Must-read on Afghanistan

Rory Stewart, a journalist and candidate for parliament in Britain (whose book "The Places in Between," documenting his walking trip across Afghanistan in 2002-2003 is also a must-read) has the best discussion of Obama's Afghanistan strategy that I've read in this month's New York Review of Books. It's a bit lengthy, but for anyone who's looking to understand what's going on in Afghanistan, please read it here- http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23562.

Name that Tune Cntd.

In response to Adam's post below, I believe there's already technology that will do that, which you can put on an iPhone. You can hum, sing, whistle etc. a tune, and the app searches for it and gives you the name of the song. About a year ago, a couple friends and I cobbled together a pretty neat party game using it. One player calls out the name of a relatively well-known song, and then assigns it to another player. That player then has to sing/humm the song well enough for the app to recognize it. Then that player picks the next song and singer. This works particularly well to get otherwise shy singers to belt out the chorus to "living on a prayer."

NaNaNa.com? Name that tune 2010?

I have an idea. After talking to a friend who works at a certain social networking company that shall remain nameless, I don't think I could ever make money on it, so I'm just throwing it out there to the universe. I hope someone who reads this can run with the idea and make the world a happier place, for a little while at least.

I want there to be a website where that allows people to do two things:

1) People can upload sound or video clips of themselves humming, whistling, or singing nonsense lyrics to songs that they know, but don't know the names of, and

2) Other people can log in and try to figure out what song it is.

For people who upload songs, the website might have some parameters. For example, you could say whether you think the song is in a certain genre, from a certain time period, or has certain words.

For people who try to guess songs, you could log in and hear a series of songs picked at random, or you could choose to just hear country songs, or something along those lines.

Good luck to all you web people out there who know how to do this kind of thing!

(If any of you ever do find a way to make money off of this, please consider making a sizeable donation to charitable organization. Among others, I would recommend the as the Dr. Marnie Rose Foundation, which supports brain cancer research and works for the needs of sick children in Houston, Texas.)

What we're fighting for

It's critical to remember that health care reform is not about scoring points or roughing up Lieberman or even "winning." It's about the chance to make life tangibly better for millions of Americans. Josh Marshall posts an email from one of them:

If I feel abandoned, it's not by Obama and the Democratic party, it's by those on the left advocating to kill the bill.

I am unemployed and have a pre-existing condition that requires daily medicines, quarterly doctors visits and an annual test. I am on COBRA, which runs out mid-2010, when I will have to find new health insurance. I will need to purchase some kind of health insurance, assuming I can find provider who will insure me

I don't pretend to understand all the intricacies of the health care reform bill, but I do read a lot. From what I can glean, if the bill passed, I would be able to find health insurance because I could not to be turned down due to my pre-exisiting condition. And based on my income at the moment, my premuims would be subsidized.

Believe me, it's scary being 52 and unemployed with a medical condition. Any form of security is vital.

Why the "Obama didn't fight hard enough" and "Obama got out-negotiated" memes are wrong

Megan McArdle has a great post about the realities of the bargaining situation for the healthcare bill that must be read by everybody who thinks that Obama, Reid, Pelosi etc. got rooked by the GOP and conservative dems in the negotiating process:

Krugman, and the commenters, seem to imagine that negotiation is a process where you ask for huge concessions, and then bargain your way down to splitting the difference. So naturally, the reason that liberals have ended up with nothing in the way of a public option is that they were too nice to Republicans and conservative Democrats, and did not start out demanding single payer, and the nationalization of the coal mines.

Negotiation doesn't work that way. There is a zone of possible agreement (known to those who study this sort of thing as the ZOPA). You can't negotiate your way out of that zone no matter where you start. Nor does starting from a more aggressive bargaining point always mean that you will do better in the negotiation. It can often mean you do worse, because you poison the process.
...

This bill is, at this point, hideously unpopular. I'm pretty sure you've got a bunch of senators who would really, really love not to vote for it. Ultimately, the moderates had a very good alternative to negotiated agreement, and the progressives didn't, and that was crystal clear from Day 1. That meant the progressives were never, ever going to get very much. This was not a failure of political will or political skill. It was the manifestation of a political reality that has long been obvious to everyone who wasn't living in a fantasy world. If progressives decide that the lesson from this is that they haven't been sufficiently demanding and intransigent, they are going to find themselves about as popular with the rest of America as the Bush Republicans, and probably lose their party the House next year.

The other thing to note here, for folks who think Obama should have "fought harder" for the bill is that there's a very limited amount of leverage that he has over the Senators who have been the key choke points. In Nebraska, Obama is less popular than Ben Nelson - Ben Nelson repeatedly wins statewide elections in Nebraska, and Obama lost the state (other than Omaha). Obama polls below Nelson in Nebraska. If Obama went to Nebraska and went around talking about what a jerk Nelson is, the end result would not be that Ben Nelson would be replaced by a more liberal senator -- Ben Nelson would either win anyway and then work against everything else Obama does, or else liberals would stay home or vote for a non-viable 3rd party vandidate and Nelson would lose to a Republican who would be vastly more hostile to progressive policy goals than Nelson is. The same thing is pretty much true for Blanche Lincoln.

Obama has some better leverage in bluer states, but even there it's somewhat limited. In 2006, Obama backed Ned Lamont against Lieberman, and Lieberman won anyway and is now hostile to Obama. Historically, it's just very hard for even very popular presidents to purge troublesome senators from their own party. FDR tried it in 1936, at the very height of his popularity, and it was a dismal failure. A homegrown, viable primary opponent can make something happen (witness Joe Sestak pushing Arlen Specter ever-leftward in PA), but it's just not that helpful for a sitting president to get into a public pissing match with senators from his own party.

It's also critical to remember that, as big a deal as the healthcare bill is, Obama has 3 or 7 more years of governing left, and a lot he wants to accomplish- climate change, energy policy, education reform, Afghanistan and Iraq. All of those things are going to require 60 votes in the Senate- which means they'll need Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, etc. Would it feel great to have Obama grab Lieberman by the jowls and toss him bodily from his committee chairmanship? Sure. But one of the reasons a lot of us supported Obama for president over the hot-headed other guy was because he takes the long view.

Thoughts on the drinking age

At one point in college, I served on a joint student/faculty/administration counsel on student alcohol consumption (something my friends at the time thought was highly amusing), and one of the members was Barrett Seaman, a college trustee. Since that time, Seaman has written a book on college binge-drinking ("Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess") and has started a group called Choose Responsibility that has been lobbying to overturn the Federal mandatory 21 year old drinking age.

Seaman's argument, which makes a lot of sense to me, is that the the mandatory drinking age creates a college culture where drinking is pushed underground, leading to dangerous excess (a greater tendency to poison yourself drinking shots of vodka in your dorm room instead of waiting in line to get a beer at a party or a bar). It also socially separates adults from teenagers at a critical moment in teenagers lives. They lose the chance to see adults responsibly consuming alcohol, and also removes a way for students and professors to bond outside of class. A number of times my fraternity tried to invite professors to our more, er, "upscale" events, but they never showed up because of the risk of being around a lot of underage drinking. That brings up the third problem- because underage drinking is so pervasive in college, it creates a situation where large numbers of otherwise law-abiding folks are forging government documents, endangering the welfare of minors, etc - which is risky for the people involved, and also breeds a general contempt for the law.

Seaman also notes that the main selling point of the current drinking age is a sham:

The other side almost invariably trots out the same statistics supporting their claim that MLDA 21 has reduced drunk-driving fatalities by some 13 percent, allegedly saving nearly 1,000 lives a year on the nation's roads. I know I can knock that one right out of the park with the simple observation — backed by peer-reviewed studies — that Canada, during roughly the same period, had an even greater reduction in drunk driving deaths without changing any of its provinces' 18- or 19-year-old drinking age limits.

This is an interesting area where, much like marijuana legalization, you'll find that a lot of policymakers tacitly agree there should be change, but right now the politics are so toxic it's almost impossible to do. Any governor who opted to buck the Federal highway money (the Federal Government basically bribes the states to go with a 21 year drinking age by making a condition to get a portion of the state's federal highway dollars) and drop the drinking age back to 18 would inevitably have the DWI deaths of every 18-21 year old hung around his neck at the next election- even if the overall rate of DWIs for that category stayed the same.

In any event, Barret's piece in the Hamilton College alumni mag (available here) is a good read on this topic.

Laura Ingraham can't even trivialize the holocaust properly

Rightwing squawker Laura Ingraham has her take on the classic holocaust poem "First they came..." -

"First they came for the rich. And I did not speak out because I was not rich. Then they came for the property owners, and I did not speak out because I did not own property. Then they came for the right to bear arms, and I did not speak out because I was not armed. Then they came for me and denied me my medical care, and there was no one left to speak for me,"

Not only is this in pretty terrible taste, but it also makes no sense. In the original , when the Nazis "came for the communists," or the trade unionists or the Jews, they actually showed up, carted them away and imprisoned or killed them. That's why the kicker- "there was no one left to speak for me" works, because all of those people were actually gone and thus not able to speak.

Unless Ingraham is vastly more paranoid than I think she is, she can't actually believe that people are coming for the rich. At the worst, maybe the government will take a bit of money from the rich, or insist that gun owners put trigger locks on their guns so their kids don't shoot themselves accidentally or what have you... but never fear Laura, when they come to take your healthcare or whatever, the rich, armed, property owners will still be around to speak for you.

Don't Kill the Senate Healthcare Bill

Howard Dean, for whom I generally have a lot of respect, today calls for liberals to unite to "kill the bill" - scrap the Senate healthcare reform bill and try again later by going back to the House for a new bill that would be easier to get through the Senate using budget reconciliation- and critically needing only 51 votes.

The problems with this are numerous- There's a lot of chance that, having failed once in the Senate, the House (which only passed their bill by a small margin) won't pass it- many reps will be loathe to stick their necks out for what they perceive to be a failing process. Even if it gets through the House, there's no guarantee that there is any willingness in the Senate to push it through the reconciliation process.

Are there problems with the compromise bill? Sure- removing the medicare buy-in and the public option makes it much less likely that the bill will "bend the curve" of healthcare costs. Does it rankle that Lieberman and Ben Nelson are shoving progressives around? Yeah, it really does.

However, passing the bill will have real consequences- 30 or so million Americans who currently don't have health insurance will get it. That's huge- by far the biggest progressive domestic legislation since LBJ. Over time it will save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. This country will have made an affirmative statement that healthcare is a right and not a market commodity. That's what's at stake.

We can always go back and try to add the public option or medicare buy-in later - and frankly we'll probably have to do so, as something will have to be done about geometrically rising costs. We can punish Lieberman by stripping him of his Homeland Security Committee chair. These are all things for tomorrow, but for today- let's keep our eyes on the prize.

Cowardly silence from Senators opposed to marriage equality

During this week's "debate" in the NY State Senate leading up to the 38-24 defeat of the marriage equality bill, there were a number of heart-wrenching statements by those in favor the bill, particularly Sens. Diane Savino and Ruth Hasswell-Thompson. On the "no" side, however, only Democratic Senator Reuben Diaz spoke, in a rambling statement largely complaining about how Dems had stabbed him in the back and how gays never gave him any money.

The "no" voters need to explain themselves- they didn't do it in the Senate and they haven't done it for their constituents. The video below shows a constituent of Western New York's George Mariaz asking why he's opposed to letting the questioner marry her partner, and get all the legal security that comes with it. Mariaz, coldly and cowardly, merely says that he doesn't support marriage equality because he believes marriage is between a man and a woman.

After seeing the video, I sent Mariaz the following email, with questions that need to be asked of every Senator who voted "no" this week:

You owe your constituents and the citizens of this state a real answer about why you don't support marriage equality, not a mere conclusory statement that you oppose the bill. Why do you believe marriage is only between a man and a woman? If your only basis for that belief is religion - say so, and then explain why your particular religious beliefs are a legitimate basis for state legislation. If you have another reason, explain it. Your constituents and this state deserve better.

The Price of Torture

Last night I watched a pretty amazing interview on the Daily Show with journalist Maziar Bahari who was imprisoned by the Iranian regime for several months after he covered the protests this summer. One of the most amazing things Bahari said was that, despite the fact that the interrogators beat him, they tried to win him over by saying that what they were doing was not nearly as bad as what the US did at Abu Ghraib- no leashes and dog collars, no waterboarding. It's a pretty sad spectacle when a morally bankrupt and brutal regime like Ahmadenijad's can try to make itself look better by comparing themselves to the US.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Maziar Bahari
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
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Doug Hoffman blaming nonexistent Oswego County ACORN for "vote tampering"

Doug Hoffman recently sent an email to his supporters, claming that the recent special election in NY-23 was "stolen," and blaming ACORN and the unions for "vote tampering."

He specifically cites problems in Oswego County:

A recanvassing in the 11-county district shows Owens' lead has narrowed to 3,026. In Oswego County, I was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, but inspectors found I actually won by 1,748 votes

Let’s force them keep this recanvassing active! Let’s give this election a chance to end differently!Oswego County elections officials blame the mistakes on "chaos" in their call-in center that included a phone system foul-up, and on inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results. This sounds like a tactic right from the ACORN playbook.

I'm from Oswego county and my family and I have been very active in Democratic politics- my dad is an elected town judge, and my mom and in-laws have worked on a number of national, state and local campaigns within the county, and none of us have ever encountered ACORN staff or volunteers active in the county.

Moreover, the county government in Oswego and Jefferson counties is dominated by Republicans, and they use all the old-school patronage tools to make sure that county employees (like the ones staffing the polling sites) are good Republicans. These are also really small town places, where everybody knows each other - there's no way that ACORN (even if it existed in the district) would be able to have operatives sneaking around and fiddling with the voting machines without drawing the attention of the poll workers, who have probably worked together on the same crew for every election for decades.

Oswego County (and I believe other counties in the district) had brand new voting machines, and each machine covered multiple election districts, unlike the old manual machines that were one to a district. The new machines printed out a slip at the end of the night that listed the results for each of the EDs covered by the machine. My mom was working some of the polling sites for the New York Democratic Lawyers' Council, and told me that it would be really easy for the poll-workers to call in just the results from the first ED on the slip.

By blaming ACORN for his defeat, Hoffman is further showing that he's a creature of the national right-wing, completely tied up with national right-wing boogeymen, and just as completely out of touch with the realities of political life in NY-23 (perhaps because he's never lived in the district).

GOP nonsense about the new mammogram recommendations

“This is the little toe in the edge of the water,” said Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “This is where you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician.”

This is the Republican reaction to the recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force that women between 40 and 50 not receive annual mammograms. The Wall Street Journal piled on, blaming the result on "Obamacare" and cost-cutting. The WSJ article focuses entirely on the fact that by not screening women from 40 to 50, some number of women in that range will not catch a tumor in time. That is true. What the article ignores, however, is what's on the other side of the scale- some serious negative consequences of screening women in that age-range:

The task force advised on Monday that most women should not start routine screening until they are 50, as opposed to the current standard of 40. The reason, according to the task force, is that studies show that “the additional benefit gained by starting screening at age 40 years rather than at age 50 years is small, and that moderate harms from screening remain at any age.”
While the downsides of mammography have not received much attention, cancer researchers say they are real and include excess biopsies, unnecessary anxiety and the discovery and treatment of tumors that would not cause problems if let alone.

In addition, some research has found that mammograms themselves, because of the radiation dose, lead to an increased risk of cancer.

This line of thinking is not, as the GOP would have you believe, a brand new thing brought on by Obama's desire to heartlessly kill off old people. For years, the American Cancer Society and other groups have recommended that men not be screened for prostate cancer, because screenings lead to unnecessary treatments (radiation therapy and surgery) that are oftentimes more dangerous than the cancers they are treating.

One final point- with all the squawking about how "government bureaucrats are getting in between patients and doctors," you'd think that the task force was made up of federal employees, right? Probably a bunch of unqualified hacks and bean counters sitting around dreaming up ways to screw over patients.

In fact, looking at a list of the members of the panel shows that these are actually pretty qualified people- the Dean of the College of Public Health at U. Iowa, the Director of Women's Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA, the Medical Director of HealthPartners Co. in Minneapolis, the Dean of the School of Nursing at the Medical College of Georgia, a professor from Johns Hopkins Medical School, etc. You know, the sort of people who might have a better idea of how to interpret cancer research literature than Congresswoman Blackburn, whose only work experience outside of elected office is selling textbooks door to door.

What shall it profit a man...

Matt Yglesias has a post today that probably should be tacked on the wall of every elected official- reminding them that their job is to accomplish something, not to stick around forever:

But that’s okay—it’s not the job of an elected official to lurk around in office forever and ever. The job of an elected official is to do things. Hopefully things that make the world a better place. Winning an election is an opportunity. Not an opportunity run for election again—you can run again if you lose—but an opportunity to change the world. Look up any former legislature in the history books or on Wikipedia or what have you and you’ll see that he or she is remembered (or not) for his or her accomplishments (or lack thereof). Everyone leaves congress sooner or later, maybe in defeat or maybe in a coffin, but what ultimately matters is not how long you stay but what you leave behind.

This is particularly important for folks in tough seats like Blanche Lincoln and co. - the demographics of the southern electorate are changing, and it's going to be increasingly tough to get elected as a Democrat. To keep these seats is probably going to require a series of increasing compromises and capitulations, until one day you have to think these folks are going to wake up and have trouble remembering what they were trying to do when they first got into politics.

The dishonesty of Joe Lieberman (updated)

Joe Lieberman was on Fox this weekend discussing why he will filibuster a Senate healthcare reform bill with the public option:

LIEBERMAN: A public option plan is unnecessary. It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance. They’ve got a right to do that; I think that would be wrong.
But worse than that, we have a problem even greater than the health insurance problems, and that is a debt -- $12 trillion today, projected to be $21 trillion in 10 years.

WALLACE: So at this point, I take it, you’re a “no” vote in the Senate?

LIEBERMAN: If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote because I believe debt can break America and send us into a recession that’s worse than the one we’re fighting our way out of today. I don’t want to do that to our children and grandchildren.

I've met Lieberman, and I can say that unlike some other Senators (Ben Nelson, I'm looking at you), Lieberman is not a stupid man. He also has had some terrific staffers working for him in the past, and I imagine he still does. Consequently, I can only take the factual and logical errors in the snippet above to be pure dishonesty.

The bill coming out of the Senate, with the Public Option, has been scored by the CBO to reduce the deficit by over $100 billion over 1o years. Consequently, if Joe is actually worried about the debt and the deficit, it seems like he would like this feature of the bill. Moreover, the Public Option, by offering competition in states and locations that currently have local monopolists providing health insurance, would lower health insurance costs by providing competition.

The Public Option, as it exists in both the House and Senate bills, would get an initial boost of start-up funding from the government, and then be completely self-sufficient- which means that it's operation would, aside from an initial minimal cost - have zero impact on the national debt.

Joe tries to dress this all up in a "think of the children" kind of way by appealing to what the future will be like under some hypothetical recession brought on by the zero additional debt of the public option. This of course does not take into account the 40 million uninsured Americans, all of whom are somebody's children or grandchildren, and of whom 45,000 a year or so die because of lack of insurance.

On a completely unrelated note, Joe's wife Hadassah is a senior healthcare and pharmaceutical lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton.

*UPDATE- I had originally titled the post "The Perfidy of Joe Lieberman", when a friend noted that the term paired with a Jewish Senator has some negative connotations- see perfidis judaeis. I had no intention to evoke that connotatio- merely pointing out that Lieberman, as one who's caucusing with the Dems and owes his seniority and committee positions to the Democrats, seems particularly treacherous for backstabbing them on healthcare reform using obviously specious reasoning.

Before we jump to conclusions...

Whenever something like the Ft. Hood shooting happens, there's a real urge to jump to conclusions and use the event to score political points. I was halfway through doing so myself this morning. I scrapped a halfway drafted post that was going to be about how the shooting undermines the idea that we need to allow concealed weapons in order to thwart armed maniacs, because hey, this guy was on an army base and everybody's carrying there, right? -- until I learned that concealed weapons are banned on military bases, and the only weapons are stored away on firing ranges.

Before everybody gets too worked up about jihad in the ranks and banning Muslims from the military- take a look at the photo below (and others like it here):

What matters vs. what gets on TV

Cable news (especially Fox) is abuzz today with Michelle Bachman's "takeover" of the capitol, where some number of teaparty folks are rallying on the steps to hear John Boehner say that the healthcare bill is the "Greatest threat to freedom I've seen in 19 years." *
We also get some yahoos with banners showing skeletons and corpses bearing the legend "National Socialist Healthcare: Dachau 1945", which frankly displays a knowledge of history I'd typically thought wasn't present in these folks.

However, away from the fun and games at the Capitol, Obama quietly announced that the healthcare reform plan (presumably some mish-mash of the Senate and House plans) has now been endorsed by the AMA and AARP. The AMA represents ~250,000 doctors, and the AARP represents 35 million seniors. My guess is that, when watching the news tonight, you won't see that.

The other thing you probably won't hear about is the Republican "healthcare reform bill", which just got scored by the CBO, with the following interesting results:

• Right now aboyut 17% of Americans don't have health insurance. After 10 years of the GOP reform... 17% still wouldn't have healthcare.
• The GOP plan would shave about $68 billion off of the deficit. That sounds great, except the Democratic Senate plan would take $104 billion off of the deficit. While covering all but 4% of Americans.

But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of your banners.

*On his website, Boehner has the text of a Floor Statement on the 9/11 resolution, where he calls the terrorists Enemies of Freedom and conveniently lists a number of acts committed by these enemies:

On September 11th we came face-to-face with evil. But it wasn’t the first time. During the 1990s, the enemies of freedom used terror and violence in futile attempts to intimidate the United States and the cause of freedom.
On February 26, 1993, the 1st World Trade Center Bombing killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others.
On June 25, 1996, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 20 people and injured 372 people.
On June 7, 1998, the Kenya Embassy Bombing killed 213 people and injured 5,000 people.
On June 7, 1998, the Tanzania Embassy bombing killed 11 people and injured 68 people.
On October 12, 2000, the U.S.S. Cole bombing killed 17 people and injured 39 people.

Oddly, even though all of these events, plus the 9/11 attacks, were made by enemies of freedom during the past 19 years, they clearly, to Boehner, pale in comparison to a public healthcare plan.

The real news buried under the tea leaves

Lots of commentators on both sides spinning pretty wildly last night and this morning about what the results of last night's election mean for support for Obama and his agenda. A couple salient points:

• Corzine was an already-unpopular governor who was a.) in charge when the economy went in the tank, and b.) tied to Goldman Sachs, one of the villains of this recession. Anybody surprised that he lost?
• Deeds had already lost once to McDonnell in a statewide race for AG. He ran a lousy campaign focused mostly on McDonnell's master's thesis while McDonnell talked about jobs. Again, anybody surprised he lost?
• VA and NJ have, since 1985, consistently elected governors of the opposite party of whoever was holding the Whitehouse.
• Exit polls showed broad support (consistent with non-election-related approval polls) of Obama in NJ and VA.
• NY-23 showed two things- a.) that the tea-bagging fringe of the GOP is stronger than the moderates, and has the desire and ability to take out moderate candidates in primaries; and b.) moderate Dems will beat tea-baggers, even in conservative districts.
• In NY, a moderate Republican was replaced by a moderate Dem. In California (in the race to replace Ellen Tauscher, who's an Assistant Sec. State), a moderate Dem was replaced with a progressive Dem. Thus two seats in the House shift left, making it easier for Pelosi to get 218 votes for the public option.

The races last night will have some significant impact on policy in VA and NJ (and also, sadly, on Gay and Lesbian couples in ME), but nationally- this was not a "find a silver lining" night for Dems, because they lost where expected, and showed that they can continue to win by keeping a big tent while the GOP continues to devour itself.

Center for Global Development: U.S. is worse for global security than New Zealand?

The Center for Global Development has put together an interesting interactive chart rating developed countries on a variety of metrics as to how their conduct affects the developing world. The US rates high on trade, and pretty high on security. Everything else is either in the middle or low.

The metrics that CGD is using seem pretty flawed to me. For instance, I’m not entirely clear how New Zealand has us roundly beat on the “security” metric. Does their navy guarantee the freedom of the seas for the entire world? I don’t think so, and that freedom allows international trade to take place, which has a higher impact on global welfare than any Swedish foreign aid. If the US military closed up shop tomorrow, there would be a much greater net negative impact on global security and global well-being than if you removed the militaries of any other nation listed on the chart.

Note- I’m saying this with the full understanding that our actions in Iraq, and to some degree Af/Pak, have contributed to instability in their regions.

Also, the "technology" metric mostly counts government subsidies for technological development, and thus puts Spain as the number one country for technology that benefits the developing world, and the US is in the middle. I presume that's because Spain, unlike the US, developed the internet, hybrid drought and pest-resistant seeds, and things like Twitter that encouraged the Iranian dissident movement.

The proof is in the Krugman

Paul "the Krug" Krugman writes in today's New York Times that the charges being bandied about in the healthcare "debate" of 'death panels' show that Pres. Obama's stated goals of postpartisanship and avoiding the pitched battles of the 1990s are at worst conceptually unsound or at best merely yet unfulfilled. Part of the evidence in his argument is that the media continues to let the 'death panel' meme move forward without rebuttal and continues to identify Sen. grassley as a moderate Republican, even after he speaks immoderately.

To me, Krugman accidentally proves the point that Obama is trying to make. You have to ignore the things that whipped up the partisan battles of the 1990s, rapid-response policy "debate," and 24-hour cable news in order to deafeat them.

How many people do you know were really considering their support or opposition to the President's healthcare plan and thought, "I like the focus on reducing medicare costs, and I like the potential insurance reform, but wait a minute, this plan has death panels in it, so.... maybe not." That's never, ever what happens.

Instead, people decide to engage or not engage, they think about momentum and political capital. And then, they make decisions based on whether or not they generally trust or favor the people proposing things. This process has some very important feedback effects, because people have opinions, but they only vote once every two years (if ever). Congressman vote week or so, not only by voting on bills, but also by voicing support or opposition to other politicians, and very importantly, by feeding the feedback loop. The TV shows 'vote' basically every day or two.

Death panels, Harry and Louise, smoking guns that turn in to mushroom clouds, and a thousand other little passenger pigeons get some people excited. Getting some people excited makes news. Making news manipulates the feedback loop. To use the ready musical analogy, I'm all for a little grind in the lead guitar sound, but Krugman is listening to the distortion that comes from the amp, not the music that comes from the guitar.

I like Obama's way better. I can almost guarantee that we will not win the healthcare debate by aggressively rebutting the aspersions of least responsible opponents. We might win, however, by talking about healthcare.

The bogus "I won't get to choose my doctor" argument against healthcare reform

One of the frustrating things about the healthcare debate is the idea going around that, under "Obamacare," people won't be able to go to the doctor they want to see.

To begin with, this is a huge problem under the existing setup. People without health insurance, of course, can't afford to see any doctor- they're stuck with whoever's in the ER or free clinic. Even many people with insurance can't get the doctor they want. When i was a teacher in LA, I had my pick of doctors so long as they worked at they Kaiser Permanente medical center. Even after the doctors there lost the pathology report on a surgery I had, and one of them nearly killed me because he didn't read my chart properly, I was stuck with them because it was my insurance didn't cover anywhere else. While in Law School, I was using the Beech Street, and I couldn't see a Crohn's specialist because Beech Street wasnt accepted by any doctors in NYC who specialized in that disorder.

The argument against reform is that having a public option will force all the private insurers out of business, so everyone will be stuck with something like Medicare- and I keep hearing from people something along the lines of "everyone knows that most doctors won't even accept medicare, so you'll be stuck with the lousy doctors who accept it." This sounds like a big problem with the public option, until you read something like this from a 2007 study by the Department fo Health and Human Services:

More than two thirds (70 percent) of traditional Medicare enrollees say they “always” get access to needed care (appointments with specialists or other necessary tests and treatment), compared with 63 percent in Medicare managed care plans and only 51 percent of those with private insurance.

The same study showed higher rates of customer satisfaction from Medicare (and even Medicaid!) enrollees than from private insurance customers. This seems to indicate that, even if you accept the premise (which I don't) that the "public option" in Obamacare will force everybody into a Medicare-like plan, that that plan will be worse than what most people already have.

A (perhaps) novel solution to kidney donation

Like Dante's Peak and Volcano, and Armageddon and Deep Impact, this month we have an interesting pair of long-form magazine articles on kidney donations from the New Yorker and the Atlantic (both very much worth reading- New Yorker's here and Atlantic's here).

The New Yorker article focuses on people who decide, for varying reasons, to donate a kidney to a complete stranger- complete altruism seems to be the uniting theme. The Atlantic article ranges along varying methods of spurring donations, such as exchanges where a husband who's not compatible with his sick wife (pair A) and a mother not compatible with her sick daughter (pair B) swap kidneys- healthy A to sick B, healthy B to sick A. It also looks at more convoluted chain donations where one altruistic donor can kick off a cascade of matching donations- with each donor giving to an unknown recipient.

Both discuss the idea of paying donors- either in immediate cash payments, or perhaps (to be less likely to exploit the desperate) paying in the form of health insurance, or 401k contributions, or college funds. For many people, the idea of paying for kidneys is ghoulish, or raises problems of class inequality, which I can definitely understand- even though it seems that the person selling his or her kidney is unlikely to face any serious health consequences, as the other kidney will grow to assume all the functions of the pair, and kidney disease typically strikes both.

Right now, people waiting for kidneys are on the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) list, where there's a 4-year wait time- many of those on the list will die while waiting, and the rest will spend a lot of time undergoing painful dialysis. What if donating a kidney didn't have to be an altruistic act, but could essentially function like insurance. It would work like this- a healthy person could, at any time, arrange to donate a kidney that would go to whichever matchable person is at the top of the list in the donor's state (the lists go state-by-state). In exchange, the donor would then have the right, if he or she ever needed a kidney, to slot into the list at the top. This right would be assignable, so if person A donated a kidney, but never needed one, she could assign her "cut to the front" right to her husband, aunt, etc (but the right could not be sold or exchanged for anything of value).

Furthermore, if a healthy friend or relative of a person who needed a kidney was willing to donate, but was not a match, he or she could donate to the person at the top of the list, and then immediately assign their "cut to the front" to their sick relation.

I don't think that this would be any less equitable than the current system- and would probably improve things. Some number of people would donate for the "insurance" purpose, and then never have to use it because they or their friends/relatives never needed a kidney- thus adding additional organs into the system that would not be there otherwise. For people that did then use the "cut to the front" for themselves or friends/relatives, it would give the most benefit to sick people who have a large circle of altruistic friends, but that's the case currently, where anyone who has a matchable friend or relative who's willing to donate gets to cut the line.

I know I have some doctors and other smart folks who read this blog- so please feel free to point out to me what the problems are with this idea are- it wouldn't surprise me if this had been thought of (and discarded) before...

Footage of crazy Obama conspiracy theorists shouting their Congressman

Delaware Congressman (and Hamilton alum) Mike Castle, one of the 8 responsible Republicans who voted for Cap and Trade, was recently accosted by a wildly misinformed woman who shouted that Obama is a Kenyan citizen, and then, bizarrely, demanded that Castle lead the crowd in reciting the pledge of allegiance. In an additional weird detail, the woman brought her own birth certificate in a plastic bag, and describes it in detail... perhaps unaware that birth certificates can vary by state.

Note the crowd's reaction when Castle defends the President's citizenship- which has been clearly verified (see here for a ridiculously in-depth look at the Prez's birth certificate).

The "Birthers" as these folks are known, appear to be staking out a pretty strong position within the GOP community, and getting regular play on talk radio and Fox news. Props to Castle for standing up for the truth against a hostile crowd of his own party.

Obama as the "Democratic Ideal"

A bit more on Ross Douthat's Times piece about how Palin, not Obama, demonstrates the triumph of the democratic ideal, because Obama is an Elite and Palin is a regular American.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Atlantic notes that there's a real racial bias to who gets to be a "regular American," and that if you pull that out, it's not clear that Palin is any more regular than Obama-

The use of the word neighbor is instructive--Barack Obama hails from the black side of town. And not just any black side of town, but the South Side of Chicago, a place that was the cultural and economic capital of black America for decades. Moreover he isn't simply from our side of town, he actually behaves like the people we know. He gives dap in the manner that we give dap. He plays basketball, our national past-time. He paraphrases Malcolm X. He bops through the Senate chamber. He's married to a black woman, and not just a dark-skinned black woman, but one who is the progeny of working class black Chicago. Before he became president, Barack Obama got his hair cut by the same South Side barber every week, and it looked tight. For black men, that is the democratic ideal.

The Progressive Bloc

Chris Bowers at Openleft describes an interesting emerging strategy among progressive Dems in the House and Senate:

Bowers suggests that, instead of 60 votes in the Senate or 218 in the House, what progressives really need are 12-13 Senators and 45 Reps who are prepared to walk away from legislation unless their demands are met- thus forcing the administration and the Congressional leadership to whip the others hard in order to bring them in line with the progressives.

This works best when there's an easily articulated demand- like the public option in healthcare reform- that the progressive bloc can get behind.

Bowers notes that the inspiration comes from the Senate "blue dogs" and Evan Bayh's conservative dems, who often threaten to side with the GOP and walk away from bills unless their demands for watering them down aren't met.

An additional benefit, that Bowers doesn't really get into, is that this opens up the possibility of tapping the energy many of the most progressive constituents in steeling the spines of their Reps and Senators. For instance, in Manhattan, where I live, most people are represented by Jerry Nadler, Charlie Rangel and Carolyn Maloney, as well as Schumer and Gillibrand- all solid, liberal Dems. I periodically get emails from Moveon and other progressive organizations generally asking me to call my member of congress to support this or that, but it's pointless to do so, because my folks are already on board, and it's equally useless to write/call elected officials who don't represent me.

If, however, the progressive bloc strategy got moving, people like me (and active constituents in deep blue districts and states all over the country, who are likely to be the most progressive) can contact our reps and demand that they walk away from mediocre bills if progressive improvements aren't included. That's a pretty serious font of untapped elected-badgering energy that could be put into play in an organized manner to make sure that Bayh and Baucus aren't running the show in DC.

Brooks admires Obama's "self-mastery"?

Huh? I'm all for sociologically interesting reporting, but today's David Brooks is sort of a whiff:

[...] three stories have dominated public conversation, and each one exemplifies another branch of indignity.

First, there was Mark Sanford’s press conference. Here was a guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who was given to rambling self-exposure even in his moment of disgrace. Then there was the death of Michael Jackson and the discussion of his life. Here was a guy who was apparently untouched by any pressure to live according to the rules and restraints of adulthood. Then there was Sarah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who aspires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust.

But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.

What do all these people have in common: Barack Obama, Saarah Palin, Michael Jackson, and Mark Sanford? They're all famous, they're all on TV, they all do things to get on TV, etc.

Could it possibly be that people who have whatever traits were described there in the article as the "dignity code" choose not to live in a way that puts them on television?

What people we admire who don't necessarily aspire to "dignity" in Brooks's meaning? Let me just try to put a few out there. I realize not everyone will agree on these suggestions, but I'm just wondering what allows them to attempt to be subjectively good moral influences without working off the "dignity code?" Rick Warren, Dan Savage, Bono.

There's something missing from today's David Brooks, and I intend to write more later to try to find out what it is.

Palin's problems run deeper than class or gender

I don't really have anything to say about Palin's bizarre departure from the Alaska governorship other than that it confirms my general opinion of her as a loon who's not fit to govern anything.

I do, however, take issue with new Times columnist Ross Douthat's portrayal of Palin as a small-d democratic foil to the "elite" Obama-

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

I'll first note that plenty of female candidates (Hillary, Liddy Dole, Gerry Ferraro) have made it through presidential campaigns without having their children paraded through the tabloids- largely because they had selling points beyond "I didn't abort the special needs child." I'll also note that basically whenever the kids of high-profile politicians do stupid things, they end up in the tabloids.

As far as class goes, Matt Yglesias makes the point that one could reasonably compare Palin with Joe Biden. Like Palin, Biden was a graduate of less-than-first-tier schools (U. Delaware and Syracuse Law). Unlike Palin, neither of Biden's parents went to college. Biden never became rich, eschewed the fancy trappings of the Senate and continued to live in Delaware (and if the Northeast has an Alaska, it's Delaware).

Biden managed to avoid being labeled as stupid and trashy not by dint of his superior social class, but by being generally well informed and appearing to be a legitimate vice presidential candidate. You could say the same about Lyndon Johnson (graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers' College) or Harry Truman (no college)- regular guys without elite east-coast credentials who succeeded by being smart and tough.

Douthat's article does a disservice to women and to the non-elite-school class (which I imagine Douthat knows a lot about from his time at Hamden Hall, a private Connecticut high school, or maybe from reporting that he did on them while writing for the Harvard Crimson). Palin's problems with the press came from her being an unprepared joke of a candidate- not because she was a woman or because she didn't graduate from Yale.

The worst reporter in America

Cokie Roberts, ladies and gentlemen. Cokie Roberts.

This morning, I was treated to yet another of Ms. Roberts so-bad-its-barely-even-wrong little postcards from pre-1992 Democratic lobbyist land. She was criticizing the MoveOn for 'pushing' Democratic Senators on health care and energy issues 'without realizing that these Senators would be up for reelection, and there's only so far they can go without getting in trouble back home.' (Not an exact quote. Maybe later I'll find the real quote and compare it to my recollection.)

There are several conventions required in order for that bit of garbage to make sense:

1. People from states other than NY, CA, and MD are not smart enough to want things like affordable healthcare and clean energy
2. People from states such as NY, CA, and MD who join groups such as MoveOn are too stupid to act in their own best interests
3. People from Washington DC are the only ones smart enough to scurry around in oh-so-intriguing back rooms and put together the deals that keep this Republic chugging along down the track
3.a. Sometimes, reporters with really good access to sources (as opposed to reporters who really read things, call people, and write down the product of reading and calling) can shed a little light on how that happens

Here's a piece by Jack Shafer criticizing her, too: http://www.slate.com/id/2216890/

My friends, harking back to a quote I hear placed in the mouth of Thomas Jefferson, I would almost rather have a government without newspapers, than newspapers with reporters like Cokie Roberts.

MJ

I've have mixed feelings about the death of Michael Jackson. I never really listened to any of his music until college, where I developed a serious appreciation for '80s hits that I'd bypassed while spending the first 10 years of my life (I was born in '79) listening to Crystal Gale and the Eagles.

As a child during MJ's peak, I remember him largely as a figure of unvarnished terror. I must've been maybe 3 or 4 when I first saw the Thriller video playing on a display TV during Halloween season while shopping for a costume at Jamesway, and I remember having nightmares about it for weeks.

Around the same time, my parents (who were unaware of my fear of werewolf-Michael), as part of their sporadic attempt to keep my musical tastes from totally alienating me from my peers (see their 1991 purchase of New Kids concert tickets), installed in my bedroom a seriously creepy poster of MJ and ET., which engendered a new round of nightmares until being taken down.

For the following 15 years, I had a hazy idea of Michael Jackson as a weirdo celebrity, with any reference to his actual body of work made hazy by my better familiarity with Weird Al's "Eat it" and "Fat". In college I drunkenly sang along to MJ's hits from my spot at the beirut table, although usually slipping "Ham on, ham on, ham on whole wheat... all right" into Beat it.

I watched Michael's descent into MacCauley Culkin-befriending, baby-dangling weirditude with the eye of the prescient- hadn't I known from the age of 3 that this guy was scary? - but with a sense of regret at the wasted talent.

This morning, after hearing yesterday's news, I felt a weird urge to memorialize MJ by facing down my childhood fears, and I became the 136,457,280th person to watch Thriller on Youtube.

Waiting Room

One of the things I'm getting really sick of hearing from anti-reform folks during the health care debate is that, under any kind of reform, health care in the US would go from being immediately available to a six month wait:

Thus, the public option will crowd out other insurers and achieve monopoly pricing power. Once monopoly pricing power is achieved, then you will see a decline in both quality and supply of health services. The key is the lack of supply. At the monopoly price, the number of people willing to provide heath services will be suboptimal. This is why you have to wait six months for a CAT scan in England. Effectively, supply is rationed.

I'm not sure what kind of healthcare utopia conservatives have been living in. As a big-firm lawyer in NYC, I have (comparatively) pretty fantastic health insurance. However, I can't go see my dentist because I inadvertantly signed up for the DPO instead of the PPO plan- and can't switch until the enrollment period in November; it's a month wait to see my gastroenterologist, and about the same to see my dermatologist. My wife, who (like I did while in law school) is using the low-ranked Beech Street insurance, has had to wait months to see doctors, and several times has had to not go to a recommended doctor because of the wait. We're in New York City, which has one of the highest concentrations of doctors (and specialists) in the US- and our situation doesn't appear to be abnormal.

Forgive me for not getting too worked up when the GOP threatens that healthcare reform will result in long waits to see my doctor.

Adultery still a crime in SC

One interesting fact gleaned from blogs reporting on the Sanford story- both extramarital and non-marital/premarital sex are still violations of the South Carolina penal code- with penalties of 6-12 months in prison or a $500 fine:

SECTION 16-15-60. Adultery or fornication.
Any man or woman who shall be guilty of the crime of adultery or fornication shall be liable to indictment and, on conviction, shall be severally punished by a fine of not less than one hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars or imprisonment for not less than six months nor more than one year or by both fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the court.

SECTION 16-15-70. "Adultery" defined.
"Adultery" is the living together and carnal intercourse with each other or habitual carnal intercourse with each other without living together of a man and woman when either is lawfully married to some other person.

SECTION 16-15-80. "Fornication" defined.
"Fornication" is the living together and carnal intercourse with each other or habitual carnal intercourse with each other without living together of a man and woman, both being unmarried.

Sanford's conduct would get him fired from any other job

CNN is reporting that Governor Sanford has admitted being unfaithful to his wife during his southern hemisphere sojourn. I don't really care what he was up to in Argentina- the point that the GOP is awfully hypocritical about the "sanctity of marriage" is a well-beaten deceased horse at this point- but I will say this: Almost any American who took a week-long, unscheduled, non-emergency vacation without telling his employer and without arranging for somebody to cover his responsibilities in his absence would be fired.

I shall not be surprised if we find out that Sanford thinks himself more indispensible than the average American.






Back after a long break wherein I got married. Thanks to all who are still checking in.

Pop quiz: who is most likely to shill for banks?

I'm frustrated by the apparent failure of bankruptcy reform efforts in congress. The New York Times just published an interesting article on where this ship ran aground. A couple of excerpts, briefly:

[...] the banks defeated the bankruptcy change — the industry picturesquely calls it the “cramdown” provision — by claiming that it would push up interest rates and slow the housing market’s recovery, even though academic studies have countered such claims.

The industry also steadfastly refused offers to negotiate over a weaker version. And it poured millions of dollars into lobbying: four of the industry’s top trade groups spent nearly as much on lobbying in the first three months of this year as they did in all of 2001.

[...] an industry strategy of dividing the Democrats had the most success. One target was Senator Mary Landrieu, the moderate Democrat from Louisiana.

I'm really disappointed in that one, because I gave up a month of my own time to go to Louisiana to volunteer in Sen. Landrieu's Dec. '02 runoff. (My supervisor was Mitch Stewart, who was the Iowa caucus director of Obama, and now sends most of you weekly emails as the national head of Organizing for America). Back to article:

Throughout it all, the banks took advantage of the Obama administration’s seeming ambivalence. Despite its occasional populist rhetoric, the White House was conspicuously absent from weeks of pivotal negotiations this spring. “This would have been a much different deal if Obama had pressed it,” said Camden R. Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers of America and one of the chief lobbyists opposing the bankruptcy change. “The fact that Obama effectively sat it out helped us a great deal.”

That one I'm more OK with - it's not like the White House was off twiddling it's thumbs. The article goes on:

The industry’s worst fears began to come true in early January when Senator Charles E. Schumer announced that he had persuaded Citigroup to endorse the idea. Mr. Schumer had held discussions with Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, and Lewis B. Kaden, a vice chairman. Mr. Schumer then spoke to other top executives, including Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, hoping to peel more big banks away from the opposition.

The article goes on to explain that the reform bill's strongest proponents were Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York, while Tom Carper of Delaware and Tim Johnson of South Dakota opposed the bill.

I can go on at length some other time about the economic and legal reasons why the consumer bankruptcy laws need changing, but let me just ask you a question from the political perspective: what does it mean when the senators from New York and Illinois want to get rid of special interest bank legislation, but the senators from those financial hubs of South Dakota, Delaware, and Louisiana work to keep it?

Another reason not to prosecute torture - litigation blows

Jeff and that guy who write the thing have captured some of the most important reasons not to prosecute, but may I add another? The Old 97s once sang, "telephones make strangers out of lovers," and that dynamic would also go to work here.

As far as I can tell, we made real advances on torture when John McCain and that excitable sidekick of his Lindsay Graham took up the fight. So now that Congress is investigating the lawyers, not contractors, CIA agents or soldiers, but just the lawyers, who is trying to make hay by fighting the anti-torture side? Lindsay Graham.

My favorite presentation of this debate would be the Democratic congressional leaders to play possum on this and let the Republicans like Graham and Hagel go on TV to argue with Dick Cheney. I understand why the dynamics of Congress don't really allow this to happen, but where we might have developed a national consensus that would keep this kind of thing from happening again because the collective conscience of the country understands that it's either ineffective and thus immoral (my position) or immoral a priori.

Instead, now all we have is an argument.

Global warming forces Island to evacuate

From Matt Yglesias:

The Carteret Islands, a somewhat outlying atoll off the coast of Papua New Guinea, don’t normally attract much attention. But it’s a shame more people weren’t paying attention in late April when a lone blogger, Dan Box, was on hand to witness the beginning of the islands’ evacuation. It’s a small atoll, you see, and relatively low-lying. Sea levels are rising. Flooding is increasing. And even though the island is still there, it’s no longer habitable: “King tides have washed away their crops and rising sea levels poisoned those that remain with salt,”wrote Box. These days, in other words, sometimes the high tide gets so high it buries the farmland, and even when it doesn’t, the salt permeates the soil. So 2,600 people need to move.

Still, it’s hard to miss the fact that the elite conversation in Washington, D.C., has a distinct air of frivolity about it that attention to events abroad might dispel. If it were announced that the United States of America was planning on dumping a load of poison on the Carteret Islands rendering them uninhabitable, I think even Sen. James Inhof of Oklahoma would be spurred to action. Certainly I doubt that you’d see a Blue Dog member of the House whining that since the poison factory is located in his district, he doesn’t see how we can possibly afford to stop producing the poison. Libertarians wouldn’t be arguing that the pristine logic of the free market grants companies the right to poison other people’s islands.

Clear-eyed on the costs of prosecuting the torturers

A reader writes into Andrew Sullivan with a theory on Obama's real position on prosecuting torture:

I’m sorry, but President Obama is going to break your heart on this one. He is not playing some long game, rope-a-dope, clever strategy which will allow him to ultimately expose Bush’s war crimes and prosecute them. In fact, he is going to do everything he can to squash all of this.

Imagine what such prosecutions would entail: years of courtroom drama, depositions, lawsuits and counter-suits; the long parade of powerful and high ranking ex- and current members of government, including a goodly number of Democrats, being called on the carpet and having to testify against one another; the enormous rancor and bitterness. This would be Watergate on steroids. And imagine the shot in the arm this would give the zombified Limbaugh Right.

The prosecutions you are asking for would simply swallow the Obama presidency whole. It is the kind of energy draining, oxygen consuming drama that is the nightmare of every president. It would come to define his presidency in the same way the Hostage Crisis defined Carter’s and there is zero chance he will opt for this.

President Obama is making a realistic, cold, clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis. This is the choice: Does he fix the economy, fix healthcare, get a handle on the two wars he’s dealing with, or does he prosecute Bush era war crimes? He has chosen his agenda and is asking us to choose that to.

I pretty much agree with this. Politics comes down to choosing- allocating resources. The main resource a President has is time and public attention. Obama can spend it on his agenda, or on prosecuting the torturers. I'd like to see these guys get their comeuppance too, but not at the cost of flushing Obama's agenda. It's easy and noble-sounding to pipe up about the paramount importance of the rule of law- and for the most part I agree with that. However, right now- nobody's torturing- because the good guys won the last election, and last I checked the dead-enders in the GOP who are supporting torture are polling at about 20%. They may be loud, but their strategy is being discredited as we speak.

The surest way to bring torture policies back to the US? An epic fail of Obama's programs that brings Sarah Palin to power in 2012.

Traffic Rules

Megan McArdle clarifies a point I've been thinking about a lot lately when dealing with the Administration's push to cram down the bondholders in the Chrysler bankruptcy:

The seniority rules have no particular moral priority; like traffic rules, they matter because they are the rules. People make decisions based on what the rules are, and if you change the rules without warning, you get nasty accidents.

Right now, senior debt is cheaper than junior debt; secured debt cheaper than unsecured. If you declare that there are no priority rules, because the government will step in and arrange things so its friends get to cut in line, then everyone will have to pay something close to what the most junior unsecured creditors get now. Not only will interest rates go up, but terms will shorten--no one wants to lend into a period when default risk can't be calculated. And companies that are particularly likely to have administration "friends"--union shops, when Democrats are in office; maybe oil companies or defense contractors for Republicans--are going to find it harder to do debt financing at all.

Most people underestimate just how economically valuable the rule of law is. A roughly stable investment environment that doesn't maximize social justice is undoubtedly better than an unpredictible one that tries to--just as the billions of poor people who live in states that have tried to exchange the former for the latter. The winners were not the dispossessed.

Well, I think it's about trade...

This graph, representing the responses to the question "What is Cap and Trade," leads me to believe that perhaps Obama should do a better job selling the program...

Mis-reporting on the Chrysler Bankruptcy?

Quite out of the ordinary that the administration has gotten so involved in the Chrysler bankruptcy, and that deserves to be a story line in the news reports, but I think articles such as this one, U.S. Played Rough with Chrylser Creditors, WSJ 5/11/09, kind of confuse the issues in the minds of most readers. Based on reading the excerpts below, what do you think the Creditors with whom rough was played by the U.S. ended up getting?

The results of these hardball tactics were on display Friday, as the last resisters of a deal to slash the value of Chrysler debt abandoned their effort to fight it in bankruptcy court. That raised the chances for a relatively swift transit through Chapter 11, producing a new Chrysler 55%-owned by a trust for union retirees, 35% by Fiat SpA -- which hasn't even been a Chrysler creditor -- and not at all by the senior secured lenders.

That conclusion would upend a longstanding tradition concerning rights in a bankruptcy: Senior secured lenders get paid in full before lower-priority creditors get anything. Not this time.

[...]

When the issue of the $6.9 billion in debt came up, Mr. Rattner looked at the lending group and said, "We have in mind for you a much lower number." He silenced the room by proposing they get just $1 billion.

While that wasn't the administration's bottom line, the task force had determined what was: the amount lenders would get in a liquidation of Chrysler assets. A Chrysler analysis in January estimated that at $2 billion. The UAW and Fiat knew about this figure, and also knew that the task force was first going to offer lenders just $1 billion. But the lenders, having waited so long to engage with the Treasury, were in the dark.

[...]

After receiving one more bank counteroffer, the Treasury on April 28 offered what it had planned all along, to buy out the lenders for $2 billion. The only sweetener was that it would be in cash, meaning the lenders didn't have to wait for a reorganized Chrysler-Fiat to pay it.

Mr. Rattner called Mr. Lee: "It's $2 billion, take it or leave it."

The big banks quickly agreed to the deal -- equal to 29 cents on the dollar. Though that offered a profit to a few firms that bought debt as low as 15 cents on the dollar, most of the lenders had paid 50 cents to 70 cents, and the banks 100 cents. News that the big banks were accepting the offer leaked before they had told the smaller lenders. "To say the least, we were floored," says one.

So what's the significance of 29 cents on the dollar, and how did that play in to the negotiations? That's the amount that the government estimated the secured lenders could get if the lenders liquidated the Chrysler assets. Maybe that number is a little low, but work with me here: if you lent 100 million dollars to build a Chrylser factory last year, Chrysler owes you 100 Mil, but what's the value of that factory now if you had to foreclose on it and sell it? There might not be a Chrysler company who plans to keep using it, all the competitors have their own plants, no one else is going to needs a plant in order to like... start a car company right now, and even if they did, what are the odds they want one in Michigan? 29 cents on the dollar sounds pretty reasonable, huh?

The rule in Chapter 11 cases is that to reorganize a company, you can force a creditor to take something other than full payment for his claim as long as he gets at least what he would in a liquidation. OK, now we've met that part of the test.

The fight then, was that some, but not all, of the lenders thought they could get more. What else did they want? The venture funds were looking for stock in a reorganized Chrysler. That new Chrysler stock has a lot of really cool built in features. First of all, the owners of the new stock wipe out the owners of the old stock, so they're already ahead of lots of people. Second, the new company benefits from cabining off a lot of the previously open-ended liability of the old company, which could be a really big deal with liabilities for things like retiree health care. Third, a lot of the other liabilities of the company get paid off out of a really good type of loan available in bankruptcy (debtor in possession financing) that really isn't available to businesses outside of bankruptcy. Fourth, the new company can emerge lean and mean by shedding a lot of unprofitable business units or product lines that would have been tough to drop outside of bankruptcy. All in all, this means that the new stock is a product of the bankruptcy process, it can be really valuable, and a lot of the lenders were planning on getting some.

So what did the lenders lose? Their entire investments? Not even close. They got paid that same 29 cents on the dollar they would see in liquidation, but they got none of the upside of participating in a reorganization. This is pretty unusual, because in all but very large cases, the lenders are the only ones with the money or legal position to keep fighting. It's unusual, but it's not illegal, it's not the result of bullying and intimidation, it's not the result of Putin/Chavez-style crony-capitalism, it's just unusual.

My point here isn't that the Obama effort on Chrysler was divinely conceived and should be beyond scrutiny; my point is that just focusing on the Obama administration role and ignoring the underlying legal and business dynamics only gives you a slightly misleading part of the picture. It's not that the lenders were denied something they had a right to, it's more like they were denied instead something they had a chance at. Some would be-Madame DeFarge figure is certainly weaving the Chrysler episode in to the long memory of the right wing, and I don't expect this explanation to influence any of those, but here's hoping that maybe the other 88% of the country can get a better handle on these issues by seeing the shape of the whole Chrysler bankruptcy forest and not just silhouette of the Obama tree.

Memo to Cheney- England beat the Nazis during the Blitz without torture

Andrew Sullivan compares our methods with those the Brits used against spies during the blitz:

My great aunt was blind in one eye from a bomb blast in the blitz; my grandfather lived with a brain injury when he was a prison guard in the war and was attacked by a prison inmate during an air-raid; my mother was knocked over by the impact of a rocket at the end of the war; my parents and aunts and uncles were evacuated. Most ordinary people lived through the Blitz, a random 9/11 a week, from an army poised to invade, and turn England's democratic heritage into a footnote in a Nazi empire.

As all that was happening, and as intelligence was vital, the British captured over 500 enemy spies operating in Britain and elsewhere. Most went through Camp 020, a Victorian pile crammed with interrogators. As Britain's very survival hung in the balance, as women and children were being killed on a daily basis and London turned into rubble, Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting.

The terrifying commandant of Camp 020 refined psychological intimidation to an art form.
Suspects often left the interrogation cells legless with fear after an all-night grilling. An inspired amateur psychologist, Stephens used every trick, lie and bullying tactic to get what he needed; he deployed threats, drugs, drink and deceit. But he never once resorted to violence. “Figuratively,” he said, “a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet.” But only ever figuratively. As one colleague wrote: “The Commandant obtained results without recourse to assault and battery. It was the very basis of Camp 020 procedure that nobody raised a hand against a prisoner.”

Stephens did not eschew torture out of mercy. This was no squishy liberal: the eye was made of tin, and the rest of him out of tungsten. (Indeed, he was disappointed that only 16 spies were executed during the war.) His motives were strictly practical. “Never strike a man. It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise.”...

"The President of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire"

During the first week of FDR's presidency, while the country was dealing with a massive banking crisis, the President sent a bill to Congress asking it to grant him new powers over banking and currency to stem the tide of panicked bank-runs. Bertrand H. Snell, the Republican floor leader of the House, told his caucus "The house is burning down, and the President of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire." The House then passed FDR's bill without a record vote, it was passed by the Senate a couple hours later, and signed into law later that night.

Just take a moment to contrast Snell with John Boehner or Eric Cantor, and then consider whether today's Congressional Republicans really give a damn about their country.

Specter switches parties, Dems now filibuster-proof!

The Senate Dems get their 60th vote (once Norm Coleman winds up his pathetic grasping in MN) today, with PA Senator Arlen Specter switching parties.

"I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary," said Specter in a statement. "I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election."

"Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans."

I have to imagine that Schumer and the DSCC will clear the decks for Specter in the Democratic primary- and that this was probably part of the deal for Specter coming over. Specter was in an untenable position before his switch- he almost certainly would have won the general election as a Republican, but was facing an almost unwinnable primary challenge from former Congressman and Club-for-Growth president Pat Toomey. Specter, as a D, should cruise to victory- he has support from organized labor- which he can now deploy without fear of Toomey stirring up anti-labor issues in a primary. I suspect that in a general-election matchup with Toomey, Specter will keep much of his support from independents, some of the moderate Republicans, and pick up a lot of votes from yellow-dog dems who liked him but wouldn't vote for him as a Republican in the past.

Now the Dems can break a filibuster, so long as they can keep Ben Nelson and co. in line...

What torture advocates have to prove

Anonymous Liberal considers what torture proponents would have to prove, even if everyone conceded the human rights argument against it:

Among other things, you would have to prove that 1) such information could not have been extracted using other means, 2) that the misinformation produced by such methods doesn't overwhelm the accurate information to the point of rending the whole exercise pointless, 3) that the strategic costs of using such techniques (international outrage, increased radicalization of the Muslim world, increased danger to U.S. troops, etc.) don't outweigh the benefits, and 4) the value of the information produced is worth the tradeoff of never being able to use that information (or the fruits thereof) in court and severely jeopardizing any hope of ever convicting that individual in any constitutionally compliant legal proceeding.

Ron Paul wants the US to hire Pirates to fight Pirates

According to Politico, Ron Paul and various other "national security experts" are calling on the US to revive the practice of granting Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private citizens, which would allow them to hire ships of war to hunt down the pirates plaguing the Somali coast and the Gulf of Aden:

In a YouTube video earlier this week, Paul suggested lawmakers consider issuing letters, which could relieve American naval ships from being the nation’s primary pirate responders — a free-market solution to make the high seas safer for cargo ships. “I think if every potential pirate knew this would be the case, they would have second thoughts because they could probably be blown out of the water rather easily if those were the conditions,” Paul said. Theoretically, hiring bounty hunters would also be a cheaper option.

National security experts estimate that this week’s ship captain rescue by Navy SEALs cost tens of millions, although a Navy spokesman says the military cannot confirm the exact cost of the mission. Instead, privateers would be incentivized to patrol the ocean looking for key targets — and money would be paid only to the contractor who completed the job.

“If we have 100 American wanna-be Rambos patrolling the seas, it’s probably a good way of getting the job done,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow and security expert Eli Lehrer. “Right now we have a Navy designed mostly to fight other navies. The weapons we have are all excellent, but they may not be the best ones to fight these kinds of pirates. The only cost under letters of marque would be some sort of bounty for the pirates.”

Look, as a naval history geek I'm as excited about a revival of letters of marque as anybody. However, I think in this case it's a situation of way too much faith that the free market is the way to go. First of all, the situation described by Paul would not really be letters of marque and reprisal, because those authorize people to sieze enemy ships. Nobody wants some pirate's leaky fishing raft- basically he's suggesting putting bounties on the pirates.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons. The first is that we no longer have the bureaucracy of "Prize Courts," which were used by Western navies from the 1500s through the late 1800s, and had administrative judges that determined whether a seized ship was actually an enemy's ship- and if it wasn't it would be given back. These institutions were around for a long time, and had experienced judges and lots of credibility, which would be hard to duplicate with some kind of jury-rigged office in the Navy Department. The second, more critical problem, is that they would have to operate without even a ship as evidence. If some modern-day buccaneer shows up at the Navy Department or wherever with bits of a sunken boat and the scalp of some Somali teenager, how do we figure out if he killed a pirate or a fisherman?

I'm sure the Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow meant it to sound like a good idea, but does the concept of "100 American would-be Rambos" ramming around the Somali shore sound like something that would actually help? Sure, piracy might fall, but at what cost? What Paul is describing seems somewhat more like the bounties-for-Indian-scalps policies of colonial America and Mexico... and we know how that worked out:

Sonora was the first state to enact a scalp bounty law; in 1835, offering 100 pesos for the scalps of braves (with a peso roughly equal to an American silver dollar). An American named James Johnson sparked the boom period in 1837 when he fired a concealed canon at close range on unarmed Apaches. The blast tore into Apache warriors as well as women and children, and Johnson and his troops swarmed into the mass of natives, killing and scalping. While this event occurred in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, the scalps were cashed in Sonora, and the entire incident proved how profitable scalp hunting could be. It also flamed native animosity towards both Mexicans and Anglos, encouraging more raids and greater violence (a cycle that continued throughout this era). Soon afterward, Chihuahua enacted a similar law offering a graded bounty: $100 for braves; $50 for squaws; $25 for children under fourteen (although the latter two were ostensibly for live captives).

Bush NSA tried to wiretap a Congressman

The Times reported earlier this week that the Justice Department's investigation into warrantless wiretapping revealed an attempt by the Bush NSA to wiretap a member of Congress:

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.
The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.
The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

It's great that the plan was ultimately blocked, but extremely problematic that the only thing standing in the way was "concerns from some intelligence officials."

I've been a bit cavalier about the warrantless wiretapping issue in the past. I realize it's a FISA violation, but there's no constitutional requirement to get a warrant if one of the callers is outside of the country. I also don't see a huge problem if the NSA listens to a minute while I call my friend in Australia. There really didn't seem to be evidence that this was a concerted effort to either a.) use info from the calls for general domestic criminal purposes (ie- they don't hear you talking terrorism, but do hear about your embezzlement and bust you for that) or b.) abuse of the wiretaps to target political opponents or legit domestic groups (as Nixon did tapping Dr. King, etc.).

Going after a member of Congress for contacts made during an official trip abroad really crosses that line for me. It indicates that there may have been some political motivation, or at least a serious lack of thinking on the part of some of the wiretappers about who in fact needs to be tapped.