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.