Hope is not a plan

As we've seen previously, John McCain can be of two minds about a great many things. For example, he believes Congress is fully within its rights to withdraw funding from a war it disapproves of, unless there's a Republican president in office. Shucks. Also, he's been happy to report lower casualties in Iraq, whether or not casualties are actually down. Shucks again.

Fortunately, we have the fresh, new face of Sarah Palin to bring honesty to things.

As the new mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, in 2000, Palin initiated a tradition of making annual trips to Washington to ask for more earmarks from the state's congressional delegation, mainly Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, both Republicans.

Later that month, when asked whether she would continue state financing for the Gravina bridge and another proposed bridge project, she said yes. "I would like to see Alaska's infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later," she responded in a questionnaire from The Anchorage Daily News. "The window is now - while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist."

Shucks, a third time.

International Herald Tribune article

Reunification talks have begun between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders, in hopes of finally reuniting Cyprus, more than forty years on from the civil conflict that split the island firmly down ethnic lines (click here for background on the original conflict).

Wednesday's meeting, the fifth this year between the two leaders, will pave the way for substantive negotiations to begin on September 11, initially focusing on power-sharing.

The leaders have also agreed to set up a hotline so they can remain in constant telephone contact throughout the negotiations.

al Jazeera article

As part of his recent tour of nations in Russia's shadow, Dick Cheney expressed America's full support for Georgia's eventual accession into NATO:

"He was keen to stress that the US was keen to stand by Georgia ... and that he would stand by Georgia's Nato ambitions ... those ambitions which have angered the Kremlin so much to the run-up of the war last month."

I've wondered, as have others, if Saakashvili ordered Georgian forces into the Ossetia region with the hope that Western nations would support him from the inevitable Russian response to this act (inevitable because, among other things, Russia has been pushing independence movements in Georgian provinces for a decade as a provocation and a destabilizing effort). As it happened, the Georgian military folded so quickly, few non-strategic responses from Western nations would have been possible.

The question to ask, then, as we push for NATO membership for Georgia, is what it actually means to the United States for a nation to be a NATO member. You can read the official text of the 1949 NATO treaty here. For our purposes, we really want to look at Article 5:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .

In other words, the fact of Russian armor rolling into Georgian territory last month would have been a clear cause to invoke Article 5, forcing all other NATO members, including us, to respond as if Russia had invaded our soil.

Would NATO membership have kept Russia from considering inciting that catastrophe? Certainly, Moscow is taking every opportunity it can to lean on its remaining non-NATO neighbors to keep them out of the organization, and to destabilize them as much as possible while it can. After the fact...well, I must admit that I am much more comfortable with the idea of protecting Poland, which pretty much just sits there, than I am with the idea of protecting Georgia, which has an unfortunate imperial history of its own and where the issue is the attempt to hold onto two ethnic enclaves where the local majorities don't want to be part of the country.

In short, it feels like adopting a broken country.

Regardless of our final analysis in this case, we must remember that NATO is not NAFTA or the UN. Each new NATO member is another potential war trigger, linked to an ever-larger pool of militaries. This may mean that no other nation will ever choose to attack a NATO member, but it may alternately mean a chain of treaty obligations that sparks a horrendous war.

al Jazeera article on Cheney in Georgia
al Jazeera article on Cheney in Ukraine

Although I originally picked this up from the Houston Chronicle, it's a copy of this New York Times article:

Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday called in top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants, and told them that the government was preparing to place the two companies under federal control, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions said.

So what's the upshot? Well, if you had Fannie or Freddie shares, they're pretty much worthless now. In addition, this means that the United States -- and thus, you -- is picking up billions and billions in liability. As one commenter over at the Houston Chronicle aptly said:

What model ! Privatize the profits, and socialize the loss ...Welfare state for coroprations and tough love for middle class and below . This bailout is nothing but a massive transfer of wealth from the US taxpayers to astronomically rich private investors and foreign governments. [Their spelling and punctuation]

And indeed, it is. The Republican model since the beginning of the Reagan administration has been to talk the talk of helping out average Americans while offloading Federal money to wealthy individuals and corporations - often not American owned - and shifting the tax burden to those same average Americans. The disloyalty to our country and its citizens has been profound, unethical, and cruel.

It is, in a word, immoral.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has told a conference of church leaders that they really need to get with the program:

Archbishop Tutu told the conference in London that the Anglican Church was ideally placed to tackle poverty because of its presence at the heart of communities in the UK and overseas.

Archbishop Tutu accused some of his fellow Anglicans of going against the teaching of Jesus in their treatment of homosexual people by "persecuting the already persecuted".

BBC article

A fraud trail aimed at the Church of Scientology is set to go ahead in France by the end of this year or in early 2009. This marks a continuation of the Scientology organization's ongoing problems in gaining and maintaining a foothold in several European nations, most notably including France and Germany.

But it been accused in some countries of cult-like practices and exploiting its followers financially.

In Germany last year, federal and state interior ministers declared the Church of Scientology unconstitutional, and in France in 2000 a government committee recommended dissolving the Church.

For more on Scientology, you may want to read here before you go and have your personality tested by someone with a resistance meter.

BBC article

In its latest video, al Qaeda -- as fronted by Ayman al-Zawahiri -- has taken to task basically everyone else of note in the Islamic world, claiming among other things that:

• Iran of aiding the United States by not preventing the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
• Hezbollah of celebrating a victory that's actually a defeat
• Lebanon's leadership of following America's lead
• The anti-insurgency movement in Iraq is "treacherous" and "doomed"

Some of this was done in nicely amateurish fashion, most notably with al-Zawahiri referring to an "Iranian-Crusade" alliance, trying to imply that by not getting itself smashed to bits trying to block two different American invasions of neighboring nations, Iran is somehow our ally.

The hallmark of all those being verbally assailed by al-Qaeda in this video is that they're placing the health and welfare of their people ahead of the intangible concept of an overall Islamic nation. Iran has chosen to protect itself and its interests rather than get directly involved in fighting American forces on the ground, because that's a fight it would lose (and it almost certainly has been shipping armed support for the insurgency into Iraq, even so). Hezbollah doesn't really give a damn about a larger Muslim nation -- it wants Israel to go away and it wants to be able to control the future direction of the Lebanon area. Similarly, the official government of Lebanon isn't interested in al Qaeda's interests -- they just want Lebanon to no longer be the place where Israel, Hezbollah, and Syria fight. Finally, the teaming up of local militias and other movements in Iraq with the Iraqi and American militaries has come on the heels of locals realizing that as much as they want the Americans out, large-scale murder of their own civilians by al Qaeda in Iraq is completely unacceptable.

It is a fundamental error to assume that anyone will place a global ideology above the health and safety of their own people.

al Jazeera article

As I talked about in this post from earlier today, al Qaeda's most recent message is a screed whose targets represent a laundry list of folks within the Islamic world who have realized that al Qaeda hurts them, their nations, and their people, and who have as a result rejected al Qaeda. One quote in particular from Ayman al-Zawahiri's criticism of Hezbollah struck me:

"The most bizarre and astounding thing is that Hassan Nasrallah [Hezbollah's leader] celebrates a victory every year.

"What victory?" he said. "Retreating 30 miles backwards?" he said.

This utterly simplistic "if you've retreated, you've lost" mentality has a remarkable parallel in the minds of our toy-soldier pushing, wanna-be war heroes (without actually participating in that nasty fighting) the neo-cons. To the Bill Kristols and Paul Wolfowitzes of the world, a 30-mile withdrawal is a loss. Even though Hezbollah kept the soldiers whose kidnapping sparked the war, even though Israel took extensive casualties on the way in, even though Israel was never able to shut off Hezbollah rocket fire, even though Israel was eventually forced to leave Lebanon with no conclusive result, and even though Hezbollah was able to claim extensive political advantage within Lebanon by handing out cash reparations to civilian victims of the conflict immediately afterward, to the simplistic, action-hero-in-their-own-minds members of al Qaeda and the neo-con movement, you went backward, so you lost.

It's this same mentality that has al-Zawahiri insisting that Iran should have somehow blocked the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that has Paul Wolfowitz unable to imagine that the postwar occupation of Iraq could take more troops than the invasion would -- despite empirical evidence from so many recent and distant wars that showed just that.

It's more than a little ironic that Michael Goldfarb called out the "Dungeons & Dragons crowd" who criticize war heroes from "the comfort of mom's basement" when this war was promoted and pushed by people who conveniently skipped out on their opportunity to serve, but enjoy pretending to be Jack Ryan and pretending to know how to run a war.

Except, of course, that even Jack Ryan actually goes into the damn field. If someone threatened to punch little Paulie, I imagine he'd sue them rather than try to fight back.

I'd be willing to put up air fare and some money for knives so that al-Zawahiri and friends could have at it once and for all with Wolfowitz and his buddies. If anyone's left over, we can have them work out the rest of their days doing community service in whichever urban center wants them.

In its report DCAA Audits: Allegations That Certain Audits at Key Locations Did Not Meet Professional Standards Were Substantiated, the GAO adds to our understanding of the current collapse of American military procurement.

Before discussing the GAO's most recent findings, let's turn to the archives and consider some of the other layers of procurement failure. In May of this year, GAO found that despite consistently negative performance reviews by the Defense Contract Audit Agency, the agency tasked with auditing military contracts, KBR was still being given "outstanding" ratings by military procurement officers when rating its expected performance on future contracts. Similarly, in August of 2007, GAO found that DOD's response to a finding of $221 million in disputed charges on the KBR-run Restore Iraq Oil contract was to just go ahead and pay them anyway.

So multiple times we have DCAA finding a problem, and someone else involved in DOD procurement ignoring them.

How disturbing is it, then, to discover that DCAA audits are failing to find significant problems in the first place?

In this report, GAO followed up on claims that DCAA was engaging in insufficient oversight with regards to multiple defense contractors. Despite DCAA claims that its auditing follows "GAGAS" (jargon for "Generally Accepted Government Accounting Standards"), GAO discovered that DCAA made up-front deals with contractors, swapped out auditors who uncovered millions in incorrect billing, and made auditing decisions covering billions of dollars worth of contracts without actually reviewing the appropriate materials. Here's the GAO's summary table:

So where does this tendency to ignore problems come from? According to GAO interviews with DCAA staff, management pressures auditors to prevent or ignore problems so they can finish audits quickly and hit desired performance goals. Even more troublingly, auditors indicated that they were told not to report problems so that future audits would not be required to check on them, saving even more time (and once again hitting those apparently all-important performance metrics).

Considered in the full context of the last several years, this paints a truly disturbing image of military procurement that is broken in detail and in depth. Contractors exert undue influence on the DCAA, and the DCAA's management exerts an undue influence on itself. Anything that actually is reported on through these pressures is often simply ignored by those who work in procurement.

Actually, seen from that perspective, it perhaps should not surprise us to see DCAA auditors cutting their investigations short. After all, if you reported on over two hundred million dollars in fraudulent KBR charges and the official response was to simply pay it off, how steady would your esprit de corps be?

Managing to hit a mark several thousand times lower than the auditing failures at the DCAA, up to a third of employees of the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service Royalty-In-Kind program opted themselves right out of government ethics rules, accepting gifts, drugs, and sex from oil company employees. Let's let the official report speak to this point:

In the other two cases, the results of our investigation reveal a program tasked with implementing a "business model" program. As such, Royalty in Kind (RIK) marketers donned a private sector approach to essentially everything they did. This included effectively opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act, both in practice, and, at one point, even explored doing so by policy or regulation.

We also discovered a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity in the RIK program - both within the program, including a supervisor, Greg Smith, who engaged in illegal drug use and had sexual relations with subordinates, and in consort with industry. Internally, several staff admitted to illegal drug use as well as illicit sexual encounters. Alcohol abuse appears to have been a problem when RIK staff socialized with industry. For example, two RIK staff accepted lodging from industry after industry events because they were too intoxicated to drive home or to their hotel. These same RIK marketers also engaged in brief sexual relationships with industry contacts. Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.

Interestingly, the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice declined to prosecute cases against two of the implicated employees, including the "Greg Smith" in the preceding paragraph. As this case has the requisite "sex and drugs" aspect to keep it in the headlines for a while, perhaps DoJ will comment on why they chose not to prosecute obvious ethics violations already backed by a two-year investigation.

We should also ask DoJ to investigate Chevron's failure to cooperate with the investigation. Perhaps Chevron was applying "The Power of Human Energy" to efforts to corrupt the Royalty-In-Kind program, and wants to keep their proprietary methods secret for the next crop of new MMS staffers.

We'll leave Inspector General Earl Devaney with the final word here:

The remaining current employees await your discretion in imposing corrective administrative action. Others have escaped potential administrative action by departing from federal service, with the usual celebratory send-offs that allegedly highlighted the impeccable service these individuals had given to the Federal Government. Our reports belie this notion.

CNN article
BBC article

The "sex, drugs, and bribes!" scandal at the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service has already rolled out of sight at CNN, blown out of the water by some political interviews and (more reasonably) a gigantic hurricane. Today, however, the GAO, in its quiet way, shed some light on the impact of having a bunch of frat boys and sorority girls running parts of MMS in its report titled Mineral Revenues: Data Management Problems and Reliance on Self-Reported Data for Compliance Efforts Put MMS Royalty Collections at Risk.

In the original CNN article reporting on the scandal, current MMS head Randall Luthi is cited as saying that the public had not suffered any financial losses as a result of employees taking gifts, sharing narcotics, and engaging in sexual activities with oil industry reps.

The GAO might differ on that.

In this report, GAO shows how the MMS has been letting its monitoring of oil company royalties slip over the past several years. It starts with screwed up inspections:

Neither BLM nor OEMM is meeting statutory obligations or agency targets for conducting inspections of certain leases and metering equipment used to measure oil and gas production, raising uncertainty about the accuracy of oil and gas measurement. Moreover, when these inspections have been conducted, BLM and OEMM have at times recorded inspections inaccurately in their databases.

In fact, many of the inspections are not being done at all.

More disconcertingly, and yet fitting with the top-down message of the last eight years of the executive branch, is the fact that MMS has increasingly shifted from audits to compliance reviews:

MMS has historically relied on audits to determine whether a company accurately paid its royalties by examining third-party documents that contained information on prices, volumes, and deductions. More recently, MMS has transitioned to relying heavily on compliance reviews that assess whether the royalties paid by a company are reasonable, and do not always include an examination of third-party documents.

Whereas an audit involves checking third-party documentation and evidence -- that is, materials not provided directly by the oil company -- to determine if an oil company is accurately reporting production, compliance reviews involve looking at the production reported by the oil company and saying, "Yup. Seems reasonable." According to the GAO report, this preference for compliance reviews comes from the fact that they are -- naturally -- much faster, letting MMS managers more easily hit performance goals. This is sounding a lot like the failures over at the DCAA. MMS has also eased its workload by reviewing the same companies year after year, with the consequence that some companies may go years between even compliance reviews.

So let's revisit Luthi's claim that no financial losses came about due to the Royalty-In-Kind program being drinking buddies with Chevron and the rest. As GAO reveals to us, the state of MMS royalty inspections are so poor that we'd be hard-pressed to say whether there's been financial loss or not.

I read one entertaining editorial piece that suggested the wacky promiscuity at MMS was a consequence of Bill Clinton's behavior in office. Risible, but there you go. I'll reflect that concept into a more realistic application, however, and argue that an upper executive branch culture of no-bid contracts, a discounting of auditing, and a belief that the free market will magically take care of everything has generated a top-down crumbling of ethical and performance standards, such that we see MMS moving away from genuine audits and toward ticket-punching signing off on paperwork shuttled straight over from the folks who are pulling in the profits from land you own.

It's all a touch frustrating.

In June of this year, the High Court in South Africa ruled against mass killer Matthias Rath, refusing to let him kill large numbers of South Africans by convincing them to switch off of highly effective anti-HIV drugs and instead buy into his ineffective vitamin profiteering effort.

This week, the happy news came out that Matthias has dropped his libel case against the Guardian and its columnist, Ben Goldacre. Matthias initially sued Goldacre and the Guardian after Goldacre called him out on his pandemic profiteering, and the fact that Matthias was actually hurting and killing HIV-positive people in Africa by pushing a massive ad campaign of lies about the effectiveness of his vitamins over known HIV treatments. From the Guardian:

The Dr Rath Foundation focuses its promotional activities on eight countries - the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, France and Russia - claiming that his micronutrient products will cure not just Aids, but cancer, heart disease, strokes and other illnesses.

The collapse of the case will have repercussions around the world. International authorities on Aids welcomed the outcome. Prof Brian Gazzard, one of the UK's leading HIV/Aids experts, who advised the Guardian on its case, said he was delighted at the result. "The widespread provision of anti-retrovirals in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important public health measures of this century," he said. The confusion caused by suggestions that giving undernourished people vitamins and minerals was an alternative to taking Aids drugs was "extremely harmful".

One clear hallmark of a medical scam -- the suggestion that the magical cure is a cure-all. Cancer, HIV, heart disease, and stroke? Impressive.

The court case pulled up some scary material from Matthias, including the text of a complaint made by his companion Anthony Brink against Treatment Action Campaign founder Zackie Achmat in the Hague, in which Brink tried to have Achmat charged with genocide, suggesting that it would be appropriate to torture him as a consequence.

Had the case proceeded, the court would have been presented with details of Brink's complaint to The Hague, which called for Achmat to be permanently confined "in a small white and concrete cage, bright fluorescent light on all the time to keep an eye on him" and force-fed his Aids drugs or, "if he bites, kicks and screams too much, dripped into his arm after he's been restrained on a gurney with cable tied around his ankles, wrists and neck". The complaint was described by the Rath Foundation in January last year as "entirely valid and long overdue".

Trying to get someone charged with genocide is a pretty extreme corporate tactic. Notably, if someone did ever catch Achmat and dose him up with modern anti-HIV meds...well, he'd be okay. As much as liars like Andy and Matt would like to give people the impression that HIV meds are all AZT, modern HAART therapy is effective and has relatively mild side effects, with its major drawback being its expense -- a problem that Achmat effectively challenged and has helped resolve in South Africa. In fact, it was Achmat's efforts to make HIV treatments highly affordable that threatened Matthias Rath's vitamin profiteering, which in turn prompted the attempt to attack Achmat with a genocide charge.

We'll give the last word to columnist Ben Goldacre:

Rath is an example of the worst excesses of the alternative therapy industry; UK nutritionists make foolish claims on poor evidence - they can make your child a genius with fish oils, or prevent heart attacks in the distant future - but Rath transplanted these practices into the world of HIV/Aids, where evidence really matters.

Mr. Bush --

I was heartened this week to hear that our military is increasing operations along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. I was heartened as well to hear that more troops and other resources will be sent presently to Afghanistan to help stabilize that fine nation and wrench the future away from the hands of extremism.

I am disheartened, however, by your pathetic negligence and disregard for our citizens, especially our brave soldiers in the field, in putting this off as long as possible, and then trying to "shoehorn in" the capture or killing of Bin Laden and his compatriots before you leave office.

Are you doing this to help your party? Did you knowingly leave enough threat around to justify your own policies, but now want to cap things off in time for the McCain campaign to benefit?

Are you doing this to try and secure your legacy? Is it a failing-student, last-ditch effort to slide your copied homework under the office door and hope the teacher doesn't realize you turned it in late?

Either option is sad. Either option means that you, through will or neglect, have put off doing what you said you would emphasize above all other things.

You are derelict.

Before your second term, there was no clear answer to the question of "Who was the worst president?" Even presidents with deeply problematic times in office, such as Grant, could point to high points and redeeming qualities in their lives. You had a chance for that as well, but instead chose to put our welfare and safety aside, hand out no-bid contracts to your war-profiteering friends, and then try desperately, at the last minute, to get your homework in on time.

Fail.

Just so you know.

Sent today. For background on the "late homework" I'm referring to, click here.

In 2000, I voted for John McCain in the primary. I'm not particularly party affiliated, and with Al Gore as the presumptive Democratic nominee that year, I decided that McCain was a significantly better option than George Bush. I appreciated McCain's support of campaign finance reform and at the time, he seemed like he matched his "straight talk" image pretty closely.

Since then, John McCain has cashed in his personal integrity in hopes of achieving the highest executive office in the land.

I've previously discussed John McCain's willingness to make up numbers concerning violence in Iraq, as well as his willingness to out-and-out lie about how peaceful Iraq was during one of his visits there (the famous "like an Indiana market" trip, although that winner of a quote belongs to McCain's colleague Mike Pence).

Now, the folks at the nonpartisan FactCheck.org have been working overtime to keep up with more lies coming out of McCain's campaign. Keep in mind that FactCheck is, indeed, nonpartisan -- they've commented throughout the campaign season on inaccuracies coming out of Obama's campaign as well. However, as one recent news report noted, about twice as many "inaccuracies" come out of the McCain campaign as are seen from the Obama campaign. Consider some recent winners:

McCain tells Barbara Walters that Palin took no Congressional earmarks during her time as governor. In fact, she officially, as governor, requested $187 million in earmarks. So John's either actively lying or willing to spout off a good-sounding, made-up answer without knowing what the hell he's talking about.

That choice between ignorance and malice is too familiar, and too much like the current administration. No thank you.

Second, we have a flurry of ads asserting that Obama has belittled Sarah Palin.

First, she should be belittled, as a vice presidential candidate. She's unqualified. No judgment on her worth as a person, but I find myself fearing an election and subsequent accident that would put the governor of a state less than half the size of my home city in charge of our entire country.

Second, as FactCheck points out, one of the "disrespectful" quotes was an offhand compliment directed toward Palin by Joe BIden, and another was, well, true.

I voted for McCain in 2000, but eight years later I find myself watching not the upstanding politician I thought I saw in that primary campaign, but a burned-out remnant who's willing to trade in his most important ideals for the chance to live in the White House. Did you change, John, or were we all just fooled the first time around?

Following an armed attack by settlers from the Yetsahir settlement against Palestinians in the village of Asira al-Kabaliya, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert started a cabinet meeting with this statement:

"In the state of Israel, there will be no pogroms against non-Jews."

That's a particularly powerful and intentional choice of words on the part of Mr. Olmert, making a clear connection that must be at once striking and perhaps uncomfortable to many listeners in Israel. It seems, however, like now might be the time for just that connection to be made.

The incident followed the stabbing of a nine-year-old boy by a Palestinian in a nearby Jewish outpost earlier in the day. His wounds were not life-threatening.

...and...

Yigal Amitai, a spokesman for the nearby Yitzhak settlement, said the Palestinian who stabbed the boy had come from Asira al-Kabaliya.

Asked whether Yitzhar settlers had taken the law into their own hands, he said: "I think it is time for Israel to stop playing the victim, and start being the aggressor."

Incidentally, Amitai is Aramaic for "friend."

al Jazeera article

Now that AIDS profiteer Matthias Rath has dropped his harassing libel suit against the Guardian and columnist Ben Goldacre, the Guardian is once again free to report on Rath's malice in Africa and in general on the shocking failure of the South African government to deal appropriately with the AIDS pandemic.

As the Guardian reports, South Africa was ripe for infestation by scam artists like Rath based on the government's AIDS denialism and its unfortunate view that the choice between drugs that work and other practices that don't was somehow an extension of old anticolonial battles. I'd like to once again quote something very important that Barack Obama said in 2006:

"On the treatment side the information being provided by the minister of health is not accurate," he told reporters outside an AIDS clinic in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township.

"It is not an issue of Western science versus African science, it is just science and it's not right."

Indeed.

Unfortunately, the South African government has been letting its people die by using this, of all things, as a venue to shrug off "Western" influences. Curiously, this has meant repeated intrusions by Western scam artists -- apparently, you're accepted as long as you're promoting nonsense. Consider folks like Michael Hart Jones, who was trying to set up a goat-serum AIDS cure scam. And, of course, Rath, who used incredibly unethical methods to screw up AIDS care in South Africa:

In time, MSF learned that Rath Foundation workers had infiltrated Aids clinics in Khayelitsha. A nurse and the manager of the bustling Ubuntu clinic, Nompumelelo Mantangana, says she discovered that some of the foundation's employees were paying health staff to pass on the names of HIV-positive patients: "We stopped that but not before it did a lot of damage."

She says the Rath Foundation played on the fact that many people came to the clinic only once they were sick, and that ARVs tended to make them feel worse before their health began to recover. "They said, come off the ARVs and take the multivitamins and you will feel better. And you do - but it doesn't mean you are getting well. Eventually you get sick again," she says.

But then, if you're already unethically leading people away from life-saving treatments, it's hard to imagine it being a big stretch to take the extra step and actually steal them away from effective clinics.

For more, read the full Guardian article on the topic, and applaud the Guardian for standing behind Goldacre in the face of this harassing and frivolous lawsuit.

In the news this week is yet another food and pharma safety scandal in China. At issue is, once again, the addition of melamine to food products. This same unexpected additive caused kidney failures in American pets earlier this year, and is now causing the same problems in over a thousand Chinese infants that we know of.

The belief is that the melamine is being added at the farm level to milk that has been diluted with water, in an effort to mask that dilution by raising the "protein" count -- really, raising the detectable nitrogen level, as that's likely the proxy being used as a measure of protein abundance. Unfortunately, adding this plastic precursor to infant formula has resulted in many babies developing kidney stones, and at least two known deaths.

What's particularly upsetting about all this is that Sanlu, the Chinese milk company distributing the tainted product, has been receiving customer complaints about problems with infants since March of this year. Action was not taken until New Zealand firm Fonterra, who owns a significant stake in Sanlu, went to the New Zealand government after failing to get Chinese officials to issue a recall. According to Fonterra, they tried for about a month to get the recall to happen, then finally contacted government officials in New Zealand, who immediately went at the national level to the PRC government, who finally issued the recall.

Had there not being a foreign company with a stake in the issue and a government willing to make a move, it's likely this problem would have kept going. Although the men who adulterated the milk in the first place have now been arrested, one wonders what exact combination of bribes and image maintenance was at work in keeping a recall from happening even when a major shareholder in the producing company was calling for it. If it's bribery at the local or regional level, we may expect more arrests (and as is the way of these things, executions). If it was the PRC trying to save image, then nothing much will happen.

But if so, that's just more logs on the fire of civil unrest in China.

al Jazeera article

One of the recurring concepts that lets us know that we as a species are headed in the right direction is the idea that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. This week brings us what is expected to be one of the last cases of its kind, war crimes charges against a former Nazi:

Josef Scheungraber, 90, is accused of ordering the killing of 14 civilians in a Tuscan village in 1944.

He has previously been sentenced in absentia by an Italian military court to life in prison.

The killings were in retaliation for a partisan attack.

It is appropriate that, even after this much time, war crimes charges be addressed.

BBC article

Back when I voted for John McCain in the 2000 primary, I appreciated his apparent willingness to stick to his guns and operate ethically and reasonably. As much as I didn't necessarily agree with all of his approaches, he seemed to fit his "straight talk" image.

That's why his willingness to lie to win the presidency is so much more upsetting. Once again, I'm now left to wonder if this represents a change in McCain, or if we were all just wrong the first time around.

John's latest lapse came in a speech in Ohio where he said this:

"He talks a tough game on the financial crisis, but the facts tell a different story. Senator Obama took more money from Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac than anyone but the chairman of the committee they answer to, and he put Fannie Mae's CEO, who helped create this problem in charge of finding his vice president. That's not change, that's what's broken in Washington."

The nonpartisan fact checkers are FactCheck.org took a look at this claim. What did they find?

• First, they point out candidates can't accept contributions from corporations. We'll accept that John was speaking here of contributions from employees of corporations, which are legal, and are tracked past a certain point by the FEC.
• Even so, Obama is not number two on the recipients list for contributions from Fannie and Freddy employees. He's beaten out by Christopher Dodd, Melissa Bean, and Lamar Alexander.
• And oops...John McCain took $9,500 from Freddie and Fannie. Shoot. He must have forgotten to mention that.
• The contributions both Obama and McCain received from Freddie and Fannie amount to 0.005% of their total campaign funds raised so far. How much impact do you suppose that has?
• Finally, the "CEO" placed "in charge" of finding the VP? Well, that's Jim Johnson, who was one of three heads of Obama's search committee until he resigned in mid-June, and was the Fannie Mae CEO nine years ago.

Really, John? Why?

There were two reasons to vote for John McCain - ethics and a willingness to make an unpopular yet correct choice. In this election year, John has made his devil's deal and sold off his ethics and standards in hopes of receiving the presidency in exchange. It makes me sad.

Edit -- (ooh, fact checking again) -- In this update FactCheck says that they unknowingly used incomplete data, and John gets a point back -- Obama is the second biggest recipient of contributions from F&F employees. Of course, that also unfortunately reveals that McCain took more money than FactCheck reported before as well. The rest of McCain's statement is still, sadly, false, whether by commission or omission.

Making news today is Senator Chuck Hegel's interview with the Omaha World-Herald, in which he departs from the RNC script and flat-out says Sarah Palin isn't qualified to be president.

"She doesn't have any foreign policy credentials," Hagel said Wednesday in an interview. "You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don't know what you can say. You can't say anything."

...and...

Palin has cited the proximity of Alaska to Russia as evidence of her international experience.

"I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, 'I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,'" he said. "That kind of thing is insulting to the American people."

...and...

Washington experience isn't the only kind of experience, Hagel said, and he noted that many White House occupants have been governors with no time inside the Beltway.

"I think it's a stretch to, in any way, to say that she's got the experience to be president of the United States," Hagel said.

I tend to agree with Senator Hagel. As far as I'm concerned, he has a pretty good, highly patriotic track record.

Omaha World-Herald article

In looking up a link to the RNC site, I just saw this page on the RNC site where they "catch" Joe Biden saying that it's patriotic for the wealthy to pay higher taxes. Here's the quote as cited by the RNC site (and taken from "Good Morning America"):

Anybody making over $250,000 is going to pay more." Biden: "You got it. It's time to be patriotic, Kate."

This is cited as a 'flub' with the same disregard for sanity that Bush-style-non-conservative Republicans reserve for all mention of taxes. But you know what? It's patriotic for those of us who are better off to pay more into our nation. It's certainly more patriotic to pay our own bills instead of handing our debt -- and influence over our economy -- off to China, of all places. It's certainly more patriotic to put money back into the Federal government and the innovation it builds in American research and technology instead of handing it over to dictatorships ruled by people who may well be funding anti-American terrorism on the side.

And it also might, just might, be patriotic for the well-off among us to help our fellow Americans, providing funding for health care and education so that people have a chance to grab the gold ring and prosper.

It's America, morons. We help our own first, even if it might mean a slightly smaller television.

(And you know what? The real conservatives out there can lower taxes because they oppose unnecessary wars and foreign adventurism. Just lowering taxes alone does not, and cannot, make you conservative. The basic rule of thumb -- if you're funding an antagonistic foreign power, you're not a conservative. I'm really looking forward to true conservatives retaking the Republican party.)

Over at FactCheck.org they just posted a second debunking of a frankly gross campaign season lie, that John McCain was in some way responsible for the Forrestal disaster.

Briefly, no. Hell, no.

Here's the first debunking
Here's the second debunking

A frankly depressing excerpt of footage capturing the disaster:

Attempting to win "by any means necessary" is the hallmark of fundamental moral failure. Despite my deep distrust of John McCain as a presidential candidate, and my disappointment with his behavior over the last decade as a politician, that in no way makes it reasonable or sane to try and undermine his political effort by lying in such a repugnant fashion.

Trust that the Navy investigated an incident that killed over a hundred sailors and stop lying about it. It debases you and damages whatever cause you think you're supporting.

One of the questions that came out of the recent scandal at the Royalty-In-Kind program at the Minerals Management Service was why the Department of Justice has not prosecuted the various ethics violations found by the Inspector General's investigation. Given that royalty collection oversight has been slipping badly for the last couple years, it seems like it might be worthwhile to follow up on claims of problems or corruption with standing or former officials in such a lucrative area as Minerals Management.

As it happens, DoJ has been prosecuting other, unrelated corruption cases coming out of the MMS. In this press release from last week, DoJ tells us about guilty pleas by two former MMS employees who set up new contracts and jobs for themselves, then left MMS and government service to take those jobs. Specifically, one employee set up a contract's requirements, then left MMS and bid on it. The other employee set up the evaluation for the bid, helped evaluate and award the bid to the first employee...and then quit MMS and took a job as a subcontractor with the company.

It's unclear where the boundary falls for prosecutable corruption offenses here, but clearly, something is wrong at MMS.

Mr. McCain --

I voted for you in the 2000 primary. At the time, I was drawn to your two selling points -- the image of an honest speaker and an ethical man.

So I have to ask. What happened?

In a recent round of campaign ads, you misrepresented Joe Biden's remark that it would be patriotic for the especially well off to help their fellow Americans by paying somewhat higher taxes as some kind of general call to tax lower income families and the elderly, of all things.

As we can plainly see from Biden's remark, and as FactCheck.org, who you've cited, confirmed -- this is a lie on the part of your campaign. Similarly, you talk about Senator Obama voting for a tax increase for people earning as little as $42,000 per year, when he really voted to rescind the frankly damaging Bush-era tax cut, and even that would just amount to an extra $15 per year tax increase for people in that range. I don't know about you, but I've lost a lot more than $15 to increases in fuel prices and decreases in the interest I'm earning on my investments and in my retirement account over the last couple years.

What happened? I voted for you eight years ago based on your image of honesty and ethics. Was it just an image?

I'm severely disappointed in you, both as a politician and as a person. If you don't think you can win on your own merits, you really shouldn't have run in the first place.

----

I sent this today, after reading another FactCheck.org article debunking a particularly misleading McCain campaign ad. This one refers to Joe Biden's remark that it would be patriotic for the well-off among us to pay a little more in taxes. First, of course, I'll repeat my assertion that it is patriotic to help your fellow Americans, as your taxes provide health care and support for the elderly, education funding for children, and armor for American soldiers. Second, unlike the implication in the ad, Joe was saying that it's patriotic for those of us who are doing well to pay more -- not to raise taxes across the board.

And so on, and so it goes. John is bleeding ethics now, and that's unpleasant to witness.

This one has already made the rounds, but I had it lingering in my bookmarks ever since Tim passed it on to me. From an article on the increasing percentage (about one in four!) of Texas residents who are uninsured:

But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

Has Goodman been to an emergency room? More to the point, does he realize that emergency rooms don't provide coverage for well-baby visits for expecting mothers, for regular vaccinations for kids, or for any of a number of other issues that require regular medical visits? Does he also realize that illnesses factor into a third of personal bankruptcies?

A catastrophic illness costs a catastrophic amount of money. Insurance coverage negotiates this down, covers some of the costs, and generally makes it possible for working Americans to keep their heads above water should things go wrong -- as well as making it much simpler and easier for them to receive regular, preventative medical care that can stave off the worst of the catastrophes, reducing costs to everyone overall.

The sheer cynicism is really distressing, and verging on soulless. Let the McCain campaign spend the next year only receiving medical care in busy urban emergency departments, and then ask them again what they think about that plan.

Dalls Morning News article

Thirty-three religious leaders will endorse candidates during religious services this Sunday, as part of a move they're calling "Pulpit Freedom Sunday." The ministers are backed by Alliance Defense Fund, a group that promotes fundamentalist-leaning Christian ideas. They're trying to oppose a 1954 law that prevents organizations that accept tax-deductible contributions from intervening in political campaigns. They consider this a limitation on their right of free speech, and are "protesting" accordingly.

Of course, this misses the clear alternate option.

Pay taxes.

If you go ahead and pay taxes on the contributions from your congregation, you can promote all the political positions you like.

As someone who has paid tithes to a church and worked for nonprofits, I think the limitation on nonprofits is perfectly legitimate, whereas the idea that churches in general need to be tax-free is not always clear. If you want to campaign from the pulpit, pay taxes. If you want to be a legitimate nonprofit, don't campaign from the pulpit.

There you go. Easy.

New York Times article

The Congress today reached an agreement* on a modified version of George Bush's bailout plan, pushing seven hundred billion dollars into large companies that took too many risks and are now in danger of collapse.

It is, once again, your tax dollars at work. That's seven hundred billion dollars on top of about nine billion dollars that already went into the IndyMac rescue and over two billion dollars that's gone into other failed banks in 2008.

This should, one would wish, finally put paid to the lie that is modern Republican pseudoconservativism. Real conservatives are howling in dismay at this bailout. If you really, honestly believe in conservative capitalism, then this is a market correction and that should be that. The business that fail should fail. In contrast, if you believe that the government can't let these businesses fail, then you shouldn't be letting them taking drastic, stupid risks in the first place.

This is the plan of people who won't put cash aside to prevent home foreclosures, and who self-righteously talk about "welfare reform", but are then willing to spend over two thousand dollars, from each of us, to bail out corporations. Keep that in mind. Keep that in mind as you look at who lauded widespread deregulation, and then thinks it's okay to suck up two grand from you, from your spouse, from each of your kids, to pay for a corporate executive's errors.

Unfortunately, we're stuck with this bill now, unless the next session of Congress can be convinced to revoke it or it doesn't pass in the voting stage despite the agreement of Congressional leaders.

Fortunately, you have a chance to speak, loudly, with your vote in November. I'll hand it off to John Ibbitson here:

But now there really is no practical alternative. John McCain helped create this emergency. He's partly to blame for it. Under the circumstances, rewarding him by voting for him would be perverse.

But the watchman state at least needs to be a watchman. Deregulating past the point of common sense, so tainted food starts making its way onto shelves, municipal water supplies become lethally contaminated and banks take risks so hazardous they imperil the global economy, is an abdication by government of its duty to serve and protect its citizens.

Let's repeat that last part.

"An abdication by government of its duty to serve and protect its citizens."

John McCain, along with the rest of his breed of false conservatives, has abdicated this duty. While I still hope real conservatives will retake the Republican party, in the meantime, McCain and his ilk cannot be allowed to do any more damage.

BBC article on the bailout
The full text of the bailout

*I am full of corrections on this one. I wrote before about it having passed -- obviously, the agreement was reached, but voting had to wait for, you know, a workday. Click here to see how that turned out.

Or, at least, that's as valid a claim as the McCain campaign's "Obama voted against funding our troops." In this recent FactCheck.org post, they point out the clear and callous lie in a new McCain campaign ad that declares that Obama voted against troop funding. As they clearly point out, there were two competing troop funding bills at the time, and Obama voted for one rather than the other. John McCain, in turn, urged the president to veto the bill Obama supported.

So you could just as reasonably say that John McCain urged a veto for funding our troops.

More to the point, let's look at some legitimate voting and policy history. If we roll ourselves back a decade and a half to our deployment in Somalia and the debate that immediately followed the Battle of Mogadishu, John McCain had a rather different message about funding our troops:

Congress should work closely with the administration to help keep the President from making future mistakes like the debacle in Somalia. But should he persist in making them, our legislative resources should be to terminate them as quickly as we can by denying them funds for further implementation once they have been made.

That sounds shockingly like an argument for "not funding our troops," and it was one that was made immediately after nineteen of those troops had been killed by mobs led by bandit warlords.

Neither Obama nor McCain have yanked funding for this war, but of those two, only John McCain has actively argued for yanking funding for a war in progress.

Maybe it has to do with facing election more frequently than a Senator does.

Following the agreement on an arbitrarily chosen $700 billion bailout plan by Congressional leaders, the House failed to pass the actual bill, with 205 for and 228 against. Around two-thirds of Republicans and two-fifths of Democrats in the House decided that their constituencies might remember this vote when the next election rolls around and refused to pass the bill.

But after a several hours of impassioned debate, the bill's opponents - the majority of whom were from the Republican Party - got their way.

Speaking after the vote, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives suggested the Democrats were to blame, accusing them of failing to mobilise their majority in the chamber.

That last bit is hilarious, entirely dodging the fact that the Republican representatives were heavily, heavily against the bill.

Here are two other quotes:

"Our time has run out," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. "We're going make a decision. There are no other choices, no other alternatives."

Added Barney Frank, D-Mass.: "Today is the decision day. If we defeat this bill today, it will be a very bad day for the financial sector of the American economy and the people who will feel the pain are not the top bankers and top corporate executives but average Americans."

I have a great deal of respect for Barney Frank, but I wonder at his remark. Will average Americans not end up feeling the pain of hundreds of billions of dollars tossed at shoring up finance corporations? Is a drastic increase in our national debt not also incredibly damaging to the average American taxpayer?

More to the point, has Secretary Paulson or anyone else promoting the bill generated a clear cost-benefit analysis demonstrating that we, as a nation, come out ahead financially by following this plan?

BBC article
CNN article

As an object lesson in not writing while tired, I previously wrote part of this post as if Congress had passed the bailout bill, rather than Congressional leaders having agreed on it, which was actually the case.

Today, the House in fact did not pass the bill, so hopefully no one was confused by my earlier error for long.

Apologies for the mistake.

The New York Times has a complete roll-call breakdown of the failed bailout vote. I was curious how my own state, and my Representative in particular, voted, but it's worth looking at the diagram for a general feeling of how the vote worked nationwide.

Here are some worthwhile numbers:

New York Democrats: 20 for, 3 against
New York Republicans: 5 for, 1 against

California Democrats: 19 for, 15 against
California Republicans: 10 for, 9 against

Texas Democrats: 5 for, 7 against
Texas Republicans: 4 for, 15 against

In a little over a month, we have the next general election. In California, this comes bundled with a whopping twelve propositions this time around. As always, I'll review them one at a time, providing a summary of the proposition, some additional relevant background, a view of who's providing the funding for and against, and my up or down recommendation for each (and, as always, I'll put links into this post as I complete the reviews).

This November, we are being asked to vote on:

1A: High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act - recommend "No"
2: Standards for Confining Farm Animals - recommend "No"
3: Children's Hospital Bond Act - recommend "No"
4: Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of a Minor's Pregnancy (again) - recommend "No"
5: Nonviolent Drug Offenses; Sentencing, Parole, and Rehabilitation - recommend "Yes"
6: Police and Law Enforcement Funding; Criminal Penalties and Laws - recommend "No"
7: Renewable Energy Generation - recommend "No"
8: Elimination of Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry - recommend "No"
9: Criminal Justice System; Victim's Rights - recommend "No"
10: Alternative Fuel Vehicles and Renewable Energy - recommend "No"
11: Redistricting (again) - recommend "No"
12: Veterans' Bond Act of 2008 - recommend "Yes"

Proposition 1A: Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act. - recommend No

Update: Look to the comments for an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of this proposition. I am going to stay with my "No" recommendation.

As the legislative analyst's summary tells us, the state of California created the California High-Speed Rail Authority in 1996 to set up an intercity, 200+ mph rail system linking the major metropolitan areas of California, with a first goal of linking northern and southern California.

Delving into the actual text of the proposed legislation, we find a bond measure that would take out $9.95 billion in bonds (thanks to commentor Rafael for catching my error here), at an estimated cost of $19.4 billion over thirty years, to fund the development of high-speed rail and upgrades to local rail to link the two systems together. Specifically, the funding is broken down like so:

$950 million is dedicated to that second task, of funding "capital improvements to intercity and commuter rail lines and urban rail systems" to connect them to the projected high-speed rail system. $190 million of this goes to the state Department of Transportation, with the remainder going to local transit agencies. This latter portion comes with strings attached, namely that the local transit agency has to provide matching funds, and that it can't reduce its spending below its average spending across the 1998-2001 period. I have no idea why that period was chosen, but there you go.

The remaining roughly $9 billion (fixed, per above) goes to building the high-speed rail system itself. The assigned goal for this money is to first complete a rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and then fill in routes linking Oakland and San Jose, Sacramento and Merced, Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, The Inland Empire and San Diego, and Los Angeles and Irvine. This money also comes with some strings attached. First, it can't be used for the operating costs of the rail system -- just construction. Second, it can only be used for half of those construction costs, with the other half to be acquired some other way, "including, but not limited to, federal funds, funds from revenue bonds, and local funds."

That last bit might give you some pause. What happens if the other half can't be found anywhere? Hard to say.

It's nearly impossible to evaluate something like this in free space. With that in mind, we might want to take a look at two recently created high-speed rail systems, those of Korea and Taiwan.

The Korean high-speed rail system, the KTX, connects Seoul to Daegu and to Mokpo via a branched system. Currently, it represents about 200 miles of track, not all of it fully enabled to be high speed. Although it was initially costed at about $5 billion, the system to date has ended up costing about $18 billion to build, taking 12 years to start operation. It initially had ridership issues, but that has picked up, with a concomitant drop in air and road travel. The system itself has generated $3 billion in income since its opening.

The Taiwanese high speed rail system just started operation in 2007, after about 7 years of construction. Also covering about 200 miles of track, this system has come in at about $15 billion so far. As it just opened last year, there's obviously not much to say about ridership, although there have been some concerns about production quality.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority estimated the cost to build the full California rail system at $45 billion -- so obviously they don't think they're going to cover it all in one go right now, with only $9 billion in state money and a presumptive $9 billion in matching funds from somewhere. Is $45 billion a reasonable number?

Consider that the Korean and Taiwanese systems both clocked in around the $15-18 billion range to cover 200 miles of tracks. Consider also that the San Francisco to Los Angeles line alone is 381 miles. The remaining proposed routes add another 350 miles of track, for a grand total of about 730 miles of track. If we presume to extrapolate from the Korean and Taiwanese experiences, we're looking at $54-65 billion for the full system, and $28-34 billion for the SF to LA route.

If we presume the full matching funds, it's looking suspiciously like Prop 1A will only get us from San Francisco to Paso Robles. As nice as Paso Robles is, it's only halfway to Los Angeles.

I think the imbalance between the available funds and the likely costs ultimately makes this impractical right now, especially funding it via a bond measure.

So who's putting money into the effort for or against this proposition? Well, as it happens, there are no groups putting money up against it. Major groups contributing money in support of Prop 1A include the Members Voice of the State Building Trades ($50,000), the California American Council of Engineering Companies Issues Fund ($25,000), the California Alliance for Jobs Rebuild California Committee ($200,000, and sporting a cumbersome name), the Association of California High Speed Trains ($24,000), and the Californians for Safe & Reliable High Speed Rail ($54,000). A number of architecture, construction, and engineering firms also contributed in the tens of thousands of dollars range. Contributors there include companies like HDR, HNTB, Systra, Alstom, Hatch Mott MacDonald, and Parsons Brinckerhoff Americas. Nothing especially shocking in either set of contributors.

You can read the full list of people putting money into supporting Prop 1A here.

You can read the full text of Prop 1A here.

You can read my reviews and recommendations for the other propositions by clicking here.

Proposition 2: Standards for Confining Farm Animals. Initiative Statute. - recommend No

Proposition two is a concise bill that would alter the regulations that say how certain farm animals can be kept in California. Specifically, it would expand the required space for egg-laying hens, pregnant pigs, and calves grown for veal. Under the proposed law, these animals would have to be given enough space to turn freely, and to stretch their limbs without reaching the sides of their living spaces. You can accurately surmise from this that these animals are not currently given that much space.

The appeal of this proposition is obvious. The idea of an animal that spends much or all of its life literally unable to move is unpleasant. The animal certainly can't appreciate it much. This is why I buy cage-free, vegetable-fed chickens.

However, this change in the law would solely affect farming within California. That suggests that California farms would have to shoulder the added costs while still competing with farms outside the state. What impact is this likely to have on California farming?

The Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis has addressed the potential impact of Prop 2 on the egg industry in California in their report titled Economic Effects of Proposed Restrictions on Egg-laying Hen Housing in California. They make a number of salient points:

• The egg industry is a significant part of California agriculture, with a value ranging from $213 million in 2006 to $337 million in 2007
• The California egg industry actively competes with egg production nationwide, although we are a net importer, as we generate 6% of the nation's eggs and consume 12%
• Current non-cage production in California amounts to 5% of the total
• Costs for non-cage production are at least 20% higher than cage growing, and might go even higher if companies were required to solely use non-cage production (many companies do a mix of both methods)
• A typical hen flock has a two-year life cycle, making it easy for companies to expand their flocks
• Covering the entire capacity of the California egg industry would entail less than a 10% expansion of the industry in other states

Their report comes to this conclusion:

Our analysis indicates that the expected impact would be the almost complete elimination of egg production in California within the six-year adjustment period. Non-cage production costs are simply too far above the costs of the cage systems used in other states to allow California producers to compete with imported eggs in the conventional egg market. The most likely outcome, therefore, is the elimination of almost all of the California egg industry over a few years.

Who's weighing in for or against this proposition?

On the "for" side, we have an impressive array of private citizens. Alongside them, we have significant donations from groups such as The Fund for Animals, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and The Humane Society of the United States. The Humane Society is by far the largest contributor, donating over a million dollars in support of Prop 2. If you go through to their website, you'll also see that they have this as a front-page issue.

On the "against" side, we have a number of farms and farm industry groups. As you might expect, this includes groups like the California Egg Marketing Association, the Demler Egg Ranch of San Jacinto, the Pine Hill Egg Ranch in Ramona, and others. In addition, however, there are significant contributions from out-of-state farms and companies. For example, Mississippi-based egg producer Cal-Maine Foods has donated over half a million dollars to the effort against Prop 2.

Clearly, from the nationwide money coming in on both sides of the debate, this is being viewed as a test issue. Indeed, California law does often presage changes in the law nationwide. Consider what's being debated over in Prop 8. That said, I think there's a fundamental problem with letting our state be the test case for this change in the law.

Simply put, a yes vote on Prop 2 probably means killing 90-95% of the egg production industry in California. Leaving aside the pig- and calf-related aspects of this proposition, that alone is untenable. Although I approve of the proposition's goals, its immediate outcome will be the loss of a hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs, with no net change in the living conditions of the animals involved in production -- just a change in their location. I am not generally a true believer in the power of the market, but in this case, I think more can be achieved, with less destruction for the state's agriculture industry, by "voting with your wallet" and buying eggs produced in a cage-free environment. I've been doing that, and will continue to do that. I prefer that to simply outsourcing the egg industry to the rest of the nation.

To see who's providing money in support of Prop 2, click here.

To see who's providing money against Prop 2, click here.

You can read the full text of Prop 2 here.

You can read my reviews and recommendations for the other propositions by clicking here.

Proposition 4: Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor's Pregnancy. Initiative Constitutional Amendment. - recommend No

This is the third time in recent memory that fundamentally the exact same proposition has been placed on the ballot. It was initially floated under the somewhat misleading name of Prop 73: Parents' Right to Know and Child Protection Initiative. When that was defeated, it appeared once more on the ballot as the more accurately titled Prop 85: Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor's Pregnancy. Both propositions were voted down. The opening text of Prop 4 runs with the dishonesty of Prop 73 and refers to itself as the "Child and Teen Safety and Stop Predators Act." After all, who could vote against child safety and stopping predators?

Looking to the meat of Prop 4, it puts forward almost exactly the same new laws as Prop 73 did in 2005 and as Prop 85 did in 2006. These include a parental notification required by a personal physician's visit or a certified letter 48 hours in advance of a minor's abortion, except in cases of immediate medical emergency. As before, a physician who provided an abortion in violation of the rules could face $10,000 in civil penalties. Also as before, the minor can potentially challenge the need for notification in juvenile court, with the court being obligated to decide by 5pm on the second day after the filing.

Let's reflect, again, on the ridiculous notion of a young woman somewhere in the Central Valley, with no access to a car or public transit, trying to make it to the juvenile court that's sixty miles away, twice in two days without her abusive father or mother noticing.

One might hope that a physician, trained to recognize the signs (and they are), could determine that a minor's home situation is abusive, and that parental notification should not be required. Prop 4 tells us that parental notification can be waived if the physician makes a written report of known or suspect child abuse and, 48 hours ahead of the abortion, delivers notice of the waived notification to an adult in the household.

In other words, in cases of abuse by a family member, you're allowed to notify a family member.

That's sick. Unlike the two previous propositions, which seemed mainly like attempts to make it very hard for a minor to get an abortion, this one will actually make it hard for minors in desperate home situations to seek the care they need.

Why is this "notification of a parent no matter what" clause such an issue? Well, let's look at the numbers. For male perpetrators of child abuse, including sexual abuse (which men are significantly more prone to than women):

51% are the biological father
1% are the adoptive father
8% are the stepfather
10% are the mom's boyfriend
5% were "combination" fathers (that is, some mix of above categories -- think briefly, you'll see how that works)
26% were nonparents

(I presume some rounding errors here, as this sums to a little over 100%)

So, in a full 75% of cases of child abuse by a male, it's clearly by an adult in the household. Either the authors of the proposition didn't do their research, or they fully realize that this proposed law is about blocking abortion, and not about "preventing sexual predators from using secret abortions to conceal sexual exploitation of minors." With the notification going to the predators in question, the abortion may be prevented, but the exploitation will continue.

I'll quote what I said at the end of my review of Prop 85:

This kind of proposition is the lazy and callous way out. If you are a genuine opponent of abortion, I recommend that you lobby for greater funding for health and safety education for kids, especially at-risk kids. I recommend combined programs that are oriented toward helping kids lead healthy lifestyles, supporting abstinence and understanding safer sex measures, such that we can prevent dangerous behaviors, unwanted pregnancies and, at the end of the day, abortions. You could even support counseling for parents to help them not respond with violence, or to identify abusers more effectively. If a young woman feels she can talk with her parents or a counselor safely, she will. Forcing her to face parents she can't talk to will not make things better.

Let me add that the proper response to two failures to pass a notification law was not to draft an even more dangerous version of that law that will get more young women beaten or raped by abusive parents. It might have been to propose a law for more funding to seek solutions. But not this.

Major funding in support of this bill includes several hundred thousand from San Diego Reader publisher James Holman and two hundred thousand dollars from the Knights of Columbus, who are involved in a major anti-abortion push during this election season.

Major funding against this bill comes in the form of a couple million from Planned Parenthood, bolstered by several hundred thousand from the California Teachers Association, and a number of significant donations from private citizens.

We can take a moment to point out that the California Teachers Association is probably not fundamentally anti-child, and that may say something about this proposed law.

You can see who's providing money in support of Prop 4 by clicking here.

You can see who's providing money against Prop 4 by clicking here, here, here, and here.

You can read the full text of Prop 4 here.

You can read my reviews and recommendations for the other propositions by clicking here.