oil goes without encouraging dramatic increases in production, the more worried the market gets.

One response is VW’s soon-to-be-marketed concept car, which gets 235 MPG.

On a deeper level, John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report — how many of you have been reading that blog? — has given a name to something that really needed one: the Silent Running fallacy. Named after a classic sci-fi movie, the fallacy is “the mistaken belief that human industrial civilization can survive apart from nature. It’s this fallacy that leads countless well-intentioned people to argue that nature is an amenity, and should be preserved because, basically, it’s cute.” (Now we need a name for a similar fallacy on a smaller scale: that emotions are an amenity androids could function without.)

And just when we were getting used to the idea of Peak Oil, what about Peak Metal? A lot of industrial metals — gallium, indium, hafnium, and even (to a lesser extent) zinc — are being used up faster than we’re discovering new supplies.

CalorieLab released its annual fattest states rankings: Mississippi is the repeat champion, with 31.6% of its adult population classified as obese. West Virginia waddled past Alabama to claim second at 30.6%. Colorado is the slimmest state at 18.4%. In general, the Mountain West and New England are the least obese regions, the South the most. But it’s getting worse across the board — CalorieLab had to shift the color-coding standards on its map this year.

Ian Welsh on FireDogLake comments intelligently on the rankings and why Americans are so fat. Our farm policy “literally subsidizes crap food that makes people fat. … And if you’re missing essential nutrients in your diet, your body keeps wanting them and keeps telling you to eat more, in the vain hope you might eat something that isn’t crap.” (Those subsidies could also explain why the fattest states tend to be the poorest states.) He also blames unwalkable suburbs and recommends that physical education classes teach children how to exercise rather than just play team sports that involve a lot of standing around.

When I grew up back at the dawn of time — before SimCity, in other words — we thought games like Monopoly were educational because you had to figure out how much change to give somebody who buys Baltic with a $500 bill. Well, games currently on the drawing board are supposed take things to yet another level. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is involved in a game project called Our Courts, which is scheduled to appear late next year. She describes it as “online, interactive civic education project for seventh- and eighth-graders.” (It’s necessary because the No Child Left Behind Act, according to Reagan appointee O’Connor, has “effectively squeezed out civics education” in the schools. Guaranteeing an uninformed populace for decades to come — just one of the many accomplishments of George W. Bush.)

Microsoft and AMD sponsor the Imagine Cup, an annual student competition to create computer games. Each year (2008 is the sixth) the games revolve around a theme from the UN’s Millennium Goals. This year the theme is “Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment.”

I noticed this stuff when Mike Musgrove wrote about it in his @play column in the Washington Post. But a more consistent source of information is the Games For Change blog.

While we’re talking about play, a great internet toy is Policy Map. It combines U.S. maps with all sorts of data sets so you can see things like how income is distributed around the country, or between neighborhoods of your city, or which neighborhoods have a lot of car thefts. A bunch of the data sets come from the 2000 census, so the unemployment figures are way out of date. But the crime stats come from 2006 FBI reports, and the ethnic distribution of the country probably hasn’t changed that much since 2000. The basic interface resembles GoogleMaps, so you can zoom in or out at will. It’s hours and hours of wonkish fun.

I frequently highlight statistics showing how poorly the economy is doing. The American magazine presents the other side: How well the American economy is doing over the long term. One criticism: Most of the article’s graphs display averages. Meaningful economic graphs display medians. Unlike medians, averages hide the gap between rich and poor, as well as the gap between the very rich and everyone else.

For example, if Bill Gates (net worth $58 billion ) walks into a bar in a poor neighborhood, the bar’s average customer becomes a billionaire — hiding the fact that all the other customers (besides the guy who mugs Gates) are still poor.

Suppose Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (net worth $16 billion) invites Gates to join him in the owner’s box at a Seattle Seahawks game, and fills the rest of Qwest Field’s seats with 66,998 homeless bums. Then the average fan is a millionaire, but the median fan is a homeless bum.

July 7, 2008 – 1:15 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Compromising Positions

Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand on. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In This Week’s Sift:

Remind Me Why We Elected Democrats. Congressional Democrats agreed to two compromises with the Bush administration: They wrote another blank check for Iraq and gave Bush everything he wanted with regard to FISA. And in exchange they got … well, they must have gotten something.

Don’t Get Sick in Mississippi. Mississippi’s “moral refusal” law protects healthcare workers whose consciences keep them from saving your life. Creationism is back in Lousiana. And South Carolina offers Christian license plates.

Remember Iraq? Americans made up their minds about Iraq in 2007, and now they just don’t want to hear about it.

Short Notes. The usual collection of torture, racism, pollution, and dictators. Plus a detailed Republican plan for our economic future. Enjoy.

Next Week: You’ll have to sift for yourself. I’ll be blogging on the web site of the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly from Fort Lauderdale. I’ll post a link on my Free and Responsible Search blog. In the meantime, check out my latest column for UU World.

Remind Me Why We Elected Democrats

Two important bills got passed in the House this week. One provides $162 billion to keep fighting the war in Iraq, among other things. It’s yet another blank check, containing nothing that might cramp the style of our Warmaker in Chief. The other revises FISA to make legal a lot of the domestic spying and wiretapping that the administration was doing illegally — and by-the-way to make sure that the lawsuits against the telecom companies will be thrown out of court.

Described by the Democratic House leadership as “compromises,” both bills were backed by the White House and passed with almost unanimous Republican support, while Democrats were split. Republicans voted for the FISA bill 188-1, Democrats against 128-105. Republicans voted for the Iraq funding bill 188-4, Democrats against 151-80. Both votes fit the definition of “bipartisanship” offered by Glenn Greenwald in January:

On virtually every major controversial issue — particularly, though not only, ones involving national security and terrorism — the Republicans (including their vaunted mythical moderates and mavericks) vote in almost complete lockstep in favor of the President, the Democratic caucus splits, and the Republicans then get their way on every issue thanks to “bipartisan” support. That’s what “bipartisanship” in Washington means.

Sounding more like an innocent bystander than Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi said of the Iraq funding bill: “Let us hope this is the last time another dollar will be spent without constraint, without conditions.”

Time magazine buys the “compromise” spin on the FISA deal and asserts that it “has drawn attacks from both sides.” But the only attacks they mention come from the Left. By contrast the Right seems pretty happy. The New York Times quotes Republican Senator Kit Bond: “I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped to get.”

What did the Democrats get? According to Time:

In negotiations with Pelosi’s office, the telecoms offered a compromise: Let a judge decide if the letters they received from the Administration asking for their help show that the government was really after terrorist suspects and not innocent Americans.

But if the letters say “We want you to spy on ordinary Americans for us” — then we’ll really throw the book at them, I guess. Republican House Whip Roy Blunt says bluntly: “The lawsuits will be dismissed.” I’m sure the plaintiffs will appreciate what a compromise that is from the administration’s original position, which was that the lawsuits should be dismissed.

The problem with this I-had-a-note-from-my-president reasoning was summed up inadvertently by Kit Bond:

I’m not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.

So, if that’s our operating principle, what should happen if Bush tells Blackwater to assassinate someone? (A terrorist, naturally. Or at least someone that the government says — in the letter that Blackwater will use to get court proceedings dropped — it suspected to be a terrorist. I mean, it was a suspected terrorist they were really after. Those other people were just in the line of fire.) Digby calls this what it is: the Nuremberg Defense. It’s OK that the telecoms broke the law, because they were only following orders.

So let me disagree with Senator Bond: When the government tells you to do something against the law, you say no. That’s what it means to live under the rule of law.

The Senate hasn’t voted on the FISA bill yet, but Barack Obama is not covering himself with glory. He says he’ll try to strip telecom immunity out of the bill — a symbolic effort likely to fail — but generally supports the “compromise.” He hasn’t endeared himself to the bloggers who have been fighting this issue from the beginning: Emptywheel, Glenn Greenwald, and others.

So, in short, it’s a complete, across-the-board Democratic cave-in. To an unpopular lame-duck president. Why? Time explains:

Pelosi wanted the issue off the table for the political campaign this fall. Despite anti-GOP sentiment in the country and record low popularity for President George W. Bush, Democrats still trail on national security and that could hurt them in Congress.

You may remember that this is exactly the reason the Democrats gave for passing the original Iraq War resolution in 2002: They were getting national security off the table, so that they could focus the fall campaign on issues where they felt stronger, like health care and the economy. In 2002 it worked so well that Democrats lost the Senate and didn’t get it back until they found some backbone in 2006.

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen offers this contrary advice:

The question of when to avoid certain issues because “the poll numbers look bad” has an unambiguous answer: never.

Getting an issue “off the table” just cedes it permanently to your opponents. They make their case and you change the subject — the voters are not going to be impressed. And by doing something against the fundamental principles of your party, you look untrustworthy. Because voters respond to candidates emotionally, and not by going down an issues checklist, the way to look strong is not to agree to positions that your opponents define as “strong,” but to defend your own principles forcefully.

Worst of all: What if your principles turn out to be right? Then, after the policies you capitulate to bring disaster, you can’t capitalize because you’re implicated. (Ask Kerry or Clinton about their 2002 Iraq votes.) Atrios makes this prediction:

Democrats will regret embracing the expansion of executive power because a President Obama will find his administration undone by an “abuse of power” scandal. All of those powers which were necessary to prevent the instant destruction of the country will instantly become impeachable offenses. If you can’t imagine how such a pivot can take place then you haven’t been paying attention.

Don’t Get Sick in Mississippi

If you don’t live in a state dominated by the Religious Right, you probably don’t realize just how bad things have gotten.

Wednesday, Dogemperor on DailyKos explained Mississippi’s “moral refusal” law paragraph-by-paragraph. The upshot: If the care you need violates the conscience of a healthcare worker — doctor, nurse, pharmacist, ambulance driver, anybody — that worker doesn’t have help you, not even by directing you to some other professional whose conscience is less picky. The worker cannot be punished or reprimanded in any way, even if you die from lack of treatment. Even an insurance company can refuse to cover a claim by asserting an issue of conscience. (Insurance companies have consciences?)

The purpose of all this is to make it as difficult as possible to get an abortion in Mississippi, even if it’s necessary to save your life. (And secondarily, to allow pharmacies not to fill prescriptions for birth-control pills.) But the provisions are general enough that you have to wonder about unintended consequences. What if I join one of those sects that objects to any medical intervention, and then I buy a Mississippi-based health insurance company and start refusing all claims on moral grounds? That’s a business model that really works.

In other theocratic news: Christians in South Carolina will soon be able to get a special “I Believe” license plate, complete with a crucifix and stained-glass window. Three ministers, a rabbi, and a Hindu organization are suing.

Students will soon be learning creationism in science classes in Louisiana’s public schools, if Governor (and rumored McCain VP) Bobby Jindal signs a new law, as expected. The Louisiana Science Education Act is part of the new “academic freedom” push creationists are making in the wake of the Dover decision against teaching intelligent design. The bill authorizes teachers to introduce “supplemental textbooks” that encourage “critical thinking” about “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” The anti-evolution Discovery Institute, which drafts models of laws like this, wants its own anti-evolution textbook, Explore Evolution, to be just such a supplement.

Morbo on the Carpetbagger Report considers moving this “academic freedom” argument from science to history classes: “Should we allow ‘criticism’ of the history of the Holocaust in the classroom? After all, some cranks write books saying it never happened. Shouldn’t our children hear both sides?” I think Morbo could pick an ever better set of cranks: the ones who claim Jesus never existed. How about helping our children learn “critical thinking” by “teaching the controversy” over that issue?

Remember Iraq?

Frank Rich has put his finger on an important point: The public and the media have increasingly tuned out of the argument about whether we’re succeeding or failing in Iraq, and tuned out of any news about Iraq at all. The American public decided in 2007 that the war was a mistake, and they only want to know when it will be over. The latest suicide bombing, the latest offensive, the latest claim that we’re winning or that we can’t win — not many people want to hear it. But in case you’re still interested, here are some recent articles:

The giant oil companies are about to sign a new agreement with the Iraqi government. They have had no role in Iraq since Saddam threw them out four decades ago. From their point of view, mission accomplished.

Violence is down, but the militias are still well armed and capable of renewing their fight at any time. Agreement on Iraq’s political future still seems far off.

Salon’s Tom Engelhardt looks at the colossal bases we’re building in Iraq, the ones the Bush administration wants to hang onto permanently. Since the permanence of our occupation is not something we like to talk about, the bases have largely gone uncovered by the media. Engelhardt finds this remarkable: “Imagine if just about no one knew that the pyramids had been built. Ditto the Great Wall of China. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Coliseum. The Eiffel Tower. The Statue of Liberty. Or any other architectural wonder of the world you’d care to mention.”

One reason that Iraqis are uncomfortable with a long-term American presence is that our Christian soldiers won’t stop prosyletizing.

And if Iraq has passed off the front pages, what about Afghanistan? Since the start of that war, 531 American troops have died in Afghanistan. 56 of those deaths have come in the first half of 2008. That’s about the same pace as 2007, our worst year so far, when 117 died.

Short Notes

A Senate report verifies the claims of the Vanity Fair article I told you about in April. The push for torture came from the top levels of the Bush administration and had to overcome resistance from the military. The idea that the administration just responded to the needs of interrogators in the field is the usual propaganda: Blame the guys at the bottom.

Another new report: Physicians for Human Rights examined 11 ex-detainees who claimed to have been tortured. The physical evidence PHR found supported the claims. Broken Laws, Broken Lives summarizes their findings. The preface is written by retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who is famous for overseeing the Army’s internal investigation of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. He writes: “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

The poll-reading geeks at 538 see a trend toward Obama. Their current electoral map predicts a 339-199 Obama victory. They calculate the odds of an Obama victory at 75%.

Meanwhile, Brave New Films documents more McCain doubletalk in video. In These Times covers the same ground in print.

23/6 presents both the latest anti-McCain MoveOn ad and a humorous parody of it.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Donovan Hohn tags along on a mission to clean up Gore Point, Alaska. Gore Point is uninhabited and almost inaccessible, but when Hohn’s team arrives, the beach is full of plastic crap. Think about that. Apparently the ocean currents have “convergence zones” where floating trash collects. Somewhere north of Hawaii, there’s growing accumulation of floating trash that’s currently about the size of Texas.

The Saudis are promising to increase oil production. This will be an interesting test of the Peak Oil theory, because there’s been a lot of speculation that the giant Saudi oil fields are closer to exhaustion than the Saudis let on.

Thomas Friedman characterizes the Bush-McCain push for more drilling in America as: “Get more addicted to oil.” Cartoonist Ann Telnaes makes the same point visually.

Jezebel is keeping a racism watch on the presidential campaign. If you haven’t seen the Obama/CuriousGeorge monkey or the “If Obama is President … will we still call it The White House” button — well, here they are.

dday on Hullabaloo calls attention to Rush Limbaugh’s spin of the Midwestern floods. Rush contrasts the midwestern response to “all the stuff that happened in New Orleans.” It’s an interesting look at how race prejudice creates its own evidence.

Thanks to all the people who have asked about my hometown Quincy, Illinois. Other than a narrow strip along the riverfront, the town sits on a bluff over the Mississippi, so my parents are high and dry. In response to Limbaugh I’ll say this: Anybody who is a veteran of these midwestern river floods sees an immediate difference between them and post-Katrina New Orleans. When the water rises in Illinois, you retreat a few hundred yards to higher ground. You may lose your property, but you don’t get encircled and cut off from food and drinkable water.

President Mugabe of Zimbabwe is holding onto power the old-fashioned way, by using violence to intimidate his opponent into withdrawing from a run-off election. “We will not ask people to sacrifice their lives by voting,” said an opposition party spokesman. The run-off became necessary when Mugabe’s election commission refused to admit that he had lost the first election.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak calls attention to the “Roadmap for America’s Future” laid out by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. If you want to know the real meaning of those vague phrases entitlement reform and tax reform, it’s all spelled out here in the kind of detail McCain and the other Republicans don’t dare to go into.

  • Social Security is made “permanently solvent” through “a more realistic measure of growth in Social Security’s initial benefits and an eventual modernization of the retirement age.” Translation: lower benefits beginning later. (There’s a subtle class issue in “modernizing” the retirement age. Working beyond age 65 is easier for pencil-pushers and keyboarders than for bricklayers.)
  • Medicare is turned into a private insurance system, with government contributing “up to $9,500” annually to your personal medical savings account after you turn 65 (or whatever the “modernized” retirement age turns out to be). Medicare spending becomes predictable because all subsequent medical inflation is your problem, not the government’s. And what you do if $9,500 isn’t enough to buy coverage for your pre-existing conditions is a mystery.
  • A “simplified” tax system eliminates taxes on the non-working wealthy and on corporations: Interest, capital gains, dividends, and inheritances are untaxed. The alternate minimum tax (whose original purpose was to make sure the very wealthy didn’t use loopholes to avoid taxes entirely) goes away. A national sales tax replaces the corporate income tax.

Novak’s prediction: “After what is expected to be another bad GOP defeat in the 2008 congressional elections, Ryan [and like-minded youngsters] McCarthy and Cantor could constitute the party’s new House leadership.” He’s looking forward to it.

June 23, 2008 – 1:01 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Habeas Corpus Isn’t a Corpse

If you don’t include torturing helpless prisoners in your definition of evil, your definition of evil is meaningless. — Tony Lagouranis, Fear Up Harsh


In This Week’s Sift:

Hocus Pocus: The Court Makes Habeas Corpus Reappear. Justice Scalia says Americans will die for this. Newt Gingrich thinks it could cost us a city. What evil invention are they talking about? Habeas corpus, the foundation of human rights.

The Negative Campaign. John McCain is behind in the polls and doesn’t have a popular issue to run on. So he’s going to have to make Barack Obama even less popular.

Short Notes. Obama comes to the town where I grew up, while McCain visits the town where I live now. The SOFA negotiations become uncomfortable. Governor Jindal, exorcist. Impeachment or hanging? And the surprising downside of loaning large sums of money to people in jail.

Hocus Pocus: The Court Makes Habeas Corpus Reappear

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: Just about all of your rights as an American are founded on habeas corpus. The Latin is intimidating, but the idea is simple. If a government official arrests you, you can get a hearing before a neutral judge. The judge determines whether or not the government has a legal basis to hold you, and if not, you go free.

Most of your other rights concern what reasons the government can or can’t use at that hearing. Your freedom of religion means that “He’s a Muslim” is not a good enough reason to imprison you. Your freedom of speech means that “She called the president an ignorant jerk” is also not a viable reason. But if the hearing is never held — if the government just arrests you and doesn’t have to explain itself to anybody — then even though your other rights may stay on the books, you have no way to claim them.

Worse, if any class of people is denied habeas corpus rights, that creates a hole in the system into which anyone else might fall. Say, for example, that non-citizens aren’t allowed a hearing. “No problem,” you say, “I’m an American citizen.” But if the government says you’re not a citizen, then who’s going to hear you claim that you are?

Cutting corners on habeas corpus is especially dangerous when combined with the Bush administration’s unitary executive theory, by which they interpret Article II of the Constitution to mean that all officials in the executive branch of government are “emanations of the president’s will” (in David Rifkin’s evocative phrase). So if somebody in the Pentagon accuses you of being an enemy combatant, and a military commission assesses the evidence against you, your accuser and your judges are all emanations of the president’s will. If the president doesn’t like you, you’re pretty much screwed.

This week the Supreme Court decided this is a bad situation, and is not consistent with the American tradition of constitutional law. That’s the good news. The bad news: They decided it by one vote, 5-4. The four in the minority — Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito — are healthy, relatively young, and likely to stay on the court for many years. The next two or three retirements are going to come from the five. Senator McCain has mentioned Roberts and Alito as models for his court appointments, so this ruling could easily be reversed if McCain is elected.

As for what the new ruling says in detail, I haven’t finished reading it yet. Glenn Greenwald (I keep forgetting he’s a lawyer) summarizes it. So does Salon’s James Ross. The Volokh Conspiracy extracts key quotes. So does emptywheel.

From the responses of conservatives, you might think that the Court had ordered the immediate release of everyone at Guantanamo, rather than just offer them a fair hearing. (Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick: “The court merely said that the petitioners are entitled to some reasonable approximation of a habeas corpus proceeding, and that the jumped-up pretrial hearings known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals just don’t substitute.”) Bush said, “It was a deeply divided court. And I strongly agree with those who dissented.” Presumably he meant Justice Scalia, who wrote that the decision “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” On Face the Nation Sunday Newt Gingrich raised the ante: “This court decision is a disaster which could cost us a city.” McCain said it was “one of worst decisions in the history of this country.” (By contrast, Obama supported the ruling, calling it “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”)

Conservative commentators went even further. National Review’s Andy McCarthy passes on a “practical response” suggested to him by “an old government friend.”

Let’s free all Gitmo detainees…on a vast, deserted, open and contested Afghan battlefield. C-130 gunship circling overhead for security. Give them all a two minute running head start.

Glenn Greenwald reports on a radio debate he had with conservative Jed Babbin:

The question I put to him again and again was one that he simply couldn’t answer: how and why would any American object to the mere requirement that our Government prove that someone is guilty before we imprison them indefinitely or execute them?

And the bottom line is that many of them aren’t guilty. That’s the conclusion the McClatchy Newspapers came to in its Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series.

From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

This conclusion would not surprise anybody who has read Fear Up Harsh, the account of an American interrogator in Iraq. (It sounds familiar because I put it on the Summer Reading List last week.) The book describes in detail a system focused entirely on sweeping up anyone who might know something, and not at all concerned with clearing the innocent.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the patrol that discovered the IED had no reason to believe these two farmers had anything to do with it. But they were nearby, and so they were worth arresting. Then they were handed to someone like me, who really wanted to believe that the infantry had a good reason to pick them up.

So he moved them on to the next prison up the ladder. And so on.

The Negative Campaign: It’s Starting

Securing the Democratic nomination gave Obama a bounce in the polls, and a small but definite lead over McCain. The 538 blog is currently predicting a 300-238 electoral college victory for Obama. 538 has a complicated technique for assessing the probabilities state-by-state, and they now give Obama a 62% chance of becoming the next president. That agrees with the Intrade market, where shares of Obama are trading at 62.

Pundits of all stripes are starting to agree on the general shape of the campaign: With an unpopular Republican president, an unpopular war, unemployment and gas prices rising, and an amazing 80% of the public agreeing that the country is on the wrong track, the only way for McCain to win is to tear Obama down. Ideally, as in all negative campaigns, the candidate himself will keep his hands clean. But the mudslinging is already starting.

A lot of it will revolve around race. In America today, you can’t just campaign on the theme “Don’t vote for the black guy.” But you can raise racial fears and resentments indirectly, then provide a smokescreen argument for directing that fear and resentment at a candidate. This path was blazed by the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which never came out and said “Dukakis will let big black studs rape your womenfolk” but certainly raised that idea in viewers’ minds. The 2006 “Harold, Call Me” ad against black Senate candidate Harold Ford again put forward an interracial sex theme — deniably, of course. The beneficiary, now Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, was able to have it both ways. He could denounce the ad while claiming to be unable to stop the national Republican Party from running it. (Meanwhile, his own anti-Ford ad had African tom-toms sounding in the background.) Expect something similar from McCain.

Fox News is already trying — sometimes with unintentionally comical ineptitude — to connect Obama with anything dark and scary. The fist-bump greeting that Obama and his wife exchanged before his victory speech in St. Paul was characterized by Fox as a possible “terrorist fist-jab“. Fox labeled Michele Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama” — a slang expression for mothers of illegitimate children, more-or-less equivalent to calling the Obama daughters bastards. As with Willie Horton, the “baby mama” phrase triggers images beyond its literal meaning, connecting Obama with ghetto gangsters who father more children than they can keep track of.

Floyd Brown, the producer of the original Willie Horton ad, is raising money for an “independent” anti-Obama advertising campaign. His first ad pushed the idea that Obama was soft on gang violence, and his most recent one promotes the frequently debunked Obama-is-a-Muslim charge. Expect more. His group, the National Campaign Fund, maintains the exposeobama.com web site.

The worst stuff, naturally, is in emails of no determinable source that people forward to their friends. Maybe you’ve gotten some.

Obama is showing early signs of responding more quickly and effectively than John Kerry did to the Swift Boat ads in 2004. His campaign recently put up a Fight the Smears web site to collect simple evidence debunking negative rumors. For example, in response to the charge that Obama won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, they have a tape of Obama leading the Senate in saying the Pledge on June 21, 2007.

At a fund-raiser in Pennsylvania Friday, Obama promised not to be a patsy. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said. This line has been widely interpreted as a reference to the scene in The Untouchables where Sean Connery explains “the Chicago way” to Kevin Costner.

Maybe the best way to fight back is with ridicule, like this video in which people explain why they’re voting Republican.

Short Notes

Saturday Obama was in my home town (Quincy, Illinois), which is bracing for the same flood waters that have swept through Cedar Rapids. He filled a few sandbags and called for his supporters to come out and volunteer to build up the levee. This is the right way for him to exploit the age issue. Obama wielding a shovel displays vigor in a way that McCain can’t match. The call for volunteers is a clear contrast with President Bush, who won’t ask average Americans for any sacrifice beyond going shopping. And anything about floods and levees is going to remind Americans of New Orleans, where the Bush administration failed in its pledge to protect American cities.

I saw McCain here in Nashua Thursday. He said pretty much the same things he said here in December, but I think I’m starting to understand him better now. I wrote up my observations on DailyKos and on my own Open Source Journalism blog. And if you happened to see this piece on CNN, the questioner was absolutely as boring and single-minded as they made him out to be.

Today is the first day for same-sex marriages in California. State officials think they might be busy.

The Bush administration’s attempts to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government has run into problems. The administration has been very secretive about what it is proposing, but leaks from the Iraqi side indicate that the administration wants a large number of permanent bases in Iraq and free rein for American forces to do whatever they deem necessary, without Iraqi approval. Prime Minister al-Maliki says this would “violate Iraqi sovereignty.” Smintheus on Daily Kos has a pretty good summary of what is publicly known.

Glenn Greenwald recalls when it was almost treason to accuse the administration of wanting permanent bases in Iraq:

What’s striking is how those who pointed out that this was the administration’s plan were totally demonized in our establishment political discourse — Americans who said that long-term bases were the real U.S. intention in Iraq were scorned as anti-American, far Leftist hysterics, while Iraqis and other Middle Eastern Muslims who said this were mocked as primitive, Arab Street paranoids.

This week the Washington Post has a series (called The Bubble) about the housing mess. Here’s a clip from Sunday’s installment:

The young woman who walked into Pinnacle’s Vienna office in 2004 said her boyfriend wanted to buy a house near Annapolis. He hoped to get a special kind of loan for which he didn’t have to report his income, assets or employment. Mortgage broker Connelly handed the woman a pile of paperwork.

On the day of the settlement, she arrived alone. Her boyfriend was on a business trip, she said, but she had his power of attorney. Informed that for this kind of loan he would have to sign in person, she broke into tears: Her boyfriend actually had been serving a jail term.

Not a problem. Almost anyone could borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house in those wild days. Connelly agreed to send the paperwork to the courthouse where the boyfriend had a hearing.

Who could possibly have foreseen that something might go wrong with such a sound business model?

Congressman Dennis Kucinich filed 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush this week. Read them all here. I think Bush should be glad that he’s president of the United States and not Pakistan, where opposition leader Nawaz Sharif is calling for President Musharaf to be hanged. On the other hand, Kucinich should appreciate that he’s not in Zimbabwe, where President Mugabe has brought treason charges against the second-in-command of the party that had the audacity to run against him. “We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it,” Mugabe said.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is sometimes mentioned as a McCain VP. So isn’t it handy that he has experience as an exorcist? I can see it now: Vice President Jindal is presiding over the Senate when some crazy-assed thing Senator Inhofe says about global warming makes Harry Reid’s head spin. As soon as Reid’s eyes come around to the front again, there’s Jindal with the Holy Scripture in his hand. “Out, demon, out!” he commands.

Pollster.com graphs the changing party identification of people in Wisconsin: Democrats rising, Independents and Republicans sinking. This may not be a swing state any more.

A few weeks ago I linked to a video that compressed the Democratic presidential race so far into seven minutes. Well, now that the race is complete, it takes eight minutes.

June 16, 2008 – 2:21 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (4)