The Punditburo

Emperor Berlusconi

2010-05-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

(A Czech Republic protest in solidarity with the anti-Berlusconi last December 5th, dubbed by opponents of Berlusconi "No Berlusconi Day.")
The Italians tend to think of heirs to the glory of the Roman empire. This is just another nationalistic myth of lineage from an ancient civilization, and there are few similarities between the present day Italian state and the Roman empire. However, in terms of government, I think they may have a point. The style of Emperor driven politics of the most dissolute Caesars has made a return to Italy, and shows no sign of leaving. I am referring of course to the reign of Silvio Berlusconi, the richest and perhaps most corrupt man in Italy. The politics of Berlusconi are a revolting cocktail of corruption, misogynism, money politics and media control. Italy is unique among developed democracies is how much of official and unofficial power can be wielded by one man, and how this the influence of this one man has perverted and coarsened the already non-too-robust Italian democracy. These developments should give us pause. Though much of Berlusconi-ism is unique to Italy, the power of corporations and media tycoons certainly is not. The power that an oligarch like Berlusconi can accumulate in Italian politics by dint of media empire and monetary power should give us reason to look hard at the role money plays in our own politics as well.
For some idea why I dislike Berlusconi so much, I recommend this article in the New York Review of Books. Some of the details about Berlosconi's politics are salacious and titillating, and I suppose ought to be reasonably ignored, but when Berlusconi starts packing Italian and European parliament with his show-girls, a line has been crossed.

Berlusconi did indeed bring several former showgirls into parliament in the 2008 elections. Two of them were made government ministers, one of equal opportunity, the other of tourism. Both had appeared, as starlets, on Berlusconi entertainment shows. A series of wiretapped conversations made during a criminal investigation was said to reveal that Berlusconi had a sexual relationship with some of these women but prosecutors destroyed numerous taped conversations of a “purely personal” nature because they had no bearing on the investigation. Wiretaps that have been made public show Berlusconi using the state television system as a kind of casting couch, getting auditions for le mie fanciulle (my girls) in order to “lift the morale of the boss.”
The incident that initially infuriated Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, occurred in 2009 when he handpicked a couple of dozen showgirls, many of them young women in their early to mid-twenties, to be groomed as candidates for the European Parliament. Few of them had any political experience. One of them had been the weather girl on a Berlusconi network. Several had attended some of his private parties. He set up a school to give them a crash course in European politics so that they wouldn’t embarrass themselves during the campaign. Lario denounced the women as

trash without shame…who offer themselves like virgins to the dragon in order to chase after success, fame, and money.

This says more about Italian politics than just that Berlusconi is sexually voracious (and, unsurprisingly, sexist.) This is one more story of the use of power for personal ends, that is, corruption, by the Italian president. If he gets in trouble, the president can simply have the laws rewritten to accommodate his corruption.

Berlusconi set back to work on a new law that would immediately eliminate the two criminal cases pending against him—the Mills case and another charging that his TV company, Mediaset, used offshore accounts to inflate the prices it paid for movie rights in order to cheat the Italian treasury of millions of dollars it would otherwise have owed. To avoid the suspicion that the law grants special status to Berlusconi, it is written so that it will absolve many other white-collar criminals and could eliminate as many as 80,000 to 100,000 criminal cases. By some counts, Berlusconi has passed eighteen laws that appear to have been written specifically to meet his own personal needs, but this time, neither Berlusconi nor his allies make much of a pretense that there is some larger public principle involved. It is government for and by one person.

The whole article is worth reading for the picture it paints the sin and corruption of this one-man political system.

Don't Talk to Aliens

2010-04-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Stephen Hawking tells us that we should probably not try to contact aliens.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The idea that extra-terrestrials could be scary isn't exactly new idea, the alien invasion trope has been used again and again in fiction ever since H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.
I would somehow prefer to believe that whatever aliens we came across would have developed morally to a point where they think just kill us, but this obviously isn't necessarily the case.
Among the greatest defining features of humanity is our rapacity. Whenever early humans arrived in a new part of the globe, most of the other life forms died off soon after. It could be that the aliens operate in much the same way. What if the aliens are simply rapacious, and don't care about any other forms of life they come across. Daniel Drezner on comments:

Why would aliens go after the inhabited planets? Ceteris paribus, I'm assuming that aliens would prefer to strip-mine an uninhabited planet abundant with natural resources than an inhabited one. Three hundred planets have already been discovered in the Milky Way, and there are "likely many billions." Even rapacious aliens might try some of them first before looking at Earth, since we are mostly harmless.

There is a counterargument, of course. Over at Hit & Run, Tim Cavanaugh tries to assuage fears of aliens by observing, "Why would a race of superintelligent jellyfish or blue whales even take notice of us, let alone want to conquer us?" This cuts both ways, however. If those jellyfish fail to notice us but notice our abundant amounts of salinated water, they could decide to come without a care in the world for the bipedal inhabitants of Earth.

One can imagine a callous species of aliens, who are as uncaring toward human interests as most of humanity is to the inhabitants of the forests we chop down. Think of the Vogons from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who demolish Earth in order to build a hyper-space highway, or these aliens from Calvin's imaginings in Calvin and Hobbes (click the pictures for more legible view.)

More on Money and Politics

2010-03-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

For the opposite point of view from my own on this Supreme Court, I would point you to this piece by libertarian Will Wilkinson. Wilkinson does a good job characterizing the liberal logic on the decision. He goes on to say we should applaud the ruling because the law, as it pertains to free speech, is very clear. "The trouble is, the First Amendment is written in stubbornly plain language. By honoring the simple letter of that law, the Citizens United decision dealt a crushing blow to this progressive project, leaving them wailing as if all were lost." I think the flow of money in political elections is pretty questionable as far as free speech, especially when we start extending free-speech rights to imagined entities, ie corporations. For more of this argument, see my piece for the Michigan Independent, as well as this piece from slate.
Wilkinson goes on to discuss three "progressive fallacies" on this issue.

First, progressives mischaracterize the nature of corporations. Corporations are not essentially villainous agglomerations of money and power. They are a convenient form of social organization that enables large numbers of people to undertake cooperative endeavors. Non-profit corporations, like Citizens United or the ACLU, provide individuals the opportunity to amplify their lone voices in harmony with like-minded others. Meanwhile, for-profit corporations are little more than lenders’ co-ops – a way for people to pool their resources to finance what look to be profitable lines of business. It is true that managers of corporations can -- and do -- take advantage of their owners and creditors. But there is a staggering number and diversity of for-profit corporations, and most of them, most of the time, do right by their stakeholders. Moreover, very few ever get involved in electoral politics in a significant way.

This seems to me a problematic objection. Even if we accept everything Wilkinson says about the essentially benign nature of corporations (which seems to me wrong, a group of individuals banded together in the search for profits can be a sinister entity), this seems to me scant reason to grant these agglomerations special rights that citizens are already allowed. Further, it is very clear when one looks at the way pharmaceuticals, insurance companies and large banks have played in the recent legislation, the role of corporations is in the political process is outsized. Wilkinson addresses this concern in his second point:

Which points to a second progressive error: the tendency to fixate on the high drama of elections rather than the more mundane processes by which corporate and other special interests actually do rig legislation and regulation in their favor. A single lobbyist with a good friend in the right place can deliver more to a special interest than many millions spent on campaign advertising. In 2009, $3.47 billion was spent on federal lobbying – a large sum, certainly, but not when you consider that the stimulus bill alone dispensed nearly $800 billion in public funds.

This also seems at first reasonable until one realizes that the reason that lobbying is so effective is that lobbyists hold the strings to possible campaign funds. Now, it is far from the case that all influence-peddling in Washington is the result of campaign contributions, but enough of it is that it doesn't make sense to dismiss it by simply pointing to the lobbyists who often enable it.
This brings us to our final "progressive fallacy":

But the granddaddy of all progressive errors – the one that breeds all others -- is the assumption that greater government power can rectify the problem of unequal citizen power. Government can only act as a “countervailing force” in this regard if it is not acting already to serve corporate and special interests. But it is. That is why new government powers merely augment, rather than offset, the already disproportionate power of entrenched interests.

This is in part pretty reasonable, the state is admittedly a very flawed vessel for changing the way that groups influence the state. On the other hand, if, as this argument pre-supposes, the state is already a under the sway of special interests, I don't think the argument necessarily follows that one must give up hope of using it to regulate interests. The best way to curb these interests would be for civic-minded people to fight a few key battles to attempt to limit these interests, rather than having to fight on every issue. Often, campaign finance reform does not work for the reasons outline (McCain-Feingold has not been an overly successful piece of legislation), but the answer is to attempt to fight to limit the interests in smarter ways, like providing public financing for elections, not by simply acknowledging that the state will always be hostage to special interests.

Article from the Independent

2010-02-27T08:30:00.000-08:00

In case you've missed it, you can find my article from the here.

The article, is part of a point counter-point, the second article can be found here.

The article seems to counter-point argues that the decision will likely have little effect on our democracy, and that any changes made by the decision are greatly oversold, and that in any case, it doesn't benefit one party more than the other. I don't think there's anything wrong with this conclusion, as far as it goes, it merely seems to me far from the beating heart of the matter. In my editorial, despite its hysterical title (for which I am not responsible), I write:

President Obama quickly moved to condemn the decision. “This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy,” he said in a statement issued soon after the decision. “It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t.”

This is only partially true. The floodgates were already open, the decision just opens them a crack wider. The decision FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life already allowed corporations to run attack ads about candidates. The only thing that this recent decision changes is it allows these ads to explicitly endorse a candidate. Concern that corporate money will now flow into the system is overblown; it already could. The president is right, however, to be worried about this decision, which will only exacerbate the situation.

Indeed, I am cautiously optimistic about the result of the decision. It both changes very little about existing law and brings attention to absurd ideological justification for money in politics (corporations are people and money is speech, it all follows from that). Very few people believe that existing campaign financing laws (ie McCain-Feingold) have been successful in restricting the influence of corporations in politics, this decision is a wake-up call for limiting corporate influence.

The other article concludes:

There are certainly valid reasons to question the decision—primarily, whether corporate personhood entails the right to free speech. Some take issue with the idea of corporate personhood in general. I don’t intend to in any way undermine the importance of these issues, but I don’t think these are the primary issues for most people. If those are the real issues, and not politics, why is this so polarizing? If Citizens United is actually eroding the very foundation of our democracy and will inevitably lead to the collapse of our entire civilization, then this is not a political issue. But this very obviously is a political issue, which seems to indicate that the doctrinal issues are not on the forefront of people’s minds. If the partisan divide of the donations remains the same, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t continue to fluctuate with the political cycles as it has in the past ten years, no party stands to benefit from this decision any more than any other party.

It has has certainly not been the impression I've received, either from the people I've talked to or the articles I've read, that must people are worried about the decision because they believe that most contributions will go toward Republican candidates. Perhaps all of the what I have heard from editorial writers, friends and politicians worrying about untoward corporate influence is simply a Machiavellain smoke-screen for concern about Democratic politicians, but there is little reason to think this. It is wrong to point to the fact that their is a partisan divide on this issue as showing that it is an issue primarily because of how it effects the two parties. There are similarly partisan divides about abortion, gun-control, climate-change and healthcare but simply because beliefs about these issues tend to break down along partisan lines doesn't mean that liberals some how think gun-control will lead to more more votes for a Democratic candidates, or that Republicans oppose abortion because they think future Republican voters are being aborted. Similarly, to suggest that the partisan divide on this issue is due to worry about who gets more contribution (a worry that the article has already shown to be largely invalid) is to completely write-off the genuine ideological difference between liberals and conservatives on issues like this one.

Is Religion Adaptive? Does it Matter?

2010-01-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

I've just finished watch a bloggingheads tv featuring Nicholas Wade, author of The Faith Instinct and Razib Khan of Secular Right. I recommend this diavlog thought-provoking and containing interesting discussions of historical religion.

The main argument made by Nicholas Wade here (and in his book) is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation as opposed to, say, a spandrel- a byproduct of otherwise adaptive faculties used wrongly. Many have postulated that humans have an innate tendency to deduce agency- that is, attribute a will and intelligence to something which in fact acts out of natural forces rather than emotion. A storm, for example, may appear angry to the observers, but correctly understood it is merely the result of blind meteorological forces. It's easy, so goes this theory, to see that gods began- we simply imagined these beings from an otherwise adaptive faculty.
Wade has a not altogether convincing alternative- religion is in fact an adaptive force for "social cohesion". Though this initially seems plausible, I have trouble seeing that there's that much evidence far it to be. Perhaps we have a predisposition toward belief in a higher power, but its difficult to test this: we rather either have the belief drilled into our heads and acquire it, or don't. According to Wade, in the same way we acquire language early in life, it is similarly much easier to come by religion as a child. A much more obvious answer is simply that we are most impressionable as children, and tend to reflect the world-view of our parents and other influences.
Obviously, just because something is adaptive does make it true, indeed, because their are other reasons for such a belief to evolve, it increases our reasons to doubt such a belief. Those who make the "religion is adaptive" argument tend toward an altogether different argument, namely that it shows religion to be a social good. This is problematic, as many things that are adaptive are utterly evil (rape and genocide, come to mind). Nevertheless, Wade does apparently seem to think that the argument that religion is adaptive and the argument that it is good go hand in hand.
From the New York Times review of the Faith Instinct

Wade would probably deny that being adaptive makes any religion better in a non-evolutionary sense than any other. His scientist’s neutrality slips toward the end of the book, however, when he starts making the case for Religion with a capital R. Like Robert Wright in “The Evolution of God,” Wade wants to defend religion from so-called “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who see it as a malignant illusion. In chapters on religion and trade, religion and warfare, religion and nation, and the “ecology” of religion — the way in which religion regulates fertility and population size — Wade argues that our religious disposition can enhance social and national unity, manage scarce resources, even solve the tricky problem of how to get young men to die for the greater good when that’s called for. But Wade also knows that the faith-based preference for the group has engendered genocide, mass suicide and maladaptive cargo cults. Perhaps that is why he declines to draw one inference that proceeds from his arguments: that individual religions can be compared and ranked and, well, approved or disapproved of, since a religion can be good only insofar as it’s useful.

The argument that religion is merely an evolutionary adaptation and clearly socially constructed, yet ought to be encouraged for its social effects seems incredibly Machiavellian. the argument in a nutshell is that this is not true but the masses should believe it, so that they will be more socially cohesive and hence, among other things. Napoleon made the point similarly "Religion is excellent stuff to keep the poor from killing the rich". If it were true that these myths were useful, there might be some sort of argument, but there's little reason to think they are. Take the example of getting people to die in battle. Evidence points toward the secular being over-represented in the military. Even it true that the religious being more willing to fight and die, today technology is far more important than fanaticism. The Taliban and Al Qaeda have shown themselves far more willing to die for their cause, however, the United States is far more powerful because of the weaponry. In the modern world, know how (primarily furnished by secular scientists) trumps fanaticism ten times over.
Beyond this fact, I don't understand why anyone sane would ever recommend religious belief as a way to encouraging military service. I for one would prefer the soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan to have a secular world-view, rather than be encouraged to see themselves as on a crusade. I think the other alleged "good effects" of religion are probably similar to this. They sound appealing on first blush, but upon examination don't make sense.

What Would Likely Be the Result of an Iranian Bomb

2009-10-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the revelation of the Qom reactor, it seem likely that Iranians are building their warheads, not for more than just power. Hawks report, ominously, that Iran is 3-5 years from reaching a nuclear weapon. People have been estimating that Iran is 3 to 5 years from building a bomb for the last two decades, but no matter. The conventional wisdom here in American that Iran is obviously going to build a bomb. Whether this conventional wisdom is true is unclear, it is at least as likely that Iran will halt on the brink of weaponization such that, in a pinch, nuclear weapons could be manufactured quickly.

The arguments that Iran ought not to be allowed to build a bomb are of several sorts, a similar to those which were applied to Saddam Hussein prior to the invasion. First there's the standard line that proliferation of any kind is to be avoided. A second argument is that Iran possessing a nuclear weapon would allow a "nuclear umbrella" and would galvanize anti-western forces throughout the region. This strikes me as overblown. It seems unlikely to the extreme that Iran's nuclear umbrella would ever extend to proxy forces, nor does it seem to me that a nuclear weapon would put Iran in any particular good place from a strategic point of view. Most countries in the region either are under US protection or possess their own arsenals. The only gain Iran might have from their weapons would be deterrence, which doesn't seem much of an issue unless we are contemplating the invasion of Iran.

Stephen Walt has a lengthy post wherein he considers the possible effects of an Iranian bomb.

The key point to remember is that a decision to build a bomb involves some complex cost-benefit calculations, and Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon would not necessarily lead any of its neighbors to decide that their best course is to follow suit. One reason they might hold back is simply the recognition that getting a bomb would not enhance Iran's influence as much as is sometimes claimed. China did not suddenly become a more influential power when it tested a bomb in 1964; its rise to true great power status came when it began to modernize its economy in the l980s. Getting a bomb may have reinforced Israel's "existential security" (which is why Ben Gurion wanted one), but having a couple of hundred nuclear weapons doesn’t enable them to blackmail the Palestinians or the other Arab states into doing whatever Jerusalem wants. Similarly, North Korea has hardly any influence in world affairs despite its recent entry into the nuclear club; the only thing that that Pyongyang can do with its weapon is discourage others from putting too much pressure on them. Americans really should understand this: we have several thousand nuclear weapons and we have a tough enough time getting other states -- even rather weak ones -- to do what we want. The same would be true for a nuclear Iran: it could not blackmail anyone because the threat would not be credible, and even nearby states might find it easier to adjust to than we sometimes think .

This strikes me as pretty sound. Iranian nuclear weapons would obviously not have a positive effect on the security in the region, but there negative effects are clearly massively over-hyped.

The final case is that a nuclear bomb represents a sort of final solution. This school of though points out the the USSR and Maoist China were fundamentally rational adversaries, whereas sees Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ruling ayatollahs (the difference between the two is often brushed over) are motivated by Millenarian beliefs and therefore fundamentally irrational. Under this theory, as soon as Iran achieves weaponization, they will destroy the state of Israel.

On its face, this seems completely reasonable, but in fact it seems very overblown. If Iran is so irrational, one would probably see it manifested in their actions, yet this doesn't seem to me to be the case. Iran is happy to increase its influence by selling weapons and political support to anti-Israeli terrorist militias, but they haven't had Revolutionary Guards fighting on the the front lines against Israel. A fundamentally irrational regime is generally manifests some way in its actions. Idi Amin and the Pol Pot both led fundamentally irrational regimes, but it was easy to tell how insane there regimes were, and because of their irrational actions, these regimes were removed from power. The case that Iran is irrational is based on no action in particular, rather it is based on speculation and key misreading of statements by the Iranian president. Though proponents of the irrationality view tend to contrast this with the USSR and Red China, they conveniently forget that when we faced these countries, they were considered just as irrational as we now say Iran is. Later we'll be contrasting rational Iran with the suppoed irrationality of whatever future adversary we face.

No power would welcome an Iranian bomb, and no one is arguing that Iranian nuclearization is a positive development. I would say, though, that overheated predictions of apocalyptic scenarios is no help to the dialogue.

Visiting the Creation "Museum"

2009-08-13T08:43:00.001-07:00

Last friday, 300 atheists descended on the notorious creation museum. The trip was in conjunction with a Secular Students Alliance conference in Columbus, Ohio. I was one of those 300 atheists.

above: the lobby of the creation museum
Why did I see the museum? Mainly because I was curious, not just of the creation museum itself, though that too, but also the trend it represented. The creation museum has become the symbol of the know-nothingism in American society. It seems likely that the creationist will not succeed in imposing their bizarre version of reality on the school-children of America, but the balkanization of reality and a disregard for objective facts exemplified by the creationists has already so permeated out discourse it has become almost impossible to have a reasonable political dialogue in this country. Elect a new president? We're told he's not born in this country, and secretly a Muslim anyhow. Want to reform healthcare? People scream that the new plan will euthanize old people. The creationists are symbolic of this irrationality.
It used to be people were welcome to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Today our discourse allows two sides their own facts as well. As Paul Krugman put it, if a small group of people began claiming the Earth is flat, the newspaper headline would be "Shape of the Earth: Views Differ". Stephen Colbert famously labels this phenomenon "truthiness".
One of the earliest exhibits in the creation museum perfectly illustrates this point. It shows two scientists on an paleontological dig. One scientist says the bones are roughly 100 million years old. The sees the same thing, but says the bones are about 4400 years old (just the idea of a creationist on a dig like this should raise some eyebrows). What is happening here is not two "interpretations" as the museum claims. Instead, the latter scientist has hocked back the facts provided by the find, and made up his own. Basically the museum is saying "age of the Earth: views differ."

The museum is at least consistent . It "teaches the controversy", the thing that the evolution deniers been encouraging rural school-boards to do since time immemorial. A whole section compares the alternate interpretations of "Human Reason" and "God's Word". I note some inconsistency here, a lot of this museum seems to be arguing that the precepts of creation are more reasonable than those of evolution, a feat requiring considerable twisting of the facts.

In a series of displays, we are shown both the fundamentalist interpretation on one hand and on the other hand, the scientific world-view is displayed. The creationists, despite what you may think, do in fact believe in evolution, indeed, they believe in evolution several factors of magnitude faster than anything any true scholar of the subject would ever propose. To the creationists, every animal evolved from several base types over a period of several thousand years since the great flood. This fact allowed Noah to only take on board the basic "types" and thus fit all the animals on the Ark (I was unable to maintain a straight face typing that last sentence). Via PZ Myers, (for soem reason, I did not photograph this) a picture of the genetic divergence of both the "monkey" and the human types. See if you can spot the difference.

Of course, the creationists can't just leave us with the appearance that both ideas might simply be equal so, we are then led in to what might be called atheistland, a representation of our dystopian present. Believers, you see, think of evolution as a sort of Pandora's Box, and when you open it, you never know what will jump out at you. Abortion, euthanasia, acceptance of gays; all these are horrible results of evolutionary theory. We walk through a what could be a recreation of a seedy New York City back ally, replete with newspaper clippings emphasizing these various hot-button issues. The next part of atheistland portrays the spirtual vacuum of a modern suburban home and a wrecking ball destroying a church.
This may be the real reason creationists insist on their cockamamie theories. They are convinced that in a world determined by evolution, people will grow wicked, so it is better that we don't question God's word, even in the slightest. This is highly idiosyncratic. There certainly are ills in our world, but it's very difficult to attribute any of these to evolutionary theory. What's more, our world is superior in a whole host of ways to the pre-enlightenment world, including in being less violent (see previous post). The creationists also ignore the fact that one could just as easily point to horrible things as resulting from christianity. For example, the museum draws a clear link between evolution and "scientific" racism, yet they are clear in embracing the Hammite descent of Africans, the most common justification used for slavery.

There's more material in the creation museum, but this post is getting long, so I will try to cover more in another post.

Is War/ Violence Becoming Less Common?

2009-08-05T15:19:00.000-07:00

An interesting article by John Horgan in Slate seems to illustrate pretty clearly that war is indeed becoming a less common phenomenon, especially wars between states. Perhaps this is democratic peace theory at work.

Counting casualties is fraught with uncertainty; scholars' estimates vary according to how they define war and what sources they accept as reliable, among other factors. Nevertheless, a clear trend emerges from recent studies. Last year, 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts, according to the 2009 Yearbook of SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, to be released Aug. 17. Two thirds of these deaths took place in just three trouble spots: Sri Lanka (8,400), Afghanistan (4,600), and Iraq (4,000). In contrast, almost 500,000 people are killed each year in violent crimes and well over 1 million die in automobile accidents.

SIPRI's figure excludes deaths from "one-sided conflict," in which combatants deliberately kill unarmed civilians, and "indirect" deaths from war-related disease and famine. If these casualties are included, annual war-related deaths from 2004 to 2007 rise tenfold to 250,000 per year, according to "The Global Burden of Armed Violence," a 2008 report published by an international organization set up in the aftermath of the Geneva Declaration. Even this much higher number, the report states, is "remarkably low in comparison to historical figures."

For example, Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland's School for International and Security Studies has estimated that war and state-sponsored genocide in the first half of the 20th century killed as many as 190 million people, both directly and indirectly. That comes to an average of 3.8 million deaths per year. His analysis found that wars killed fewer than one-quarter of that total in the second half of the 20th century—40 million altogether, or 800,000 per year.

Even these staggering figures are low in comparison with prehistoric ones, if considered as a percentage of population. All the horrific wars and genocides of the 20th century accounted for less than 3 percent of all deaths worldwide, according to one estimate. That is much less than the probable rate of violent death among our early ancestors.

This seems to me both contrarian and convincing. Generally, we tend to ascribe violence in society to immutable human nature, and suppose we have some sort of natural tendency toward war and violence. This article explicitly argues the opposite.

Our prehistory seems to have grown more bellicose as time went on, however. According to anthropologist Brian Ferguson, there is little or no clear-cut evidence of lethal group aggression among any societies prior to 12,000 years ago. War emerged and rapidly spread (PDF) over the next few thousand years among hunter-gatherers and other groups, particularly in regions where people abandoned a nomadic lifestyle for a more sedentary one and populations grew. War arose, according to this perspective, because of changing environmental and cultural conditions rather than because of "human nature".

Steven Pinker also argues the same case, but expands it to all forms of violence, looking at homicide rates, harsh punishment and other forms of violence as well as war. He points out that cruelty was once considered high entertainment. The burning of cats to death was once considered very amusing for example. Another example is be bear-baiting, a sport involving a fight to the death between bears and trained dogs. This sport was a major form of entertainment in England until the 19th Century.

Since Pinker is known for, among other things, his blistering attack on those who deny the importance of genes in shaping human behavior, it is interesting that his argument is explicitly not that we have a genetic disposition toward violence, but rather that violence is rational. The logic of a the preemptive strike makes violence tempting option to both sides. If two armed groups exist because each side know that the other side could raid first, and therefore it seems wise to launch a first-strike. This dynamic can also be seen between nations. In 1967, the Egyptian army mobilized on bad information obtained from the Soviet Union about a looming Israeli attack on Syria. Israeli sources picked up the mobilization and the leader-ship decided, knowing the country to be vulnerable to a first-strike, and itself struck first. The result was the 6 Day War. Because they attacked, Israel was able to destroy the Egyptian air-force while it was still on the ground (it should be pointed out that, despite the fact that the war was a stunning success from an Israeli perspective, most of current the problems of the area grew out of the conflict).
John Quiggin of Broken Timber thinks thinks Pinker is confused and inconsistent as to the matter of violence.

I’ve seen this kind of confusion before. Rational egoist models like homo economicus, ’selfish gene’ models like evolutionary psychology, and ‘realist’ models of international relations (in which nation-states are viewed as unitary actors) use similar styles of argument and therefore appeal to the same sort of person, but they radically inconsistent with each other, because they each posit a single level at which everything can be explained, different in each case.

I don't see the inconsistency in the position. The logic Pinker is using is similar to logic used by those who espouse homo economicus and "realist" theories of international relations. "Homo economicus" and "realist" international theory are both suspect for different reasons, the former because it assumes the human being to be rational, the latter because it makes similar assumptions about states, when in reality foreign policy is generally the result of special interest infighting and politicians trying to maintain their power, not "great powers" attempting to maximize their power and influence. However, the argument Pinker makes about preemptive attacks doesn't rely on either of these (or even, in this case, on selfish genes). The level that this takes place in dispute, this effect clearly happens at the level of human organization, whether they are tribes, clans, mafia families or nation-states, as the 6 Day War illustrates.

Birthers

2009-08-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

One story that has been getting a lot of play is the large group of people who don't believe that the president was born in this country. Obviously, those subscribing to this ridiculous belief simply don't want to admit Obama is a president, and the belief has racial overtones, clearly a stalking horse of those who don't want to accept a black president with a Arab sounding name. Disgusting.
The godmother of the birther movement, lawyer/ real-estate broker/ dentist Orly Taitz was on the Colbert Report. Apparently, Colbert wanted a chance to show just how crazy these people are. She didn't disappoint (also, where the hell did she get the idea that both your parents must be citizens for you to be president?)

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On the other hand, is this really any crazier than the many people who think that George Bush had a role in the destruction of the twin towers? No. Both are stupid conspiracy theories. The difference how widespread the theory is, and who believes it. Only about 20% of southern whites gave the factually correct answer to the question of where Obama was born.

The Republican leadership seems to kowtow to this group of lunatics. If a substantial number of Democratic officeholders had refused to say whether they though George Bush had destroyed the World Trade Center, people would comment.

Show-trials in Tehran

2009-08-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

The spirit of Stalin is alive and well. The New York Times:

The Iranian authorities opened an extraordinary mass trial against more than 100 opposition figures on Saturday, accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers to stage a revolution through terrorism, subversion, and a media campaign to discredit last month’s presidential election.

The Tehran Trials seem echo strongly of the Moscow Trials. In the Moscow Trials, Joseph Stalin liquidated all of the "Old Bolsheviks", as well as the entire Politburo, and the purge eventually spread to the general populace, and the secret police were given quotas of people who had to be tried. The (initial) logic of the show trials was to liquidate anyone who could possibly challenge the Stalin's authority.
The Iranian show-trials target reformist Iranian politicians. The even have the classic "confessions".These confessions were clearly obtained under torture. The radio program This American Life recently had a program in which a liberal Iranian journalist describes how he was tortured until he signed a wrote a confession admitting to be a agent of the United States attempting to foment a "color revolution". The segment points out that there have been forced confessions of reformists and journalist being aired on Iranian TV for a decade. The process of torture and eventual confession to bizarre conspiracies is almost identical to the practices of the Soviet government.
The program notes that confessions all have a sameness. Each one was written by the elements of the Revolutionary Guards. The have a preponderant worry about foreign governments, such as the United States and Britain, and with the CIA. The confessions also almost always talk about fomenting a "velvet revolution". These obsessions are easily enough explained, about hlf a century ago, the CIA did indeed over-throw the government of Iran, and the fact that the Revolutionary Guards are so concerned with a "Velvet Revolution" is because they know the regime is vulnerable to such an uprising. To get some idea of the strange paranoia of the Iranian Revolutionary of the conservative Iranian establishment, watch this video.

The End of the F-22

2009-07-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

The president and congress went eyeball to eyeball on the F-22 Raptor, and it looks like congress blinked. The Hill:

The Senate’s decisive vote this week to cut off the F-22 program is resonating in the House, where leading appropriators on Wednesday said they would back away from an effort to continue production of the radar-evading fighter.

“When the Senate said 58 to 40, I think that ended the debate,” said Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee. “We have to be realistic about this.”

The vote on whether to extend money to the F-22 emerged as a crucial test for President Obama, who personally vowed to veto any defense bill that contained money to extend the fighter program. The Obama administration wants to cap the fleet at 187 planes.

Murtha last week included $369 million in the 2010 defense appropriations bill for advance parts for 12 more F-22s after 2010.

Now Murtha said he will seek to use the $369 million for spare parts and engines for existing F-22s and not as a down payment of sorts on any additional jets.

Matt Yglesias has an interesting piece dealing with the wider implications of the fight over the F-22

Once upon a time, it was generally agreed that spending on defense, like spending on roads or health care, counted as the expenditure of money. Perhaps a good idea, perhaps a bad idea -- it was, at any rate, spending. Spending that had to be judged relative to alternative expenditures of funds or the possibility of lower taxes. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as an advocate of small government, was actually an advocate for restraint in U.S. defense spending. He thought that we could rely on our nuclear deterrent to secure ourselves and our allies from Soviet aggression. By contrast, big government Democrat John F. Kennedy argued in favor of more spending, both at home and on military forces. The particular merits of these debates aside, the point is that defense spending was generally acknowledged to be a form of spending as such.

Things changed when the modern-day version of the conservative movement came to power in the person of Ronald Reagan. Taxes were slashed. We were told that "government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem." Consequently, spending would be cut in line with taxes, and the size of government would shrink. But in reality, total federal spending was essentially flat in the Reagan years and the country witnessed its first peacetime debt explosion. The reason? Despite the drastic reductions in federal revenues, defense spending skyrocketed.

Under George W. Bush, the same pattern repeated itself. Taxes were cut massively, creating a situation in which we were told we "couldn't afford" various kinds of domestic social outlay. But military spending -- including the "regular" Pentagon budget outside the various war supplementals -- just kept going up. Alleged small-government conservatives enthusiastically support this agenda, and Blue Dog Democrats and other self-proclaimed "deficit hawks" in Congress did not raise a peep of opposition. Indeed, within the GOP caucus, opposition to the federal government having any money is strongly correlated with support for spending tons on defense. And within the Democratic caucus, proclivity to bleating about deficits is, again, correlated with support for massive defense expenditures.

To some liberals, any defense budget fight that doesn't actually reduce expenditures isn't a defense budget fight worth engaging in. But the first step to a serious debate about the necessary level of defense spending is to change the political context so that we're no longer doing fantasyland budgeting for which politicians pretend the Pentagon's bills are paid with Monopoly money.

One of the oddest things about the debate over military spending is those ostensibly against the inefficient use of government funds are those most dedicated to bloated, inefficient military programs. Saxby Chambliss, for example, excoriated Barack Obama's budget as spending to much money, yet fought tooth and nail to preserve the F-22. Unsurprisingly, Lockheed-Martin, the F-22's maker, is a big employer in Georgia, Chambliss's home state. This wider trend of conservatives supporting massive defense spending was true of George W Bush and Ronald Reagan, both of whom ran up massive debts in there time in part due to increasing defense spending.
It is interesting to think that once Republicans were suspicious of military spending. Dwight Eisenhower once warned in a speech in 1961:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Whether Eisenhower had the right answer (a force more reliant on the threat of nuclear weapons) is dubious, but he was completely right to warn of the creeping influence of the complex.
The junking of the F-22 Raptor is a loss for the military-industrial complex, but a minor one. Despite the way it has been portrayed in the media, Obama's budget in fact increases military spending from the Bush years. Leaving out the expenditures on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama budget is $534 billion, the Bush budget was $513 billion. Though the Obama budget has tried to shift toward more relevant program, my guess is there's still plenty of useless projects in that budget as well. Still, it is hopeful that the president and defense secretary have signaled they are at least ready to take on these issues at all.

F-22 Raptor and other Oddities

2009-07-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

The effects of the military-industrial complex upon our politics only becomes most obvious when an attempt is made to cut a program. A fight has broken out between the White House and congress over the F-22 program. The problem with the F-22 is it's a program looking for a justification and the very definition of a boondoggle. The Raptor is not of use to any of the current strategic issue for the United States. I heard one caller on the radio put it "the president and the Secretary of Defense want to prepare to fight terrorist, congress wants to prepare to fight aliens" One would think, with the President, the Defense Secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff supporting the decision to cut the program, congress would go along. Alas.

Congress decided to end production of the costly F-22 Raptor fighter jet at 187 planes after a debate on the 2009 supplemental war budget last month. But the very next day, the House Armed Services Committee stripped $369 million for environmental cleanup from the fiscal 2010 budget to fund an additional 12 F-22s. The Senate Armed Services Committee went a step further, providing $1.75 billion for seven more F-22s without clearly identifying the source of funds.
The F-22 costs nearly $150 million per plane - twice what was projected at the outset of the program. Factoring in development costs, the price tag increases to about $350 million per plane for the current fleet of 187.

It may look as if the House Armed Services Committee has added "only" $369 million. But given that it would provide funds for 12 additional F-22s, each with a price tag of $150 million (excluding development costs), the real cost to American taxpayers would be about $2 billion.

The F-22 is the most capable air-to-air fighter in the Air Force inventory. Yet it has only limited air-to-ground attack capabilities, which makes it unsuitable for today's counter-insurgency operations. In fact, the F-22 has never been used in either Iraq or Afghanistan. It was designed to fight next-generation Soviet fighters that never materialized, and, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has noted, it is nearly useless for irregular warfare.

The fact that the project has a massive budget overrun is not an accident, when the project was first proposed its cost was purposely lowballed. Part of congress's reluctance is also due to the fact that pieces of Raptor program were purposely placed in a number of politically potent districts.

The Raptor, by the way, is vulnerable to rain.

The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show.

The aircraft's radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings -- such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion -- challenging Air Force and contractor technicians since the mid-1990s, according to Pentagon officials, internal documents and a former engineer.

Climate Pessimism

2009-07-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

I must confess, I'm very pessimistic about the idea of humankind turning around the effects of climate change before it's too late. This doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to try, but I can't help getting the feeling that it's not going to happen.
Take the bill that's making its way through congress.

Unlike Brad Lindsey, I am very worried about the idea that climate change could be an "apocalyptic problem", so the failure to deal with it is even more troubling to me, particularly the utter servitude of congress to agri-business, going so far as to muzzle the EPA on the matter of biofuels.
Yet worse is the failure of developed and undeveloped countries to reach an agreement on climate change at the G-8. Critics, such as the blogger I linked to, suggest that it's the patchy commitment of the United States to reducing greenhouse gasses that led China and India to reject the deal. My own opinion is that neither country is any more interested in reducing greenhouse gasses than the Bush administration was, and further, both nations feel it only just that they produce greenhouse gasses at the same rate western societies did when they industrialized. This is unfortunate, if, as seems likely, both nations pump out as much fossil fuel as they like as the become more developed, then there's no way of advert a possibly catastrophic change in the climate.
China and India have a point, most of the greenhouse gasses that exist were produced by the United States, and the "global north" nations never had to worry about cutting there emissions when they made the leap to prosperity. They are also foolish though. If climate changes drastically, it will be nations like China and India, much more than the United States and Europe, that will pay the price. There strategy should be one of clean development rather than refusing any climate agreement by (rightly) observing that the west lacks any moral high-ground on this issue.

RIP McNamara

2009-07-12T20:00:00.000-07:00

I'm back. From this point on, I'm going to attempt to do a post a day again.
Though our media has been fixated and the death of Michael Jackson, to me, the death of Robert McNamara is far more interesting. Robert McNarmara played a profound tragedies of American life in recent times. Probably the most interesting commentary I read on McNamara's demise comes from Stephen Walt's blog.

Some commentators see McNamara as a tragic figure; a talented, driven, and dedicated public servant who mishandled a foolish war and spent the remainder of his life trying to atone for it. The obituary in today's New York Times takes this line, describing him as having "spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences," and as someone who "wore the expression of a haunted man."

I see his fate differently. Unlike the American soldiers who fought in Indochina, or the millions of Indochinese who died there, McNamara did not suffer significant hardship as a result of his decisions. He lived a long and comfortable life, and he remained a respected member of the foreign policy establishment. He had no trouble getting his ideas into print, or getting the media to pay attention to his pronouncements. Not much tragedy there.

McNamara may have been a gifted analyst and corporate executive, blessed with a lot of raw smarts, but he was also one of those people who could not imagine being wrong or resist the desire to tell the world what to do. Failure in Vietnam did not teach him humility; he ran the World Bank with same ego-driven sense of infallibility he had brought to the Pentagon (and with predictably mixed results). Yet this second experience with failure did not temper his love of the limelight or his desire to prescribe How Things Should Be Done. He spent the last decades of his life offering high-profile advice on various aspects of nuclear weapons policy -- with the same degree of self-assurance he had always displayed -- and he sought the spotlight once again with a belated memoir on his role in Vietnam. As always, however, it was filled with "lessons" for others; to the last, McNamara retained an unwarranted confidence in his own ideas as well as an inability to keep quiet.

Overall, McNamara's post-Vietnam behavior raises a broader question about the role of former officials who have led their country into major disasters. Ordinarily, we should respect the men and women who have devoted years of their lives to public service and listen carefully to the counsel of those who have the benefit of long experience. Moreover, someone who is no longer competing for a job in Washington may be more likely to give honest advice than someone who is still worrying about the questions she might face at a confirmation hearing.

But in some cases -- and a lot of former Bush administration officials come to mind here -- the failures are of sufficient gravity as to render all subsequent advice suspect. And when a government official's repeated errors have left thousands of their fellow citizens dead or grievously wounded, along with hundreds of thousands of other human beings, it would be more seemly for them to remain silent, in mute acknowledgement of their own mistakes. And if they persist in pontificating -- as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney are now doing -- a nation that understood the importance of accountability might have the good sense to pay them the attention and respect they deserve. Which is to say: none.

This seems to me slightly too harsh, but only just. McNamara, by his own account, was already convinced that the Vietnam war was futile well before he left office, yet he said nothing out of "loyalty to the president". Such loyalty is misplaced, McNamara should have first had loyalty to those who would die should the war continue, and only second to the United States president. McNamara also kept silent on Vietnam throughout the entirety of the Nixon years, a fact which can't be explained by loyalty to Lyndon Johnson. McNamara only brought his doubts forward in memoirs written 30 years later. Too little, much too late (This article from Foreign Affairs discusses the matter further).
Yet it's not fair too compare McNamara to the Bush neo-conservatives. Dick Cheney still aggressively defends the clearly criminal enterprises that he created in office. Neither he nor any of the other Bush administration show any contrition, or even seem to realize there is anything for the to feel contrition for. McNamara is at least seems genuinely tortured by what he did. It is not a coincidence that a man who could easily have been brought up on charges before a warcrimes tribunal has argued for international rules of war. McNamara realized he was wrong and regretted it. As weak a measure as that is, it's far more than I expect out of any of those responsible for war-crimes in the bush administration.

Berlusconi Chases Jailbait

2009-06-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

It is generally the strict philosophy of this blog not to cover stories that I find overly trivial, I category that sexual scandals are emphatically falls under. While this rule is seldom broken, I am prepared to make my first exception since Eliot Spitzer.
Silvio Berlusconi's wife recently made known her desire to divorce the Prime Minister, of "consorting with minors". She further accused him of wanting to put up showgirls as candidates in his party.
The charges seem difficult to substantiate. They could just be a an embittered wife's attempt to sully her husband's reputation.
Since then, photos of a half nude party with young women (one 18) at a party with Berlusconi have appeared in al Pais.
The real issue of course is the use of public resources for private purposes. From the Guardian.

El País quoted the photographer, Antonello Zappadu, as saying that "virtually every weekend" Italian air force flights brought Berlusconi's friends, dancers and television hostesses to his 60-hectare weekend retreat. The paper said Zappadu had pixellated out the faces of his subjects to protect their identity.

Berlusconi has been accused of far more corrupt acts than this, and gotten around it by simply rewriting the law to prevent himself and his cronies from being prosecuted. No doubt he will avoid the law in this case as well.
The lesson of the Clinton impeachment is that sex scandals are bunk. Chasing jailbait does not make Berusconi unfit for governance, though it does make him a despicable human being. What makes Berlusconi unfit for office is that he is a corrupt, power-hungry charlatan.

Right-wing Extremist Violence

2009-05-31T21:16:00.000-07:00

Dr. George Tiller, one of few remaining providers of late-term abortions in the United States, has been assassinated. He was shot in his own church.
A the gunman, a Scott Roeder, is in now custody, and some research into his background has (shocker) found that he is linked with right-wing extremist groups such as the anti-abortion group Project Rescue (now Operation Save America), the Sovereign Citizens and the Freemen. I Let me remind you that when the office of Homeland Security published a report on the threat posed by these groups, congressional conservatives threw a hissy-fit. Despite the politicking of the congressional Republicans the threat posed by right-wing extremists is all too real, as illustrated by this assassination, and the similar incident where a gunman began firing into a crowd in a Unitarian Church in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church with the intention of killing liberals. The 90s saw a spurt of right-wing extremist violence. My guess is that the election Obama will galvanize a new group of extremists.
The campaign of Christianists against Dr. Tiller has been long and ongoing. They've previously vandalized his clinic and shot both his arms (for a more full walk-through of the Tiller campaign, click here and scroll down). The campaign of terror waged by Christianists forces against late term abortion providers has generally been successful, and Dr. Tiller was one of the last. Late term abortion is morally repugnant, and it seems acceptable if the a legislature or the Supreme Court wanted to take action to limit it. What is not acceptable is what has happened: the use of violence by a narrow band of extremists to impose their opinions on society.

Pakistan Increasing Nuclear Spending

2009-05-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

So say the New York Times

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Unless we can prove that somehow Pakistan's nuclear program is beggaring its counterinsurgency effort, saying that money is being "diverted" doesn't make a lot of sense. Pakistan hasn't dealt with the insurgency raging in its hinterland very effectively, but the problem would not be solved by throwing money at it.
Robert Farley on the buildup.

This fits in well with a developing narrative about how Pakistan's focus on India is the problem: The story goes that the Pakistani military still considers India its central threat and isn't overly concerned with the Taliban. There are also long-term concerns about growing Pakistani capability and especially of the dangers of some of that capability falling into Taliban hands.

With that in mind, I'm not sure that these reports are as alarming as they seem on face. Pakistan has long sought a more capable nuclear arsenal. This build-up is part of Pakistan's long-term national security strategy, rather than a response to the availability of U.S. dollars. The logic of the strategy itself can certainly be criticized, but that is an altogether different debate. Were the United States not allocating substantial aid to help the Pakistani military fight the Taliban, it's unlikely that any money would be drawn from the nuclear program. Rather, the Pakistani Army would simply be less capable at counterinsurgency. The nuclear program has occupied the highest point of prestige and importance in Pakistani defense circles since 1971, and it is unlikely that the growing strength of the Taliban -- or complaints from the United States -- can change that. If there were any direct evidence that U.S. aid was funding an increase in Pakistani nuclear capabilities above and beyond what Pakistan had already planned, I'd be more concerned, but this doesn't appear to be the case thus far.

For Pakistan, as conventional wisdom correctly suggests, the cold-war with India has a higher importance than the damage warlords and fanatics a wreaking on their frontier. The is illustrated very clearly by the fact that Pakistan is only beginning to divert sufficient forces to fight this group of rural yahoos.
Pakistan, needless to say, has a somewhat different perspective on the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (father of Benazir), who initiated the Pakistani nuclear program back in the 70s, said that Pakistan would build a bomb even if Pakistanis had to eat grass. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the scientist most responsible for the Pakistani bomb, is still regarded as a hero by most Pakistanis, even though he headed a network proliferating nuclear technology to rogue states. Pakistan's focus on the bomb seems folly, a bellicose one-upmanship with India which beggars the public good. The countries, it must be said, have behaved like the United States and the Soviet Union. So much the pity.

India and Nuclear Diplomacy

2009-05-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

India's recent elections come as a pleasant surprise, a big win for the ruling Congress Party, and a stinging defeat for the nefarious, nationalistic BJP. The Congress party should not have trouble forming a coalition, a departure from the difficult coalition forming that has characterized India politics for the last few decades.
The Times of India article:

NEW DELHI: India has yet again been surprised by Indians. Last time, no one thought a Congress-led UPA would emerge winners. It did. This time, many said Congress would be the single-largest party and UPA the top coalition, but few imagined Congress would retain office with 201 seats — the highest any single party has got in 25 years — and UPA 258 seats. And yet like a silent tsunami, the Congress swamped its rivals to triumphantly return to power.

This election was supposed to be without any national issue. The Indian voter, however, had different ideas — he has voted with his feet for a coherent and stable government. Manmohan Singh is set to take charge as Prime Minister and become the only PM since Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961 to be voted back after completing a full five-year term. What's more, he will head a government without the support of the Left, whimsical partners like Mayawati or any other coercive ally. The middle class would be heaving a sigh of relief.

Mark Kleiman thinks after this win, we should even credit Bush's policy of bringing India in from the cold and reversing the traditional US tilt toward Pakistan. This seems to me what the administration had in mid when it cut the nuclear deal with India: a "Nixon goes to China" moment of grand diplomatic thinking. If we've forgotten about Bush's nuclear deal with India, the New York Times wrote a piece on the Bush administration's relationship with India.

In July 2006, 15 years after the Soviet Union collapsed and five years after Islamic terrorists became America’s principal enemy, Mr. Bush decisively reversed course. Raising India to the status of a strategic ally, he cut a unique exception in the global nonproliferation regime, proposing that India be allowed to keep its military stockpile even as it gained access to technologies and fuel for its civilian reactors. Over the next two years Mr. Bush used dwindling political capital to get the deal approved by the Congress and foreign governments. When Pakistan requested a similar pact, it was told that such deals were reserved for “responsible” states.

This was the diplomacy of the grand gesture, and when this barrier fell others followed. The American and Indian militaries increased joint exercises. They exchanged trade delegations. Their companies won expanded access to the other’s markets. American officials began to talk up India as a rising great power in a new century.

This seems a basic problem with Bush's approach to nuclear weapons, the administration always approached such weapons with the attitude that such weapons are ok, in the right hands. He was doubtless right to pursue such a close relationship with India, but the means by which he did it are questionable. Though the deal is legal under non-proliferation law (the guidelines which would have prevented the deal were rewritten), it necessarily undercut the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty by giving India all the benefits guaranteed to NPT signatories. The message to countries that develop weapons outside of the nuclear non-proliferation regime: hold on, and you could get legitimated by the world only superpower, have your arsenal and nuclear technology cooperation. Not a bad deal.
It makes sense that the deal was not extended to Pakistan as well. The notorious Abdul Qadeer Khan famously sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya, the last of which snitched and thereby blew the lid off of the network. Though Khan himself took full responsibility for the entire program (though he was oddly let off the hook) I can see from a Pakistani point of view such a deal being regarded as scary from a strategic point of view. United States nuclear cooperation with India, though ostensibly only on the civilian nuclear program, necessarily. It's no wonder that Pakistan has tried to negotiate a similar deal with France and increased its nuclear arsenal.

Torture and Exposure

2009-05-14T20:27:00.000-07:00

It certainly feels like my blog is morphing into a running commentary on the torture issue. The latest controversy is over centers around Obama's decision not to release the additional pictures depicting torture. The decision was a tough call. I think it's a pretty good guess that Obama heard from the military that releasing the photos would endanger the lives of American troops, perhaps even endangering his timeline for withdrawal. This sort of advice would be very difficult for a president of the United States to resist. I'm not completely decided, but I think I would lean toward declassification. The opinionator has a rundown of opinions on the issue. Particularly of interest is Joan Walsh:

For the first time in his presidency, I had the sick feeling that Obama was lying in his remarks on the photos, once when he said the new images "are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib" -- I simply don't believe that -- and again when he insisted "the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken." That is a flat-out lie. Out of eight prosecutions, mostly of so-called bad apples, only reservist Charles Graner sits in prison today, while the architects who "Gitmo-ized" Abu Ghraib and encouraged torture all went free.

Is Obama trying to cover-up the torture issue? I'm not convinced this is the case. Obama came out strongly against torture, the administration just seems to want to get it off of the agenda in order to concentrate on what they want to concentrate on. On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi is a different story. Conservatives are fond of responding, when one brings up prosecution of the torture team, by asking "which Democrat who was informed would you like to see prosecuted?" Actually, almost know one was informed outside the executive branch making it difficult for congress to curb the program. One of the few that was informed, though, was Nancy Palosi. While I don't think that there's a prosecutable case against Pelosi, she clearly was informed early on, making her complicit. She's been turning herself in all kinds of knots to avoid blame.

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More on Torture

2009-05-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest questions for the media is not whether "torture" ethical or effective, but simply whether to use the word "torture" (as opposed to a more neutral "aggressive interrogation") to talk about the policies of the previous administration. Most media outlets, such as the Times have opted for "aggressive interrogation, which very clearly sides with the previous administration.
Andrew Sullivan points out, these the Times has no such qualms about describing these acts as torture.

Col. Harold E. Fischer Jr., an American fighter pilot who was routinely tortured in a Chinese prison during and after the Korean War, becoming — along with three other American airmen held at the same prison — a symbol and victim of cold war tension, died in Las Vegas on April 30. He was 83 and lived in Las Vegas. The cause was complications of back surgery, his son Kurt said.

From April 1953 through May 1955, Colonel Fischer — then an Air Force captain — was held at a prison outside Mukden, Manchuria. For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.

As Sullivan points out, the techniques used by the Chinese in this case are the exact same ones which became the basis for the United States torture program (the techniques cribbed from the SERE program were the based on the techniques that Harold Fischer, among others, was subjected to.)

But I would like to know if Bill Keller will remove the t-word from this obit and replace it with "harsh interrogations" as he does when referring to the US government's use of identical techniques. If not, why not? Remember: these people won't even use the word torture to describe a technique displayed in the Cambodian museum of torture to commemmorate the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge - as long as Americans do the torturing.

Jon Chait on Torture and the Rule of Law

2009-05-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

In keeping with this blogs recent focus on prosecution for torture, I recently read an piece by Jon Chait summing up how ridiculous the right's arguments about torture are.

Remember the Rule of Law? In the late 1990s, it was all the rage in conservative circles. Having maneuvered Bill Clinton into a position where he could either lie under oath or suffer massive personal and political embarrassment, conservatives reasoned that Clinton must be held accountable for perjury or the basic underpinnings of democracy would be shattered. The Republican sensibility was best reflected by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which not only crusaded for impeachment but demanded, in 2001, that Bill Clinton be indicted even after leaving office. The Journal rejected the logic of promoting healing and insisted that a post-presidency indictment would uphold "the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law."

Over the last decade, though, the right's thinking on this question has evolved. Today, the administration malfeasance consists of illegal torture, a crime I'd argue is no less serious than lying under oath about fellatio. Yet Republicans now believe that the Rule of Law is not only consistent with letting administration crimes go unpunished but actually requires it. To prosecute the departed administration would make us (to use their new catchphrase) a "banana republic"--the premise being that banana republics are defined not by their use of torture but by their overly zealous enforcement of anti-torture laws.

The GOP line is once again reflected by the Journal editorial page, which now thunders against "a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements." The editorial notably fails to even address the question of whether the previous administration complied with the law, which is apparently no longer an important element of the Rule of Law.

The right's newfound outrage is a more hysterical manifestation of the mainstream sentiment that it would be an unseemly form of vengeance or "looking backward" to hold the previous administration legally accountable for torture. It's a bizarre sentiment. The prosecution of any crime is inherently backward-looking. We prosecute law-breakers to keep them or others from breaking the law.

S.P.E.C.T.E.R.

2009-04-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

The bombshell of today: Arlen Specter switches political party. This will not only give the Democrats the magic 60 vote Democratic majority (once the other shoe drops, that show is Al Franken), it also bring the per capita jowl of the party substantially higher.
Obviously, the Republican party wasn't too happy, and it fell on hapless RNC Chairman Michael Steele to respond:

Some in the Republican Party are happy about this. I am not. Let's be honest -- Sen. Specter didn't leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record.

This statement is illogical on many levels. If Specter did have a "left-wing" voting record as Michael Steele claims (left-wing is a very odd word to apply to Arlen Specter) than he did leave the party based on principle, the only way he betrayed his principles was being in the party in the first place. Second, why is it that Steele wouldn't be happy about this? If Specter is an opportunistic left-wing politician, shouldn't the party be glad to have him out?
Steele did get one thing right though, Specter's flip clearly wasn't based on principle, Specter said as much himself. He was oddly forthright in his explanation of why he switched parties. Like Senator Joseph Lieberman, Specter has certain views that are best characterized as centrist, chief among these that it is most important to look out for number 1. This is what ultimately drove Specter out of the part, he was completely forthright about this: he saw the poll, and promptly jumped.
The Republicans brought this one on themselves by running wing-nut Pat Toomey against Specter. What we've seen is the dynamic of "big tent" versus "little tent". The Democratic party is not rigidly orthodox, allowing many politicians who take positions different from, or even hostile to, the supposed Democratic consensus. The party is a coalition of moderates, center liberals and left-liberals. The Republican party on the other hand, is far more disciplines, and deviating too far from the party lines risks a primary challenger. This strategy just blew-up in the face of the Republicans, GOP purists aren't going to like how little clout they'll have as an ideologically pure party.

The Debate Over Torture

2009-04-27T19:51:00.001-07:00

In the past, I've read Michael Scheuer, and been favorably impressed by some of his analysis, but his recent op-ed in Washington Post strikes me as off of the deep end, indeed, if a moron like this was responsible for catching Bin Laden (Scheuer was "chief of Bin Laden issue station") it's no wonder the terrorist chieftain has eluded US capture.

Now, in a single week, President Obama has eliminated two-thirds of that successful-but-not-sufficient national defense troika because his personal ideology -- a fair gist of which is "If the world likes us more we are more secure" -- cannot tolerate harsh interrogation techniques, torture or coercive interviews, call them what you will. Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying "War on Terror" and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.
Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families.

The last part reminds me of the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Buck Turgidson tells the president "Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American People than with your image in the history books" when the president says he refuses to go down in history as the greatest murder since Adolph Hitler.
What Scheuer misses is that Obama's belief is that these techniques don't protect America. Even if you disagree, it is a bogus charge to say he is putting his personal beliefs before protecting the country.
Scheuer's version of events is contradicted by his agencies own finding that torture is not helpful in providing intelligence. Even so, the agency has greatly squandered its credibility. Unlike the FBI, the CIA was ready to violate the law by torturing prisoners. The agency has no background interrogation, but were chosen clearly because they can operate in the darkness outside the rule of law and accountability.
The kind of information that can be obtained from torture is generally what one already wants to hear. This should be no surprise, the forms of torture we use are in many cases cribbed from Maoist practices explicitly designed to illicit false confessions (such torture tactics were stored in US army manuals for resistance to torture), and this seems to be what they've been used for.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Generally, we hear torture justified by people pointing to a "ticking time bomb", and arguing that torture will save American lives. In this case, torture was used in order to attempt to justify US policy and provide political cover for an administration, after all, even if such links existed (they didn't) they were hardly a pressing national security priority, and certainly didn't merit abusive treatment.

Pork and Swine Flu

2009-04-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

It appears that Republican's removed $900 million from the Stimulus Package dealing with a flu pandemic. Karl Rove, he of the of the supposed political genius, mocked the fact that flu preparedness was considered inserted into the bill. Susan Collins insisted that the spending be cut out of the bill
.
Collin's for her part disputes that the money would have helped:

's office dismissed the stimulus-linked criticism as "blatantly false and politically motivated," and claimed that she's long been a leader on pandemic flu preparedness as part of her work to fight bioterrorism in the Senate. Plus, as Collins' communications director, Kevin Kelley, wrote me in an email: "There is no evidence that federal efforts to address the swine flu outbreak have been hampered by a lack of funds," today.
...
But when Collins' spokesman goes on to explain what the government could be doing differently to prepare itself for the outbreak, the tone suddenly changes. "Senator Collins does, however, believe that it is a problem that the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services still do not have top positions filled," Kelley said. "She hopes the Senate will move promptly to confirm Governor Sebelius for HHS Secretary." So after pushing back against her liberal critics, Collins explicitly puts herself to the left of her GOP colleagues who have been trying to obstruct Sebelius's nomination. At the least, Collins hasn't given up on trying to redeem herself as a genuine centrist.

Even if this is the case, pandemic spending seems pretty important, yet Collin's played politics with its appropriation. More broadly, this illustrates a more general problem with theose who crusade against government "waste". Whenever crusaders identify programs that should be cut, the programs don't seems so useless. An example is when Bobby Jindal took a whack at volcano monitoring. Isn't that self evidently useful? Jon Chait pointed out a pattern of this during the McCain campaign.
No one would dispute that some of our money is wasted by the government, but I wish the "anti-pork" crusaders would identify the real wastes (agribusiness subsidies and useless military projects, to name two) and stop hamstringing useful spending.

The Shadow of Torture Part III

2009-04-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

Greg Sargent is worried that Cheney has succeeded in shifting the torture debate from whether torture is ethical to whether it is effective. I don't share that view. To begin with, I'm not sure if the ethical question is completely clear cut, torture is horrible, but is it morally worse than collateral damage? Its hard to say what principle says it is.
Second, there's lots of good evidence that torture is ineffective, and any worth it might have is outweighed by massive down-sides of using it. This is the position of Dennis Blair in a classified memo. He acknowledged the US had gained information from torture (though one cannot say certainly that these results could not be obtained by other methods), but pointed out the downside outweighed any benefit. Tortures biggest critics have generally been those with the most experience with interrogation. the British, for example, have shied away from the rough-tough interrogations because they've already learned that this is ineffective in Northern Ireland, and further inflames terrorist violence.
Another quarter that criticism of the torture regime has come from is the FBI. In an article well worth reading, special agent Ali Soufan lays out the case.

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

Parenthetically, the op-ed adds

It’s worth noting that when reading between the lines of the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use of these techniques.

I would hope that contractors wouldn't be allowed in these situations, and them setting policy is stunning. I suppose we see a link between privatization and human-rights abuse here.

Dick Cheney on the Torture Memos

2009-04-21T09:57:00.001-07:00

I hope satan has a sweat-shirt, because today is a cold day in hell. Dick Cheney wants to see more torture documents released.

Mr Cheney said that the decision to publish the memos was a mistake.

And it was misleading, he said, because the documents did not include those demonstrating that harsh interrogation delivered intelligence "success".

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is that they put out the legal memos... but they didn't put out the memos that show the success of the effort," Mr Cheney told Fox News.

"There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified. I formally ask that they be declassified now."

The American people should have a chance to weigh the intelligence obtained alongside the legal debate, he said.

Mr Cheney made his comments as US President Barack Obama visited the CIA headquarters just outside Washington.

If we're going to release the documents on the torture policy, it makes sense to release the documents that would be pertinent in evaluating the policy made by the Bush administration, if such documents do exist (that is a big if). Evidence suggests that Bush's "harsh interrogation" policy was not effective, so probably documents don't exist Up till now, Bush administration officials have assured us that "harsh interrogation methods" are effective, but they have shown no evidence. Perhaps Cheney knows no documents of this description exist, but is calling for their release to make it appear that Obama is with-holding these documents for political reasons.
Even if they exist, it would be hard to determine whether the torture is in fact an effective method. Even if Khalid Sheikh Muhammed broke under the 183 water-boardings he received, there's no way of knowing that another tact wouldn't have worked just as effectively.
My opinion: take up Cheney's challenge, and declassify as many documents as we can on the results of our torture policy. Whatever these documents show, it is better to have fuller transparency on what occurred.

In the Shadow of Torture Part II

2009-04-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

Stephen Walt has some thoughts on the the impunity seems to be being offered for the torture committed by the United States.

First, a lot of countries (including the United States) have expended considerable diplomatic effort to hold people like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic or Liberia’s Charles Taylor accountable for their crimes. Apparently Obama feels that this principle can be jettisoned when it might be politically expedient to do so. At a minimum, we ought to remember this incident the next time we get upset that some other country is declining to prosecute a former leader, turning a blind eye to some other ruler's depredations (think Robert Mugabe), or cutting a deal with some warlord or terrorist leader. Maybe they were making pragmatic calculations too, and we holier-than-thou Americans ought to be a bit less judgmental.

Second, does our failure to prosecute open the door to other efforts to do so? A number of states (France, Canada, Belgium, Spain, etc.) have incorporated a principle of “universal jurisdiction” into their own domestic legal systems, when dealing with genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity (including torture). This principle can be invoked when the home country of the alleged perpetrator is "unwilling or unable to prosecute" Earlier reports suggesting that Spanish officials were going to indict six former Bush administration officials eventually led Spain's attorney general to say that U.S. courts would be the proper venue, but Obama has now made it clear that this isn't going to happen. I don’t know what the practical implications might be, but if I were Dick Cheney or David Addington, I wouldn’t be planning a summer vacation in Spain.

Third, for those of you who think that power is of declining relevance in world politics and that normative and legal standards are becoming increasingly important, I'd just point out that the various officials who sanctioned these abuses would be in a lot more trouble if they came from a weak and vulnerable state, as opposed to a global power like the United States. Not only does power corrupt, but it allows people who sanction torture to get away with it, albeit at some considerable cost to America's image and reputation. Those reputational costs will be borne by all Americans, who ought to be furious at the crimes that were committed in their name.

I'm somewhat disappointed by the lack of accountability for administration members, but not surprised. I would hope that a country like the United States, which has been a democracy (of sorts, at least) throughout its existence, would be politically mature enough to prosecute people who break international laws. Sadly, this is not the case now, nor has it ever been. Walt writes that "for those of you who think that power is of declining relevance in world politics and that normative and legal standards are becoming increasingly important, I'd just point out that the various officials who sanctioned these abuses would be in a lot more trouble if they came from a weak and vulnerable state, as opposed to a global power like the United States". This has also always been the case. Germany and Japan were rightly held accountable for war-crimes after World War II, but the US, Britain and the Soviet Union were not. Curtis LeMay, who had engineered the firebombing of Tokyo (killing roughly 100,000) commented that if we'd lost the war, he'd be tried as a war criminal.
In a similar vein, Telford Taylor (a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials) commented in 1971 that if we applied the same standards to the architects of Vietnam that we did at Nuremberg and Tokyo, the leaders of the US would likely meet the same fate as General Tomoyuki Yamashita: hanging. I don't think this is any less true of the architects of the "War on Terror", who among other things have organized secret "black sites" in which to torture people, and have purposely sent people to be torture. The men who wrote the torture memo are no less callous and banal than Eichmann in Jerusalum. The difference is Eichmann got caught.
Fortunately, there is hope. The administration expressly ruling out prosecution of certain individuals opens the door (as Walt points out) to universal jurisdiction. Phillipe Sands, a longtime critic of the torture team, pointed out a year ago that this should be taken care of by the United States, or else we'd be face with international prosecution of US citizens. Though this would be far from the ideal solution, (the ideal being accountability for these individuals here in the US) I hope the international community takes action. It's time that citizens of powerful countries, not just two-bit dictatorships, be held accountable for their actions.

The Shadow of Torture

2009-04-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

The Obama team has published the notorious "torture memos". The author of the memos, James Bybee, remains obscenely remains a federal judge. Jeffrey Toobin:

Bybee is generally the forgotten man in torture studies of the Bush era. The best known of the legal architects of the torture regime is John Yoo, who was a deputy to Bybee. For better or worse, Yoo has been a vocal defender of the various torture policies, and he remains outspoken on these issues. But whatever happened to his boss?

Today, Bybee is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was confirmed by the Senate on March 13, 2003—some time before any of the “torture memos” became public. He has never answered questions about them, has never had to defend his conduct, has never endured anywhere near the amount of public scrutiny (and abuse) as Yoo. It is an understatement to say that he has kept a low profile since becoming a judge.

It would be nice to see an impeachment, though his appointment would sadly be upheld.

It appears Obama has reversed the Bush course on what is euphemistically called "tough interrogations". The big question now is whether there will be accountability for the abuses. Obama has shut the door on prosecuting low-level interrogators who acted in "good faith", while leaving a the door a crack open on prosecuting the Bushies. To me, the good faith defense is suspiciously close to the Nuremberg Defense (I'm pretty sure acting in "good faith" is code for doing what you were told to). It's also unclear whether the interrogators did in fact act in good faith. The memos specify one can be waterboarded 60 times a month (6 times a session, 2 sessions a day, sessions 5 days per month), yet Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was waterboarded a whopping 183 times in one month. It would also seem that Obama's offer of immunity is against our legal obligation to prosecute torture.
I can understand why we've let accountability fall by the way side, but it's sad, nevertheless.

How to Solve the Pirate Issue, more thoughts

2009-04-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

In the face of piracy, there has been disagreement about how best to respond. One solution suggested is to arm merchant ships. If I were unfamiliar with this, I'd be surprised that anyone would be heading into pirate waters not armed to the teeth. Unfortunately. there are issues with this strategy. The New Republic:

Among other issues, ship owners fret about the fact that most merchant sailors lack combat training, that a large cache of guns might make their vessels a target for marauders specifically trolling for weapons, that on-board firefights could lead to accidental fires or other disasters, that any move toward arming ships could provoke an unwinnable arms race with well-funded pirates, and that many ports' severe restrictions against vessels' docking with on-board arsenals could complicate shipping routes.

The post suggests that some of these problems would be easier if snipers were hired instead of handing out guns to the untrained merchant marine.
The most ridiculous objection to arming merchants ships comes from rush Limbaugh, who fears that arming sailors will lead to class-based fragging of captains (the captain is the CEO of the ship, you see). If this were the case, one would expect to see, and the left indoctrinates people to hate CEOs). If this is the case, why aren't people in our heavily armed nation shooting real CEOs?
This post discusses the entire crisis, and this one examines the trade-offs of appeasing the pirates vs confronting them. To me (and I think most other people), paying the ransom is the worst possible strategy , because it would provide reward that make the piracy business worthwhile. The post seems to concede that.

One significant problem is the low cost of entry into the piracy business. It would be much better if a single pirate leader controlled entry. Then we could do business with him, paying him a tribute (we might prefer to call it a “toll”) in return for a promise not to molest our ships. As a monopolist, he would have an incentive to limit “production” of piratical activity, relative to the unregulated market we currently live in. The monopolist essentially would be selling passage off the coast of Somalia, and would be constrained by competition from people who control alternative routes (which, unfortunately, seems limited). We might even expect the pirates to start organizing, or fighting among themselves, in an effort to establish a single firm that could obtain these monopoly rents. In the happy event that an organization emerged, we could call it a “state” and deal with it as we deal with any other state—paying it or pressuring to act as we want it to act, in light of its interests and capacities. We could even call this state “Somalia.” If the gains from rational management of this newly discovered resource—the power to block important sea lanes—provide sufficient incentives for Somalia’s warring clans to make a deal and reestablish a state that can control entry into the market, we should be sure to keep paying Somalia money (we might call it “foreign aid” if “tribute” or even “toll” is too irksome) rather than yield to the temptation to smash it to pieces. In the state system, sometimes you do better with an enemy than without one.

But that outcome is a long way off. In the meantime, governments will have to employ an unsatisfactory combination of carrots and sticks—mounting expensive patrols that spot and pick off pirates on occasion, while paying ransoms to those pirates who succeed.

Pirate Standoff Ends

2009-04-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

From the Christian Science Monitor:

The dramatic Navy rescue Sunday that freed an American cargo ship captain from his Somali captors could begin to change the calculus of the rampant piracy in some of the world's most traveled and dangerous waters.

Snipers aboard the USS Bainbridge shot the three pirates aboard a lifeboat with Capt. Richard Phillips 100 feet away. Mr. Phillips was seen to be in "imminent danger" – with at least one of the pirates pointing an AK-47 at his back, said Vice Adm. William Gortney in a Pentagon briefing. A fourth pirate surrendered and was taken into custody.

The operation apparently brought to a close the remarkable story of the Maersk Alabama, a US-flagged cargo vessel that was set on by pirates Wednesday hundreds of miles east of Somalia. Though the crew of the Alabama fought off the pirates, Mr. Phillips offered himself as a hostage to save his crew, according to several news reports.

pirate miscellany:
Q & A on the Somali Pirates

The Case treating Terrorists like Pirates

2003 LRB Article on "The New Piracy"

Happy Zombie Jesus Day

2009-04-12T09:08:00.001-07:00

Also, remember the Easer bunny is a symbol of "fertility", so those of you too old for receiving Easter baskets, remember to practice wild and crazy "fertility rites".

To me, the bunnies coming out of the egg are even more creepy than Jesus as a zombie.

Right-wing Teabaggery

2009-04-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

Tax revolt has a long and often proud history. This is not one of one of those times to be proud of. This is one of those movements to be embarrassed or amused by, depending which side of the ideological spectrum you sit on. I'm referring of course to the "Tea Parties" occurring supposedly across the nation on the 15th, covered so amusingly by Rachel Maddow here (highly recommended).
The Tea Parties, despite how it has been sold as a "populist" revolt, are nothing of the kind. Besides running completely contra general public opinion, Think Progress documents clearly how these represent prefabricated protest:

Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests:

– Freedom Works staffers coordinate conference calls among protesters, contacting conservative activists to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”

– Freedom Works staffers apparently moved to “take over” the planning of local events in Florida.

– Freedom Works provides how-to guides for delivering a “clear message” to the public and media.

– Freedom Works has several domain addresses — some of them made to look like they were set up by amateurs — to promote the protests.

– Americans for Prosperity is writing press releases and planning the events in New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas, and several other states.

The "movement" unsurprisingly, is being hyped by FOX news. There's also the little matter of what the hell they're actually protesting. By some accounts, they're protesting "pork-barrel spending", which is somewhat different from protesting taxes. Steve Benen:

The stickers, signs, and shirts have a simple enough message: "T.E.A. Taxed Enough Already."

And that's where I start to get confused about why these events are occurring. Obama already passed the largest middle-class tax cut in history. Yes, he's proposing increasing the top rate back to where it was when our economy was healthy, but that only means that folks with household income below a quarter-mil aren't really in a position to whine about the administration's agenda.

...
Which brings us back to where we started: what are these people whining about again? They don't like economic recovery efforts, but the stimulus has already passed and it's a little late to rally opposition to it. They don't like budget deficits, unless they're run by Republican presidents. They don't want their taxes to go up, but Obama has already passed a significant tax cut.

Andrew Sullivan summarized this nicely: "These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown."

It's useless to try to find any intellectual merit to the position of these "Tea Parties" whatsoever, they represent no more than a brain-dead movement babbling to itself incoherently. Expect more coverage from this blog on Wednesday, when these protests are scheduled.

Socialism Resurgent

2009-04-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

Rasmussen:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

20% of Americans polled preferring socialism to capitalism is a big thing, I'm not sure what the percentage has been historically, but I suspect it is considerably lower. The polling of my age-group (adults under thirty) is even more surprising. It's almost evenly matched, with socialism trailing capitalism by only a few percentage points. Not bad for an ideology all but declared dead almost two decades ago.
What exactly is going on? Part of it may seems to be an increasing disenchantment with free-market ideology, and a willingness to consider other options. Another dynamic at work here is the end of the Soviet Union. No longer does "socialism" translate to ruthless men wearing bad suits lording themselves over the populations of Eastern Europe and Russia. Now socialism is associated in the mind of most Americans with European social democracy. At least our affluent classes have visited Europe and know that this is nothing to be afraid of. We now associate socialism with France and Germany. Often, liberals (justifiably) hold up the Nordic Model as providing a higher standard of living than our own society: Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland (Iceland is rarely mentioned in this context anymore, for obvious reasons).
This poll bodes will for Obama's agenda. Conservatives can shout all they want about how Obama is a socialist, but what they don't realize is that socialism is the bogeyman it once was. Thank god.

The Pirates of Aden

2009-04-08T20:23:00.000-07:00

The big news story of the day seems to be the dramatic take-over of an American ship by pirates, and the even more dramatic retaking of the ship. The situation remains a nail-biter, as the pirates still hold the captain. This led the crew captured one of the pirates themselves, and he was then released in an attempted prisoner exchange for the captain, however the pirates appear to have not negotiated in good faith.
The pirates, still holding the captain, made off in a life-boat... it seems pretty likely they'll be captured... those things don't move too fast.
The problem of piracy in this area seems very substantial. According to the AP:

The Maersk Alabama was the sixth vessel seized by Somali pirates in a week. Pirates have staged 66 attacks since January, and they are still holding 14 ships and 260 crew members as hostages, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a watchdog group based in Kuala Lumpur.

An article by Jeremy Scahill tries to put a different perspective on these pirate attacks, explaining piracy in part as a response to the greedy foreigners despoiling the sea around helpless Somalia.

Consider what one pirate told The New York Times after he and his men seized a Ukrainian freighter "loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition" last year. "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits," said Sugule Ali:. "We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard." Now, that "coast guard" analogy is a stretch, but his point is an important and widely omitted part of this story. Indeed the Times article was titled, "Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money." Yet, The New York Times acknowledged, "the piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago... as a response to illegal fishing."

Take this fact: Over $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are "being stolen every year by illegal trawlers" off Somalia's coast, forcing the fishing industry there into a state of virtual non-existence.

He further quotes an article from the Independent

As soon as the [Somali] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

As shocking as this is (and, in my opinion, this seems a more important story even than the pirate attacks), I rather doubt that the attacks which we are focusing on are the work of sea militiamen acting to protect defenseless Somalia against the rapacious west. Still, it's good to bring attention to the way Somalia is taken advantage off.
In the long run, the best way to solve this is for the international community to get involved in sorting out the troubles of Somalia. Unfortunately, that will take to long, so a more short term solution will have to be the Second Amendment on the high seas: armed and trained crews. Countries (with the exception of Russia and Israel) have been resistant to arming their ship's crews, but it seems like the logical way to deal with it. This particular incident shows how important the initiative of the crew can be: the ship was retaken without the help of any Navy. Perhaps pirates will think twice if they face a potentially fatal struggle every time they attempt to board a ship.

Ted Stevens is not Don Siegelman

2009-04-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

If you're wondering who Don Siegelman is, he spent time in prison because of a political prosecution engineered by Karl Rove. This is not his story.
The charges against Ted Stevens have been dropped. What's more, the judge is targeting the original prosecutor's from the Department of Justice for contempt of court... to me this looks like another botch from the Bush-era DOJ. They're even bringing it military lawyers, you can tell the department is in bad condition when they need to do that.
The most amusing part is the outpouring of sympathy that Stevens has gotten. Mainly, these come from the usually beltway insiders and Republicans. Chris Matthews made the howler that "the charges should never have been brought." Don Young would like to see Stevens as governor of Alaska... watch out Sarah Palin. Palin for her part maintains that Begich should resign because this "tainted" the election.
Nonsense. Ted Stevens is not a martyr, indeed, this is a very lucky break for him. There is nothing "alleged" about the floor his crony's added to his house, and he should be thanking his lucky stars that he's not doing time thanks to the mess the DOJ is in.

Afghanistan Rape Law

2009-04-06T17:55:00.000-07:00

One of the crazier crises, a law in Afghanistan legalizing marital rape.

The law eliminates the need for sexual consent between husband and wife, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the family home. Some Nato countries have threatened to withdraw troops and withhold aid unless the law is repealed.

Last night it emerged that the United Nations was quietly seeking emergency funds from donors to provide bodyguards, cars and safe houses to protect MPs who had dared to speak out against the legislation. Wenny Kusuma, the head of the UN Development Fund for Women in Afghanistan, said a number of activists had already received death threats. "There's no other country in the world where working for women's rights puts you at a higher risk of death," she said.

Analysts believe Mr. Karzai signed the legislation to win support from Afghanistan's minority Shia leaders, but instead he scored a spectacular own goal as talk of its draconian clauses dominated Nato's 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg, alienating his already-weary Western backers.

One has to wonder how much change we can make in such a society... and one must consider that this is the government that we installed that is doing this.

More on the Banking Plan

2009-03-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

Apparently Joseph Stiglitz likes the Geithner plan even less than I do.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plan to wipe up to US$1 trillion in bad debt off banks' balance sheets, unveiled on Monday, offered "perverse incentives", Stiglitz said.

The U.S. government is basically using the taxpayer to guarantee against downside risk on the value of these assets, while giving the upside, or potential profits, to private investors, he said.

"Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people. I don't think it's going to work because I think there'll be a lot of anger about putting the losses so much on the shoulder of the American taxpayer."

Those of us familiar with Stiglitz's characteristic understatement shouldn't be too surprised by the tone of the critique.

Ehud Barak Leads Labor Off a Cliff

2009-03-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

Israeli Labour leader Ehud Barak has agreed to be part of the nationalist coalition in Israel, headed by right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu, and gotten labor to go along with it. I've never been much of a fan of Ehud Barak, but even so the sheer stupidity and opportunism takes my breath away. The fact that the rest of the labor party voted to go along with the choice tells me everything I need to know about the state of the labor party in Israel. The fact that Tzipi Lvini, head of Kadima, which is to labors right, refused to be moderate cover to the far-right government of Netanyahu and the neo-fascistic Avigdor Lieberman shows this decision to be all the more craven.
I can't understand why Barak's party would go along with this. It's good for him in the short-run, in that he can play a (minor) cabinet role, but it's suicide for his party. This gains no votes: anyone who likes the nationalists is not going to vote for labor simply for being a lackey of thses parties. It will lose plenty of votes though. What progressive in his or her right mind would vote for such craven party. What constituency does that leave labor with? Barak fans?

AIG and the Geithner Plan

2009-03-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

Though I am generally happy with the Obama teams progressive priorities, especially as spelled out in the recent budget (which now looks imperiled by deficit predictions caused by the downturn an congressional opposition, but that's another matter). I am increasingly unhappy with the Obama administration's handling of the financial crisis. I can't help agree with Paul Krugman's comments on the results of the AIG bonuses as well as the Geithner Plan.

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics.

The AIG bonuses are not a big deal themselves, but are rather symbolic of the non-accountability of the bailout plan. In a column complaining about the outrage over the bonuses, Michael Lewis begins:

Last September, the U.S. government began to dole out the first of $173 billion to American International Group. A big chunk of it passed right through to banks that had bought insurance from AIG against mortgage and corporate defaults -- foreign banks such as Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale but also some domestic ones, such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

U.S. government officials then went to great lengths to disguise from the public exactly what they had done, and why, going so far as to declare the ultimate list of recipients of taxpayer funds off limits to the taxpayer. To its immense credit, the media -- or, rather, a handful of diligent reporters, the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson chief among them -- prevented the public officials from getting their way.

This incredible act triggered hardly any political backlash. In effect, the U.S. taxpayer had paid off AIG’s gambling debts. The end recipient of the money was not AIG, but Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and the others.

This is a good point. The problem isn't the bonuses themselves, it was the way the bailout was structured that allowed things like the bonuses to occur. Lewis is wrong though, to claim that there was no populist backlash at the time, I remember the backlash occurring. However, push was so strong at the time to do something about the crisis populist wouldn't truly coalesce until later.
The Obama administration isn't at fault for the Paulson plan, it was the Bush administration and congress that wrote it (the original plan was worse than the plan after congress rewrote it), but the Obama administration seems to be just fine with the plan, and Timothy Geithner worked with Paulson on the AIG bailout. The approach of the current administration is disappointing and represents little change from the approach of the previous administration.

Those AIG Bonuses

2009-03-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

An outrage has been kicked off over the $165 million in bonuses awarded to executives in AIG. The commentariat seem as outraged as anyone else.
AIG is arguing that they are legally obligated to pay there executives. Basically, say AIG executives, we didn't want to pay ourselves million dollar bonuses, but we are legally forced to do so. I am not familiar with these legal arguments, but this does strike me as a little suspect: if the government had not floated AIG to the tune of $170 billion, those executives would be getting jack (Robert Reich makes similar arguments about the matter here).
Worse, AIG argues that it needs to retain "talent". Before the crisis, people might even have bought into this sort of argument. Today, this is laughable , especially since this will be going to the architects of the "credit default swaps", what Warren Buffett labeled "financial instruments of mass destruction". These helped stick us in the hole we're in, and now we're rewarding the people who did it.
Obama expressed outrage, as far as he could with his cool style. Supposedly Timothy
Geitner had asked that the bonuses not be paid, but AIG went ahead and paid them anyway. It remains to be seen whether this is genuine, or mere political posturing in the face of popular outrage.
Tyler Cowen argues that this is a good reason not to nationalize the banks because that would "politicize" decisions like this (as if the money we paid to float AIG and the other banks hasn't already politicized this matter). To me, it demonstrates the opposite. If we need to bail-out the banks, but wish to mitigate the moral hazard problem of giving money to those who made this disaster (not to mention the gross unfairness of this) temporary nationalization seems the best option.

Michael Steele Countdown Clock

2009-03-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

Yes, Michael Steele stepped in it again, this time over abortion. Steele said both that abortion is an "individual choice" and best left to the states (facepalm). He retracted the comment. Mike Huckabe called the comment as "a violation of the most basic of human rights." Steele also described being gay as not a choice. This is all obvious to me, but in the Republican party, you can't say these things.
This post points out, the shortest serving RNC chair in history is C. Wesley Roberts (his son is Pat Roberts, who is still in the US Senate). Roberts was removed as chair after four months for corruption. I'm not sure that Steele can make it that far.
Steele's likely replacement is Katon Dawson, practically a crypto-segregationist. I'm sure that will be an even bigger disaster.

Cramer vs. Stewart

2009-03-11T19:27:00.000-07:00

There have been larger spats: Jefferson vs. Adams, Stalin vs Trotsky etc. Still, I'm definitely loving the fight between Jon Stewart and unhinged Mad Money host Jim Cramer. On thursday, I will be watching with baited breath as Cramer appears on the Daily Show. The story thus far:
It started when Rick Santelli called underwater homeowners losers, Jon Stewart responded by lampooning Santelli's CSNBC. Santelli had just wussed out of an interview on the Daily Show, perhaps having some inkling of the treatment he was in for. Here's the original the made such a stir.

Jim Cramer responded to this segment saying he was taken out of context:

Take Frank Rich and Jon Stewart. Both seize on the urban legend that I recommended Bear Stearns the week before it collapsed, even though I was saying that I thought it could be worthless as soon as the following week. I did tell an emailer that his deposit in his account at Bear Stearns was safe, but through a clever sound bite, Stewart, and subsequently Rich -- neither of whom have bothered to listen to the context of the pulled quote -- pass off the notion of account safety as an out-and-out buy recommendation. The absurdity astounds me.

The Daily Show then issued a faux-apology
The Daily Show then issued a faux-apology
Jim Cramer made the rounds, criticizing Stewart, soliciting yet another response from Stewart.
That's where we stand today. As I mentioned, Jim Cramer is going on the Daily Show... big mistake, there's an outside chance that Stewart will roll-over, but if not, Cramer will not look good.

Chait Review Shlaes

2009-03-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

A little while back I saw Amity Shlaes on Jon Stewart, and found her performance so mediocre as to be borderline embarrassing. For example, she repeated the right-wing trope that puts Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac at the center of the crisis, although she quickly backed off as soon as Stewart challenged her on it.
I had no idea, though, the stature her book was taking in right-wing circles. Jonathan Chait has a great critique of the book in the New Republic.

The Catholic Church's "Morality"

2009-03-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

A 9 year-old is raped in Brazil, and the Catholic Church in that country is outraged... about the abortion. Outrage is completely called for, but one must be a moral cretin to not see that one should be outraged about the rape of the girl. The church ignores this, but is up in arms over the abortion.
One thing the article points out that I didn't know is that abortion is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape or when the mother's life is in danger.
The big story to follow with the Catholic Church is the way Benedict is trying to transform the institution. From an article on the subject in the New Yorker.

It is well known that Benedict wants to transform the Church of Rome, which is not to say that he wants to make it more responsive to the realities of modern life as it is lived by Catholic women in the West, or by Catholic homosexuals, or even by the millions of desperately poor Catholic families in the Third World who are still waiting for some merciful dispensation on the use of contraception. He wants to purify the Church, to make it more definitively Christian, more observant, obedient, and disciplined—you could say more like the way he sees Islam. And never mind that he doesn’t seem to like much about Islam, or that he has doubts about Islam’s direction. (His doubts are not unusual in today’s world; many Muslims have them.) The Pope is a theologian—the first prominent theologian to sit on Peter’s throne since the eighteenth century. He views the world through a strictly theological frame, and his judgments about Islam, however defiant or reductive they sometimes sound, have finally to do with the idea of Theos—God—as he understands it. Those judgments have not changed much, in character, since he left Germany for the Vatican, twenty-six years ago.

The direction he is taking the church was made clear recently (as if it wasn't already obvious) when he de-excommunicated extremist priest (I previously mentioned this in this post) including two who denied the Holocaust. He's clearly acting to shore up the far-rightwing of of the Catholic Church.
All this shows how little the Church has changed over the last thousand years, as if we needed more proof after their horrific handling of the pedophile priests.

How Long Can Michael Steele Last?

2009-03-04T10:09:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I noted Michael Steele's craven apology to Rush Limbaugh. This brings me to another question: how long can Michael Steele last as RNC Chair? U.S. News:

"If his implosion continues, RNC members are likely to call a special session to dump him for an effective chairman. There is not much patience for failure."

Besides the Limbaugh flap, there's possible corruption and Steele's incessant embarrassment of the GOP trying to sound gangsta (Democrats want the stimulus package for "bling bling"). I can't say for sure, but I think Michael Steele is too big a moron, even for the Republican party.

Operation Hog Bait

2009-03-04T09:49:00.000-08:00

It should come as no surprise when Rahm Emmanuel brilliantly characterizes Rush Limbaugh as "the voice, energy and intellect of the GOP".
The Politico details the Democrat's plan to make Rush the face of the GOP.

The strategy took shape after Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville included Limbaugh’s name in an October poll and learned their longtime tormentor was deeply unpopular with many Americans, especially younger voters. Then the conservative talk-radio host emerged as an unapologetic critic of Barack Obama shortly before his inauguration, when even many Republicans were showering him with praise.

Soon it clicked: Democrats realized they could roll out a new GOP bogeyman for the post-Bush era by turning to an old one in Limbaugh, a polarizing figure since he rose to prominence in the 1990s.

Just how low are Limbaugh's numbers? Pretty damn low.

Paul Begala, a close friend of Carville, Greenberg and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, said they found Limbaugh’s overall ratings were even lower than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor, and William Ayers, the domestic terrorist and Chicago resident who Republicans sought to tie to Obama during the campaign.

Then came what Begala called “the tripwire.”

“I hope he fails,” Limbaugh said of Obama on his show four days before the president was sworn in. It was a time when Obama’s approval ratings were soaring, but more than that, polls showed even people who didn’t vote for him badly wanted him to succeed, coming to office at a time of economic meltdown.

The best part of this strategy is Rush keeps playing directly into their hands, and the congressional Republicans have been caught in the middle. As the strategy has continued more and more congressional Republicans (and the pathetic RNC head Michael Steele) have tried to break with Limbaugh, only to issue abject apologies (see here, here and here).

Wither the GOP?

2009-02-26T15:15:00.001-08:00

(no, that's not a typo)
I just heard Judd Gregg on NPR, attack Obama's budget priorities. I strikes me that he is not at all a man who could fit into an Obama administration. Thus, we have two possibilities. Either Gregg is a) an opportunist capable changing his ideological belief's to fit his situation, or b) he was, as he claimed, too stupid to realize that Obama is liberal.
Speaking of GOP flim-flam, I managed to catch the first 90 seconds of Bobby Jindal's terrible response to the un-State of the Union speech. I could stand the first 90 seconds of the "I'm talking to a bunch of 1st Graders" tone before I flipped it off. Badly delivered, the speech was also stupid, among other thing complaining about the money we waste monitoring volcanoes.
I've seen my share of horrible responses to State of the Union: Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle, Kathleen Sebelius (I've only seen one exception, that given by Jim Webb). The difference here is that this was Bobby Jindal's stepping onto the national stage and he tripped, badly. Jindal is already campaigning for the Republican nomination for 2012, by saying he will reject a (very small) portion of the stimulus money.
The Republican party is up in arms about the increase in the deficit, and, paradoxically, equally up in arms on the increase in taxes on those earning over $250,000. The "increase in taxes" is achieved by allowing Bush's tax cuts to run out, tax cuts that the Republicans would have fought tooth and nail if their was anything to their principles of fiscal responsibility besides opportunism. Where were these people when president Bush was spending massive amounts on the Iraq war? Yet when a Democrat wants to spend money to bail out the economy, they're suddenly up in arms.

RIP Socks

2009-02-22T12:29:00.000-08:00

The Clinton's cat, Socks, has gone to the great scratching-post in the sky.
Oddly, Socks was in the care of Clinton Secretary Bettie Currie, not in the care of the Clintons themselves. Wonkette:

And why was Currie watching over Socks? Because when Bill Clinton left the White House for New York, he brought along newer pet Buddy the Dog, who was soon run over and crushed to death by a car. Socks was supposedly going to live in Hillary’s fancy new house in Washington, but Hillary was never quite “ready” to allow her own pet — a helpless animal — to move to Georgetown. So poor old Socks was stuck with Mrs. Currie, or poor old Mrs. Currie was stuck with Socks.

Now I have to take a look at Mo Rocca's All the Presidents Pets. says P.J. O'Rourke: "Mo Rocca describes how U.S. political policy has been guided by presidential pets for more than two hundred years. Oh, and I suppose you have a better explanation?"

California Screamin

2009-02-19T05:40:00.000-08:00

The California state is to be in a pickle.

Since the fall, when lawmakers began trying to attack the gaps in the $143 billion budget that their earlier plan had not addressed, the state has fallen into deeper financial straits, with more bad news coming daily from Sacramento. The state, nearly out of cash, has laid off scores of workers and put hundreds more on unpaid furloughs. It has stopped paying counties and issuing income tax refunds and halted thousands of infrastructure projects.

Twenty-thousand layoff notices will go out on Tuesday morning, Matt David, the communications director for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Monday night. “In the absence of a budget we need to realize this savings and the process takes six months,” Mr. David said.

Paul Krugman writes "Years of neglect, followed by economic disaster - and with all reasonable responses blocked by a fanatical, irrational minority. This could be America next."
There are obvious similarities between the way that California Republicans have destroyed any attempt to raise the California budget, and the way that congress Republicans have fought to blunt response to the financial crisis. There's more to it though. I've long contended that ballot initiatives have hamstrung that state, mandating high spending (three strikes anyone?) and imposing bad policy in general. The fact that the Republican minority has been able to block any compromise is that an initiative required a super-majority for tax increases. The situation in congress, despite the filibuster, is not the same.

Hitchens Beaten

2009-02-19T05:23:00.000-08:00

Huffington Post:

The assault on Christopher Hitchens' body continues - he's been waterboarded, body-waxed and suffered through countless hangovers.

In the latest incident, Hitchens sustained gashed knuckles and bruises in a vicious street brawl with shoe-shopping thugs during a Valentine's Day night out on the streets of Beirut.

Hitchens, the chain-smoking, hard-drinking, intellectually ambitious Vanity Fair columnist, was beat up during the altercation, according to several blogs.

Hitchens was apparently visiting Beirut at the invitation of the Hariri-Saudi group, affiliated with the assassinated Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, when he defaced a poster for the Syrian Social Nationalist party and was assaulted by some members of the SSNP who happened to be walking by, according to the Angry Arab News Service.

Hitchens is an odd fellow. I recommend his book "God is Not Great" and his collection of atheist works "the Portable Atheist", but his columns are nearly incoherent (drinking perhaps?)
Considering his recent outspokenness as an atheist, it's most people would have expected him to get in a brawl with a group of religious fanatics. Instead, he got beaten by a wily group a nationalists who were, reportedly shopping for shoes.
The SSNP, by the way, is a Syrian Nationalist party that believes Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, the Sinia, Cyprus, Iraq and Kuwait should all be incorporated into Syria. The Lebanon branch is unsurprisingly pro-Syrian. Probably Hitchens distaste for the SSNP comes from a distaste for the gangsters running Syria as well. Abu muqawama points out that what Hitchens did was the equivalent of disrespecting the local gang in rougher parts of LA. Not smart.

The Israeli Election

2009-02-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

The BBC:

With almost all the votes counted, the governing centrist Kadima has 28 seats and the right-wing Likud opposition 27, election officials said.

Kadima's Tzipi Livni told supporters she was ready to lead the country. But Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu said the "nationalist camp" had won.

Both need coalition partners. Ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu came third.

Although Israel may not have a government for weeks, the results of the election are already in. Though it appeared before the election that the Likud party (headed by Benjamin Netanyahu) was set to win, the Gaza many commentators noted the Gaza offensive may have given a bump to their centrist rivals, Kadima (headed by Tzipi Livni).

The BBC article quotes Netanyahu as stating that the "nationalist camp" has won. I think he is right, and that he will be forming the next government. Likud sowed up a relationship with Shas (a orthodox party). The big story is that Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu Party beat labor into third place in terms of votes. Lieberman advocates loyalty oaths for Arab Israeli and execution of MKs that meet with Hamas. His supporters have been known to shout "death to Arabs" awaiting their hero.
To quote Marty Peretz of all people:

In the last elections, it was the Pensioners' Party that surprised everybody by its strength, which pivoted it into the Cabinet. This year, alas, it is likely to be the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) Party, a neo-fascist list headed by a Russian immigrant and certified gangster, Avigdor Lieberman, who is the Israeli equivalent of Jorg Haider of Austria (now dead) and Jean-Marie LePen who, with Bridgitte Bardot, is a leader of National Front in France, who once overwhelmed the country's Socialist Party.

Both Kadima and Likud are eager to include Lieberman in a coalition, instead of avoiding him like the plague as they should be (this would not, though, be the first time Lieberman has been in coalition). Likud seems a natural choice for Lieberman. Extremism is also rising in the Likud itself. None of this looks good for a potential peace.

The Audacity of Pope

2009-01-31T23:04:00.000-08:00

The pope seems to be cutting a pretty reactionary path. We were told this pope would be conservative, but his choices, especially recently, are fairly breath-taking. He recently de-excommunicated a bishop who denied the Holocaust (said bishop has issued one a non-apology apology but has not retracted his odious views).
Coming on the heals of this decision, the pope has elevated a ultra-conservative priest to bishop-hood. Gehard Maria Wagner has accused the Harry Potter books of spreading satanism, and believes Hurricane Katrina was gods vengeance on New Orleans for tolerating sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and abortion.

Roland

2009-01-31T22:56:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or is Roland Burris a little nutty and self-obsessed? There's the mausoleum he had built for himself, which lists his accomplishments. As Jon Stewart observed "lots of people do that: Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, a couple of the Caesars..."
Odder still, Burris's two children are named Roland Burris II and Rolanda Burris. That's right, he named both his children in honor of himself. Now, being egotistical to the point of disorder cannot bar one from entering the senate, but it sure is weird.

Bill Kristol and the Times Break-up

2009-01-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

According to the last sentence in Bill Kristol's op-ed today, this will be his last. Like every bad relationship, we should have seen the end of this one coming miles off. Friends of the Grey Lady warned her that this guy, but she only responded that they don't know him like she does. The relationship was clearly under strain. Did the Times simply get board of his banalities, bad editing and general lack of respect, or did Kristol decide no self-respecting conservative could work for such a newspaper?
Kristol's already rebounded with the Washington Post , hopefully the Times can find a conservative that treats her a little better.

Oscar Buzz

2009-01-24T13:46:00.000-08:00

Apparently, the nominations for the Oscars are out. I don't really trust the Oscars as much of a finder of artistic merit. Every year Hollywood gets dressed up and pretends a business is an art, and gives crucial movies. I've seen all of the Oscar Best Picture nods ("Slumdog Millionaire", "Benjamin Button", "Milk" and "The Reader") except "Frost/Nixon" (I'll see it, even though it's not supposed to be amazing). They're good films, nothing blew me away like There Will Be Blood did last year. Slumdog's probably the best of the lot, and has an OK chance of taking the award.
James Surowiecki has an interesting point at the New Yorker:

The funny thing, though, is that Hazlett’s broader point, about the Oscar voters foolishly ignoring popular films this year, is right—though not for the reasons she thinks. There’s no doubt, after all, that the most popular film of the year, “Wall-E,” was also among the best, yet it went unnominated for Best Picture. And one could similarly make a case for Christopher Nolan’s excellent if flawed “Dark Knight,” which was a huge box-office smash. The problem with the Oscar voters isn’t that they love small, independent films like “Frozen River” too much. The problem is that they think tasteful, middlebrow dramas like “The Reader” are necessarily more artistic or serious than a movie like “Wall-E.” This year, at least, the Oscar voters should have more paid more attention to what ordinary people liked, not because it would have made for great television, but because it would have made for better nominations.

I'm not altogether sure I agree. "Wall-E" was not snubbed this year, and is a shoe-in to win best animated feature (Animated Feature is the official Pixar category... just you try to convince me that "Ratatouille" had more artistic merit than "Persepolis"). If the academy relies to heavily on middle-brow, it is because it is try to find the mid-point between the popular and the artistic. A movie based on a comic-book can never be nominated for Best Picture, but a movie too dark for the audiences tender sensibilities could never win.
My thinking: Sean Penn will win for "Milk", Kate Winslet will win for playing a concentration camp guard in "the Reader", and Heath Ledger will be awarded posthumously.

Daffy Qaddafi

2009-01-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was somewhat surprised to open up the New York Times and find an op-ed by none other than Muammar Qaddafi.I represented Libya in 11th grade Model UN; the country and it Rufus T. Firefly type leader hold a special place in my heart.
For me, the most surprising thing about the article is that it lacks the bizarreness characteristic of Qaddafi. This is a man who at different times has claimed alternately (and contradictorily) that AIDS a CIA created bio-weapon to exterminate Africans and that it is a "divine disease" sent to by Allah to protect Africa from the white man. In the op-ed, there's no material nothing stranger than Qaddafi calling his plan for a united Israel-Palestine state Isratine. Somewhat of a disappointment.
The New York Times is right to at least try to stir up debate on the subject of a solution to the Israel Palestine conflict, advocating a one state solution challenges a widely held orthodoxy on the subject. By why choose Muammar Qaddafi to say this? The Libyan strong man is far from the only person who holds this opinion. Why not have Tony Judt summarize his argument from the New York Review of Books?
It's easy to see why Gaddafi is an improper messenger. As one New York Times letter-writer sneered "the brutal dictator responsible for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, most of them Americans — would give advice on a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict". Actually, evidence of Qaddafi's involvement in that attack is incredibly sparse. Still, the point makes sense. Gaddafi is a dictator and has supported terrorism, including the Black September movement that perpetrated the massacre of Israeli athletes at the '72 Olympics. He has expelled 30,000 Palestinians from his country. Can he really be said to have either the interests of Israelis or Palestinians at heart?
As far as I can tell, this op-ed is part of the transition of Qaddafi from a anti-US dictator, which we find intolerable, to a pro-US dictator, which is ok. A pro-US dictator is accorded do respect in the media accords to any other world leader by our media. Remember Musharraff on the Daily Show? Qaddafi still oppresses his own people, but since him giving up tiny WMD program gave Bush a chance at what looked like an international success, the US is ready to regard him as "our son of a bitch". The media, it appears, is all too ready to play along.

Inauguration

2009-01-20T22:17:00.000-08:00

This entire election season has been felt rather odd. I'm so used to bad news, I don't quite know what to do with good news, and it feels especially odd the way momentous events on the national stage contrast with the mundaneness and routine of everyday life.
The inauguration was a truly heartening sight, with thousands (at least two of whom I personally know) gathering to see the august soon to be president take his oath.
The speech I especially liked. Obama speeches are characteristically strong, but on the trail his speeches generally offered uplift, and he was accused not altogether unfairly of lacking substance. Clearly, he knew what to say to get elected, and now, he's laying down the line on what change really will mean. The speech was a rebuke of many Bush policies, stating, for example, that we reject as false the choice between our ideals and out liberty.
Another high point: it has been a cliche of American policy to rattle of the religions in America, and hail this diversity. Obama did the same in this speech, but made a surprising addition: unbelievers.
The ceremony had it's high and low points. The poem was atrocious. It looked like Obama flubbed the the oath, and many Americans thought "Oh no. I thought he was perfect". Fortunately, we have been reassured: it was Roberts who dropped the ball, not Obama. And really, what do you expect from a Bush appointee? the Chief Justice has all of four years to practice to get it right next time.

Fighting in Gaza

2009-01-06T13:45:00.000-08:00

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is once again very much in the news. Juan Cole has a brief history of the entire conflict which is worthwhile as a refresher. One paragraph about Gaza:

The current Israeli military effort to substantially weaken Hamas in Gaza follows on the contradictions in Kadima Party policy. In 2005 Kadima, led by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which Israel had occupied in 1967. But since Kadima refused to negotiate with Hamas, Israel was unable to shape the political structures of its former colony, leaving the outcome to chance. It was not a stable place. By 2005 Gaza had a population of 1.5 million. Although it was a relatively nice little Mediterranean region before the rise of modern nation states, its traditional markets were Egypt and Jordan, and after 1967 its only outlet was Israel, which already produced much the same things as Gaza did. So Gaza had become trapped economically.

I am unclear on the legality of Israel's recent bombing campaign but I am fairly certain that the blockade on Gaza is both illegal and foolish. Many western commentators described the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza as a "coup". This is hardly accurate: Hamas became the legitimate government of Palestine by elections pushed by the Bush administration as part of the much-vaunted "freedom agenda". Yet, when Hamas won, we didn't accept the outcome on the grounds that Hamas is a terrorist group. With tacit US and Israeli backing, Fatah refused to give ground to Hamas, and the result has been the division of Palestine into two states, making matters much worse.
In some ways, the events in Gaza are a side-show to the West Bank, where Israel continues to build settlements. Dov Weisglas, a close confidant of Ariel Sharon admitted that the 2005 pullout from Gaza was merely a ruse to expand Israeli hegemony on the West Bank (Israel also rung out concessions from the Bush administration, including a greater willingness to acknowledge the "facts on the ground"). Now a peace between the the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas does not buy peace, because Hamas is kept away from the table. Instead of attempting to negotiate, the Israeli government (with support from the United States) has decided it will simply destroy Hamas. Israel, if it wants to end the current fighting, is going to have to lift the cruel embargo of Gaza. It will find that this cannot be easily accomplished. A summary by the International Crisis Group wisely concludes:

Sustainable calm can be achieved neither by ignoring Hamas and its constituents nor by harbouring the illusion that, pummelled into submission, it will accept what it heretofore has rejected. Palestinian reconciliation is a priority, more urgent but also harder than ever before; so, too, is the Islamists’ acceptance of basic international obligations. In the meantime, Hamas – if Israel does not take the perilous step of toppling it – will have to play a political and security role in Gaza and at the crossings. This might mean a “victory” for Hamas, but that is the inevitable cost for a wrongheaded embargo, and by helping end rocket fire and producing a more stable border regime, it would just as importantly be a victory for Israel – and, crucially, both peoples – as well.

Retracting the Pardon

2008-12-25T13:13:00.000-08:00

Merry christmas to my (admittedly sparse) readership.
The pardon system is fairly ridiculous, and has been abused on countless occasions, and is a fairly straight-forward affront to the rule of law. Richard Nixon pardoned scummy union leader Jimmy Hoffa. In 1974, Nixon himself was pardoned for his criminalization of the executive branch. Mark Felt, as we now know key to Nixon's downfall, was pardoned by Ronald Reagan for numerous abuses in pursuit of the Weather Underground (I have trouble seeing Felt's rule as noble. He exposed Nixon, but only because he was disgruntled for careerist reasons, Nixon had passed him over for head of the FBI.) Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich for 51 counts tax fraud and running illegal oil deals with Iran. As unedifying as these pardons are, the worst are those which allow the executive to cover-up its crimes: Bush I pardoning 6 Iran-Contra felons (Bush must have been knee deep in Iran-Contra) , Bush II pardoning "Scooter" Libby for obstruction of justice. Libby's actions saved Rove, and perhaps Cheney, from indictment.
Still, one thing we've never seen is a president retract a pardon. At least, not until now. The original pardon was pretty clearly outrageous, this person deserves to answer for what he's done. It's hard to say though, whether a president can really call off a pardon like that.

Bush Done Good

2008-12-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

... well, Bush done ok, on this issue. He's extending a loan to the car-companies, as I suspect you were already aware. Bush was for the car loans all along, but he had two differences with the Democratic congress, first insisting on not tying it to increased fuel efficiency standards, and second wanting it to come from money ear-marked for enhancing fuel efficiency. Sense a pattern? Our president really doesn't like fuel efficiency.
When congressional Republicans killed the deal, Bush had little choice but to take the money from TARP, not from the fuel efficiency money. If GM went under, by the way, the government would be shelling out a lot more TARP money, so it makes sense fiscally to bail out the company. From Bird Brain.

AIG issued credit default swaps on GM. A lot of credit default swaps, apparently; according to Forbes.com, estimates are that AIG's exposure is about 10 times the outstanding debt. If GM declares bankruptcy, AIG is on the hook for that money, and guess who currently owns AIG? That's right, the government. In a nutshell, if we let GM go bankrupt, we taxpayers are likely to end up paying out eight to ten times as much as if we bail them

The congressional Republican's who opposed didn't get much of what they want. This seems only fair to me. Opposing the deal was prompted mixture of southern regionalism and ugly classicism-based union-busting. The congressional Republicans have shown themselves unwilling to play any constructive role.They deserve nothing.

Bill Kristol Gets it Right

2008-12-15T09:38:00.000-08:00

I'm having trouble believing it, but I actually agree with Bill Kristol. From his Times op-ed.

Now there are other ways to explain the disparate treatment of G.M. and Citigroup. Finance is different from manufacturing, and banks from auto companies. It may be that the case for a huge bank bailout was strong, and that the case for a more modest auto package is not. Still, it seems to me true that the financial big shots haven’t been treated nearly as roughly in Congress or in the media as the auto executives, who have done nothing remotely as irresponsible as their Wall Street counterparts.
...
Last week, Senate Republicans picked a fight with the U.A.W. on union pay scales — despite the fact that it’s the legacy benefits for retirees, not pay for current workers, that’s really hurting Detroit, and despite the additional fact that, in any case, labor amounts to only about 10 percent of the cost of a car. But the Republicans were fighting Big Labor! They were standing firm against bailouts! Some of the same conservatives who (correctly, in my view) made the case for $700 billion for Wall Street pitched a fit over $14 billion in loans for the automakers.

OK, I don't agree with the column 100%, but Kristol points out that the Republican party line on this specific issue is totally wrong. I didn't really expect that to happen.

The Shoe Thrower

2008-12-15T09:24:00.000-08:00

It appears that the shoe was thrown by a man named Muntathar al Zaidi. He remains in Iraqi custody. People report that the man was beaten senseless by PM al-Maliki's guards.
It appears he was partially influenced by his witnessing of US bombings in Sadr city.

Friends said Zaidi covered the U.S. bombing of Baghdad's Sadr City area earlier this year and had been "emotionally influenced" by the destruction he'd seen.

Zaidi's channel is Baghdadiya Television, which supports the insurgency. It appears it's an Iraqi channel, but is based in Cairo, Egypt, presumably because Iraq itself is too dangerous.
From the Times

Hitting someone with a shoe is a particularly strong rebuke in Iraqi culture. Although the president was uninjured, the incident overshadowed media coverage of the trip in the Arab world. And it has transformed Muntader al-Zaidi into a symbolic figure in the debate about the American military’s presence in Iraq.

Maythem al-Zaidi said his brother had not planned to throw his shoes prior to Sunday. “He was provoked when Mr. Bush said [during the news conference] this is his farewell gift to the Iraqi people,” he said. A colleague of Muntader al-Zaidi’s at al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, however, said the correspondent had been “planning for this from a long time. He told me that his dream is to hit Bush with shoes,” said the man, who would not give his name.

Muntader al-Zaidi appears to have a long-standing dislike of the United States presence in Iraq. He used to finish his reports by saying he was in “the occupied Baghdad.” His brother said that he hates the occupation so strongly that he canceled his wedding, saying: “I will marry when the occupation is over.”
...
Maythem al-Zaidi said that his brother is politically independent, but several people who know him mentioned that he was a Baathist who turned into a Sadrist after the war.

So Much for Journalistic Impartiality

2008-12-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

It appears our president is better at dodging objects than he is at dodging question, at least that's the impression this event gives me. I'd say this just is one more reminder of how disliked out president is.
One thing that surprised me... I would have expected that Iraqi journalist to have been shot 16 times by secret service as soon as he threw. Is that not how it works? Were they asleep at the wheel? Perhaps they simply don't mind seeing this president get attack?

Killing the Auto-Deal

2008-12-11T22:04:00.000-08:00

Yes, apparently it's died again, probably for the last time until Obama and the new congress takes over
John Judis:

Here’s what bothers me. Japanese companies, which for years have benefited from one-way deal by which they could sell cars in the U.S. while U.S. companies were stymied in selling cars and trucks in Japan, set up non-union plants in low-wage, low-education, right-to-work states where they can pay less wages and benefits to their workers. Of course, in Japan, these same companies recognize and work with unions, but not here, where they have a chance to undercut American firms that work with unions. Corker and these other great patriots want to allow these Japanese companies to dictate the wages and benefits that American companies pay their workers. It’s despicable. Imagine, for a moment, American companies being allow to operate in this manner in Japan or South Korea. It would not happen.

The Republicans did refuse to take a responsible stand in this crisis. Apparently, they hate unions so much (and like foreign automakers) that they wouldn't mind seeing a car company bankruptcy so long as they don't cave to the unions. Real good going, guys.

States of Corruption

2008-12-11T21:41:00.000-08:00

With corruption very much in the news thanks to comically corrupt and stupid governor Blagojevich, this seemed topical. A report released last year listed the 35 most populous states from most to least corrupt. Louisiana came in number one. This should come as no surprise (William Jefferson, recently voted out, had had $90,000 in cash in his freezer. He's just the latest in a long line.) It's followed by Mississippi, Kentucky and Alabama. Illinois comes in at number 6, though clearly not for lack of trying. New Jersey, another state known for corruption, come in at 9. My own state is 20, not so bad (state governments pretty clean, though there certainly is corruption at the local level... remember Kwame Kilpatrick). Alaska is to small to make the list but would doubtless have scored highly. The ranks can be found here.

Speaking of corruption... the Golden Duke "scandal awards" have come out. Expect Blagojevich to sweep the top scandal, Eliot Spitzer may hit best sex and carnality. Local scandal: I'm thinking from our own home state... Kwame Kilpatrick.

Rod Blagojevich: the Best thing Since the Nixon Tapes

2008-12-09T21:37:00.000-08:00

Rod Blagojvich, who has been engulfed by a cloud of scandals for some time, declared that anyone could tape him, if they wanted to, but, he warned "it smells like Nixon and Watergate.
I agree it smells like Nixon and Watergate, though compared to Rod Blagojevich, Nixon is a class act.
One always had to wonder with Richard Nixon: why did someone committing such abuse of presidential power tape everything going on in the Whitehouse (with the exception of the the notorious 18 1/2 minute gap). Even stranger though: why on earth would anyone ever try to sell a public office (senate seat vacated by the president-elect, no less) on a tape he had good reason to think was tapped. The taps kinda remind me of the Nixon tapes, full of profanity and incriminating comments. At the Daily Beast they have a test where you identify quotes by Tod Blagojevich and Tony Soprano. I went 10/10, not surprising, I watch the Sopranos all the time. Still, the two sound similar.
For 5 weeks, Illinois was considered an amazing place. Now the Obama magic has dissipated, and we're back to good old fashioned Illinois politics. Of the last 5 governors, 3 have been indicted. Perhaps they'd save on transportation by having the prison next to the governors mansion.

India- Don't Attack Pakistan!

2008-12-08T20:13:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an article detailing the support the ISI has had for the group Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group accused of carrying out the recent attack in Mumbai. This is not news, the these links have long been known. This is merely background. News would be if we discovered that the ISI were involved in this particular attack. This has not happened yet, but it could.
Should this happen, we should expect Indian and Pakistan to go to war. This would be a profound mistake. These elements in the ISI area common enemy to the government of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and the US. Ali Asif Zardari had been, as I mentioned previously, attempting both to rein in the agency and pursue better relations with India. As corrupt and immoral as this man is, I take these overtures at face value. Now he looks weak and impotent.
As Ahmed Rashid points out, these attacks were intended as a distraction. War between India and Pakistan would be a gift to the islamists currently fighting the Pakistani government, even as Pakistan acts to curb the group responsible.
Juan Cole wrote a post asking indians not to go down the Bush/Cheney route in fighting terror. It's beginning to look like many indians learned exactly the wrong lessons from the US "War on Terror" and many compare the possible attack on Pakistan to the US attack on Afghanistan. At a time like this, I wish we had remembered there are indeed other countries, and hadn't embraced the idea of "preemptive strike".

More Thoughts on the Automaker Bailout

2008-12-07T18:41:00.000-08:00

Chastened auto-executives carpooled to Washington this last week to beg the lawmakers for a bailout.
One of the most notable features is the way congress seems intent on humiliating the auto CEOs. One has to wonder why the auto company CEO and the bank CEOs have been treated so differently. Partly it's clearly clout: the automakers are pretty well connected, but the big banks influence is doubtless far greater. Also, as I pointed out in the previous post, there are plenty of southerners who have regional interests directly opposed to those of the automakers.
The country seems understandable reluctant to land money to a failing business. Recently, Paul Krugman said he believed there is no future for the US car industry. It seems clear, even given the bailout, the automakers will emerge smaller companies that will eventually fade away.
Beyond this, we need a paradigm shift, before cities start going under water. America in 50 years will not be the car-centered nation it is today, market pressures (rising gas price) and environmental problem will see to that.
So, we should have no illusions about the long term viability of these companies. Still, the bailing them out would be money well spent. Allowing one of these companies to go under would likely hurtle us toward depression. From this perspective, shelling out billions to merely postpone the inevitable seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Bailout Politics

2008-12-06T12:13:00.000-08:00

One thing I've been wondering about is why the automaker bailout is treated so differently by our elected representatives. I have particularly the Republicans in mind... my impression is that the reason Democrats like Nancy Pelosi talk about this differently (e.g. the automakers need a plan... did she ever ask the banks for a plan?) is she knows she's not going to be able to push this through. Part of the answer is that there was opposition to the original Paulson Plan. Still, opposition from Republicans has been really extremely hard, and the passage of the bank bailout means it can't be all to do with ree-market ideology. Matthew Yglesias makes a point about the rest.He points to Mitch McConnell's comments that we still have a foreign owned auto industry and concludes

[I]t’s pretty aggravating to see these Dixie conservatives who obviously have a parochial stake in letting the Michigan-based firms die off popping up all across the media without the coverage even reflecting that fact. Whenever you see Carl Levin or Debbie Stabenow on television or quoted in the papers, it’s made clear that their views aren’t just stuff they thought up one afternoon — they’re trying to represent the interests of their constituents. But people need to understand that Bob Corker and Richard Shelby and Mitch McConnell all have equal and opposite parochial interests pushed in the other direction — if Detroit folds, then that’s way more market share for Japanese-owned, non-union factories in their home states.

I suspect this makes the difference between the bank bailout and the automakers bailout. It also helps us understand why Richard Shelby said "this is your problem, not our problem", he thinks that the Big Three's problem are his good-fortunes. Foolish. If the Big Three go down, the entire national economy suffers.

Who's Behind the Mumbai Attacks, Part III

2008-11-28T22:32:00.000-08:00

US intelligence seems to thinks the group responsible may be Lashkar-e-Toiba. From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday that there was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group based in Kashmir, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for this week’s deadly attacks in Mumbai.

The officials cautioned that they had reached no firm conclusions about who was responsible for the attacks, or how they were planned and carried out. Nevertheless, they said that evidence gathered in the past two days pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba or possibly another group based in Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad, which also has a track record of attacks against India.

US intelligence has more credibility in these matter than India intelligence. If this is confirmed, it looks like bad news, especially if we begin seeing evidence support from the Pakistani government.

According to one Indian intelligence official, during the siege the militants have been using non-Indian cellphones and receiving calls from outside the country, evidence that in part led Indian officials to speak publicly about the militants’ external ties.

Lashkar-e-Taiba denied any responsibility on Thursday for the terrorist strikes. American intelligence agencies have said that the group has received some training and logistical support in the past from Pakistan’s powerful spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., and that Pakistan’s government has long turned a blind eye to Lashkar-e-Taiba camps in the Kashmir region, a disputed territory over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars.

Officials in Washington said Friday that there was no evidence that the Pakistani government had any role in the attacks.

Washington would deny that, wouldn't they? They don't want to see a nuclear war on the peninsula. What interests me is why the head of the ISI cancelled his trip to India, and instead is sending some flunky in his place. Perhaps he know that a drip-drip of information will point to his organization, and does not wish be embarrassed by the Indians asking questions. Stay tuned.

Now I Know why It's Called "Black Friday"

2008-11-28T22:21:00.000-08:00

Is consumerism getting out of hand? A Wal-Mart employing was trampled to death trying to hold back costumers.
In Palm Desert, two are dead after shots fired in a dispute in a Toys "R" US.

Who's Behind the Mumbai Attacks, Part II

2008-11-28T14:44:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an article which suggests, beyond the
Lashkar-e-Taiba possibility, that the attacks may have been carried out by the "Indian Mujehideen" (or Mujahideen, depending how you transliterate).

An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.

On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened potential “deadly attacks” in Mumbai. The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that “you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously.”

Does this rule out Pakistani involvement? Decidedly not. But put put the Indian Mujahideen on the suspects list with Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Who's Behind the Mumbai Attacks?

2008-11-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

Much of the world is transfixed by the violence occurring in India's largest city, as commandoes battle Islamic militants in two luxury hotels and a Jewish community center. Terrorism, like communal violence, has become regular in India. Though far from common terrorism in India is reoccurring, not a single event as we in America have experienced it.
A heretofore unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen (named for the Deccan Plateau) has claimed responsibility. I'm guessing this is misinformation, because it seems very unlikely for an unknown terrorist organization to pull off an attack like their first time. So, who is really behind it?
One captured terrorist has confessed to being a member of Lashkar-e-Toiba, probably the most notorious terrorist group on the subcontinent. I would take this with a large grain of salt. The Indian government has a pattern of blaming attacks on this group, but have insufficient evidence to back it up.
Still, the theory that the Lashkar-e-Toiba is behind the attack seems as likely as not... being the most dangerous terrorist group in the region. This raises some question. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stated that the terrorists were based "outside the country" (read: in Pakistan), and India would not tolerate this from "neighbors". The External Affairs minister has been even more clear in blaming Pakistan.
Do I think that they are right? Yes and no. The current government in Pakistan has made it very clear that it seeks better relations with India. The attack comes on the heals of a Pakistani peace initiative, and has pledged cooperation with India. Considering that nearly all Indian have links to Pakistan's famously out of control intelligence service (the ISI) and the civilian PM has taken steps to bring the ISI under control, it's easy to imagine that a rogue element of the ISI helped with this attack. I haven't yet seen evidence, but I have a suspicion.

Stupid CEO Tricks

2008-11-21T20:18:00.000-08:00

What kind of idiot, on the way to ask for a loan, takes a jet. The heads of the Big Three, apparently.
These men, as if we needed any more proof, are morons. After that PR travesty, GM is selling two of its 5 jets, while Ford is looking at selling its five.
Corporate jets which high-flying executives get access to are just one part of our culture of inequality. It may surprise you, but there is no law of the universe that states that CEOs must be paid tens of millions of dollars... only a few decades ago, a CEO made only 40 times what a normal worker makes, rather than several hundred times. It was only when people started arguing that we need exorbitant salaries to attract those most qualified (like these 3 morons) that CEO pay went through the roof.
This seems an especially good illustration of what's wrong with conservatism. Throughout this entire automaker bailout debate demonizing unionized workers for receiving benefits, but somehow don't see anything wrong with this.
This is also a good illustration of why these bailouts need string and rules. I don't want to see an automaker bailout end up in some scumbags CEO's account, like some of the money from our other bailout has.

In the Senate

2008-11-18T21:10:00.000-08:00

I can almost see it: a paper showing Ted Stevens Holding in turn holding a newspaper declaring STEVENS DEFEATS BEGICH a la the infamous Chicago Tribune headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. This is another one the papers got just as wrong. After much tutting over Alaska sending a felon to the the senate, it appears it won't be (well, ok, Don Young).
This bring the number of Democrats in the Senate up to 58, with 2 race yet to be decided (the Franken-Coleman recount in Minnosota and Saxby-Chambliss run-of in Georgia). There are also two independents in the Senate, both of whom caucus with the Democrat. Bernie Saunders is a socialist from Vermont, and then of course Joe Lieberman, who received the slightest of wrist slaps. Obviously, Obama is interested in keeping him onboard.

US Industrial Policy

2008-11-18T19:31:00.000-08:00

Steve Coll, writing for his blog on the New Yorker website, makes a good point. Various pundits have claimed the US doesn't have a planned industrial policy. Coll points out that we do, we just call it defense contracting.

Another fallacy of the current debate, often a theme of op-ed essays from the right, but an argument not limited to conservatives, is the notion that the American system is, and should be, fundamentally biased against industrial policy—that is, the use of the commanding heights of the federal government to pick winners and losers in the economy, whether these are whole industries or companies within industries. In fact, we already have a massive industrial policy, funded by the federal budget—it’s referred to as defense contracting.

Why does the United States have one of the most robust aircraft-manufacturing industries in the world? The answer is not that pure free markets have, through the workings of a natural law, granted us such a bounty. Yes, Boeing has been disciplined and strengthened by global-market competition, particularly with Airbus, but large-scale federal spending on defense contracts has crucially strengthened Boeing’s position as a locus of human capital, design experience, and innovation. In 2006, the federal government spent more than sixty billion dollars on aircraft manufacturers. Boeing received $20.8 billion, according to Government Executive magazine. (Lockheed-Martin received $27.3 billion, and Northrup-Grumman $16.7 billion.)

Why does the United States have one of the most sophisticated, innovative electronics industries in the world? Raytheon’s take from the Pentagon in 2006: $10.4 billion; Computer Sciences, $2.7 billion. And so on. General Motors received $806 million dollars that year, mostly from the Army, enough to make it the fortieth largest defense contractor on the list, just ahead, startlingly, of Johns Hopkins University, which received more than seven hundred million dollars, most of it from the U.S. Navy. (Note to self: Why?)

So we have an outsized industrial policy, centered on our national-defense strategy. General Motors receives a lot less than Boeing because our current strategy favors aviation over ground transportation. This strategy has shaped our patterns of employment and innovation—the subsidies do not remain only within the military, but spill across the civilian economy as well. Our industrial policy has also given us less inspirational national capabilities such as world-beating personal-security and mercenary services (Blackwater).

The larger argument Coll is making is that ultimately a bailout for the automakers is beneficial and necessary. James Surowiecki argues the same thing at his New Yorker blog.

Pirates!!!

2008-11-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

It's about time that piracy make it back into the news. Recently, Somalian pirates made a slash by hijacking a Saudi Arabian supertanker.
Kenneth Anderson of Opinio Juris (a blog focused on international law) points out that this is a good chance for president Obama to show our mettle enforcing international law on the high seas.

# One is to act in a way to demonstrate that the operation is a military one within the traditional law of the sea responding to piracy - one fights and detains any who survive in order to prosecute, but the operation is not law enforcement as such. (And the law used to prosecute could usefully be the traditional law of piracy - common enemies of humanity, etc.)
# Second, the US can demonstrate the traditional US commitment to the rule of international law on the high seas and freedom of the seas.
# Third, it can act with allies and friends - India, for example - to create patrols and the reinforcement of multilateral sovereign duties; many countries find their vessels and interests at stake here. It might even manage to re-acquaint the British government with its international law obligations, by making clear through joint declarations of states undertaking patrols that asylum is not an option.
# Fourth, it might even find a way that the US could support the ICC without triggering the usual issues for the US, by sending (or at least opening discussions on sending) captured pirates to trial at the ICC.

One of the odd things I took from the post: Britain is currently ignoring the pirates because they're worried the pirates would claim asylum in Britain. Captured pirates could be beheaded (for murder) or have their hands chopped off (for theft) under Islamic were they sent back to their country of origin, hence they could plausible make claims for asylum.

HRC at State?

2008-11-16T17:46:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest pieces of gossip to come out of the Obama transition is the tidbit that he's considering Hillary for Secretary of State. If the rumors prove true and Obama picks Hillary, he's probably taking a page from one of his favorite books Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, about Lincoln's cabinet.
Lyndon Johnson said "it's best to keep them in the tent pissing out than outside pissing in" (yeah, he was a weird guy). Though the literal interpretation of this doesn't work, it seems pretty solid. Obama doesn't want Hillary outside of his administration, or the press flocking to her to pass judgement on him.
People have said her support of the Iraq war ought to disqualify her... by such a standard none of the top contenders is qualified. It seems possible that Obama and Clinton won't mesh into an effective team, but I see nothing objectionable about the pick if the he thinks it's worth it.

Spy Stuff

2008-11-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

I saw Quantum of Solace yesterday. I enjoyed it, though the bar has clearly been set too high by Casino Royale. One of the most interesting things about the movie is how the face of villainy has changed our modern world. In Ian Flemings books, Bond is pitted against the evil of the Soviet Union and it's spy organization SMERSH. In the older movies, SMERSH was swapped out for the fantastical organization SPECTRE, headed famously by the cat-stroking, bald Blofeld. Quantum now fills the rule of SPECTRE, but unlike SPECTRE, the Americans and British have a working relationship with Quantum.
Private organizations are involved in similar actions to Quantum all the time . The Wonga Coup is one such example, though it admittedly failed. Organizations like Executive Outcomes are fairly similar to Quantum, though they're clearly not as far reaching.
Juan Cole has a long post about the evolution of James Bond from left to right, which I recommend. (Warning: spoilers ahead)

In the new film, Dominic Greene is a secret member of Quantum, a mercenary coup-making consulting firm. That is, it is represented as a private contractor to which the CIA is willing to farm out coup-making instead of doing it directly. Greene's cover is that of the head of a conservation organization that buys up land in poor countries to ensure it is preserved from despoilment. In fact, he despoils it. In a complicated and not very plausible plot twist, Greene appears to be buying up land under which he is convinced there is oil, but in fact is trying to corner the market on Bolivia's aquifers so as to overcharge the country for its water after the military coup unseats Morales.

The CIA is convinced to back Quantum both because it wants leftist governments in Latin America overthrown and because Quantum would re-privatize Bolivia's fossil fuels. Greene observes to CIA field officer Greg Beame that the way the Bush administration bogged the US down in the Middle East allowed several Latin American countries to move left (obviously, the referents are Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil).

Though the parts of the actual plot hatched by Dominic Greene are far-fetched, but not as much as you would think. The films villain, Dominic Green, has hatched a scheme to engineer a water shortage in Bolivia. This plan (reminiscent of Noah Cross's scheme in Chinatown) is clearly inspired by the actual water privatization
in Bolivia undertaken at the behest of the IMF.

Whither Conservatism?

2008-11-14T08:32:00.001-08:00

After the election of president-elect Obama and the drubbing the Republican party has taken nearly all across the country in the last two election, we must now ask the question: what direction will the Republican party take? On the Colbert Report William Buckley Junior commented that he hoped that a Obama victory would cause soul searching all over the Republican party, then added "it probably won't happen".
It probably won't happen. There's been a moderate amount of sniping between conservative intellectuals (George Will, David Brooks) and the populist conservatism, but it hasn't been nearly enough to begin to remake the movement. Jonathan Freedland reminds us of the time the Tories have spent in the wilderness. Freedland tries to make the op-ed a chance for Republican's to learn the lesson of their sister across the Atlantic, but I wouldn't be surprised if the story has some predictive power: it will be a long painful process for the Republicans to modernize their party.
Conservatism's wings are clearly discontented. The base clearly connected with Sarah Palin in a way that no one else did. Sarah Palin clearly inhabits an alternate universe, and the base lives there with her. Everyone else, including most of the rest of the GOP, finds her laughable and scary. However much of a crush the base has on Sarah Palin, they won't be able to get her past the corporate establishment. Palin 2012 is the new Thompson 2008: a dud. Similarly, the harsh economic time offers the Republicans a chance to become the party of Tancredo, blaming Mexican immigrants for the problems our nation is having, but as long as the corporate elite holds on, the party can never fully become the party of nativism.
The Republican could still be a problem though. My guess is that the party will double-down, taking refuge in the comforting belief that their losses came because they deviated from the conservative faith. I suspect they will become the party of neo-Hooverism, opposing increases in spending precisely when such increases are needed to stimulate the economy, and simultaneously attempting to blame Obama for the economy. This isn't as bad as it sounds at first. Ezra Klein:

he question is not whether the Republican leadership is cowed, but whether their ability to impose broad party discipline erodes and moderates decide that they're better off playing a constructive role in the first few years of the Obama administration. Ask yourself this: What leverage does Mitch McConnell -- whose party affiliation almost cost him reelection in Kentucky -- have on Susan Collins, who just rode her bipartisan credentials to a landslide win?

The Democrats weren't effective as opposition to Bush because there were always a few who were willing to play ball. The Republican party, even if the leadership decides to resists, probably doesn't have the party discipline to block Obama's agenda. We'll see.

Rahm Emmanuel: Fucking Intense

2008-11-13T15:58:00.001-08:00

From an old Rolling Stone article about Rahm Emmanuel:

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity. There's the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There's the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth — Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it's a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton's White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don't earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.

At every step, we've thought that Barack Obama is less ruthless than he is. Personally, he's easygoing, but he knows too have someone like Rahm Emmanuel around to bang heads together.

Also check out... Obama at a roast for Rahm Emmanuel. Two especially good parts:

It hasn't been easy for Rahm though as a young man he had a serious accident. I think, as many of you were aware of this, he was working at a deli, accident with a meat slicing machine, he lost part of his middle finger, and as a result of this, this rendered him practically mute.

Some of you may also know that Rahm’s brother Ari is a model for the lead character, on the big hit on HBO, Entourage. What some of you might not know that Rahm himself is also an inspiration for that other HBO character, Tony Soprano.

Crime Doesn't Pay

2008-11-12T20:48:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was all for revoking Alaskan Home Rule... Alaska sent two criminals to congress Ted Stevens and Don Young... together a smorgasbord of corruption and slime.
Perhaps this won't be the case, it appears that Begich now leads Stevens by... 3 votes.

A Center-Right Nation?

2008-11-05T20:27:00.000-08:00

One idea I've been hearing ad nauseum from media yakkers is the idea that America is a "center right nation" (a couple of examples can be found here, including from the loathsome Karl Rove).
We are, I suppose, a center right country when compared to Western Europe, but this is already much discussed. I don't think any politician would confuse the United States with Sweden, though the more astute observer might note that Sweden provides a greater degree of economic security to it's people without sacrificing prosperity.
This is not, I think, what the pundits mean when they say we are a center-right nation. Americans agree more with the sort of policies espoused by moderate conservative candidates. This is clearly untrue. Even before Obama routed John McCain, it was clear majorities of Americans agree with Democratic positions. Generally, Republicans lose on issues but when on flim-flam. As Paul Krugman notes of the most recent presidential race.

[B]ear in mind that the campaign, in its final stages, was really about different philosophies of governing. This wasn’t like the 2004 campaign, which was essentially fought over fake issues — Bush running on national security and social issues, then claiming that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. In this election, Obama proudly stood up for progressive values and the superiority of progressive policies; John McCain, in return, denounced him as a socialist, a redistributor. And the American people rendered their verdict.

It is amusing, I guess, to see the same people who labeled Obama as a socialist now claiming he only won because of his moderate policies. This does indicate one thing though: the center-right thesis is worthless because it is not falsifiable. The proponents of this idea still cling to it even as the country votes in the moderate left. It's become a feel-good fantasy for those who can't accept the progressive path this country is headed.

Obama!!!

2008-11-05T10:36:00.000-08:00

We did it as a nation, not only by electing a man who deserves to be president, as still-president Bush manifestly does not, but by electing a black president. Though I was alive for the fall of the Soviet Union, I obviously don't remember it occurring, so the most amazing event in my life has been the election of a black president. In downtown Ann Arbor, a spontaneous crowd of mostly students took to the street when the victory was announced, chanting "Obama", "yes we can" or "yes we did". The crowd snaked around the city and campus. The police game out, they've been waiting 40 years for students to take to the streets again, well, better late than never.
People also took to the streets in celebration in cities all over the country...
I agree with what Michelle Obama said. This is the first time in my life I have been proud to be an American.

Get him outta here

2008-11-04T09:25:00.000-08:00

OK, so I'm pretty sure he's not up for election this year, but I think the Democrats must start making a file on Orrin Hatch. He's a liar in the highest order, in addition to being a Republican. I've been receiving his nasty emails all campaign season, but this one is one that should sink him with a nice "Orrin Hatch sent out a campaign email that straight up lied".
Here's the one in question:

Matt --

Today is the day we've all been working towards -- Election Day.

Please vote today.

Don't know where to vote? Find out at http://www.JohnMcCain.com/gotv

Remember, there are stark differences between where Republicans want to lead our nation, and where the liberals would take us ...

... Over $1 trillion in new government spending, massive tax hikes on families and small businesses, liberal activist Supreme Court judges, censorship of conservative talk radio and a crushing 25% cut to our military.

Thank you,
Orrin Hatch
Senator Orrin Hatch
Vice Chairman,
National Republican Senatorial Committee

P.S. Please forward this email to your friends, family and neighbors to remind them to vote today.

I don't know where that 25% cut to the military came from. It will probably be more like $25. Maybe it was a typo?
Our military is bloated and the military-industrial complex is way too entrenched in Washington. Cutting more than the military's fingernails would be a good move for our country. Instead, Orrin Hatch uses lies to try to pump up the email-literate Republican vote.

I'm glad we're set to win big today, but we shouldn't stop thinking about the future, a future where liars like Orrin Hatch get the boot from their lofty, lobbyist-infested offices.

Palintology

2008-11-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

Previously, I've compared Sarah Palin with Dan Quayle. Now, I feel this remark was deeply unfair: Dan Quayle was a class act compared to Sarah Palin. To perused just a few stories about the governatrix....

1. Sarah Palin accused the mainstream media of mainstream media of violating her First Amendment right to free speech by daring to criticize her.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

I should hardly need to point out that this is particularly insidious because it completely turns the First Amendment on its head, making it a damper on free speech.

2.Palin suggested our nation is at war with Iran. One hopes this is merely a slip of the tongue...

3.NPR's Talk of the Nation brought Lawrence Eagleburger, specifically to make for John McCain. upon being asked whether Sarah Palin was qualified, responded "of course not", though he added that, hopefully with teaching she could do an "adequate" job. As Gail Collins said:

This was a particularly cruel blow since Eagleburger is not just one of the five former secretaries of state that the McCain campaign constantly cites as having endorsed the ticket. He is one of the four who McCain was actually able to remember during a recent interview on “Meet the Press.”

Fortunately for McCain, Eagleburger appeared on FOX to spout stupid Republican talking points (he sounded much more intelligent on Talk of the Nation by the way) some good old Maoist self-criticism.

4. Finally, there's the two comedians who convinced Palin that she was talking to Nicolas Sarkozy... at least she takes prank well enough.

This is rich

2008-10-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

How to build a spontaneous crowd for Sarah Palin in a few easy steps.

Why Obama and the Democrats Are Still Going To Win

2008-10-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

...especially if we keep up the strong GOTV game.

Here's an excerpt from the latest NRSC email:

One week ago, I asked you to support our Get-Out-The-Vote efforts, and we had a tremendous response.

All told we helped state parties put 364 field organizers on the ground in battleground states -- including an additional 12 people in Mississippi because of your support last week alone.

I need your help again.

Right now, liberals are outspending us on TV by $236,124 in Minnesota to elect Al Franken and $350,000 in New Hampshire to install another tax-and-spend liberal in the Senate.

And to make matters worse, the DNC just announced they are going to spend an additional $5 million on attack ads against our candidates.

You came through for us last week -- now I need your help again. We need your help today to boost our TV ad buys for the next 7 days.

An additional 12 people in Mississippi? Jeez, they must be really hurting. And also sorely lacking in party faithful right now. I get the sense from reading reports at fivethirtyeight and elsewhere that Obama has 364 field organizers in one or two states alone, not to mention hordes of enthusiastic volunteers. I don't think the Republicans get it. I think in an election year like this, when Obama and the Democrats are connecting neighbors and fellow citizens with each other in a well funded but people-centered way, it's a sign of the Republican's true ideas about a centralized government that most of their campaigns boil down to a few organizers in understaffed campaign offices and a bunch of negative ad buys. The Republican party: by and large a group of a few committed ideologues with a bunch of money and no enthusiastic volunteer support from the common people?

Sounds like a great strategy for governing a democracy, if you ask me.

-Matt S

Adam Smith, Socialist

2008-10-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

I truly do not understand the attack by the McCain campaign as a "socialist". People have recently dug up a recording of a radio interview where Obama discusses why the judiciary hasn't been used effectively to redistribute income (it appears Obama thinks the judiciary shouldn't be able to redistribute wealth, this is discussed it here), and attempted to blow it into a scandal.
The Politico

“That’s what change means for the Obama administration. They’re redistributing. It means taking your money and giving it to someone else.”

It seems we must classify all government spending as redistributionist, after all, it take private wealth and spends it on public goods. In such case, we must logically conclude what John McCain is this: anyone not an anarchist is a socialist.
Even if we are willing to give what McCain is saying the most charitable interpretation, it makes no sense. As Hendrik Hertzberg put it "The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent."
Further, if McCain is saying that taxation with intent to reduce inequality is socialist, then a lot of people have been socialist. Republican's are quick to remind us that Karl Marx said "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This is to misunderstand what Marx believed socialism is altogether. To him, it was about workers seizing the means of production... a far more radical shift than I would guess Obama has in mind.
The founder of communism believed in progressive taxation, but the founder of capitalism was no less enthusiastic .From Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations:

""The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

Ted Stevens: Crooked

2008-10-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

Surprise!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted of seven corruption charges Monday in a trial that threatened to end the 40-year career of Alaska's political patriarch in disgrace.

The verdict, coming barely a week before Election Day, increased Stevens' difficulty in winning what already was a difficult race against Democratic challenger Mark Begich. Democrats hope to seize the once reliably Republican seat as part of their bid for a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Stevens, 84, was convicted of all the felony charges he faced of lying about free home renovations and other gifts from a wealthy oil contractor. Jurors began deliberating last week.

This story has been making the rounds all over what Stevens once called the "series of tubes".

campaign updates

2008-10-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Two quick campaign updates.

The first is that I'm really, truly, so proud of my home state of Kentucky right now. The tolerance, the intelligence, the curiosity that leads a disturbing number of them to think that Obama is a Muslim or not a christian just makes my heart soar like a hawk. Couldn't we just roll out Keith Ellison (D-MN) and have him take the fall as the evil, plotting, Manchurian, radical Muslim in our government? I actually used that a few times (minus the satire) during the primaries, to positive effect. It's much easier to tell people in Kentucky (or elsewhere, I'm sure) that they're confused about two different black men, rather than to give them an answer that straight up contradicts their Stone Age prejudices.

The second update is that McCain must seriously be low on cash right now. Behold this latest campaign email:

"John McCain 2008

Can you invest a few days of your life to make history?

McCain-Palin 2008 is looking for volunteers who are willing to spend the final days of the campaign helping in a nearby state. Deployed volunteers will participate in a number of Get-Out-The-Vote activities. These activities will include making phone calls and going door to door.

Deployed volunteers will be unpaid and participants will be responsible for arranging their own transportation and housing; unfortunately, the campaign is unable to reimburse any expenses.

If you can afford the time and expense to serve the final days of the campaign through the election on November 4th, please apply on line at http://JohnMcCain.com/deployment and pack your bags!

Thank you!

Joni Gossett, Deputy Director of Volunteers"

Meanwhile, out of the goodness of my own heart I declined to have the Obama campaign reimburse me for my $10 gas bill (I'm not sure if I even used that whole amount). But seriously, Obama is subsidizing cross-country trips for hordes of dedicated volunteers and the RNC has given up on caring about their national ticket.
I can only hope it isn't because the corporations and defense contractors have taken their bribes across the aisle in anticipation.

Palin Unleashed

2008-10-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

According to the Politico Sarah Palin is going rougue, disregarding her handlers.

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

This should be interesting. Many of Palin's fan-boys like us to think that the biggest problem is that she's been over-coached, which threw her of off her game, and if only McCain would let her off of the leash, she would work her magic over the American electorate. I don't buy it... it's clear she is indeed over-coached, but I doubt this little leaguer can make it in the big leagues anyway. McCain's strategy of keeping her under raps has probably averted a larger catastrophe for the campaign. Looks like Palin's already doing as she pleases.

Ensuring that news of the Republican National Committee's sartorial spending spree will remain in the headlines for at least one more news cycle, Sarah Palin on Sunday sounded off on the $150,000 wardrobe that was purchased for her in September, denouncing the report as "ridiculous" and declaring emphatically: "Those clothes, they are not my property."

A senior adviser to John McCain told CNN's Dana Bash that the comments about her wardrobe "were not the remarks we sent to her plane this morning." Palin did not discuss the wardrobe story at her rally in Kissimmee later in the day.

Bad move... why talk more about an issue like that? it doesn't play to your advantage. Hold on for the next week, things are about to get dicey.
There's a debate at the New Republic between John Chait and Noam Schreiber over whether Sarah Palin will be the nominee in 2012. I think the answer is clearly no. Palin will leave the national stage a widely mocked and unpopular figure, rather like Dan Quayle (if you recall, I made the initial comparison... I stand by that). When the exit polls for this election come out, they'll show that Palin was just as much a drag on McCain as Bush was, and the Republican base will get the message. However much the wing-nuts can't escape their crush on that woman, they'll have to concede that she's unelectable. Good riddance.

Wassilla II

2008-10-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

As an additional addition to the last note, I think it's interesting to consider how Wasilla became such a free-enterprise wasteland. To do this, we should probably look at Palin's career in Wasilla, which is not an edifying sight. We get the impression that Palin is ready to promote her extremist-separatist/ church/ elementary school friends, intensely vindictive, resentful and mean, and worse, often out of her depth running the small town of Wasilla. The New Republic has an article about this, that contains this description of her campaign for mayor.

Within a few months, Palin was officially challenging Stein and exploiting the cultural shift masterfully. She welcomed a national anti-abortion group in to carpet bomb Wasilla with pink postcards affirming her pro-life bona fides. She orchestrated an NRA endorsement and a mailing from the group falsely proclaiming Stein, a lifelong hunter, "anti-gun." (Stein complained to the local newspaper that Palin was telling voters he wanted to "melt down" all the firearms in the state.) And, in a move practically out of Karl Rove's playbook, she dwelled on how Stein's wife used her maiden name, going so far as to demand a marriage certificate as proof of their nuptials. Palin's campaign literature proclaimed her "deeply devoted to conservative family values"--all in the context of an ostensibly nonpartisan election. (Stein himself was a moderate Republican.)

Additionally from Raban's essay, her leadership was even more sinister.

There followed what some Wasillaites saw as her reign of terror. She demanded resignation letters from all the city managers, ridding herself of the museum director, the librarian (whom she was later forced to rehire), the public works director, the city planner and the police chief, who’d argued against the concealed weapons bill and had supported a measure to close the town’s bars at 2.30 a.m. on weekdays and 3 a.m. at weekends (the owners of the Mug-Shot Saloon and the Wasilla Bar had given money to Palin’s campaign). City employees were forbidden by her to speak to the press, and during her first four months in office she provoked a string of appalled editorials in the local paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman:

Wasilla found out it has a new mayor with either little understanding or little regard for the city’s own laws.

Palin seems to have assumed her election was indeed a coronation. Welcome to Kingdom Palin, the land of no accountability.

Mayor Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth . . . Wasilla residents have been subjected to attempts to unlawfully appoint council members, statements that have been shown to be patently untrue, unrepentant backpedalling, and incessant whining that her only enemies are the press and a few disgruntled supporters of former mayor John Stein.

Surrounding herself with fellow congregants from the Pentecostalist Wasilla Assembly of God and old school chums from Wasilla High, the 32-year-old mayor set about turning the town into the kind of enterprise society that Margaret Thatcher used to extol. She abolished its building codes and signed a series of ordinances that re-zoned residential property for commercial and industrial use. When the city attorney ordered construction to stop on a house being built by one of her campaign contributors, she sacked him.

Wasilla

2008-10-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

I recommend this segment from the Daily Show, where Jason Jones goes to Virginia. I'm beginning to get the idea that Wasilla is not the idyllic pastoral town that Republican's have portrayed (and where "real Americans" live). Palin can hardly be blamed that it is the meth capital of Alaska, but she can be partly blamed for the shape the town is in today.
From Jonathan Raban's essay on Palin.

Present-day Wasilla is Palin’s lasting monument. It sits in a broad alluvial valley, puddled with lakes, boxed in on three sides by sawtoothed Jurassic mountains, and fringed with woods of spruce and birch. Visitors usually aim their cameras at the town’s natural surroundings, for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s a generic Western settlement, and one sees Wasillas in every state this side of the 100th meridian: the same competing gas stations, fast-food outlets, strip malls and ‘big box’ stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Fred Meyer and Home Depot, each with a vast parking lot out front, on which human figures scuttle with their shopping trolleys like coloured ants, robbed of their proper scale.
...
Wasilla is what inevitably happens when there are no codes, no civic oversight, no planning, when the only governing principle in a community is a naive and superstitious trust in the benevolent authority of the free market.

Blogs...

2008-10-24T07:25:00.001-07:00

... anyone can have one.

I'm (kind of) back

2008-10-22T19:00:00.001-07:00

The ridiculousness of this campaign has started to boil my blood, and so perhaps you all might be reading some more quips by me in the next few weeks.
Two things: I normally am very inquisitive and enjoy reading a number of blogs and newspapers/magazines and watching the news. However, the number of really, incredibly, undeniably stupid and/or un-American statements and activities by the Republican party and its various members in the past month has been so staggering I can hardly stop to reflect on one before a new scandal emerges. In the same day, in the same day it has not only come to light that Palin doesn't know what the Vice President's constitutional role is (and she spoke in kiddy terms to a journalist about it), but also the fact that the RNC spent over 100,000 dollars buying upscale, elitist clothing from Neiman Marcus and Saks 5th Avenue, to clothe Mrs. Main Street anti-elitist herself. My head is starting to hurt, and it's not because I'm still recovering from a 22 hour day trying to apply for a room-and-board scholarship so I can afford to continue attending Michigan with some level of comfort, given the recent economic hiccup we've experienced.

The second item:
I am an Eagle Scout. You don't get to be an eagle scout by practicing satanism or anarchy, much less socialism. You don't get to be an Eagle Scout by being un-American.
And I will tell all of you who are reading this, I have retired the physical flag a number of times, once even presiding over the ceremony myself while training others how to properly do so. This election cycle, Republicans in office should just plain retire (and those running, drop out) but instead they have decided to do something else - retire what the flag stands for.
I'm looking at you, Robin Hayes and Michelle Bachmann. Uncle Sam vomits every time you two and your top-tier cohort say "un-american" or "real america".

Matt Steele out.

Obsession

2008-10-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

Have you received a copy of "Obsession" in the mail? I have... I really didn't know what to make of it until I read this article in the LRB:

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.
...
Although there are interviews with the usual ‘terrorism experts’ – Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz et al – the film’s portrayal of the region is mostly left to native informants like Nonie Darwish (a leader of Arabs for Israel and the daughter of a slain fighter from Gaza), Brigitte Gabriel (the Lebanese-Christian author of They Must Be Stopped) and Walid Shoebat, a ‘former PLO terrorist’ who operates under a pseudonym – for security reasons, of course. Shoebat runs the Walid Shoebat Foundation, described on its website as an ‘organisation that cries out for the Justice of Israel and the Jewish people’. He’s made a career of recounting his journey from Islamic terror to Christian Zionism before audiences at Evangelical gatherings and the US Air Force Academy. It’s not clear, though, that he ever laid a hand on anyone. According to a relative, ‘the biggest act of terror he ever committed was to glue Palestinian flags on street posts.’

Pretty clearly Obsession is a piece of propaganda attempting to scare people around election time.
I actually saw Walid Shoebat when he came to UM campus. He spewed all sorts of hatred and bile at his former faith, which the crowd of right-wingers ate up. I was clear he knew exactly what the bigots wanted to here. I left very skeptical that he had ever been a terrorist (one of his associates claimed to have killed 300 people, mainly with a knife... does that sound likely?). Indeed, I was skeptical as to whether he was a real Palestinian.
I was reminded of the scene in Huck Finn where Huck and Jim are traveling around with two con men. One trick these con-men use is telling churchgoing people that they are pirates who found Christ.
Walid Shoebat's song and dance is the same... he claims to be an former Muslim terrorist who found christ, the only difference between the routines is that the con-men at least didn't preach hatred.

Watching "Charlie Wilson's War"

2008-10-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to see "Charlie Wilson's War", released in 2007, for some time. I'd say the movie is very enjoyable, even for someone with no interest in politics... if you're interested in politics like me, so much the better.
The plot revolves around the story of how Charlie Wilson, a Democratic congressman from Texas, was involved in supplying the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with weaponry to fight against the Soviet Union. In the movies account, these weapons provided, especially the "Stinger" missiles used to shoot down Soviet helicopter, were key to the Muj's success. A connection is drawn between the defeat in Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the USSR. The account is based on a non-fiction book by the same name.
Charlie Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) was rather a colorful character... his staff is made up completely of attractive young women... one of the first times we see him in a hot-tub in Vegas with two strippers and a Playboy bunny. Later we see he is indicted on suspicion of having used cocaine in relation to this episode (he is indicted, by the way, by Rudy Giuliani). Yes, the movie makes it clear that Charlie Wilson liked to have a good time, and was pretty corrupt.
My favorite character, though, was Gust Avakrotos, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Gust is the CIA officer Charlie teams up with to make the war happen.
So charming are our heros that we can't help root with them against the stuffed-shirts worried about silly things like whether these operations might cause World War III, or that we are arming religious extremist warlords.
The movie presents a bit of a fairy-tale account of events. It is very strongly suggested that the weaponry provided by the United States was responsible for the Afghan's Muj's victory over the Soviet Union, especially the choice to give them "Stinger" missiles used to shoot down Russian helicopters. This is not accurate, the decision to leave Afghanistan had already been made by the Russian leadership before the US decided to supply these weapons.
The movie also seem to suggest that had we only followed through in Afghanistan, things might have turned out alright in the country. Near the end of the movie, we see Wilson trying to secure a mere $1 million for Afghanistan schools and being rebuffed by his committee (in contract, $500 billion was spent on the war against the Soviets- fund matched by Saudi Arabia). I don't think any sensible person would defend the policy of cutting off Afghanistan without a dime, but given who we were supplying with weapons, should one really be surprised by what happened? In the movie, we see Pakistani president Zia telling Wilson that the weapons must flow through him. What we don't see is Zia's policy of Islamizing Pakistan, out of which arguably many of Pakistan's current problems came out off(Zia's brutality is hinted at). Zia was a powerful force bolstering Islamism, and had been giving an extra share of it to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar in his younger days threw acid on the uncovered faces of Afghan women, and is currently killing US marines... and we gave over $200 million worth of aid to this guy.
I suspect the movie also exaggerates the role of Charlie Wilson in all this. I don not recall a single mention of the Reagan administration, but I suspect when the documents are declassified, it will be clear that the Reaganites were even more central than Charlie Wilson to this drama.

Joe the Plumber

2008-10-16T21:02:00.001-07:00

If you watched last night's (terrible) debate, you may recall the name (Joe the Plumber) was mentioned in excess of a million times. Joe was supposedly a modest, blue-collar independent, who was worried that he would be taxed at a higher rate under Obama's plan.... because he makes more than $250,000 a year (seriously). It turns out
a. Joe does not make more than 250,000 a year (surprise).
b.Joe is not an independent, but a registered Republican.
C. Joe owes about 1,200 in back taxes.
D. He is not, in fact, a licensed plumber.

Not Satire...

2008-10-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

The head of John McCain's transition team lobbied the government on behalf of Saddam Hussein.