Hope is not a plan

Last week I saw a "Condi for president" bumper sticker.

Pros

First woman president
First African-American president

Cons

Desperate inability to rationally and empirically assess reality

Just in case you're checking blogs and not news:

Tom DeLay has been indicted on criminal conspiracy charges in Texas, and will temporarily leave his position as House majority leader as a consequence.

The CNN story

The indictment

Television adds are appearing that now point to todaysmilitary.com, a general-purpose recruiting site for the American armed services. The commercial I saw featured a young man speaking to his mom, viewed from the mom's POV, about his decision to enlist. That, and the site's tagline, "Make it a two-way conversation" are clearly geared toward the concept that parents will resist a decision to enlist.

In the commercial, the young man is joining because he can be in an environmental response team. Though recruiting ads in general have always emphasized something other than, "You may end up having to go get shot at," it seems even more ridiculous to be presenting military careers as training programs for various extramilitary career paths.

One interesting element of the site is this short section on Myths vs Reality. It never occurred to me that people would expect that "ordinary people" can't complete Basic. Maybe growing up around people in the military has kept me from mythologizing them, but I generally expect a reasonably motivated person to finish Basic.

After a thorough pelting with criticism vis-a-vis her lack of qualification and the vague, tap-dancing approach taken by Bush in trying to indicate that she might be antiabortion, Harriet Miers has withdrawn from consideration as a future supreme court justice.

The cover story is that she withdrew to avoid having to reveal presidential confidences from her current role in the White House. In her words:

Repeatedly in the course of the process of confirmation for nominees for other positions, I have steadfastly maintained that the independence of the Executive Branch be preserved and its confidential documents and information not be released to further a confirmation process.

I feel compelled to adhere to this position, especially related to my own nomination. Protection of the prerogatives of the Executive Branch and continued pursuit of my confirmation are in tension.

I feel sorry for Ms. Miers, but I am glad she is no longer a candidate. I don't know how much realism this will inject into president Bush's thought process, but I hold out a small hope that he has gained some reason from this experience.

Her letter
The BBC story
The CNN story
The Xinhua story

Jun Choi was just voted in as the mayor of Edison, a town of 100,000 in New Jersey. He's the second Korean-American elected mayor in the United States, and the first in the mainland.

The Chosun Ilbo article

From the article:

Edison, one of New Jersey’s five major towns, has a population of 100,000, 40 percent of whom are Asian. Koreans number around 3,000. Choi defeated incumbent Edison Mayor George Spadoro, who had been in office for 12 years, by 1,000 votes in the June Democrat primary. At the time, anchors of local broadcast stations made racist remarks to the effect that putting colored people in charge would be a bad idea, thus practically handing Choi the nomination on a platter.

Demographically, Edison sounds rather like Cupertino.

Thanks to SSO for pointing out this article link:

Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleads gulty and resigns

Cunningham, a congressman from San Diego, pled guilty to all sorts of bribery related to the awarding of defense contracts, in addition to some other offenses:

Before resigning, Cunningham, 63, entered pleas in U.S. District Court to charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud, and tax evasion for underreporting his income in 2004.

After the hearing, Cunningham was fingerprinted then released on his own recognizance until a Feb. 27 sentencing hearing. He could receive a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Cunningham spoke at the San Diego Eagle Scout dinner the year I received my Eagle.

Bush spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center today, in defense of our effort in Iraq. I'm not going to do much analysis here, but it's notable that Bush seems to be transitioning into giving more reasoned arguments in his speeches as public dissent takes away his option of just reiterating jingoistic buzzwords.

It's disconcerting to see that the sunk cost fallacy still appears in Bush's Iraq policy - "We have to succeed to make all the sacrifices so far worthwhile."

I also question Bush's analogy between the modern Iraq situation and Truman and Japan. I know he's trying to make the case that enemies can become allies, but Truman was not some general democratizer of Asia. Truman was a good president, but his policy was driven by pragmatic concerns as much as in any other era, which is why he backed the French in their attempt to retake their colonial territories in Southeast Asia.

The main news angle of the speech is Bush accepting responsibility for "faulty intelligence" leading to the war. He denied misleading anyone, of course.

Anyway, here are some articles covering the speech:

BBC
CNN

This paragraph comes from President Bush's recent address to the 2005 National Boy Scout Jamboree:

As President, I have the privilege to work with Scouts every day. When I come to the Oval Office in the morning, the first person I see is a Scout -- my Chief of Staff, Andy Card, from the state of Massachusetts. (Applause.) Down the hall is Vice President Dick Cheney, a Boy Scout from Casper, Wyoming. (Applause.) And across the river at the Pentagon sits an Eagle Scout from Illinois who Americans count on to "be prepared" -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Applause.)

Apparently Rumsfeld's Eagle training didn't stick, as he is now perpetually unprepared. Of course, as proud as I am of being an Eagle, there are a lot of idiots who made it there as well, as evidenced by this site that uses a fear- and hate-mongering approach to get people worked up about Scouting's current struggle to keep homosexuals and athiests out. I have to say that such an approach is neither Trustworthy, nor Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Brave or particularly Cheerful. It is Loyal and perhaps Obedient, but only a sick kind of each.

I was, perhaps, in a "liberal" troop in the sense that we didn't give people a lot of crap as long as they were responsible and good to others. That troop produced doctors, Ph.D.s, Rangers and many more people who actively make the world a better place. Our troop taught us citizenship, personal strength and teamwork. I can't imagine how much we would have missed if we'd been caught up in a struggle to exclude people because of religion or sexual preference -- neither of which even came up, of course. A real Scout doesn't give a damn about that stuff -- he's learning about how his nation works, how to be a good person and how to hike, shoot and survive. Everything else is trivia.

After noting that one of the search results hitting HiNaP this month was Condi for president, I decided to see how far down that list HiNaP is.

As it happens, pretty far. But on the way, I ran into American Women Presidents, a PAC that has endorsed both Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice as presidential candidates for 2008.

That would be an interesting election.

In light of President Bush's faith-based decision to cut taxes while trying to conduct a war, I wondered about the relationship between taxes and war in American history.

As it happens, war (the Civil War) induced the creation of the first income tax, as well as subsequent spikes in income tax. Consider these income tax ranges:

Civil War: 3-5%
World War I: 6-77%
World War II: 23-94%
Korean War: Up to 87%
Vietnam War: 14-70%
Now: Up to 33% (dropped from a pre-2001 top rate of ~40%)

I understand the reasoning behind the idea of reducing income tax in an effort to buoy the economy, but it is unsettling to consider that, in opposition to the three wars we won, we are taking the route of lowering taxes. If this really is a legitimate, important war, we should be willing to suck it up, accept some hardship and actually increase taxation rather than going into debt. This spend and burn policy is going to bite us someday, and bite us hard. After all, how much power do we have to tell the People's Republic of China what to do when they're our creditors?

Full historical notes on income taxes in America in the extended.

During a CNN Live Today report about the second day of student walkouts in Los Angeles high schools protesting new immigration laws, host Daryn Kagan ended with a comment to the effect of "Walking on the Harbor freeway isn't the smartest idea even when it's not rush hour; maybe these kids need to go back and get a little more education." (This is a close paraphrase -- their transcript page does not have this comment posted yet.)

It's fascinating that this capping comment basically devalues the point of what the kids are doing and suggests that they really are a bunch of idiots -- so the final message is not "people care enough to protest" but instead "people who protest are fools."

But Kagan is also missing the fact that these kids figured out how to garner television coverage -- whether local or national -- in a way that honestly wasn't that dangerous. By walking on the freeway in a group, they picked up a police escort, weren't in any danger of being hit, and made it on CNN. Effective, nonviolent protest that picked up national television coverage.

I think they're pretty smart already.

The United States army has broadened its acceptance of tattoos on recruits:

Soldiers can now have tattoos on their hands and back of the neck as long as they are not "extremist, indecent, sexist or racist," army officials say.

Women recruits can also wear permanent eye-liner, eyebrows and lip makeup, although it must "not be trendy".

The BBC story

The current "immigration and security" debate has given us a number of straw man arguments and flawed premises to deal with.

During the News Hour today, the host asked (paraphrased): "What about people who complain that you want to hold onto your culture?"

To this, I have to say, "What about it?" While you're celebrating Saint Patrick's day, Oktoberfest and, for God's sake, Cinco de Mayo, ask yourself again what is wrong with holding onto culture? Can I not go to a Highland Games to celebrate my very, very recent Scottish heritage? Does this make me less of an American?

It's racism. Back in the day, Americans feared an influx of Germans and Italians. Now German and Italian heritage are an integral part of American society. All those poor, unwanted Irish folks who made their way over here are now our stereotypical police officers. This is the way our country works.

Representative Tom Tancredo has a double-threat hated-immigrant heritage: his last name is an Italianized version of a German name. I guess he must be both lazy and a drunk.

The other flawed idea is that this debate has anything to do with security. As Tim has pointed out, we have nothing like the ability to make a reasonably sealed border. Even two of the most sealed borders in history, the Korean DMZ and that between the two Germanies, were breached repeatedly. More to the point, none of the foreign terrorism we've encountered, successful or otherwise, would have been stopped by a wall lining the South Arizona border. The most devastating attack we've seen to date was carried out by men who entered the country with no equipment and by legitimate means.

I'm going to put down my prediction now. The next successful Islamist terrorist attack on continental American soil will be carried out by British or American citizens and will involve little or no material assistance from foreign nationals.

And we will look very, very foolish for having ostracized several million hard-working immigrants who actually like this country and want to live here.

Yesterday, Senate majority leader Bill Frist and other Senate Republicans announced their Gas Price Relief and Rebate Act, whose big selling point is a $100 gas "rebate", along with theoretical increases in consumer protection against price inflation and some rollback of oil company tax incentives (you can read Senator Frist's summary sheet here).

In this act of elegant, brutal stupidity, Frist and the rest are making a play to buy you off with your own money. Rather than, say, addressing prices at the level of oil or final gas supplies, they're going to effectively hand me back one hundred of my dollars, so I can go fill my car up a few more times. So instead of wielding the potential tremendous leverage of the United States government as both a regulatory body and a massive fuel buyer, they prefer to divert money from (1) the war in Iraq, (2) homeland defense, (3) federal education programs, (4) fighting against illegal drug imports, (5) any other Federal program you can think of that has any importance to you -- say, farm subsidies that keep your produce artificially cheaper, or research money for lifesaving biomedical advances.

It's insulting to hand me my own money back, stealing it from places where it is desperately needed, because you're so in hock to the oil industry that you can't imagine challenging them directly.

Hand in hand with this unpleasant Senate effort, President Bush has ordered a simultaneously meaningless and dangerous halt in deposits to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As noted in the linked article, this will add back 0.14% of America's daily oil onto the market, for a negligible change in price, while simultaneously depleting our national strategic reserve. It's a hat trick of image manipulation, callous disregard for our national wellbeing and selling the future for minimal present gain. It's irresponsible, but this isn't new.

Porter Goss is resigning from his position at the head of the CIA.

The BBC story
The CNN story

The CNN report includes speculation that Goss is cutting out because John Negroponte was appointed as the new DNI instead of him. I'll add that it's also possible that after two years at the head of the CIA, Goss believes it's a lost cause and doesn't want to be in charge when the next big crash happens -- especially as that may not be on Bush's watch, so he can't expect to receive a medal for his failures, the way Tenet did.

Or it could just be that he was doing a bad job.

In his May 13 radio address, President Bush had this to say about the recently revealed NSA domestic wiretapping programming:

The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.

This disingenuous deflection tries to put you off the trail of anger by pointing out that the program doesn't listen to your conversations. As exciting as that may be to learn, it leaves the important problem that someone is still potentially tracking every person you call and every person who calls you. Even absent content, this is definitely personal information. Are you calling the free clinic to check up on your condition? Are you calling someone from another business because you're thinking of changing jobs? Are you calling your in-laws to plan a surprise party for your spouse? Are you calling a psychological help line? Do you want someone tracking all this?

Consider this in very digestable terms -- the American police drama. When the detectives show up with the clinching telephone record evidence, they don't say, "We recorded your call and know what you said," they just say, "So, why did you call the victim for two hours the night of the killing?"

Traffic analysis directed at you is just as personal as being followed all day. Sure, they can't hear what you're saying, but how much better do you feel knowing that?

Louie Gohmert, representing the first district in Texas, launched a pointless attack on Representative Murtha of Pennsylvania, suggesting that had Mr. Murtha's attitude prevailed during World War II, we would be under Nazi or Imperial Japanese rule.

Though I congratulate representative Gohmert on his own valiant service as a JAG from 1978 to 1982 (nestled nicely between Vietnam and Grenada), I wonder if perhaps he might like to apply that test to the war Murtha actually served in.

What if the view of pulling American troops out had prevailed early on in the Vietnam conflict? Tens of thousands of Americans would be alive today, millions of Vietnamese would be alive, and America would not be scarred by a pointless war that tore at what it meant to be an American.

It's horrendously disingenuous to suggest that recommending that we pull out of an elective war in a mid-size Middle Eastern nation is equivalent to trying to back out of the late part of a war against a genocidal world conqueror.

Whether you agree with Murtha or not (for the record, I believe that we volunteered our nation to be responsible for the well-being of Iraqis once we invaded, and should not arbitrarily leave), Louie Gohmert has shown that he is weak, rhetorically and morally. It's hard to trust or listen to someone who spends Federal time and money attacking a coworker rather than providing a reasoned argument against them. It suggests that he has no reasoned arguments.

A constitutional amendment preventing desecration of the American flag narrowly (very narrowly) missed passage in the Senate. As it had already been passed through the House, this would have handed it off to the states for potential ratification.

This is a horrendous waste.

When some fool burns a flag, they glorify the freedoms and protections that flag represents.

However, when some fools try to outlaw that, they cut away at those same freedoms and protections that make America great. More so, I have to admit I'm a little annoyed that many who voted for protection for our flag come from places that still fight for their right to fly the flag of a bunch of secessionists who didn't want to be part of America anymore.

You think they'd have picked a side by now.

Perhaps that should be a requirement for voting for a flag-protection amendment.

Full text of the failed amendment in the extended.

Recently, Republican House and Senate members have championed pointless legislative exercises such as amending the Constitution to prevent free speech and calling people unpatriotic for not blindly supporting the war, or for being the New York Times and reporting on news that every major paper reported on, and which was discussed in press releases from the White House. Democrats are often guilty of participating in this wasted time out of a fear of appearing weak.

Get over it. Seriously.

The current baseline congressional salary is $165,200 per year. Assuming a generic work-year, that comes to roughly $83/hour. What's the significance of this figure?

Well, a basic, occasionally faulty Interceptor vest as currently issued to our troops runs $1,100, or 13 congressional person-hours. The upgrade from Interceptor to a superior armor vest from Pinnacle is about $5,000, or another 60 congressional person-hours.

So, purely in terms of salary and assuming everyone is paid the minimum rate (many are paid more), every 36 minutes the Senate spent debating a flag-protection amendment was another soldier who could have had better body armor. Every 7.8 minutes was a soldier who could have had at least had the basic protection offered by the current body armor (and not all of them have even this!).

All of these estimates are based on pure salary, of course, and do not consider the extensive benefits available to members of Congress.

As of today, there have been 4.7 Congresses-worth of American military deaths in Iraq, with 3.5 Congresses-worth from enemy fire. I imagine better body armor would help save some of those lives.

So do you really want any time spent on acrimony, pointless amendments and other political deflections?

I do not like Lou Dobbs in terms of policy or approach, but he nonetheless has brought up some worthy data points in his July 26th editorial on CNN. All of them point to both neglect and active ignoring of the rule of law in America by George Bush. Some key points:

• Bush has used signing statements to challenge elements of more than 100 laws, whereas all presidents before him, combined, issued only 600 signing statements
• The first four years of Bush's presidency saw 318 fines against employers of illegal workers, whereas eight years of Clinton saw 5,587 fines for the same offense
• From 1995 to 1998, from 10-18,000 undocumented workers were arrested at worksites each year; in 2004, 159 were arrested
• Border arrests dropped from 1.52 million during Clinton's second term to 1.05 million during Bush's first

Now, I can't say that I see as much of a problem with the other points as Lou does, but the fact that Bush has outpaced all other presidents in using signing statements while letting other concerns slide speaks directly to his attitude about power -- or, perhaps more accurately, the attitude of those around him who are vying for a monarchy rather than a presidency. I disagree with Lou Dobbs on most things -- certainly, on his backing of the racism disguised as national security pushed by Tom Tancredo -- but I agree that the combined arrogance and negligence of George Bush and his cadre of controlling staffers is destructive and problematic.

In case you missed it, it's now official -- the president can revoke Habeas Corpus at will.

If you're curious, some details on who voted for what in the extended. A grand total of seven House Republicans and one Senate Republican voted against this law. For a party that's supposed to prize personal liberty and despise big government, it should be shocking that so few Republicans stood against this notion of giving the President the power to "disappear" people at will.

Except, sadly, I'm not shocked.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow has demanded that Senator John Kerry apologize for a (slightly misstated) dig he made at Bush in which he said that people who don't do well in school get "stuck in Iraq." Snow and others have chosen to deliberately misinterpret this so they can claim that Kerry, a veteran himself, would somehow decide to criticize American soldiers.

Kerry's not having any of it:

"If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq," states Kerry, "and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy.

He concludes, "No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq."

Just so. This one line captures everything: "Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they're afraid to debate real men." The current administration policy is about misdirection to avoid blame and an appearance of failure. I understand that some people feel a deep party loyalty, and will line up behind Bush and his circle regardless of what they say, but I can neither get behind that nor respect it.

Your nation is more important than your political party. Or, at least, it damn well should be.

Quote taken from Raw Story, courtesy of my random Google RSS feed.

President Bush gave a press conference on the 25th that tried to strike the right tone of candor, acknowledgement of "difficulties" in Iraq, and promise of success there anyway. With the press corps becoming increasingly skeptical, he must pretend to engage the reality of the situation and, as we have seen this week, step away from the concept of "stay the course" as much as possible, now that it's unpopular.

Even so, his press conference was still rife with the half-messages and misdirections that characterize his approach to politics. It's not policy tempered by spin; it's only spin. Let's look at some of what he said.

"Our security at home depends on ensuring that Iraq is an ally in the war on terror and does not become a terrorist haven like Afghanistan under the Taliban."

I might have believed this at one point, but I can't say I do now. Until we purge every possible terrorist "hiding place"*, there will always be somewhere for their training camps and ideological indoctrination grounds -- and remember that the most important part of the 9/11 hijackers' training was carried out right here in the United States. Even bombing the entire mideast into paste wouldn't have helped stop an American flight school.

(*Good luck.)

But Bush is on top of things. He knows we've met some surprises in Iraq.

"We learned some key lessons from that early phase in the war. We saw how quickly al Qaeda and other extremist groups would come to Iraq to fight and try to drive us out. We overestimated the capability of the civil service in Iraq to continue to provide essential services to the Iraqi people. We did not expect the Iraqi army, including the Republican Guard, to melt away in the way that it did in the phase of advancing coalition forces."

Let's rephrase this. "We did not expect the Iraqi army to melt away in the way it did after we disbanded it following the invasion." Of course, that version makes less sense, and makes it more our fault that the security situation in Iraq completely fell apart post-invasion.

Moving on...

"And I know it's incumbent upon our government and others who enjoy the blessings of liberty to help those moderates succeed because, otherwise, we're looking at the potential of this kind of world: a world in which radical forms of Islam compete for power; a world in which moderate governments get toppled by people willing to murder the innocent; a world in which oil reserves are controlled by radicals in order to extract blackmail from the West; a world in which Iran has a nuclear weapon. And if that were to occur, people would look back at this day and age and say, what happened to those people in 2006? How come they couldn't see the threat to a future generation of people?"

I thought we were going to reduce our "addiction to oil", making control over foreign oil reserves a non-issue? On the latter note, does our clever plan for preventing acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran involve making sure North Korea gets all of them? Or is it just that there's no spin to counter last month's successful nuclear test on the peninsula, so we'll stick with the other country that, through no real effort of our own, doesn't yet have nukes?

Extremists have now played their hand; the world can clearly see their ambitions. You know, when a Palestinian state began to show progress, extremists attacked Israel to stop the advance of a Palestinian state. They can't stand democracies. Extremists and radicals want to undermine fragile democracy because it's a defeat for their way of life, their ideology. "

Hm. As I recall, when the Palestinians elected a government we didn't like, we cut off all financial aid. And we haven't done much of anything there since, even though the afore-mentioned extremists still have that Israeli soldier and Israel is still pounding the snot out of the territories in retaliation. Sure, extremists made the provocation, but don't we care enough to try and intervene? Maybe lay some money and good will down and undercut them? Instead, we're starving out the Palestinians just because their democratic process elected people we don't like. I don't like them either, but we're not helping them, us, Israel or anyone in the area right now.

But that's okay, because he believes.

"He [Rumsfeld] is a smart, tough, capable administrator. As importantly, he understands that the best way to fight this war, whether it be in Iraq or anywhere else around the world, is to make sure our troops are ready, that morale is high, that we transform the nature of our military to meet the threats, and that we give our commanders on the ground the flexibility necessary to make the tactical changes to achieve victory.

This is a tough war in Iraq. I mean, it's a hard fight, no question about it. All you've got to do is turn on your TV. But I believe that the military strategy we have is going to work. That's what I believe, Peter. And so we've made changes throughout the war, we'll continue to make changes throughout the war. But the important thing is whether or not we have the right strategy and the tactics necessary to achieve that goal. And I believe we do. "

Why do you believe our strategy is going to work, Mr. President? We aren't meeting our benchmarks. We're losing soldiers every day -- October was a terrible month for us. The civil war in Iraq means that each one soldier we lose is matched by the deaths of tens or perhaps hundreds of Iraqis. If that's not failure, then what's the metric? The last place I want pure faith and guesswork is in military action -- especially if it's as critical to our national defense as you suggest.

But never mind that. What's the key message?

THE PRESIDENT: I think the coming election is a referendum on these two things: which party has got the plan that will enable our economy continue -- to continue to grow, and which party has a plan to protect the American people. And Iraq is part of the security of the United States. If we succeed -- and when we succeed in Iraq, our country will be more secure. If we don't succeed in Iraq, the country is less secure.

So the two issues I see in the campaign can be boiled down to who best to protect this country, and who best to keep taxes low. That's what the referendum is about. "

Really? Security and low taxes? I appreciate that you modified the inheritance tax exemption so that instead of applying to most Americans ($675,000) it now applies to almost all Americans ($3.5 million!), and soon we'll just revoke it altogether. I'm glad the economy will be spurred by a tax cut that swooshes right past most Americans without even a glancing blow to their income. I'm also glad that the focus on tax cuts means that we can have a $500 per child tax credit, such that every three kids means one less armored vest for our troops. I think it's entirely coincidental that we raised taxes in every war we ever won. Let's just go ahead and drop taxes, especially for wealthy people and rich corporate entities.

Maybe we can give them all some more no-bid contracts in Iraq while we're at it.

Anything to help.

David Kuo understands the 24-hour news cycle. It is voracious and amnesiac.

Earlier this month, the news was abuzz with revelations from David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. The biggie was that members of the Bush administration refer to evangelical Christians as "nuts."

But that's not really the point.

In his deeply personal and honest memoir, Kuo addresses head-on just how faith is manipulated to entirely political ends. As a true-believing, religiously conservative Christian, he worked for years in Washington to achieve the dream of a government of fellow believers who would pursue their goals of making the world a better place by stamping out drug abuse, poverty, crime and more.

Instead, Kuo became an inside witness to the way evangelical Christians have been manipulated for political purposes over the last decade or more. He has experienced, first hand, the disappointment of watching President Bush promise billions in tax credits for charitable giving and $200 million in "Compassionate" funding for community and faith-based groups, only to fail to deliver on either. He has written speeches aimed at convincing evangelical Christians that a politician really is one of them, while keeping that belief sufficiently "under the radar" to keep everyone else from thinking the person is too much of a winger.

He was part of the 2004 election-year effort to stage "nonpartisan" conferences or minorities and faith groups -- concidentally in battleground states.

He has seen the very thing that I have seen among other Christians -- the tendency to believe that because someone professes our faith, that means they're the best choice and can be trusted to look out for our beliefs once they're in office. More to the point, he's seen -- as we all really have -- that this is absolutely untrue.

Through it all, Kuo still believes that Bush is a good Christian and a smart man. It's worth pointing this out -- and the fact that Kuo also likes Karl Rove and others in the White House -- by way of saying that Tempting Faith is not a character assassination piece. In reality, it's a testimony to the fact that we can't legislate our way into a better culture, and even if we could, we can't honestly rely on political figures -- even those who seem to genuinely share our faith -- to push for that legislation.

Kuo paints politicians of all parties with the same brush of indifference, and I believe his account. His book is a good read for everyone, but is especially important for those in the Christian community who have been told, based on their beliefs, that they belong to a certain political party. If you're really a Christian, you belong to just one person, and He doesn't have a party affiliation.

Kuo advocates taking a two-year fast from political life. Not from voting, of course, but from lobbying, from mobilizing voters, from being a political rather than a religious entity. His message, as I read it, is to no longer let politicians -- any of them -- assume your support based on your religion or any other aspect of your life.

I've included some notable quotes from the book in the extended.

Here's an interesting excerpt from today's press conference that will probably go largely unreported due to the focus on the electoral drubbing and Rumsfeld being replaced:

Q Thank you, sir. During this campaign season some religious conservatives expressed support and appreciation for the work you've done. But some also expressed that they felt like they expended a lot of effort on your behalf without a lot of results. I wonder if you could tell us what parts of their agenda are still on your radar screen, and if you think they're right to be frustrated?

But, you know, Michael, you're probably following all these -- the different lists of concerns people have with my presidency, and I respect that. I just -- frankly, I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about in this question. I'm sure there are some people who aren't perfectly content, but there are some people that aren't perfectly content from different parties and different philosophies.

Bush indicates twice that he's not sure what the reporter is talking about in terms of dissatisfaction from religious conservatives. Look at this bit one more time:

And so I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, but I can tell you that I believe the faith-based and community-based -- the faith- and community-based initiative is a vital part of helping solve intractable problems here in America. And I would hope that I could work with Congress to make sure this program, which has been invigorated, remains invigorated.

Then go reread my review of David Kuo's book, or better yet, read the book itself. As Mr. Kuo detailed, President Bush's administration, in six years with a friendly Congress, never pushed for their promised religious initiatives. There was no credit for charitable giving, and the Charitable Choice fund was first underfunded (at $30 million rather than the promised $200 million) and then retasked entirely.

The faith-based initiative program was never invigorated by the Bush administration. He knows this. The religious conservative community was used for their votes, and then no effort was made to mobilize funding to faith-based groups, either directly from the Federal government or via a charitable giving tax credit.

Sounds like time for another letter.

Latest letter to the President, following these remarks.

Mr. President -

In your press conference today, you said:

"And so I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, but I can tell you that I believe the faith-based and community-based -- the faith- and community-based initiative is a vital part of helping solve intractable problems here in America. And I would hope that I could work with Congress to make sure this program, which has been invigorated, remains invigorated."

This is literally untrue. You have not invigorated the faith- and community-based initiative program. You instead have underfunded the Charitable Choice fund by about 85% and have failed to make even a mild push for a promised multi-billion-dollar charitable giving credit -- and all of that with six years of a friendly Congress. Instead, you and your party spent time on projects that explicitly help wealthier Americans, such as pushing the exemption on the estate tax from a reasonable $675,000 to a very high $3.5 million, leading to a projected loss of billions in charitable giving.

First-person accounts witness the fact that you have been told, more than once, about the continuing problems in this area. You have done nothing about them.

When you say the program has been invigorated, you are lying. If I could, I would say that directly to your face.

You help no one in doing this. It is callous and cowardly.

Cut it out.

CNN filed under "Offbeat News" the story of Randy Wooten, who lost in his bid for mayor in the small, small town of Waldenburg, Arkansas.

The ostensibly funny part of the story is that Mr. Wooten voted for himself, yet the voting machine tallied eighteen votes for each of the other two candidates and none for him.

So, to put this in a slightly less "news of the weird" manner -- a voting machine demonstrably failed to register a vote.

We're all shocked, I'm sure.

The CNN story

...and not in the good way.

President Bush says that we need to expand the military, and he's considering the possibility of increasing troop strength in Iraq.

Like a child, Bush runs things his way as long as he can, ignoring valuable advice given by experts in the field. Only a severe time out in the form of the congressional defeat of his party, gave him sufficient pause to start this half-assed attempt to change his plan.

But despite talking about "hard choices" and his usual return to the concept of sacrifice, Bush is mainly running his same old game. This week he signed the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 into law. When this is mentioned in the next election cycle, keep in mind that Bush is buying your affections very cheaply -- the average savings to you individually amount to just $99.33, and it will cost our country $45 billion over the next decade.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have $45 billion to spend on supporting our soldiers? Because for every four households getting a new tax break each year, one more American soldier doesn't get body armor. It's not such a pretty tax cut after all.

Someone should perhaps remind Bush, again, that in every war we ever won, we raised taxes. If he's not serious about this war, he probably shouldn't have started it.

The GAO's report on Transportation-Disadvantaged Populations came out this month. It opens with this precious line:

The evacuation of New Orleans in response to Hurricane Katrina was considered relatively successful for people with their own vehicles;

It then goes on to note that the 100,000 people without their own vehicles had a hell of a time getting out. Key points from the report:

• Private transportation providers may feel constrained by liability concerns
• 12% of urban plans (and 10% of state plans) adequately address evacuation of transportation-disadvantaged groups (that is, anyone without a car)
• "Furthermore, in one of five major cities GAO visited, officials believed that few residents would require evacuation assistance despite the U.S. Census reporting 16.5 percent of car-less households in that major city."
• Most state and urban areas seriously underestimate the preparation and planning required to move disabled people

The upshot? Have your own plan ahead of time, either your car or someone else's.

You can download the whole report by clicking here.

One sticking point for anti-immigration polemicists in the immigration debates of 2006 was that some individuals in pro-immigration rallies flew Mexican flags.

How un-American, right?

Well, that all depends. Are you perhaps a resident of Arizona or New Mexico? Because your flags have colors taken from Spanish standards. Admittedly, that's pretty historical.

Are you from California or Texas? Because your flags are actually the flags of independent nations, annexed either quickly (California) or after a while (Texas) into the United States.

Are you from Hawaii? Because your flag has a British flag on it.

Are you from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, or South Carolina? The flags of Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida all include reminders of the Confederate flag. Georgia's flag is the first national flag of the Confederacy, with the state seal superimposed in the middle. Mississippi's flag contains the stars and bars, the second national flag of the Confederacy. South Carolina continues to fly its flag from the secession years.

If the flag of a secessionist force that tried to destroy the United States and led to the deaths of millions of Americans is an acceptable part of our national cultural heritage, then I defy you to produce a legitimate complaint against immigrants to this country waving a Mexican flag at a rally. All the good people in my neighborhood who have Mexican flags on the backs of their cars go to work every day, pay into Social Security every day, and contribute to the fabric of my very healthy local community. If they want to acknowledge where they came from, that's great.

I'm glad to have them. I hope they're glad to have me.

I'll just quote the AP reporting, as quoted in this CNN article:

The Army general who was Joint Chiefs chairman when the Pentagon adopted its "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays says he no longer opposes allowing them to serve openly.

"These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers," Shalikashvili wrote in an opinion piece in Tuesday's New York Times.

This is a map of U.S. fatalities grouped by city, as shown by icasualties.org on their US Iraq Fatalities: City Map page (they hold the copyright in this image, which I'm using here in a review capacity).

I was struck by how much this looks like a map of "blue" states from the 2004 presidential election.

And if you look at California, you can see why it's a little harder to forget about war deaths here, especially if you live in Southern California.

The GAO released Comptroller General David Walker's testimony before the Senate Budget Committee today (you can read the full .pdf version by clicking here). The upshot? We're headed toward a financial crisis. With current administration policies, it's happening a good fifteen years earlier than it otherwise would, but it's happening no matter what, unless we enact major changes. Some notables quotes from his report:

The Prescription Drug Bill and tax cuts are both problems:

Even with short-term surpluses, we had a long-term problem in 2001, but it was more than 40 years out. Certainly an economic slowdown and budget decisions driven by the attacks of 9/11 and the need to respond to natural disasters have contributed to the change in outlook. However, these items alone do not account for the dramatic worsening. Tax cuts also contributed but the single largest contributor to the deterioration of our long-term outlook was the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill in 2003.

Our liability now is over twice what it was in 2000 -- $50 trillion instead of $20 trillion:

As widely reported, the $248 billion fiscal year 2006 unified budget deficit was lower than originally forecast and lower than last year’s deficit of $318 billion. While this improvement in the 1-year fiscal picture is better than a worsening in that picture, it did not fundamentally change our longterm fiscal outlook. In fact, the U.S. government’s total reported liabilities, net social insurance commitments, and other fiscal exposures continue to grow and now total approximately $50 trillion, representing approximately four times the nation’s total output, or gross domestic product (GDP) in fiscal year 2006, up from about $20 trillion, or two times GDP in fiscal year
2000.

We can't "grow our way out" of this financial hole:

The government can help ease future fiscal burdens through spending reductions, revenue actions, or both that reduce debt held by the public and enhance the pool of economic resources available for private investment and long-term growth. Economic growth is essential, but we will not be able to simply grow our way out of the problem. The numbers speak loudly: our projected fiscal gap is simply too great. To “grow our way out” of the current long-term fiscal gap would require sustained economic growth far beyond that experienced in U.S. economic history since World War II.

Economic growth will slow as medical and social spending rise, and by 2017 (ten years!) Social Security will no longer run a surplus:

Next year members of the baby boom generation start to leave the labor force. Reflecting this demographic shift, CBO projects the average annual growth rate of real GDP will decline from 3.1 percent in 2008 to 2.6 percent in the period 2012-2016. This slowing of economic growth will come just as spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will begin to accelerate—accounting for 56 percent of all federal spending by 2016 compared to 43 percent in 2006. As I noted earlier, today Social Security’s cash surplus helps offset the deficit in the rest of the budget, but growth in Social Security spending is expected to increase from an estimated 4.8 percent in 2008 to 6.5 percent in 2016. The result, as shown in figure 8, is that the Social Security surpluses begin a permanent decline in 2009. At that time the rest of the budget will begin to feel the squeeze since the capacity of Social Security surpluses to offset deficits in the rest of the budget will begin to shrink. In 2017 Social Security will no longer run a cash surplus and will begin adding to the deficit. That year Social Security will need to redeem the special securities it holds in order to pay benefits. Treasury will honor those claims—the United States has never defaulted. But there is no free money. The funds to redeem those securities will have to come from higher taxes, lower spending on other programs, higher borrowing from the public, or a combination of all three.

A group of Methodist ministers from across the nation launched an online petition drive Thursday urging Southern Methodist University to stop trying to land George W. Bush's presidential library.

They're trying to prevent the linking of a well-known Methodist institution with Bush's name, as well as the establishment an associated think tank that would be "dedicated to the philosophy of the Bush administration."

I don't know how you devote a think tank to covering your ass, but there you go.

You can read more about their effort at their petition site, www.protectsmu.org

CNN article

It's good to write down the promises and claims made during any State of the Union address. As David Kuo can attest, despite repeated claims of support, faith-based initatives were ultimately hung out to dry by a fundamentally uninterested President Bush. In that light, let's look at this year's State of the Union address and tally the promises and claims, in that order.

Overall, the address was unsurprisingly vanilla, choosing only the easiest applause lines, by and large. As many commentators pointed out, too much dead silence or half-hearted applause just wouldn't play well.

The Promises

Balance the Federal budget without raising taxes. As the GAO recently pointed out in an official report, although the 2006 unified budget deficit was lower than the year before, our national liability has more than doubled, from $20 trillion to $50 trillion, since Bush took over. In 2017, Social Security will no longer run a surplus, and then that particular "trick" of budget balancing will no longer be available.

Stop earmarks which amounted to $18 billion in 2005 -- notably, a year when the President's party was in power, and deeply disinclined to talk about this kind of thing. Also note that $18 billion is (1) a good savings and (2) chump change compared to our national deficit. Still, this is an easy claim for him to support -- although Republicans in Congress may hate him for it, when their own constituents get angry about lost earmarks.

Tax deductions for healthcare amounting to $7,500 for single individuals and $15,000 for families. Let's see if this happens, and if employers try to ditch health care plans as a consequence. This one is among his easy fixes -- it sounds good, it could actually help some people, and it doesn't require addressing anything about health care on a larger scale.

Provide Federal funds for state health care programs as long as they're programs that provide only private healthcare for the uninsured. There's no money there for any state-run programs, naturally.

Doubling the size of the Border Patrol which is a fairly meaningless increase, although it will cost a lot of money. Based on real-world examples of mostly secured borders (such as the Korean DMZ), we would need many, many times the current number of Border Patrol agents to have a chance of effectively shutting down border traffic. A doubling is like 20,000 more troops to Iraq -- half-assed. This part of the speech included the waffling statement that, "We need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country without animosity and without amnesty." That's another fabuluous splunge moment from Bush. Perhaps he'll see more success now that fewer of his fellow Republicans are around.

Comprehensive immigration reform is nothing new. Maybe it'll work this time.

A 20% reduction in gas use in the next ten years along with improved automotive efficiency standards, a mandate of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017, a doubling of the strategic oil reserve, and increased drilling. All of these are achievable, although the 20% decrease and the 35 billion gallons would require a heroic effort of a type that this administration has not shown any inclination toward. On the other hand, more drilling is, again, easy. I'm going to bet on that one for sure -- after all, it can be achieved within two years.

The Iraqi government must stop the violence or else nothing. Bush's tone is one of consequence, but his words speak of no consequences. They "must" do this, but we're not going to do anything if they don't. I think this empty statement is a pretty solid promise of things to come.

Set up an advisory council for the war on terror, consisting of members of both parties who, if Bush operates as usual, will be ignored regardless of party affiliation.

Add 92,000 soldiers to the military. This is a desperate need, largely as a consequence of Bush's Iraq misadventure.

Design and establish a volunteer civilian reserve corps with an unclear mandate. It sounds like he's trying to find a workaround for expensive contractors by making a "nonmilitary" that follows the structure of the current reserves. If they can find volunteers, more power to them. I'm sick of no-bid contracts to KBR and others who fail to feed our troops as required and overcharge for the unfinished job. I know volunteers will at least try.

$1.2 billion over 5 years to fight malaria in Africa. I hope he does this. More than any attempt to democratize the world, this will make it a better place and buy us decades of good will.

Fund the Millennium Challenge Account, which provides economic aid tied to performance indicators in developing countries. You can read more about the MCA by clicking here.

The claims

Minority students are closing the achievment gap if, by minorities, you mean Asians. Or, according to some reports, all minorities have improved, but others point to the troubling practice of dropping some minority tests scores, possibly to evade penalties under No Child Left Behind.

We have made advances in energy including solar, wind, clean diesel, biodiesel, clean coal, and ethanol. Of course, that's mainly on the backs of venture cap and some minor subsidies, and most of that has pushed toward ethanol, which is a dubious and incomplete solution. Biodiesel, which could actually provide all our fuel needs domestically (ethanol can't), has seen little to no Federal support.

Everything that went wrong in Iraq started with the Golden Mosque of Samarra, except that it really didn't, and Shiite militias were engaging in violence from the tail end of 2003 onward -- that would be about twenty months before the Golden Mosque was hit. And if you're honest with yourself and you paid attention to the news, you remember a whole lot of violence before then. In fact, about 2,300 or so of our soldiers were killed between the 1st of November, 2003 and the bombing of the Golden Mosque. That's right -- most of our people were killed well before anyone hit this particular Mosque.

"Every one of us wishes this war were over and won." But only he had the hubris to actually claim we'd won. Back in 2003.

"We didn't drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq." Let's shorten that to "we didn't drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan." Indeed, later on in the same speech, we hear that "In Afghanistan, NATO has taken the lead in turning back the Taliban and al Qaeda offensive..." which suggests that even Bush knows we didn't clear al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. This is a perpetual message of his administration, of course -- that they have solved our problems, but that the same problems remain, so it'd be best if we kept him in office without questioning his methods.

Our new axis is Cuba, Belarus, and Burma, because things most be said in threes to achieve rhetorical strength. This time, Bush picked nations that are highly unlikely to develop nuclear weapons and cause him to look weak anytime in the near future.

Although I eschew hope as a plan, I cleave to hope as a fundamental ingredient in my worldview. I have never believed that "the world is getting worse." I have never, ever wanted to live in the past, and I don't expect that to change.

Which is not to say that the things that give us hope will not be bleak. Two reasons I continue to have hope for America:

Man charged in 1964 killing of two young black men

US soldier jailed for Iraq deaths

The first story is hopeful because it demonstrates that we will, even after over forty years, attempt to seek justice, both individually and institutionally. The second story is hopeful because even in a time of war, we hold ourselves and our people to higher standards than the rest of the world. What other military actually charges its own with murder, convicts and jails them -- because the act was wrong, even in time of war?

There is always a struggle between those who think that we can give up that which makes us fundamentally American and yet somehow remain Americans, and those who know this is not true. But as long as the trend keeps going the way it's going, I have hope.

Glenn Greenwald writes here about the misuse ot the "commander in chief" title to imply that the President is everyone's war leader, rather than an elected public servant. In doing so, he mentions a Gary Wills editorial that notes that Eisenhower didn't trade salutes with military officers when he was President, because he considered himself a civilian -- but never-in-combat Presidents Reagan and Bush Jr. both follow(ed) the practice.

He also brings up the following quote on dissent with a wartime President, written by Theodore Roosevelt during the first World War:

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."

You can read this and other TR quotes at www.theodoreroosevelt.org

This sentence is the one you want to remember, should it come to a debate:

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. "

Remember, TR says failing to criticize is treasonable.

Amnesty International has begun offering Amnesty Wireless, a cellphone service that sends 10% of your phone charges to Amnesty and offers free calling to other Amnesty Wireless members as well as 30 minutes of free calling to certain political leaders each month.

This struck me as just an interesting new fund-raising mechanism until I hit that last bit, which is pure genius.

The Federal government plans to archive DNA samples from suspects detained by Federal authorities, following new rules instituted by DoJ in January of this year. This represents as change from previous policy, which only allowed archiving of DNA samples from convicts.

Naturally, this is upsetting to many, including folks from the ACLU. Carol Fredrickson, legislative office director for that group, made two good points, one of which I hadn't thought of before:

"DNA is far more than a simple fingerprint.

"The huge backlog of rape kits waiting to be tested will continue to grow as the government collects DNA from hundreds of thousands or even millions of individuals arrested or detained."

The former point will be more and more true as we gain more understanding about the genetic basis of many medical conditions and medical proclivities. Will your insurance company be able to issue a claim for access to DNA collected when you were held by the Park Service after failing to acquire a proper camping permit? Can they then change your rates based on that information?

The second point is very important. Have we checked to make sure we have the capacity to process all the new samples this will produce? Will evidence from violent crimes get absolute priority over processing the latest sample taken from a would-be illegal border crosser?

For the moment, we'll just have to wait and see how it's managed. A similar policy went into effect in California with the passage of Prop 69 in 2004. You can check on its status at the Office of the Attorney General by clicking here. According to their third quarter 2006 report, they have 827,066 samples on file, received 50,947 submissions in that quarter and have achieved 2,949 hits since their inception, aiding 3,191 investigations. According to the January, 2007 monthly report, they were able to cut their sample backlog from 176,220 to 158,546 and had 261 hits in that month. Given that they did that backlog clearance along with covering an additional 19,000 samples that came in that month, it looks good for them to be up to speed by 2008.

Of course, there's no indication if or how this may be impinging on other forensic DNA lab tasks.

al Jazeera article

Although I couldn't find any record that he was ever a Boy Scout, General Pace obviously picked up some solid training on American citizenship that Bush and Cheney lack:

A top Pentagon leader weighed in yesterday on the war debate and appeared to undercut the argument advanced by the White House and many GOP lawmakers that a congressional debate challenging the Bush plan would hurt troop morale.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee. He added that potential enemies may take some comfort from the rancor but said they "don't have a clue how democracy works."

Of course.

Democracy works because our means is our end. Chant it like a mantra. Our means is our end. There is no American "end" that can be achieved by non-democratic means such as saying it's unpatriotic to argue about a war plan or call the President on his stupid acts.

Theodore Roosevelt knew how this worked. It's sad that Bush and Cheney don't.

But then, one's a C student and the other never made it to Eagle (or Vietnam, but you know...).

Washington Post article

From the AP:

Nearly 60 countries signed a treaty on Tuesday that bans governments from holding people in secret detention, but the United States and some of its key European allies were not among them.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined comment except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty, but that the final text "did not meet our expectations."

Lest you get too caught up in the fact that we haven't signed on, consider everyone else who also declined to commit: Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain...

Notably, various Americans are currently being prosecuted (in absentia) or considered for prosecution in at least two of those countries for renditions carried out within their borders. Of course, inasmuch as the EU member states appear, based on documents from meetings with the US, to have agreed to the policy of allowing these renditions, the pending legal proceedings represent the people in those countries disagreeing with the official policy of their respective nations.

Or, in other words, carrying on a dialogue that will strengthen their respective democracies.

Everyone in charge ends up being a little suspect from time to time, don't you think?

The SF Chronicle has a good little story by Tyche Hendricks on Irish illegal immigrants. It's not a historical piece -- there's an active, present-day Irish illegal immigrant community in the U.S., with their own lobbying group in the form of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform.

Elaine, a San Francisco nanny who wouldn't give her last name because she lacks legal immigration status, plans to leave her 6-year-old son with her sister and fly to the nation's capital to join the call for comprehensive immigration reform on March 7.

"We're all in the same boat," she said. "The Irish are lucky because we speak English and we're white: We do get treated better. But we (undocumented immigrants) are all hard workers. We all want a better life."

If it were 12 million white illegal immigrants, would there be as much outcry?

That's not even a serious question, really.

In his editorial piece Victory is Not an Option, retired Lt. General William Odon gives a sober, cogent overview of the failings of current policy and offers an alternative plan.

For the record, that's one more plan offered as an alternative to the President's warplan.

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a "tactical draw" and make "regional stability" our measure of "victory." That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have.

The full essay is in the extended as I don't know if the Washington Post will keep the link live, but I recommend clicking here to read it on their site, as it crosslinks to other good content, such as a breakdown of the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

This SF Chronicle article reports on the group Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. This group includes a host of CEOs of larger and smaller corporations who are calling for fiscal responsibility in military spending.

Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, wrote a report that Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities distributes, pinpointing how to save $60 billion at the Pentagon by reducing the country's nuclear arsenal, cutting its National Missile Defense program, scaling back obsolete weapons, eliminating some forces and reducing earmarks in the budget. The group would like to see the money saved allocated to education, health care, alternative energy and other social programs. Its proposal does not address war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the so-called base military budget.

Military spending has an aura of sanctity in the US that is out of step with our national history. It also means that we can compartmentalize certain areas without seeing how they impact others. For example, the F-22 Raptor's unit price is over a hundred million dollars -- that is, each plane costs $120 million or more. That's 109,000 Interceptor vests, or 20,000 potentially superior Pinnacle Dragon Skin vests. The F-22 is fast and stealthy, but it's hard to say which opponent it's meant to counter, whereas it's clear that our troops need body armor and other routine supplies -- as well as research into better body armor, so they can keep their arms and legs and be even harder to kill or injure. The unit cost of the durable and effective A-10 is about $13 million, or about nine A-10s per F-22. And so on.

It's reasonable to constantly seek cost-cutting and cost-transfer (e.g. armor instead of F-22) within our military budget. This is explicitly a matter of protecting and supporting our troops, as any money wasted is money not spent giving them what they actually need.

This al Jazeera article reports that US government has indicated we'll be considering a lot more Iraqi refugees for resettlement here. According to that report, we've accepted 466 refugees since 2003, and only 202 in 2006, but have plans to interview another 7,000 by September of this year. We're also going to offer $18 million to UNCHR to help them handle Iraqi refugees elsewhere. Given the estimate of 2 million externally displaced Iraqis, that's about nine bucks a head. We can probably do better.

The DHS 2005 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics has some numbers on refugees and asylees accepted from various areas in 2005. Here are some values for the combined totals of refugees and asylees obtaining legal permanent resident status from various areas in 2005 (note that this is not the same as refugees arriving in 2005, which I'll discuss later, and which the al Jazeera report is talking about):

(Continued in the extended)

It's looking suspiciously like the pending British drawdown in Iraq is actually a switchover, as 1,400 troops are slated to head off to Afghanistan to reinforce British efforts against the Taliban. That will bring their total in Afghanistan to a couple hundred shy of 8,000 troops.

Secretary of Defence Des Browne claims that the increase in Afghanistan did not precipitate the drawdown in Iraq. Whether or not this is true, it's certainly a step in the right direction, and shows that the UK is moving toward a more rational application of its forces than our President's emotional investment in not being wrong allows.

Consider again that earlier this month, one of our own generals was in Brussels begging for 2,000 more troops, even as we were planning on tossing another 20,000 or so into Iraq. It's fortunate that, in the absence of timely help from most other NATO member states (save Poland, who upped their contribution from 100 to 1,000 troops), the British government had the will and the wit to send more troops to an area that was once a breeding ground for terrorism, and could be yet again -- potentially bringing Pakistan and its arsenal along for the ride, if we're not careful.

For the Conservatives the shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said the increase indicated that "we are taking a disproportionate burden".

He said success in Afghanistan was "essential" for global security and said there were now questions to be asked about the future of Nato.

I believe we have done tremendous damage to the willingness of NATO partners to participate in the war in Afghanistan, because by sending such limited resources to such a critical region, we've made it seem as unwinnable as the counterinsurgency in Iraq clearly is. Perhaps the additional British commitment will demonstrate that that is not so.

BBC article

In this column, Glenn Greenwald shreds Joe Lieberman's credibility by the audacious act of comparing what Joe's saying this year to what he said a little over a year ago:

Just compare these two statements:

How can Joe Lieberman claim today that we previously lacked sufficient troop strength to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared, when he insisted a year ago that we were holding neighborhoods -- he saw it himself -- and that we were therefore on the verge of success?

...and as Joe lies, he tells us that critiquing the lack of strategy in our executive is treasonous. Sounds familiar.

From Merriam-Webster:

sacrifice

1 : to offer as a sacrifice
2 : to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief, or end
3 : to sell at a loss

waste

1 : to lay waste; especially : to damage or destroy gradually and progressively
2 : to cause to shrink in physical bulk or strength : EMACIATE, ENFEEBLE
3 : to wear away or diminish gradually : CONSUME
4 a : to spend or use carelessly : SQUANDER b : to allow to be used inefficiently or become dissipated
5 : KILL; also : to injure severely

Even though McCain has officially regretted it by now, and Obama, while backing McCain's dedication to the troops, also officially regretted his own statement, it's clear that everyone has to actively try not to say "wasted" when talking about what Bush has done to our people in Iraq.

Compare the two words. We have no "ideals" here, unless the neocon fairytale of a magically democratic Middle East after we kill the big, bad wolf were to count as one. There is an end of some kind -- that same fairytale, as well as the additional end of "Bush trying to stall long enough to not have to admit failure on his own watch." In contrast, Bush and his coterie have clearly lain waste to our military. They have caused it to shrink in both physical bulk -- witness the continuing recruiting failures -- and in strength. They have gradually consumed our military, killing off its men and women, breaking its supplies, and grinding down those who yet live. And certainly, blatantly, they have squandered our people, carelessly throwing them into harm's way, choosing not only to go to war, but to do it in the worst, least-organized way possible.

There is a taboo against saying that our soldiers' lives are ever "wasted," as if to admit that would be to dishonor their personal sacrifice -- their choice to serve. This is exactly backwards. By refusing to admit that lives are wasted when we know that's what's happening, we let more lives continue to be thrown away for no reason at all.

It discourages me that both Senator McCain and Senator Obama are so easily bullied as to perpetuate the fiction that good people's lives are not being wasted in Iraq.

Finances have long been a target of anti-terrorist efforts. We freeze bank accounts of terrorist groups and problem nations. We similarly prosecute domestic sources of funding for external terrorists.

Similarly, we've shown in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent in Libya in the 80s, that attacking the host nation of a terrorist group can be a valid approach when you cannot otherwise reach that group.

Families of sailors killed in the suicide bombing of the USS Cole (in 2000, if you've forgotten) are combining these concepts to sue the government of Sudan for $105 million in damages. Their assertion is that Sudan facilitated the attac by providing material and diplomatic support for those who actually carried out the suicide bombing. Notably, the government of Sudan has not just blown the case off, and actually has lawyers in court contesting it. I was especially struck by this:

Sudan, which the US has listed as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1993, had sought unsuccessfully to dismiss the civil lawsuit on the grounds that too much time had passed between the bombing and the filing of the lawsuit in 2004.

I'm not clear why they're playing ball by even sending lawyers, but it may or may not be telling that they actually tried to get the case thrown out on a statute of limitations claim, as it were.

al Jazeera article

Valerie Plame Wilson is testifying today before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Her opening statement is captured in this CNN article, and is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand just how malicious and unpatriotic our current administration was in seeking to punish her husband through her.

I worked on behalf of the national security of our country, on behalf of the people of the United States until my name and true affiliation were exposed in the national media on July 14, 2003, after a leak by administration officials.

I raced to discover solid intelligence for senior policymakers on Iraq's presumed weapons of mass destruction programs.

...

My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department.

The CIA goes to great lengths to protect all of its employees, providing at significant taxpayers' expense, painstakingly devised and creative covers for its most sensitive staffers.

...

The harm that is done when a CIA cover is blown is grave but I can't provide details beyond that in this public hearing.

Furthermore, testimony in the criminal trial of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, who has now been convicted of serious crimes, indicates that my exposure arose from purely political motives.

I check into, but do not really listen to, KPFA, for much the same reason I only check in with Fox. Reporting with bias I can deal with, but in listening to either, you have to work around chains of buzzwords that the speakers can't help but choke out every time they mention a topic.

That said, there's more value to be found in KPFA than in Fox, by far.

The KPFA program Flashpoints featured a story yesterday about a policy of strip-searching at checkpoints in Israel and the Palestinian territories, with an emphasis on this having been done to children. While I was doing some follow-up reading at If Americans Knew -- the site of the those who compiled that report -- I found an article they'd included that made an interesting point. The problematic yield of American support for Israel is not just a matter of antagonizing Arab nations. It's also a matter of funding industries that compete directly with ours, including arms sales to countries we won't deal with (and given our own armament promiscuity, that may be saying a lot).

In general, this entire line of thinking highlights the lack of good cost-benefit analysis for everyone involved. The checkpointing policies described in the report aren't particularly helpful, and, like many semi-punitive measures, may tend to generate enemies rather than control them. Similarly, we aren't doing a good evaluation of our role vis-a-vis Israel. A friend suggested that our policy would be sounder if we cut our military aid to Israel and replaced it witha promise that we would not fall to an attack from outside. If we then went on to spread some of that money around the area, that would help reduce key pressures that lead to violence, such as poverty and lack of hope. And that, in the end, would even help Israel.

Republican Representative Christopher Shays was quoted today as saying that Congress should not "micromanage" the war in Iraq.

"Congress is not the commander in chief, and it shouldn't be," Shays said in an interview on Capitol Hill with The Associated Press.

"What happens if we stayed four more months (after the fall 2008 deadline) and we could win it?" he said. "A lot can happen in a year."

Ignoring the gambler's mentality of "just one more play, maybe I'll win this time" that he's espousing, return to 1993 and take a look at what Senator John McCain had to say about the situation in Somalia:

What is the criteria and what should be the criteria is our immediate, orderly withdrawal from Somalia. And if we do not do that and other Americans die, other Americans are wounded, other Americans are captured because we stay too long--longer than necessary--then I would say that the responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States who did not exercise their authority under the Constitution of the United States and mandate that they be brought home quickly and safely as possible. . . .

Similarly, from Republican Senator Dirk Kempthorne:

But, Mr. President, the longer we leave United States troops in Somalia under U.N. command, the longer we leave United States troops in unjustified danger. I owe my allegiance to the United States, not to the United Nations. It is time for the Senate of the United States to get on with the debate, to get on with the vote, and to get the American troops home.

For the record, Mr. Shays did not speak on Somalia in Congress in 1993 -- largely because the debate on Somalia was held entirely in the Senate. So he may be on solid ground peronsally, as much as Republican members of Congress may not be on such ground generally. However, it's worth mentioning that while John McCain spoke up defending the power of the president to commit troops, he similarly spoke up to defend Congress's right to defund a war of which it disapproved:

My concern is based on constitutional grounds. The President is the Commander in Chief. As such, he has the power to commit U.S. troops to meet any contingency. The Constitution grants the Congress the power of the purse. With the powers given it, the Congress may end those military operations by cutting off funding. The Constitution does not give the Congress the power to prevent the President from committing forces.

He also had this to say. See if it feels like it might apply a little more to today's Administration (except, perhaps, the idea of "assertive multilateralism"):

Let me stress, Mr. President, that I sympathize with Senators Dole and Nickles as they seek to impose some guidance for American foreign policy in an environment where little guidance, as well as little consultation with Congress on these matters, is forthcoming from the administration. There is a vacuum in foreign policy leadership in Washington at the moment, and that is a dangerous situation for this Nation to risk at such a challenging moment in history. Neither would I like to see a repeat of the administration's inattentiveness, miscalculations and vague inclinations toward assertive multilateralism that result in our recent misadventure in Somalia. Understandably, Senators Dole and Nickles have sought some action which would reduce the likelihood of future repetition of this kind of folly.

One would hope that with adequate consultation with Congress, the administration would avoid future blunders that needlessly put at risk the lives of our troops. If they do not avoid such mistakes, Congress has the right to refuse to fund them. However, I do not believe Congress should preclude or circumscribe the President's foreign policy leadership in advance of the policy's formulation. 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.

These later McCain quotes are from the Congressional record for the Senate, October 19, 1993.

So remember, kids -- John McCain says it's Congress's right to terminate erroneous wars "as quickly as we can by denying them funds."

Yesterday, Senator John Cornyn (R - Texas), said this on the Senate floor:

Madam President, I agree with the Senator from Arizona that the consequences of playing politics with this important funding for our troops is simply the wrong strategy; that what we have is a game of chicken between the House of Representatives, which is larding up a supplemental appropriations bill with a bunch of extraneous pork, and the President, recognizing that there are nonsecurity provisions in that supplemental appropriations, has said if that and the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is included as part of this emergency supplemental, he will veto it. So this is a high-risk game of chicken, with the impact of delaying passage of the supplemental being felt directly by our troops on the ground, if that is in fact the result.

He's expressing agreement with Senator Jon Kyl, (R - Arizona). One wonders if perhaps he's not so hot about agreeing with the other Senator from Arizona, who, as I mentioned this week had this to say about defunding a war in progress:

One would hope that with adequate consultation with Congress, the administration would avoid future blunders that needlessly put at risk the lives of our troops. If they do not avoid such mistakes, Congress has the right to refuse to fund them.

Mr. Kyl is not on the record from 1993 on his views on Somalia and Congress's control over war funding because he wasn't a Senator at the time. Instead, he was over in the House, arguing for a reduction in the capital gains tax.

He probably is the safer one to agree with, if you're going to argue for this fundamental change in the Republican position on the powers of Congress over war.

Judge Thomas Hogan of the DC District Court has dismissed a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld and others on the grounds that nine people who were tortured on Rumsfeld's watch did not have American constitutional rights, and that Rumsfeld was immune to such lawsuits anyway.

Hogan simultaneously accepted that the evidence demonstrated that the nine men -- five Iraqi, four Afghan -- had, indeed, been tortured while being held in American facilities. This torture included:

• Being hung upside-down and beaten unconscious
• Being stabbed
• Being electrocuted
• Sleep deprivation
• Being attacked by dogs
• Sexual humiliation

I have no idea if courts elsewhere care about things being on the record in the US, but it's there now. The case was dismissed on expected procedural grounds, but the torture evidence was firm enough to convince a judge.

BBC article

Yesterday, in opposing a planned withdrawal date from Iraq, John McCain said this:

You might not know it from reading newspapers or watching the evening news, but in Iraq today there are real signs the new strategy is working. I wish to spend a few moments outlining some of this progress, not to paint an overly rosy scenario but, rather, to correct what has become an almost single-minded focus in the Congress on the prospects of defeat. The debate in Congress has an ``Alice in Wonderland'' quality about it: We are debating efforts to micromanage a conflict based on what the conditions were 3 months ago, not on what the reality is today. Conditions have changed in Iraq. The Baghdad security plan--the ``surge''--is working far better than even the most optimistic supporter had predicted. The progress is tangible in many key areas despite the fact only 40 percent of the planned forces are in Iraq.

In Baghdad, the military has reported an increase in real-time, actionable intelligence provided to U.S. and Iraqi forces by a newly confident population. Prime Minister Maliki, who prevented U.S. troops from conducting certain Baghdad operations last year, has given the green light to American incursions throughout the city, including Shiite strongholds. All of the Iraqi army battalions called for under the plan have arrived, many at or above 75 percent of their programmed manning levels. Bomb attacks and murders are down since the surge began. Civilians killed in Baghdad numbered 1,222 in December, 954 in January, and fell to 494 in February. There are reports of Sunni and Shia moving back into neighborhoods from which they had fled constant and horrific violence. Markets that have been subject to horrific car bombings have been turned into pedestrian malls that facilitate commerce and thwart terrorists.

That does sound impressive -- that would be a 60% drop in civilian deaths in just two months.

Let's take a longer look back. Now, these are all-Iraq numbers, so they'll be a little higher. That said, most death totals for Iraq largely reflect deaths in Baghdad. It's also hard to actually untangle civilian and police deaths, since they tend to be reported together, so these numbers include both. I've also appended a percentage change from the preceding month to the listed month.

I'm really not sure where McCain managed to find stats suggesting that 60% drop, by the way. I suspect very creative accounting at work there. Applied to deaths, that's fairly obscene.

March 2007: 1,396 (-9%)
February 2007: 1,531 (-15%)
January 2007: 1,802 (+3%)
December 2006: 1,752 (-6%)
November 2006: 1,864 (+20%)
October 2006: 1,539 (-56%)
September 2006: 3,539 (+19%)
August 2006: 2,966 (+230%)
July 2006: 1,280 (+47%)
June 2006: 870 (-22%)
May 2006: 1,119 (+10%)
April 2006: 1,009 (-7%)
March 2006: 1,092

So, the first troops of our new surge arrived in Baghdad in late January. Perhaps they're responsible for the drops seen in February and so far in March (although March isn't done yet, and the totals may not include the revenge mass murder in Tal Afar yesterday, or the truck bombing that precipitated it). That said, the record shows far bigger variances that were apparently independent of any change in our strategy. The drop between May and June of last year is about the same as that one we've seen across the entire "surge" period to date, and the drop between September and October is positively precipitous compared to the current mild decline.

John McCain also appeared on television saying that Baghdad was so safe that General Petraeus moves around in a normal HMMWV -- this is part of McCain's repetition of the tired assertion that Donald Rumsfeld used to pull out to insist that "things are going better than you think" in Iraq. CNN Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware had this to say when asked to reality check McCain's remarks:

It's unclear what part of Neverland that Senator McCain is talking about, where Americans can stroll the streets of the capital, Baghdad. If al Qaeda doesn't get an American, if a Shia militia isn't tipped off, if the Sunni insurgents don't grab him, then a criminal gang will see dollar signs and take him immediately.

Also note that American military casualties since the surge began have been higher than all but two months of 2006.

Casualty figures for Iraqis and Americans are taken from icasualties.org. Remember, as they indicate as well, Iraqi deaths are chronically underreported.

I'll just quote the CNN article:

The Arizona Republican, who is one of the war's most outspoken supporters, became testy when pressed about his recent remarks that there are areas of Baghdad where Americans can travel safely.

"I just came from one," he said, referring to his trip to the outdoor market, which required a heavy military escort. "I've been here many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport. Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

I even voted for him in the 2000 primary.

A fierce battle in central Baghdad on Tuesday left four Iraqi soldiers dead, 16 US soldiers wounded and a US helicopter damaged by ground fire.

...

In other news, the US military announced the deaths of four more soldiers - three killed by a roadside bomb and secondary explosion in southeastern Baghdad and a fourth in combat in Iraq's western Anbar province.

The roadside bomb victims had been conducting raids against anti-government fighters in the area, and had recently captured five suspects, the military said in a statement.

Mr. Pence's analogy still isn't selling me on any trips to Indiana. As a completely related aside, Indiana has lost its fair share of people -- 63 American soldiers from Indiana have been killed so far in Iraq. Considered in proportion to its population, this is comparable to the 341 soldiers lost from California. I'm guessing all of them would have been safer back at home.

al Jazeera article

Casualty tally taken from the icasualties.org "By State" index.

Star player of the manslaughter-prone lethal tetrad, Paul Wolfowitz, has taken a break from his world tour promoting privatization as the cure to all ills to get into serious trouble over his own corruption.

Given that he was rewarded for his American-killing incompetence with a job heading the World Bank, it's no surprise that Wolfowitz thinks nepotism is okay.

Earlier it was revealed that he had directly intervened in the arrangements for Ms Riza’s transfer to the US State Department in mid-2005 to avoid a conflict of interest after his contentious appointment as head of the World Bank at the behest of the White House. Under World Bank rules, staff are banned for working under the direction of a colleague with whom they are romantically involved.

Details emerged of a memorandum from Mr Wolfowitz instructing Xavier Coll, the Bank’s human resources head, over the terms for Ms Riza’s secondment. This led to her being given an exceptional salary rise and enhanced annual pay awards, lifting her earnings to $193,000 (£97,600) a year tax-free — an $61,000 rise overall. The memo also set out arrangements for her promotion.

He'll probably keep this job, and get to keep up his policy of following his beliefs over reality, no matter how many people die as reality proves him wrong.

The Times Online
al Jazeera article

Ronald Reagan

1983 Beirut barracks bombing - 241 American military dead

Bill Clinton

Battle of the Black Sea - 18 American military dead

George Bush

Invasion and occupation of Iraq - 3,296 and counting

In a photo op with General Petraeus today, George Bush said this:

I believe strongly that politicians in Washington shouldn't be telling generals how to do their job.

Really?

So you wouldn't, say, ignore the war plan one of your best generals put together and instead choose to promote a belief that doesn't fit reality but which your political cronies like, leading to the deaths of several thousand of our people? And you wouldn't then add 20,000 troops to Iraq against the recommendations of your own military officers, even as you ignore requests for more troops from our officers in Afghanistan?

That's good. I feel better, knowing you don't believe politicians should overrule generals. What other wisdom do you have for us?

An artificial timetable of withdrawal would say to an enemy, just wait them out; it would say to the Iraqis, don't do hard things necessary to achieve our objectives; and it would be discouraging for our troops.

Hmmm. So by having an open-ended commitment in Iraq, we're forcing the Iraqis to do the hard work now? Really? Because I've seen how the average American student approaches a task when no deadline is given. Maybe Iraqis just work differently.

And therefore I will strongly reject an artificial timetable withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job.

Ah. Perhaps he needs to be told that he's a Washington politician who has consistently told those who wear the uniform how to do their job -- and how to do it poorly, at that.

You may have heard or read in the news about a serving officer criticizing the failures of American generals in Iraq. The Army was quick to distance itself officially from this letter -- unsurprising, since the letter calls into question most of the military's "business as usual." Heard as a sound bite, the letter sounds like pure criticism, and something that can safely fall off the news cycle and be ignored.

It's not, though. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling has written a strong, important critique of how the American military works. More to the point, he tossed aside George Bush's pathetic straw man defense and provided a plan for change.

When Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster critiqued the US military, I read and reviewed what he wrote. Similarly, I read and reviewed Lt. Col. John A. Nagl's book on counterinsurgency, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Not coincidentally, Yingling mentions Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife in his piece.

Yingling opens with a discussion of "the responsibilities of generalship." Choosing war, he tells us, is the province of policymakers and the people. Generals, on their own, are no more qualified to choose war than any other citizen. Their job -- and it's a critical job -- is to prepare for war and evaluate our readiness for war. When policymakers and the people choose to go to war, the generals must give a sober evaluation of whether or not we can achieve success. If they determine that we can't, they have to tell policymakers that, and then the policymakers can figure out whether they can drum up enough support to gain the resources we need -- whether it be in manpower or economic assets -- to meet the requirements of the generals.

No one can perfectly prepare for the next war, but one can try to get as close as possible. Yingling quotes Sir Michael Howard on this point:

"In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly."

As he points out, one can either fight the last war, and lose -- as the French military did in the second world war -- or rethink things and win -- as the Germans did against France in that very same war.

Yingling moves on to Vietnam, the first major failure of American generalship. As he and many others have pointed out, the American military failed to acknowledge a basic shift in the kinds of wars we'd be fighting after World War II and Korea, even in the face of explicit evidence from the French experience in Indochina. Even when President Kennedy saw that war would be heading toward counterinsurgency rather than salients and tank battles, the generals stayed in their comfort zone.

The biggest failures in Vietnam, however, came from generals who explicitly saw the problems and simply said nothing about it:

Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America's generals.

After the war, the generals made a concerted effort to forget any lessons that might have been learned:

An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.

Through the 80s the American military focused on large-scale warfare with the Soviets. Our subsequent success in pushing the conventional forces out of Iraq were taken as a sign that we were on the right track, as was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, as Yingling points out, we sped the collapse of the Soviet Union by funding an insurgency in Afghanistan. In other words, we attacked our opponents by insurgency, but refused to admit its power or importance. Thus, the 90s saw us continuing to gear up for conventional warfare -- even though the Battle of the Black Sea showed us that the odds were good we'd be fighting against folks with rifles and man-portable antitank weapons, rather than Soviet T-72s and MiGs.

Then, we went to war in Iraq -- and the first, and most critical, failure of generalship struck:

The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.

This is important, and stunningly similar to Vietnam. Bush and his apologists like to say that no one knew how bad it would be. Perhaps that's true -- although that represents a massive failure that Yingling addresses later on. But everyone knew, from hard, empirical evidence, taken from recent history, that we would need far, far more troops than we planned to send. As Yingling points out, only General Shinseki, whom the Bush administration did their best to shame, said that we needed a couple hundred thousand more soldiers to safely pacify Iraq. All the other generals stood by as manslaughter was committed in advance by "planners" who suggested we'd be down to only 5,000 troops in Iraq 12-18 months after the invasion.

Troop strength alone was not the only failure. Despite their own modeling showing that the State Department would be unable to pick up many of the tasks required for occupation, the "planners" still assumed State would handle most of the governing duties. Then, after making these two critical missteps, the generals made a huge third mistake by failing to adapt to the counterinsurgency in Iraq. This is unsurprising, given the assiduous avoidance of counterinsurgency theory and training over the last half century.

Finally, in another sick mirror of Vietnam, "America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public."

The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations.

So, that's a lot of critiquing. We have a general officer corps that misrepresents things when they don't fit executive policy, that says it is "intimidated" into silence by upper management, that will let our men and women be sent to war with half (or less!) the troops they need, and that have eschewed training in the key areas of modern war.

How do we fix this?

Yingling sets out some key areas where things need to change, and he tasks Congress with exercising its power to make sure this happens. Note that here, a military officer believes that Congress should exercise control over the military, something that George Bush has a problem with. Curious disagreement, isn't it?

Here are the changes Yingling wants us to make:

• Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.
• Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer's potential for senior leadership.
• To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.
• Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.

There you go. Lt. Col. Yingling has given us solid suggestions for fixing the critical problems that have led us to failure not once, but twice in the last half century. The next time a politician uses the dodge that "we shouldn't tell our generals what to do" to defend bad policy, we might all do well to read Lt. Col. Yingling's essay one more time, then find ourselves some new generals.

You can read Lt. Col. Yingling's piece by clicking here.

Retired General William Odom, head of the NSA during the Reagan administration, is advising President Bush to sign the current budget legislation that would mandate an American withdrawal from Iraq.

"The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place," he said. "The president has let (the Iraq war) proceed on automatic pilot, making no corrections in the face of accumulating evidence that his strategy is failing and cannot be rescued. He lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies."

As it happens, Odom agrees with something John McCain said way back in 1993. Here's the McCain quote:

One would hope that with adequate consultation with Congress, the administration would avoid future blunders that needlessly put at risk the lives of our troops. If they do not avoid such mistakes, Congress has the right to refuse to fund them. However, I do not believe Congress should preclude or circumscribe the President's foreign policy leadership in advance of the policy's formulation. 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.

From the article discussing General Odom's advice to Bush:

Odom said he doesn't favor congressional involvement in the execution of foreign and military policy, but argued that Bush had been derelict in his responsibilities.

Indeed, it seems like military officers everywhere are calling for Congressional intervention in Iraq.

No longer quite so proud of his Gold Star for Exceptional Failure in the Line of Duty from Bush, George Tenet now claims that he really, honestly, is Totally Not to Blame for even a smidgen of the war in Iraq.

He points out -- accurately -- that there was "never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat..." as if that exonerated him for his complicity in tilting the intelligence and going to war on the strength of a single, compromised source and wish fulfilment.

In other words, he's saying that he knew their case was broken, and he remained silent. This is exactly the kind of career-minded cowardice that Lt. Col. Yingling wrote about in his recent essay.

Fortunately, others aren't letting Tenet get away with this disgusting attempt to shift blame away from himself. As reported in this CNN article, six former CIA officers have written a letter to Tenet calling him out on his cowardice:

In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership."

"This intelligence was ignored and later misused."

You can click here to read the full letter.

These men are absolutely right. Tenet should give up the medal. His attempt to cover his ass with his new book compounds his failure of courage with abject immorality. It would be better simply to admit failure and then attempt to fix some of the damage.

Maybe he could volunteer for an NGO in Iraq.

George Bush has, unsurprisingly, vetoed the current military spending bill with its withdrawal clause, despite being urged to sign the bill by an experienced military officer.

"Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible," Bush said in a televised address after the veto.

He's right. You can't just rush a failure. Something that's merely a terrible failure that's cost us thousands of lives right now could really blossom into a spectacular failure that costs us tens of thousands of lives. As long as we don't set a date, or define success, or have clear goals, there's always room for more failure.

CNN article
BBC article
al Jazeera article

At the most recent Republican debate, candidate Ron Paul was attacked by Guiliani and others after suggesting that the terrorist attacks of 2001 were spurred by prior American actions.

In this editorial, CNN commentator Roland Martin takes Guiliani and the others to task for their willful ignorance in pretending our actions don't have consequences, as well as the fallacious idea that by saying "Here's why they killed people" Ron Paul or anyone else is saying that it's okay that terrorists killed people.

Here's the punchline from Martin's very cogent essay:

As Americans, we believe in forgiving and forgetting, and are terrible at understanding how history affects us today. We are arrogant in not recognizing that when we benefit, someone else may suffer. That will lead to resentment and anger, and if suppressed, will boil over one day.

Even the Bible says that the children will pay for the sins of their fathers.

Also, as Ron Paul's site points out, the idea that the terrorists who hit us in 2001 were motivated by previous American acts comes directly from the 9-11 Commission Report, so it's more than a little unsettling to hear Guiliani say he's "never heard anything so absurd."

Heck, that's unsettling even without the link to the report. What's at all absurd about the idea that our national policies may have angered people in the past? American foreign policy has angered other Americans. Surely the rest of the world might respond similarly?

Incidentally, of the Republican candidates, Ron Paul actually looks decent. I'll take an honest libertarian over a spend-crazy authoritarian pretending to be a libertarian any day.

Here's a particularly important procurement issue -- is Pinnacle's body armor better than the current Second Chance Interceptor vests that are issued to our troops?

As I discussed over a year ago, Second Chance has an unenviable record of selling body armor that rots under that rare battlefield condition -- contact with sweat. This only came to light after a round went right through the vest of a California police officer, but Second Chance subsequently received a second chance, and swears it isn't knowingly selling defective product. Back in late 2005, many people were lobbying for the adoption of Pinnacle's Dragon Skin body armor system. The chief selling points of Dragon Skin at the time were its flexible rather than rigid structure, and its ostensibly greater protective capabilities.

Now, prompted by repeated calls for better armor and an NBC story suggesting that Dragon Skin really is better than Interceptor, the Army's armor testing program has gone on the record saying that Dragon Skin didn't work in testing last year. Pinnacle has responded, claiming that testing was both incomplete and rigged for failure, driven by the testers' discomfort with the concept of flexible armor. As they note here, the Dragon Skin level III vests passed ballistic tests at Aberdeen Test Center last year.

Soldiers for the Truth, who originally made noise about the failure of Interceptor vests, has this to say on the topic:

Well, folks, sometimes things move much faster in Washington than experience would lead one to expect. This happened Monday and yesterday (May 21 and 22) when Sen. Carl Levin and Sen. John McCain, Chairman and Ranking Minority Member respectively, of the Senate Armed Services Committee short-circuited the public dispute between the Army acquisition mafia and NBC News about recent NBC reporting (assisted by SFTT and DefenseWatch) that showed Pinnacle Armor's Dragon Skin performed "significantly better" (the words of retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing) than the DOD issued Interceptor Body Armor system in the first-ever comparative "shoot-off."

They also have a White Paper on the topic of equipping our troops with the best possible body armor. A key figure I hadn't seen before is the Armed Forces Medical Examiner analysis of torso wounds. It concludes that 80% of Marines killed by shots to the torso would have been saved by armor with more comprehensive coverage (as is provided by Dragon Skin).

It's not yet known whether Dragon Skin really is as effective as many people believe it to be. It's certain, however, that a procurement system that continues to buy body armor from a company that fraudulently sold lethally defective merchandise to soldiers and peace officers is deeply suspect when it claims to be making the "best" decision on how to protect our troops.

You may have missed this, but the Washington Post has recently covered the fact that our tax-dollar funded, theoretically American-propaganda-oriented Arabic-language news station, Al Hurra, has been broadcasting all sorts of fundamentalist rantings and ravings.

From Joel Mowbray's opinion piece in the Post:

Al-Hurra was intended to cut through the anti-West and anti-U.S. propaganda that permeates even mainstream Arab media. Stories in that vein no longer see significant airtime, and nowhere is this more apparent than Al-Hurra's new approach to the Holocaust--the treatment of which in Arab society embodies so much that is wrong in that critical region of the Muslim world.

Also broadcast unchallenged were the remarks of the infamous French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who informed Arab viewers: "Gas chambers and mass killings of the Jews, in the way that it is pretended (by the Jews), is completely untrue, and an historical lie."

Al Hurra also broadcast all of an hour-long speech by Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Yes, that's the Hezbollah that we've classed as a terrorist group.

Should it seem peculiar that new Al Hurra programming director Larry Register would do such a thing, consider the fact that he speaks no Arabic. In fact, most of the upper echelon folks currently overseeing the channel speak no Arabic. This may be quirky of me, but I think if I were in any way responsible for a broadcast station meant to foster good public relations with a hugely critical part of the world, I'd bust my ass trying to learn the language.

Mowbray closes his editorial with this message:

But that's not enough. The people who already monitor the network--its employees--need to be empowered to report dubious decisions without fear of reprisal. Transparency will allow concerns to be investigated swiftly. Employees simply won't come forward, though, if they believe no one in power cares. For that reason, a clear signal must be sent by firing Mr. Register.

After all, if you can't get fired for using U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide a platform for Islamic terrorists and help further Holocaust denial, then wouldn't Congress and the Bush administration be communicating that pretty much anything goes?

I agree. Write a letter to the fool we have in the executive now, as well as your Senators and Representative. The trickle-down pattern of rank incompetence costs us money and lives, and now it's promoting radical terrorism on our dime.

The full opinion piece
Another opinion piece, reprinted on Representative Steve Rothman's site

Here's a template, if you'd like to write to the President and your Senators and Rep about the travesty of Al Hurra promoting terrorist messages using your money.

[Politician's name] -

I am writing to express my deep dismay at the fact that Alhurra, a news station funded by American taxpayers, has been broadcasting extremist messages by known terrorist leaders. This negligence and disregard for the safety of the many American soldiers and civilians working in the Middle East is intolerable, and must be stopped immediately. Programming director Larry Register must be fired, to be replaced by someone who understands the driving purpose of Alhurra, and who also has the basic competence to speak the language the station broadcasts in. Alhurra itself must also be completely reviewed, especially the levels of upper management. This includes the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who have been derelict in their duty as the true directors of Alhurra.

We need quick, decisive action on this topic before any American lives are lost as a result of continued incompetence.

[My name]

As I've discussed recently, American politicians have a pathological fear of admitting that actions have consequences. Indeed, we've learned that the penalty for marketing a lethal product to American soldiers is to have your contract renewed, that we broadcast propaganda for terrorists without any oversight to stop it, that there are no real checks on failed or even corrupt procurement practices, that it's okay to redefine our goals rather than admit failure, and that the penalty for real, solid failure is either a Medal of Freedom or a job heading the World Bank.

Imagine if, instead, the penalty for dereliction of duty were death?

The former head of China's Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, was just sentenced to death for corruption. Zheng stands accused (and we suppose now convicted) of accepting just shy of a million dollars in bribes to allow many drugs and other products onto the market without proper oversight. This corruption may well have contributed to many deaths over the last few years.

I'm not actually advocating execution for malfeasance that leads to injury or death, but prison and admission of responsibility would be an amazing start. A standout quality of America is our relative lack of corruption. I'm dismayed, if not surprised, that a bunch of people who like to claim moral authority are the ones most prone to corruption of the rankest, most lethal sort. Do you suppose I care more about someone's adultery, or someone else's sweetheart deal that puts our soldiers in defective body armor?

Of course, those who seize the moral high ground most stridently and publically have a long and tainted pedigree.

I'd like some more responsibility, wouldn't you?

Thanks to Tim for the original link. Two weeks ago the University of Massachusetts, Amherst piled onto the honoring mediocrity bandwagon by deciding to give an honorary degree for "public service" to Iraq war co-founder Andrew Card. The actual honor grads and the audience were having none of it:

Excuse me for a moment as I dip into profanity for one sentence:

This asshole just lost his cruel, harassing lawsuit against some unfortunate immigrants who may now well hate America forever. From the BBC article:

A US judge has lost a $54m (£27m) claim against a South Korean dry-cleaning firm which lost a pair of his trousers.

Legal groups have said the case, which has dragged on for two years and involved thousands of hours of legal investigative work, has damaged the image of the US judicial system.

No kidding. The Chungs have indicated that they're considering going back to South Korea. Seriously, who can blame them? Why try at the American dream when some idiot in a position of a authority can destroy your lives because he's got nothing else going on with his? Hell. You can get that anywhere else in the world.

The National Labor Relations Board is calling for Roy Pearson to be debarred, so he can no longer be a judge.

It's kind of sad when your whole life in the legal profession results in a Wikipedia entry about you being a complete schmuck.

Although it's what I expected, I'm glad that our legal system is not so broken as to allow this idiot to win his case. It is broken enough that the poor folks he sued can only now get out from under two years of stress and legal fees.

Senator Richard Lugar and Senator George Voinovich, both senior Republicans, have called this week for some kind of coherent Iraq exit strategy to be developed.

Senator Voinovich had this to say:

"It's time for the United States to put together a comprehensive plan for gradual disengagement in Iraq," Voinovich said. "We're running out of time and I don't think it's fair to the next administration to say, 'Hey by the way, we're leaving this baby for you guys to figure out.' "

It's inspiring to see a partisan voice clearly call for not making this "someone else's problem", where that "someone else" is anyone other than George Bush, Dick Cheney, and friends.

Senator Lugar said this:

"The president may believe that he can simply continue on with or without the congress, but I think he is wrong in that assumption.

"My fear is that at some point we will have a withdrawal from Iraq that is very disorderly and not very well planned," he said in excerpts released by the station.

"That would be a tragedy for the troops, a tragedy for Iraq, a tragedy for us."

Again, the Senator sees the actual strategy of "failure after, but not on, my watch" that the current administration is using and refuses to go for it.

Of course, they're already being sniped at by other members of their own party. Consider this particular bit of nonsense from Lindsey Graham:

As much as I respect Sen. Lugar, I think it's unfair to the troops in the field to say the surge is not working."

"The military part of the surge is definitely working," Graham said. "There's no question in my mind that there's improvement in stability and new political alliances being formed."

It's unfair to the troops to say that the asinine, not-actually-a-surge "surge" strategy isn't working? Seriously? It's a little more unfair to them to put them continuously in harm's way to try and hide George Bush's ever-swelling shame. But Mr. Graham feels okay, because there's "no question in [his] mind" that the surge is working, and new alliances are being formed. Of course, John McCain thought it was working two months ago, but his numbers were made up. Despite the real and continuing trend of increasing violence over time and the fact that both the Iraqi military and that nation's infrastructure are largely imaginary, die-hard war supporters won't let reality stand in the way of their strong beliefs.

Curiously, reality still appears to disagree with people like Mr. Graham. Consider the fact that the Iraqi army can't hold areas cleared by American troops during our recent offensive in Baquba. But that's okay, because new alliances are being formed. Specifically, we're making deals with local militant groups to help fight al Qaeda.

Obviously, part of the pressure here comes from the pending election season. While it's sad that people need to be kicked into action by the possibility of losing their jobs, this highlights something very important -- this is why we have elections. Whether they're caring people or cynical bastards, our political figures depend on our continued good mood to keep their jobs.

This, at least, is democracy in action.

CNN article
al Jazeera article

(Notice that the al Jazeera article is willing to show a wounded American soldier in the field. This is something our own media and government bodies tend to assiduously avoid, in an act of intense disrespect for our soldiers who have volunteered to serve us around the world. It's not a good thing to pretend that our people don't pay for our choices.)

Congratulations on your strong support for perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying. With the commuting of Lewis Libby's sentence, you have made an impressive stand for immorality and lawbreaking.

I continue to be as proud of my nation as I am saddened to see you damaging it day by day. I do wish your behavior and policies matched your rhetoric.

(My letter to George Bush today, in light of his commuting of the sentence of Lewis Libby. Notice how he's too cowardly to not do this, yet also too cowardly to actually pardon the man. Also note that he rarely ever modifies a jail sentence -- less than any other president in a century, in fact. His fondness for perjuring sidekicks must be strong and abundant.)

Joe Lieberman spoke yesterday in the Senate against a number of amendments to a pending defense bill. Setting aside discussion of those amendments, consider his remarks:

Six months ago, this Chamber voted unanimously to confirm GEN David Petraeus as commander of our forces in Iraq. The fact is - which we all acknowledge - before that, the administration had followed a strategy in Iraq that simply was not working. It was a strategy focused on keeping the U.S. force presence as small as possible, regardless of conditions on the ground, and of pushing Iraqi forces into the lead as quickly as possible, regardless of their capabilities to do so.

General Petraeus oversaw - let me step back. General Petraeus was part of a process, along with others, that presented a dramatically different strategy to the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief. He accepted that dramatically different strategy, which was to apply classic principles of counterinsurgency that have been successful elsewhere, so that instead of our main goal being to get out of Iraq, our main goal became to protect the civilian population that the terrorists were persistently attacking, bringing chaos throughout the country, including particularly in the capital city of Baghdad, and making it impossible for a new Iraqi Government to take shape.

Wait...so Joe's saying our old strategy was to eschew decades of counterinsurgency strategy and keep our force in Iraq as small as possible, and now General Petraeus has turned this all around?

I'll give him the latter half of that remark -- we did, indeed, fail to apply time-tested counterinsurgency techniques for much of our time in Iraq to date, despite a respected British officer clearly pointing out that we were screwing things up and despite many junior to mid-rank officers knowing we were screwing things up. If General Petraeus has finally reversed Lt. Col. Paul Yingling's failure in generalship, that can only be a good thing. In fact, it appears that Petraeus is on course to do one of the things Lt. Col. Yingling requires of a good general -- tell the truth. He recently said that the Iraq counterinsurgency could take quite a while, citing the long, long-term example of Northern Ireland, and saying the "average counter insurgency is somewhere around a nine or a ten year endeavour." Maybe he'll follow this up by discussing our troop totals in Iraq.

This brings us to the curious part of Lieberman's comment, where he says that our initial, incorrect goal was to keep the American presence "as small as possible, regardless of conditions on the ground." While that may have been the goal of the currently unnamed all-star moron who claimed U.S. force levels would be down to 5,000 troops on the ground within 12-18 months of the invasion, it doesn't fit the reality of our numbers in Iraq over the years, as highlighted in a recent GAO report. To summarize:

• Late 2003 - 127,000 troops in Iraq (+24,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2004 - 127,000 troops in Iraq (+22,000 coalition troops)
• Late 2004 - 152,000 troops in Iraq (+25,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2005 - 139,000 troops in Iraq (+23,000 coalition troops)
• Late 2005 - 155,000 troops in Iraq (+23,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2006 - 133,000 troops in Iraq (+19,000 coalition troops)
• Late 2006 - 132,000 troops in Iraq (+15,000 coalition troops)
• Mid 2007 - 145,000 troops in Iraq (+13,000 coalition troops)

So, Joe, where were we trying to minimize that troop total? We actually had a huge spike in troop totals at the end of 2005 - more, in fact, than our current "surge," especially if we include our coalition partners into the tally, as we probably should. Although the "surge" added some troops back in, it still doesn't reach our troop total heights in years past.

Yeah, Joe's misrepresenting again.

I'm convinced, at this point, that Senator Lieberman does not have America's best interests at heart. He shares that neo-con dream of mechanically punching a hole in the midst of the Middle East, inserting a compliant democracy, and thus making the world safer for Israel. He has the gall to go on and say this:

But the plain truth is that Iraq in this month, July 2007, is a very different and better place than Iraq in January or February of 2000, and it is because of the so called surge counteroffensive strategy.

Really, Joe? So a repressive, totalitarian regime is clearly worse than random torture and mass murder and 600,000 extra violent deaths? No, Joe. Those are two bad choices, and Iraq now is plainly a more wantonly violent place than it was in 2000. It takes a gross disregard for human life to blithely claim that the "plain truth" is that Iraq is a better place now than it was before -- and by repeating that callous mantra, you deny anyone the chance to see the real situation, and actually make Iraq a better place than it was.

Remember, human life is valuable. And Israel is not our 51st state.

In late March of this year, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and Democratic Senator Jim Webb proposed a bipartisan amendment to the Iraq War supplemental spending bill, intended to protect the readiness of our troops and limit deployments. In the words of Senator Hagel's press release concerning the amendment:

The amendment:

- and requires the President to report to Congress on the comprehensive diplomatic, political and economic strategy of the U.S. regarding Iraq.

Hagel had this to say about the amendment and its intent:

"This amendment puts the focus where it should be: on the men and women of our military. No American wants to allow a single soldier or Marine to be deployed without meeting the military's standard of readiness. Yet that is what we are doing. We are breaking our military and this amendment will help put a stop to it. This amendment is about taking care of our troops."

He said this in support of the amendment during recent debate about allowing it to receive a vote:

"The war in Iraq has pushed the U.S. military to the breaking point. I, like most of my colleagues, have been told by military leaders, both on active duty and those who are retired, that we are doing tremendous damage to our Army and to our Marine Corps, as well as our Army National Guard. Our troops are being deployed longer than they should be, more frequently than they should be, and without full training and equipment. We are eroding our military power at a time when our country faces an increasing arc of challenges and threats across the globe. We are abusing our all-voluntary force in a dangerous and irresponsible way. Senator Webb recited a number of the facts--facts, not interpretations, not subjective analysis, but facts--as to what is happening to our military today because of the burden we are placing on them in Iraq, our fifth year in Iraq, our sixth year in Afghanistan.

This amendment goes to the heart of ensuring the readiness of our military and the time between deployments. This amendment will ensure that all Active units that have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan have time at home that is at least equal to the length of the previous deployment. If we can't commit at least that to our forces, then what can we commit to them?"

So, did the Senate allow this to go to the floor for a vote?

No.

The vote to end debate was 56-41, short of the 60 votes needed.

So what was so wrong with this amendment that 41 Senators, largely Republican, felt the need to never let it see a vote? Perhaps it was the fact that a natural consequence of limiting deployment length is the inability to arbitrarily extend tours, which would in turn mean that the president would have to be honest about just how taxing the Iraq war is on our people. Maybe it was the presidential reporting requirement? If it's neither of those, it's hard to see what the issue was. Are 40 Republicans and Joe Lieberman so callous that they just don't give a damn about our soldiers being able to come home, rest, retrain, and go back out in proper order with the right equipment, instead of being overextended, worn down, and outgunned?

But then, maybe it's a matter of perspective. While Joe was off in law school, Chuck Hegel and Jim Webb were in Vietnam. That may explain why it's so easy for Joe to glibly lie in the face of the truth and support George Bush's phenomenal mishandling of this war.

The Congressional Record should have a bit more information, such as who voted against ending debate, tomorrow.

Update: Here's the list of Senators who voted against allowing this amendment to proceed to the floor for a normal vote.

Yesterday, 41 Senators voted against the Hagel / Webb readiness and troop protection amendment. As I mentioned then, the Congressional record gives us their names. Here's the honor roll:

Wayne Allard - Republican, Colorado
John Barrasso - Republican, appointee from Wyoming
Bob Bennett - Republican, Utah
Kit Bond - Republican, Missouri - his son is a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps
Jim Bunning - Republican, Kentucky
Saxby Chambliss - Republican, Georgia
Tom Coburn - Republican, Oklahoma
Thad Cochran - Republican, Mississippi - served in the Navy
Bob Corker - Republican, Tennessee
John Cornyn - Republican, Texas
Larry Craig - Republican, Idaho
Mike Crapo - Republican, Idaho
Jim DeMint - Republican, South Carolina
Elizabeth Dole - Republican, North Carolina
Pete Domenici - Republican, New Mexico
John Ensign - Republican, Nevada
Mike Enzi - Republican, Wyoming
Lindsey Graham - Republican, South Carolina - served as a lawyer in the Air Force, and is currently a reservist JAG instructor
Chuck Grassley - Republican, Iowa
Judd Gregg - Republican, New Hampshire
Orrin Hatch - Republican, Utah
Kay Hutchison - Republican, Texas
James Inhofe - Republican, Oklahoma - served in the Army
Johnny Isakson - Republican, Georgia - served in the Air National Guard (from 1966-1972)
Jon Kyl - Republican, Arizona
Joe Lieberman - Independent, Connecticut
Trent Lott - Republican, Mississippi
Richard Lugar - Republican, Indiana
Mel Martinez - Republican, Florida
John McCain - Republican, Arizona - served as a Naval aviator during the Vietnam war
Mitch McConnell - Republican, Kentucky
Lisa Murkowski - Republican, Alaska
Pat Roberts - Republican, Kansas - served in the Marine Corps
Jeff Sessions - Republican, Alabama
Richard Shelby - Republican, Alabama
Arlen Specter - Republican, Pennsylvania
Ted Stevens - Republican, Alaska - served in the Army Air Corps during World War II
John Thune - Republican, South Dakota
George Voinovich - Republican, Ohio

Sixteen Saudia national were transferred from the holding facility at Guantanamo Bay to Saudi Arabian custody this week, following a review process at Gitmo. They follow in the footsteps of sixty-one other Saudis who were previously released from American custody. According to Saudi officials, most of the prisoners who were previously transferred from our custody were subsequently released by the Saudis.

al Jazeera article

Mr. Bush --

Time and again, you emphasize that we are at war. We are at war against terror, and specifically at war in Iraq. You like to think of yourself as a wartime president.

Maybe it makes you feel special.

But clearly, you don't actually believe we're in a real war. At the very least, you're deeply ignorant of how America actually wins wars.

Despite saying we're at war, you have not made the war part of our regular budget. You continue to cheat much of the cost in as special expenditures, as if that means we're not actually spending the money. This is the first time we've ever let a conflict stretch this long without putting its costs into the regular budget. Even the Vietnam and Korean Wars, both "police actions," were put into the regular budget quite soon after they began.

Despite saying we're at war, you've pushed for lower taxes. Perhaps you don't know your history. I understand you weren't a very good student. During the first World War, the marginal tax rate went as high as 77%. During the second World War, the marginal tax rate went even higher, up to 94%. During Korea, it went up as high as 87%. During Vietnam, up to 70%. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon all understood that wars can't be won without true sacrifice on our part -- at the very least, taxes must go up. None of these men would have actually tried to fight a war on credit, with that credit coming from another, not necessarily friendly, power.

I learned these numbers from the U.S. Treasury. They're part of the Executive Branch. Maybe you can ask them for a refresher.

Despite saying we're at war, you're trying to cheat on how many troops we send. Despite historical precedent and smart men telling you what to do, you chose to send half as many troops as we needed to hold Iraq. Now our soldiers are hit every day by munitions that we didn't have enough soldiers to secure. Now they clear an area only to have it retaken by our enemies a week later, because we don't have enough soldiers to leave a garrison behind.

I understand that we aren't likely to have a draft. It would be too politically damaging for you. But if this war on terror were a real war to you, you'd aggressively recruit new soldiers. You'd offer large pay increases and solid family support. You could even support this with the taxes you would have raised.

If this were a real war to you.

I understand you were a poor student. You probably turned in essays that were just barely long enough, and copied your math and science homework from someone who actually put in the time to learn the material. I understand that you think that the appearance of trying should be good enough, success be damned. I understand that you're just putting in the time, collecting your paycheck, clocking in and out until your time in office is done.

I understand that you quit when things get hard. I understand this because if you weren't this kind of person, then you'd treat this war like a real war.

If you did that, we might even win.

For the past few years, the National Science Foundation has been looking at American science and engineering publications and how they're trending in comparison with publications from other nations. The results of their analysis are presented here.

From the report page:

The study was prompted by evidence that the numbers of U.S. S&E articles, after increasing for decades, had leveled off in the early 1990s while funding and the number of researchers continued to increase.

The study comes back with no clear answer about why American publications are making up a smaller slice of publications overall, but there are some highlights:

• The study used the Thomson Scientific ISI Web of Knowledge cited publication database, which has traditionally been heavily biased toward American publications. As foreign scientists become better trained and behave "more like scientists from the United States" they're publishing more often in American journals.
• Science and engineering funding has spiked in some other nations, such as China - this correlates with their substantially increased chunk of the publications, however...
• ...American publications are still cited far more often than foreign publications. For example, China was fifth in 2005 in terms of number of publications, but was still 124th for cited publications in the 1994-2004 period. European science and engineering articles are also cited far less often than American articles. The thought here is that even if American publications are a smaller slice of the overall pie, they're still the only high-quality slice.

So what does this mean? It's hard to say. It might mean one of these:

• The rest of the world is catching up to us scientifically
• America's growth in R&D investment is slower than in other countries
• American research is more often cutting-edge than research in other countries, and as such is increasingly expensive over time - more so than research in other countries

At the end of the day, the official panel conclusion is a big, if thoughtful, shrug. There isn't enough information to say what the exact implications of this flattening off are, both in terms of the quality of American research and in terms of what the country should do in the future. I'm inclined to think that it's not a fundamental problem. At some point, developing nations become developed nations, and the publication space simply won't expand as quickly as the expansion in publications.

As part of the debate on the current SCHIP bill, a Republican congressman (I'm afraid I did not catch his name) warned that the current version is untenable because it would still allow illegal immigrants to use fake social security numbers to claim benefits.

Well duh, fuckwit. That's fraud. It's a crime.

Is your piece of junk, straw man argument seriously going to be that "people might defraud this program?" If so, I recommend you get your ass right back onto the congressional floor and cancel the Farm Bill, the Veterans Administration, FEMA, the Small Business Administration, and every other Federal program or agency that ever hands out money to people.

You may want to look at cleaning up bad planning, unrealistic thinking, and out-and-out corruption in military procurement. I hear that can amount to billions, and it goes to corporations -- whereas fraudulently acquired health care for children goes to, you know, children.

Seriously. Be less stupid.

As described here, George Bush is trying to push through his attorney general nominee (Michael Mukasey) by disingenuously tying it to the war:

"Judge Mukasey is not being treated fairly," the president said, after taking the extraordinary step of inviting a group of reporters into the Oval Office to vent his feelings. Sitting behind his desk and leaning back in his chair, Mr. Bush said he was concerned that some people may have "lost sight of the fact that we're at war."

I think some people have. Some people like to cut taxes, despite the historical record that we win wars by raising taxes. Some people like to commit pocket treason by blowing our own spies' cover to advance domestic political goals, again hurting our war effort.

I completely agree with George Bush. He clearly lost sight of the fact that we're at war long ago. If he hadn't, he might be supporting our troops in Afghanistan, where the true war on terror began.

In this article, the BBC summarizes a 60 Minutes expose' on "Curveball," the sole source behind Colin Powell's false claims of mobile bioweapons factories in his pre-invasion speech to the United Nations.

As it happens, rather than being a top-notch chemical engineer, Rafid Ahmed Alwan was just a chem E student with bad grades and a natural desire to win asylum anywhere other than Iraq. Mindful of this exact possibility, German intelligence passed on Alwan's claims with an advisory letter warning that they had no way of verifying what he said. Failure medal winner George Tenet claims he never saw that letter. Maybe so, but surely he had some inkling that sole-source word-of-mouth intelligence with no material evidence backing it up is not enough.

For more exciting action without evidence, you may want to go look George up at his current job as a non-executive director at defense contractor QinetiQ. Perhaps a non-executive director is one who directs without actually taking action? That seems safest, given his track record.

One might, at the end of the day, be inclined to ask exactly how "conservative" it is go to war based on the unsupported statements of one random student bucking for his green card.

The State of California today filed suit against the U.S. Federal government to push the EPA to approve a two-year-old California law mandating a 30% reduction in vehicle emissions (in new vehicles) by 2016. American auto manufacturers have been fighting this law, saying that it will hurt their ability to compete and other random nonsense -- nonsense, because the California law will apply equally to vehicles from foreign and domestic manufacturers. Were they honest, auto industry representatives would just out and out admit that they know California is a bellwether for nation-wide legislation impacting human health and safety, and they'd like to keep us off laws like this as long as possible. They've been very successful nationally, although that was with the backing of a Republican legislature that happily let automotive emissions standards stagnate for well over a decade.

Since the California law is stricter than current Federal standards, the state needs a waiver from EPA before it can go ahead and enforce the law. The official word from EPA is that they'll have a "decision" by the end of the year. It is not terribly surprising that the current EPA, hamstrung by manipulation from industry carpetbaggers associated with the Bush administration, had not even reached a decision about when it was going to decide whether or not to allow California to police our own air -- not until we sued.

Pathetic, but expected. The last word here goes to our governor:

Speaking at a news conference, Mr Schwarzenegger accused the federal government of "ignoring the will of tens of millions of people" by failing to approve the legislation.

"There's no legal basis for Washington to stand in our way."

BBC article

If you've been following the news, you should have heard that a recent National Intelligence Estimate says that Iran dropped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. George Bush has countered by claiming that this recent NIE is a "warning signal" -- rather than, say, seeing the positives that apparently international pressure can put a nation of nuclear arms.

You can download and read the public version of the NIE by clicking here. Here's the relevant section heading bits:

A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.

H. We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.

Notably, this public version of the NIE was (naturally) not released at the request of George Bush. You can click here to read Dr. Donald Kerr's statement about why they released the information. Here's the punchline, in his words:

The decision to release an unclassified version of the Key Judgments of this NIE was made when it was determined that doing so was in the interest of our nation’s security. The Intelligence Community is on the record publicly with numerous statements based on our 2005 assessment on Iran. Since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available. While the decision to release the declassified Key Judgments was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers, the IC took responsibility for what portions of the NIE Key Judgments were to be declassified.

"...we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."

"...doing so was in the interest of our nation's security."

The office of the DNI is, perhaps, not as compliant as George Tenet was.

It's still largely too early to care about specific candidates, or statements that will be recanted later once they realize that the Republican party needs a strong Latino base, but Mike Huckabee's recent declaration that he'll kick out all the illegal immigrants within four months of taking office deserves special mention.

Apparently, Mr. Huckabee has an impulse control disorder. Certainly, he can't have stopped, pulled out a piece of paper, and done the math on this one.

If we go with the normal estimate of twelve million illegal immigrants in our country, and say that four months gives us one-hundred twenty days to work with, then (here's the question now) how many illegal immigrants, per day, have to be found, arrested, given due process, have their cases evaluated, and then shipped back to their respective nations (assuming those nations will take them)?

Got it?

One hundred thousand.

How many employees does U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have?

Fifteen thousand, including both direct federal employees and contractors working for the agency.

Well, they're not actually the "tip of the spear" against illegal immigration. That job falls to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Fortunately, they're good enough to give us some relevant information. According to this genuinely helpful report that should be required reading for anyone who wants to slog our men and women down with work above and beyond what is possible, in a typical day, CBP:

Arrests 70 criminals at ports of entry
Picks up another 2,402 people for illegal entry

So, do you suppose CBP has the resources to ramp up from about 2,500 people per day to 100,000 people per day? After all, that's only a 3900% increase in workload.

We can't afford to have another aggressively foolish person in our highest executive office. Unless and until he reverses himself, Mike Huckabee has, unfortunately, demonstrated that he's too stupid to lead.

The Republican party likes to lay claim to a heritage that includes Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps ardent racist and immigrant-phobe (and, paradoxically, Italian-German-American) Tom Tancredo could take a cue from Lincoln's words spoken against another party bent on useless, country-destroying xenophobia:

I am not a Know-Nothing. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "All men are created equal." We now practically read it, "All men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothing get control, it will read, "All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics."

When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no presence of loving liberty. To Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

This may, perhaps, be a good letter to send to all our misguided, jingoistic and yet not at all patriotic friends in office in our Christmas greetings this year. I just sent it to Mr. Tancredo.

I hate slavery, because it deprives the republican example of its just influence in the world, enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites, causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.

What do we suppose Mr. Lincoln would have said about Mr. Bush's validation of torture?

Mike Huckabee took the Kansas Republican primary with about 60% of the vote today.

Seriously Kansas, must you vote for the dumber, strictly worse candidate because he's the more obnoxiously xenophobic man?

Defending his continued run for the candidacy, Huckabee said, "I did not major in math, but I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them."

Indeed, Huckabee has previously affirmed his deep inability to comprehend numbers, when he suggested that we deport 100,000 illegal immigrants per day, a mere 3900% in workload for the men and women of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

It would be so wonderful to know that we could have a President who is not merely impractical, but innumerate. But, apparently, he brings comfort to us scared white folks, eh?

Ah, well. Maybe when he's raising Customs' workload 3900%, he can reduce taxes 3900%, too.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Ahead of the Maryland primary, the BBC went around and asked voters who they were voting for, and why. This unfortunate response jumped right out from all the others. It's double disappointing.

Voting the party line, even though I disagree with it in every detail

"I'm conservative, and always have been. I voted for Bush four years ago, but I don't agree with him on stem cell, abortion or gay marriage. He mixes religion and government too much."

Don't be the person who votes a party line because it's nominally in line with some portion of your beliefs. These days, people frequently quote Reagan's 80% rule as a reason to support John McCain even though he's a little too liberal (read: not a fundamentalist) for many party stalwarts. The 80% rule is fine, and very practical. But to vote for the party because "I've always been a conservative" without understanding that (1) Bush is not a fiscal conservative and (2) you may not be a social conservative if you're pro-stem-cells, pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, and want religion out of politics, is just foolish.

Don't be that person. Vote the candidate. Very specifically vote the candidate. Don't vote Republican or Democrat (or Libertarian, or even, say, Whig) because it's your default party. That's idiocy.

Failing to do even basic research

It's not hard to fail to do basic research. It's super easy. It's easy to believe what the people next door to you tell you, or what your coworkers say, or some random snippet you heard on the radio in your car this morning before they did the funny skit where they prank call someone. Easy, but stupid.

"Obama, I don't really like his Muslim roots."

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, went to Columbia University, and attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Disliking Obama for his Muslim roots is about as clever as disliking Medal of Honor recipient and U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye for his presumptive Buddhist roots.

Or, you know, disliking Christ for his Jewish roots. Or anything else that completely misses the (incidentally, very Christian and very American) idea that the beliefs you adopt define you who are, rather than your birth or ancestry.

So come on. Be Americans, people. Judge people by what they are and do, not by their ancestry.

The National Institutes of Health fund the bulk of biology and medical research in the United States, to the tune of about $28 billion a year. If you've benefited from a medical or biotech advance (and if you grew up in the U.S., you have), you've benefited from your tax dollars at work in the NIH. Money from the NIH comes with, as everywhere else, strings attached. 2008 brings three new strings, one of which is quite positive. Here are the new legislative mandates for 2008, taken from this document:

• All publications resulting from NIH funding must be made public access within a year of publication. This is a huge positive, and serves the NIH's mission of supporting biomedical and health advances in the U.S. far more than the old practice of many journals of keeping data sequestered from anyone who couldn't afford a subscription.
• Funds can't be used to disseminate false or deliberately misleading scientific information. This isn't really a change from prior policy, but it's good to see the message reinforced.
• NIH funds can't be used to employ illegal aliens. Honestly, biomedical research is not an area with a substantial illegal labor force, but this proviso does fit the mood of the times.

These new (or "new" in one case) requirements are added on top of a set of restrictions from the prior fiscal year. These include:

• Salaries paid for by NIH funds are capped, so you can't pull in millions (or even hundreds of thousands) on NIH money. It's worth noting that you do have to justify each salary when the NIH is funding you, so this process undergoes heavy oversight, in addition to the absolute cap.
• Funds can't be used for lobbying.
• NIH money can't fund needle exchange. This is a shame, because needle exchange programs work, but many people in our country have yet to reconcile their desire to help others with their desire to punish addicts.
• You must acknowledge in press releases and publications that you received NIH funding. Basically, it's a "your tax dollars at work" sign for science. Good to have it there.
• NIH money can't be used to fund an abortion. This does not come up in biomedical research, of course.
• Funds can't be used for research that uses human embryos or generates stem cell lines.
• Finally, NIH money can't be used to promote the legalization of any schedule I drug...unless there is "significant medical evidence of a therapeutic advantage to the use of such drug or other substance or that federally sponsored clinical trials are being conducted to determine therapeutic advantage".

I obviously don't agree with all these provisos, but it's good for those of you who are American citizens to be able to see what requirements are placed on the researchers who you fund to bring you biomedical advances.

In an interview on BBC radio yesterday, Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, when asked about the legality of torture, pulled up everyone's favorite example of the "terrorist who knows where the nuclear bomb that's going to destroy Los Angeles is hidden" (otherwise known as any episode of 24). He suggested that it would be ridiculous to limit people in what they could do, under these circumstances, to extract information from that person. From there, he reasoned that there's a sort of sliding scale, whereby you can abuse someone more if their information is more critical.

No.

There may someday be this situation, where thousands to millions of lives are at stake, and someone on our side is confident that the person they have in custody, right now, knows enough information to prevent a disaster. They may even make the decision to torture that person to get that information.

And if and when they make that decision, I want them to make it knowing that they will go to jail for doing it.

I want the bar for torture to be "Am I willing to go to jail for this?"

After all, ask me any day of the week, and I will happily go to jail for two to four years (that's for assault with bodily injury, under California law) to save thousands or millions of lives. I believe that our police officers and Federal agents would make that same decision. And I really want them to have to.

There can be no sliding scale. Sometimes, the bar simply must be set at jail time. If you're willing to trade a few years of your freedom for the outcome, then you may have possibly given enough thought to what you're about to do to another human being. We don't want it to be any easier than that.

Following the somewhat unsettling news that job losses of 63,000 last month were the biggest in five years, George Bush insists that while we are experiencing some economic issues, we are definitely not in or near a recession. His words:

"Losing a job is painful, and I know Americans are concerned about our economy. So am I," he said. "It is clear our economy has slowed, but the good news is we anticipated this and took decisive action to bolster the economy by passing a growth package that will put money into the hands of American workers and businesses."

Many American taxpayers will receive $600 rebates in May. Mr. Bush says that will boost consumer spending and create more jobs.

Let's break that "decisive action" down a bit. "Many" American taxpayers will receive $600 rebates. Well, let's say that all 146 million of us who are currently employed get that $600 rebate. Then let's say that instead of doing the logical thing and either saving or investing this money, we all turn around and blow it on heavily service-oriented expenditures, the kind that play most directly into providing wages for our fellow Americans. Say, we go and buy $600 worth of lunches over the next couple months at our local McDonald's.

On top of this, let's assume that all this money will be converted relatively directly into work at the cheapest possible rate, minimum wage. What does this all mean?

Well, at the current Federal minimum wage of $5.85 per hour, a full-time employee receiving no other benefits of any kind pulls in $11,700 per year. Of course, no one's just handing money directly over to folks. Now, taking a very rough assumption, we'll go with the knowledge that about a third of the operating costs from a McDonald's go toward wages (and benefits, but we'll pretend it's just pure wages). This means that if we assume a basically profit-free McDonald's, we have to pump about $35,000 into a restaurant to employ one minimum-wage worker for a year.

That's about 60 rebates (at $600 per rebate). So by this hyper-optimistic, back-of-the-envelope calculation, if we all go dump our cash on low-wage service industry jobs in the most direct way possible, we can employ about 2.4 million people.

That would be amazing, if it worked like that. Of course, there would still be another 5 million or so unemployed people. And this all gets scuppered even more by the fact that money doesn't translate over nearly that directly, by the fact that increased consumer spending will actually go into products, by the fact that your state minimum wage may be significantly higher, and by the fact that the Federal minimum wage is rising to $6.55 in a couple months (that last point alone shaves off 300,000 jobs from our nominal model).

This is all patently goofy, of course. With so many people in debt, and so many homes near foreclosure, the smartest possible thing for individuals to do with their tax rebates is not to dump it on consumer spending, but to bolster their savings, maybe earn some interest, pay off some debt, or otherwise try to get their financial homes back in order.

The president who has never once run a successful company may well expect his plan of "cutting taxes in the face of a war" to work twice, but the rest of us certainly shouldn't. It didn't even work the first time.

Voice of America story

A CDC study released this week reports that on average, one in four teenage girls in the United States has some form of sexually transmitted disease.

The demographic breakdown brings some grim news for African American teens, as about half of girls in that ethnic group had an STD, compared with 20% among white and Latino teenagers.

The predominant infection is human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer. The next three runners up are chlamydia, trichomoniasis, and herpes.

The CDC's Devin Fenton said it was a serious issue because the diseases could lead to infertility and cervical cancer.

The CDC is recommending annual chlamydia screening for all sexually active women under 25, and HPV vaccines for girls aged 11 to 12, followed by booster injections.

Of course, that last recommendation was greeted with some amount of horror when it was suggested last year, on the basis that somehow vaccinating young girls against one STD would give them license to engage in sexual activity. As the current studies show, that is already happening. And it's no surprise, what with nearly all Americans having engaged in premarital sex. The extremely low 5% abstinence rate has been steady since the 1950s, meaning that if you're in your 40s or younger and you're explaining how abstinence education would totally prevent this and we don't need to screen our kids or vaccinate them, you're lying.

Or you have a terrible memory. Your kids are sexually active, and they, being just like you, will go on doing that whether or not their teacher, pastor, or parents tells them to "just abstain." I'm by no means suggesting that's a great thing -- abstinence is a good thing, and I personally believe that it would have a lot more weight if we allowed a healthier public discussion of sex in this country. However, the idea that removing the tools to have safer sex or to be informed about or screened for diseases will somehow keep kids from getting involved in sex is ridiculous, dangerous, and unfair to our kids.

BBC article

I just posted an overview of a GAO report highlighting how outsourcing to private industry can actually waste your money. If you'd like to write to your senators or representative about this issue, here's a possible template:

Representative/Senator [name] --

I am writing to request that you press for more GAO investigation and legislative action on the issue of outsourcing of defense department services to private contractors. A recent GAO report ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08621t.pdf ) highlighted the fact that contrary to the intuition of many, outsourcing government services to private industry often ends up costing the taxpayer substantially more money for the same service.

This empirical evidence that privatizing these services costs us money and exposes us as a country to increased financial risk should be publicized, and then acted on to ensure that we do not foolishly outsource our country into oblivion.

Thank you --

I think this one's worth writing about. The dogma of "the market fixes all" is dangerous, and people will continue to follow it despite the current economic evidence that this is not always true.

In his column today, C.W. Nevius suggests that rather than the "stealth passage" of the torch relay through SF, including its last-minute diversion, was not so much an effort to avoid protesters as it was an effort to avoid handing the publicity of a trip through San Francisco over to the Chinese government.

For all the talk of protests leading up to the Olympic torch relay, we didn't hear much from the supporters of China.

They were waving thousands of huge, red Chinese flags or holding up identical, professional-looking placards that read "Beijing, 2008, torch relay."

Quite a few members of that crowd were on my train home today, hefting both giant PRC flags and those professional placards Nevius mentions in his column.

If Newsom did, indeed, extract the torch relay from the midst of an ever more egregious planned spectacle on the part of the PRC, I'm happy to hear it. We certainly won't receive official confirmation of that anytime soon.

I'll just quote this al Jazeera article:

A group of prominent US Jewish activists has launched a lobbying group and new political action committee in a bid to promote a new Arab-Israeli peace deal, organisers say.

The J Street lobbying group and its action committee, JStreetPAC, has an advisory council of more than 100 government officials, academics and activists, it says.

The organisation was formed to counter conservative groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and evangelical Christian organisations whose pro-Israel stances have dominated US foreign policy, the group said.

...and...

[J Street executive director] Ben Ami also criticised groups who portrayed organisations voicing a more critical line of Israel as anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.

"We're a pro-Israel organisation started by and represented by those who care about Israel and want it to survive, to be strong and safe."

This week has been an especially Israel-heavy news week. Negotiations between Israel and Syria may well be on the upswing again, especially following the passing of an unofficial and yet not-quite-secret message that Israel is willing to consider giving back the Golan Heights. That might come as a bit of a shock to the thousands of Israelis now living in the Golan.

At the same time, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert has publicized a 2004 letter from George Bush to then PM Ariel Sharon that Olmert claims consists of Bush giving Israel a green light for settlement expansion in the West Bank. The Bush administration has denied that the letter gave that message, and the final interpretation is clearly up in the air. That said, the cited article ends in a telling quote from Colin Powell, who was our Secretary of State at the time:

Powell said that in 2004, he did not anticipate that Bush's letter would be perceived as a green light by Israel for adding to the settlements. "I consistently spoke against settlement growth, but as you know all I could do is talk against it," Powell said. "There would be no consequences and there still aren't."

"There would be no consequences and there still aren't."

Powell certainly had the read on our interactions with and treatment of the state of Israel.

...and another American citizen is up on charges of spying for Israel.

It does become hard, over time, to justify protecting the little kid who keeps pathologically stealing your record collection, even if you're afraid his classmates are going to beat him up.

I spent most of this week in Boston, where I learned that Dunkin' Donuts is ubiquitous. As I walked away from Boston Common on my first day there, I played the game of seeing how many blocks I could make it without running into one.

This was, I suppose, serendipitous timing as it gave me a chance to not purchase anything from the chain, following their recent cave-in to a bunch of idiots in search of a win who decided that Rachel Ray was a jihadist because she wore a scarf in a donut ad. Led in the charge by "intern-all-brown-people-but-me" blogger Michelle Malkin, the wingiest of whining wingers decided that they could pressure a company into pulling an advertisement because Ray's scarf looked sort of like a keffiyeh, some Arab men wear keffiyehs, and some Arab men are terrorists.

Given that I was in Boston, home to a thriving Irish community, I shudder to think about the nakedness that would necessarily ensue if we pressed that rule concerning the traditional clothing of "Irish men." Some of them, after all, were terrorists, too. A friend points out that we should also ban all ads showing sandals, since Arab men sometimes wear them. Sad.

Malkin continues to confuse me. Given her heritage, I don't understand her willingness to vilify and persecute anything tangentially related to some form of terrorist. By that logic, her ethnic background should have her in a camp in the high desert as well, with all the other potential Filipino terrorists.

Well, she doesn't actually confuse me that much, as she buys into a philosophy that thrives on being unable to place yourself in anyone else's shoes, to comprehend how anyone has ever helped you, or to understand that your actions may have consequences that impact you.

So yeah, neither donuts nor coffee for me this week, I'm afraid.

In late may, the Brookings Institution released its report Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America. Two of the standout findings of this report were that the average metropolitan resident has a smaller carbon footprint than the average American as a whole, and that our per capita carbon footprint is significantly higher in the Eastern half of the country. This latter finding is captured well by this map (graphic taken from the report):

Following the recent indictment of Alaska senator Ted Stevens on corruption charges, his constituency has been driven into a near panic at the thought of no longer being the most Federally blessed place in the country.

The watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense said Wednesday that Stevens secured or played a significant role in 891 earmarks worth $3.2 billion to Alaska between 2004 and 2008. Divided among the state's 670,000 residents, the per capita figure of $4,872 is 18 times the national average of $263 over the same four years, the group said.

...and...

A third of Alaska's jobs can be traced to federal spending, according to the latest study by the University of Alaska's Institute of Social and Economic Research.

What do prominent party affiliates in the state have to say about this?

"There's no good that will come of this," said Jim Whitaker, a Republican who left the state legislature to combat the corrupt oil services company whose taint threatens to bring down Stevens. "For those of us who've been involved with politics in Alaska, one of the paradigms that we counted on in terms of funding public policy was the capability of Ted Stevens.

"It's not as though we don't have the capability to take care of ourselves," said Whitaker, now the mayor of Fairbanks's North Star Borough. "My concern is we're not used to it."

If nothing else ever does -- if the past seven or so years of no-bid contracts and procurement corruption don't -- this comment from a former Republican politician should tell us all that we have not earned all that we have, and that the party line of capitalism, small government, and self reliance falls by the wayside when a politician finds himself in a position to throw government money to his people.

Welfare reform clearly can begin first and foremost in Alaska. If nothing else, I prefer my tax money to go to needy kids with crappy healthcare and bad schools rather than subsidizing the high life in Anchorage.

Coming fairly under the radar in this week of war and Olympics, the United States has signed an agreement with Libya in which diplomatic relations between the two countries will be renewed following financial compensation for deaths on both sides. Specifically, Libya agrees to pay compensation to victims (or rather, families of victims) of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the 1986 Berlin disco bombing, and the United States will compensate victims of our 1986 air raid against Tripoli.

Assuming this deal continues smoothly, we can expect to see a reopening of a US embassy in Tripoli and the possibility of financial aid for Libya. And, of course, you might actually be able to go there on vacation.

BBC article

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Two years ago, Congressional candidate Tan Nguyen sent out a letter that looked suspiciously like it was meant to scare Latino Democrats into staying home on election day. The Orange County Republican Party quickly stepped as far away from Tan as they could, reasonably enough, and he was left to protest lamely that his "mailing was flawed."

Apparently, he was also less-than-forthcoming when the Department of Justice came around to investigate whether he had violated federal voting laws. Now, the DoJ has indicted Tan Nguyen on federal obstruction of justice charges. Here's part of the DoJ press release:

The grand jury alleged that Nguyen knowingly misled state investigators who were investigating the circumstances surrounding the mailing of the letter. The indictment also alleges that Nguyen's actions were intended to prevent communication to federal law enforcement officers of information relating to Nguyen's involvement in the production and dissemination of the letter and to whether the letter violated federal election laws, including interfering with the federally protected right to vote in federal elections.

An indictment is merely an accusation, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty. If convicted, Nguyen faces up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. Nguyen will receive a summons to appear in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana for his initial appearance and post-indictment arraignment on Oct.14, 2008.

As FactCheck.org reports, the group Vets for Freedom is blitzing our fine state of California with a new anti-Obama campaign that manages to lie both by omission and by commission. In the ad, they attempt to indict Obama for missing 45% of Senate votes while cleverly failing to mention that John McCain missed 64% of his Senate votes. Similarly, they tell you to call Obama (who, by definition, can't be the representative of any legal residents of this state, but let's not worry about that) to support a Senate Resolution...except that the Resolution is currently stuck in the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Obama is not a member but McCain is a senior member, and thus the only one of the two candidates who can get it to the Senate floor, where everyone else, Obama included, will get their first chance to move it forward.

They also try to say that Obama voted against troop support, which as I've previously reported, is exactly as accurate as insisting that McCain urged us not to support our troops.

Interestingly enough, the veterans over at 2 Dinar don't support John McCain. In fact, as Editor-in-Chief, Iraq war veteran, and former Marine officer Ben points out in the linked article, since 2003 John McCain has voted against seven bills supporting veterans, and failed to vote on another two veteran-supporting bills. In contrast, Barack Obama voted for all but one of those same veterans' bills which came up during his time in the Senate.

So, to reprise, John McCain has voted against the majority of veterans' bills that have come up since the start of the Iraq war, and consistently misses nearly two thirds of votes in the Senate. By the standards of the Vets for Freedom ad campaign, McCain neglects both our veterans and his Senate duties.

Instead, he was making trips through Baghdad under heavy, heavy security provided by those same soldiers, and then lying about it afterward.

I'm still very sad at how far John McCain has fallen, and a misleading ad campaign offered on his behalf can't help. Maybe he can tell the Vets for Freedom to knock it the hell off. That would earn back some of his lost honor.

John McCain was complaining today about Representative John Lewis's comments that compared the attitude of fear and paranoia the McCain campaign has been pushing with regards to Obama with segregationist George Wallace:

"During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama," wrote the Democrat.

John is stunned at the comparison. Seriously. I'm not clear why, though:

The Republican campaign has turned highly personal over the past week asking "who is the real Barack Obama" and suggesting that he was not candid or truthful.

During rallies after the initial attacks, Republican supporters shouted "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar" and even "off with his head," in reference to Obama.

In attempting to retreat from this unpleasant and fantastically unsuccessful attempt to tap into the far gone xenophobic wing of the Republican party, John McCain put on this stellar performance:

There were signs as early as Friday that the negative tone was not having the desired effect. McCain drew jeers at a town hall meeting in Minnesota when he defended Obama after a supporter said he feared what would happen if Obama were elected president.

He also cut short a woman who described Obama as an Arab, saying his rival was "a decent, family man".

Wait, what? The alternative to "Arab" is "decent?" What?

A good answer there might have been, "Well, not that it matters, since America has many fine Arab citizens, but Obama was born in Hawaii and his parents were from Kenya and Kansas."

John, it's not "Arab" versus "decent." Good lord, what's happened to you?

al Jazeera article
CNN article

I picked up at least one antagonized comment over in my recent post about the misguided politics of xenophobia the McCain campaign has turned to in an effort to generate an issue on which it can beat the Obama campaign. Although prior political campaigns have illustrated that playing up the divisiveness can pay off, I think this hard turn toward fear mongering is really doing some damage not only to the McCain campaign and the United States, but to the Republican party.

Consider this video making the rounds, provided by the folks at the American News Project:

There's a clear point here. This sad turn toward the narrow, scared, xenophobic slice of the Republican base ignorantly rejects a lot of people who would otherwise vote Republican. A significant portion of observant Muslims line right up with socially conservative values -- they go to religious services, they oppose abortion, they believe in traditional marriage, and they believe in coherent families. When the McCain campaign attempts to tar Barack Obama with the notion of Islam, the take-home message for all those Muslims is that they're the tar. If a man isn't to be trusted because he might be Muslim, you clearly can't be trusted if you are Muslim.

And for those who laud the politics of exclusion -- congratulations, you're ruling out a giant chunk of your fellow Americans, including the roughly 13% of us of African descent, the 15% of us who are Latinos, and the 5% of us who are Asian (you can look at these and other figures at the U.S. Census Bureau's American FactFinder). Try throwing all those people out of your party and see how many elections you win.

The most recent push from the McCain campaign has to try to appeal to "real America" with the idea that an Obama victory would bring about the rise of socialism in the United States. Unexamined, that idea sparks some real antagonism from Americans, as we readily identify the term socialism with the out-and-out evils of late twentieth-century Communism, and so to be socialist is to be evil.

Well, there are some problems with that.

At the height of the Cold War, we identified the Eastern Bloc as Communist and thus Socialist, and ourselves as Capitalist. What were previously technical terms describing economic approaches effectively became ideological stand-ins for the freedoms of the Western world versus the totalitarian states of the Soviet Union and its cohorts. This in turn has "fed back" into the idea that even a trace of socialism -- that is, even a trace of wealth redistribution from the well off to the less well off -- meant leanings toward totalitarianism.

It's a curious linkage, of course. After all, a lot of us happily go to church, donate money to that church, and then applaud the church when it helps the less fortunate. Redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. Socialism.

Similarly, people in this country tend to have a blindness to the amount of assistance we're all giving each other, all the time. The modern Republican party, in particular, has pushed the image of people standing on their own, not needing "handouts," and in general dismissed the idea that it might be patriotic, and the mark of a good citizen, to want to pay into a system that supports those in need.

Well, there's something interesting about that. Consider the 2004 election results, taken from CNN's electoral map calculator:

Then take a look at this map from the Tax Foundation's 2006 Special Report on Federal Tax Burdens and Expenditures by State:

The second map shows, on a state-by-state basis, how much Federal spending each state received per dollar paid in as Federal taxes. Especially low ratios (that is, paying in significantly more than they get out) are shown in light gray whereas especially high ratios (receiving much more money than they paid in) are shown in dark gray.

That bastion of "real America", Alaska? Nearly two dollars out from the Federal government per dollar paid in. Similarly, much of middle America comes out ahead, getting moderately to significantly profitable payouts from the Federal government.

In contrast, those two big blue states from 2004, California and New York, both paid in more than they got out.

Or, in simple terms, we're bankrolling you.

Real America -- especially traditional, rural America -- is about people helping the people around them. When the McCain campaign attempts to rile up middle American audiences by decrying the redistribution of wealth, he never mentions the critical fact that they're the ones getting that wealth.

If we in California reduced our pay-in to the Federal government to the amount we get out, what would Kansas do?

There's nothing wrong with helping your fellow Americans.

The single, glaring flaw in contemporary economic policy has been its faith-based nature. Despite the ability to empirically evaluate how people will behave, Alan Greenspan and his followers chose to believe that the market was basically always right, and that things would work out optimally. Notably, the 2007 Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (i.e. the Economics Nobel Prize) was given to recognize research into the design of economic systems in light of the fact that things are not optimal.

In testimony before Congress yesterday, Alan expressed his "shock" at investor's lack of self regulation even though it would have been in their long-term best interest:

Greenspan said he was shocked at the banks' inability to self-regulate and blamed over-eager investors for the sub-prime housing meltdown that led to the financial crisis, our correspondent said.

Apparently, our boy Al has never seen an overweight person of any kind (and a good one third of adults in this country are obese). Humans did not evolve in an environment of plenty, or of collaborative financial planning for optimal group outcomes (especially not that second one). We regulate things that can go drastically out of balance specifically because people don't always regulate themselves in their own best interests. Some people are opportunists, others criminals, but most just won't be able to see how their behavior plays into the system as a whole. Certainly, people aren't especially good at self regulating and just deciding not to optimize their own gain.

Faith-based economics is a poor practice, Alan Greenspan's citation of a prior lack of collapse as evidence of success notwithstanding.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Worth watching in its entirety:

More on Corporal Khan here.

The picture that is referred to in the segment is here.

One of you came to this site from that search phrase. I'm not sure where "the socialists" actually keep their plans, but I'm happy to suggest that people who fear the specter of socialism turn the way back machine to this post from last week, where I explore how we've been "spreading the wealth" from the wealthy states such as California and New York to those who apparently need it, including the putatively independently minded state of Alaska, which gets a solid $1.87 back for every $1 it pays into the Federal budget.

It's mildly saddening to watch people decry the concept of supporting your community as "socialist," especially since those same people probably drove to work on an Interstate highway, have a subsidized home loan, use the Internet, and expect to rely on Medicare someday. Yes, the term "socialism" gained an indelible association with totalitarian governments, but guess what -- helping each other is a fundamentally sane and all-American value.

Or to put it another way: I like roads.

You all are free to give back our money and opt out of using these services, but I like paying in to make my country better.

Traditionally, American Muslims have often supported the Republicans. However, this election is turning things around.

Azeem Khan, 27, is one of them. He said: "There are many Muslims who say because of what they've seen in the past eight years they can't bring themselves, in their lifetime, to vote for a Republican.

This is pretty much what I've been saying. By choosing to focus on the narrow slice of the party that is afraid of everything, the Republican leadership is pushing out those who were once attracted either the socially or fiscally conservative history of the party, including Muslims, Latinos, and others.

And why wouldn't they feel alienated by a party leadership that's now pandering to this nonsense?

Polls here suggest 10% of Americans still think Obama is a Muslim.

"We'll be giving them nuclear arms. Next thing you know they'll be attacking us again."

About the only thing that unnamed woman in question got right is that, historically, we have helped fund and arm some of the people who ended up causing us problems, including supporting Saddam Hussein and providing arms to Islamic radicals in Afghanistan. Of course, these things were done when Mr. Obama was in his late teens and early twenties, so I think we'll need to find someone else to blame.

BBC article

As we careen in toward election day, maybe you're asking yourself how you can escape a party that no longer represents your conservative values or where you can find some real socialism. If so, you're in luck. Well, at least if you're voting in California, you're in luck. You have options. It's not just one, but several third-party candidates, including:

Ron Paul -- For those who never got over Ron leaving the Republican primary. However, you might not want to cast your vote here, because Ron Paul has apparently endorsed...

Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution party, who believes the Constitution is not just a good idea, but given by divine providence. I'm afraid I can't get behind that, but it's nice to see that Chuck has debated...

Ralph Nader, who is running as the Peace and Freedom candidate, leaving...

Cynthia McKinney as the Green candidate. Note that of the parties on this list, the Greens are by far (to my mind) the most legitimate, having made many gains at the regional and local levels, even if they can't yet crack the presidency. From here, we go on to...

Alan Keyes, here to promote a return to true conservativism. If, on the other hand, you want honest to God real socialism (none of that namby-pamby "normal income taxes" stuff), we have...

James Harris of the Socialist Workers Party. I didn't realize we actually had a Socialist anything party. Finally, we can go to two rather different takes on wild freedom with...

Frank Moore, who advocates universal minimum income and universal healthcare, and...

Bob Barr of the Libertarian party, who doubtless has succeeded entirely on his own with no help from anyone.

Being less facetious, I think there is a legitimate space in the electoral market for parties with relatively sane party lines that nonetheless differ from our two big ones. Of the parties above, I think the Green Party fits that metric. There may well be room for a "true conservative" party in the future as well, whether it occurs by the expelling of the nutters from the current Republican party or the creation of a new third party that doesn't focus on hardline libertarian or religious nuttiness. Sort of a party of ethical accountants, as it were.

In its last-ditch effort to get Americans to vote against our best interest, the McCain campaign has been accusing Obama of wanting to "spread the wealth" by proposing a progressive tax plan -- that is, taxes that ratchet down for those who make less and up for those who make more. This stands in opposition to McCain's proposal to flatten out the tax progression, saving money for those who are already well off.

The concept of a progressive tax is labeled, in dire terms, as socialist, even though those who are being sold on the idea of avoiding this "spreading of wealth" are often those who benefit the most from it.

But wait. Let's put aside all ideas of reappropriating wealth in society for the moment, and consider something else.

We are at war.

Two years ago, I took a look at the American history of taxation during war. At the time, George Bush was pushing for his faith-based tax cuts -- I call it "faith-based" not as a dig at religion, but because there's no empirical basis for believing that cutting taxes, especially cutting them for the already wealthy, will actually promote the wellbeing of the economy in general. More to the point, however, cutting taxes in the middle of a war seemed like a bad idea, so I went and looked at the history (again, see the link).

During World War II, the marginal tax rate went as high as 94%. That is, the wealthiest of Americans had the upper portion of their earnings almost completely taxed. During the Korean war, that rate went as high as 87%.

Now that we're at war again -- and it's a big one, with hundreds of thousands of troops committed across multiple fronts -- our highest marginal tax rate is 33%. At the same time, our military is falling behind in fixing and replacing equipment as we attempt to fight a massive war "on the cheap." Nonetheless, a number of Republican senators blocked a proposal to put aside more funding for military reset in July of last year.

What's going on here? Are we so afraid of supporting ourselves as a group that we can't put aside funding to fight a multiple-front war? Are we that much worse than our forebears, that we can't pay more in a time of need?

The rational choice in support of our national defense right now is to pay more, especially those of us who can afford it. If paying more to armor up our soldiers is socialism, then I guess I'm on board.

A thought from John Kovalic, on election day:

A lot of my friends in the USA are posting things like, "If you don't plan to vote today, PLEASE vote. Every vote is important. Just vote."

If you do vote, you'll probably just ruin it for the rest of us.

In attacking the current financial bailout package, Alaskan Governor Palin had these words for us this week:

"We're hearing now more talk of additional taxpayer bailouts ... for companies, for corporations, perhaps even states now who may be standing in line with their hands out despite, perhaps, some poor management decisions on their part that helped tank our economy," she said.

"Republicans can help shore [these sectors of the economy] up without getting any more addicted to opium, other people's money. We need to have a rational discussion. What and when is enough enough?"

To that, what can we say except $1.87 of Federal spending into Alaska for each $1 paid in Federal taxes by Alaska.

So there are states standing in line for Federal handouts? Shameful.

CNN article

In the last month or so of the election, our now president-elect was simultaneously called a Socialist and a "hidden" Muslim (ignoring, perhaps, the various disagreements Muslims and nominal Socialists have had in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya in the past). A friend of mine very accurately said that these things are all just a proxy for fear. It's the same generic fear of the world that thinks that a president can fundamentally, say, alter the second amendment.

As an aside, I'd appreciate it if there were more overlap between avid support for the second amendment and avid support for the first. After all, the point of the guns is not having guns, but keeping government from becoming an entity independent of and in suppression of the people. The second supports the first, and without the first, there's not much value in the second.

This week, Representative Paul Broun said this:

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.
"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

There is, perhaps, some irony in a white guy from Georgia comparing a black man from Illinois to Hitler.

After making the comparison, Broun disingenuously said he wasn't making the comparison. Notably, despite his fears of Obama-lead Brown Shirts marching through our streets, the program Obama is actually suggesting was for an emphasis on overseas, civilian-based security services. In other words, as many of our own officers have noted, and as our allies have observed, the United States military is not a police force. It's not supposed to be. Our soldiers do their best to help with rebuilding and securing Iraq and Afghanistan, but fundamentally, it would be better to have properly trained, nonmilitary personnel handling many of these jobs.

But nonetheless, pandering to what he no doubt views as his core demographic -- whether that's true or not -- Broun has misrepresented our next president's remarks and has chosen to spend his time in scared guy fantasy land, where he can pretend to be Tom Hanks in his own personal Saving Private Ryan.

I'll let my search results just now in looking for Broun's congressional page have the last word:

AOL article

A Ponzi scheme, if you are not familiar, is an investment fraud scheme whereby earlier investors make fantastic "returns" by being paid out with money put into the scheme by later investors. As long as new investors come in, this keeps working, and the people who are making bank on the early returns act as unwitting agents to bring in more money, as they praise the scheme's manager for his or her financial prowess.

An alleged Ponzi scheme on a fantastically grand scale has just been cracked here in the States, where former Nasdaq chair Bernard Madoff is alleged to have accrued $50 billion (that's billion) in losses as the head of a fraudulent hedge fund. The criminal complaint alleges that Madoff's hedge fund, which ostensibly managed $17.1 billion for a number of major clients was, in reality, a straight-up Ponzi operation, paying out older investors with money from more recent investors, and is, in actuality, completely insolvent.

Oops.

Mr. Madoff's lawyers don't appear to be on the same page with their client on his culpability here:

His lawyer said he would fight to get through these "unfortunate events".

...and...

On Thursday, two agents from the FBI went to his apartment.

He told them he "paid investors with money that wasn't there", that he was "broke" and "insolvent", that it "could not go on" and he expected to go to jail.

Clearly, there needs to be either better regulation or significantly more robust due diligence by major investors.

BBC article

As the proposed bailout bill for the three major automobile manufacturers in the States failed to make its way through the Senate this week, a renewed wave of calls have gone out for some form of funding for these tottering companies.

"Given the current weakened state of the US economy, we will consider other options, if necessary including use of the TARP program, to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

She added that it would be "irresponsible" to further weaken the economy by allowing the Detroit car companies to fail.

TARP is the current financial industry bailout, which is a good fifty times the size of the proposed automotive bailout, and which went through with, oddly enough, less debate. That said, the fact of passing one with little negotiation of debate does not require that a second bill -- even one that is significantly smaller -- without proper consideration.

I was in D.C. through most of this week, which means I had a chance to listen to C-SPAN on the radio of the frankly poorly designed Ford rental that I was driving. The mantra of those supporting the bailout was that "three million" jobs depend on the industry -- that's a quarter million employed directly by GM, Ford, and Chrysler, with the rest in the industries that support them. I agree that it would be unreasonable to let hundreds of thousands or millions of skilled manufacturers suddenly lose their jobs.

But if that's the real issue, then why do we need to have three automobile manufacturers in this country?

Other than a sense of tradition and, potentially, a lack of imagination in adapting to change over time, there's no real reason that we should have the trinity of manufacturers that we currently do. I've been told by a competent analyst whom I trust that the world should have about four major automobile manufacturers -- clearly, three of these aren't going to be in the United States. With that in mind, if the real issue is saving three million jobs, then perhaps we could put this money into supporting the sideways transfer of all these skilled manufacturers into new, twenty-first century manufacturing jobs?

Is it better to patch holes in the debt structure of failing companies than it would be to support retraining of skilled manufacturers for construction of, say, alternative fuels infrastructure? Given that the coming century will necessarily be marked by the blossoming of a new wave of energy and fuel technologies, why would we choose to be the makers of bad twentieth century technology when we could, instead, be the world-leading experts in, and exporters of, cutting-edge energy infrastructure?

The two-choice question of "bailout or economic collapse?" is a false dichotomy. We have a clear third option -- spend money to invest in our workers, to build a new manufacturing base, and to seize the coming technology wave and make it a fundamentally American product. Let the automobile companies consolidate. Two companies would be just fine. Let's free those skilled workers and put their aptitude to a incredibly good use.

This is our chance to steal a march on the rest of the world. It's time to take the third option, and prosper.

BBC article

As the Madoff scam continues to unravel, we naturally have a round of people who are involved in hedge funds pointing to governments, indicating they should have detected and stopped the fraud:

In a statement, Bramdean said: "The allegations made appear to point to a systemic failure of the regulatory and securities markets regime in the US."

(Bramdean Asset Management)

Antonio Borges, chairman of the Hedge Fund Standards Board, said the scandal highlighted the need for "robust governance practices and oversight via independent boards, which will challenge management procedures and behaviour".

I, however, am inclined to echo this sentiment:

"City figures cannot call for light touch regulation yet at the same time complain that regulators missed risks that the industry failed to spot," said Simon Morris, a partner with City law firm CMS Cameron McKenna.

"It's the unequivocal job of the fund manager to check out the bona fides of whoever they chose to pass their customers' money onto," he said.

BBC article

As the O'Reilly show runs its "Is It Legal" segment in the hotel lobby where I'm accessing wireless, they just spent some time complaining that the SEC should have "done more" to stop Madoff, and that it "dropped the ball."

One of the commentators cogently noted that apparently none of these people did their due diligence either. I'd like to politely point back to this post and its quote that, paraphrased, says, "You wanted no regulation, you got no regulation. Live with it."

I'm not particularly happy with the culture of insane laissez-faire we've been operating with over the last eight years, but I think if you were going to whine about regulations holding you down last year, you have no place complaining that the SEC didn't "do its job" when the deregulation you desired happens to bite you.

If you called for regulations when they were unpopular, you're free to say "I told you so." If you called for deregulation, you're SOL, and should stop talking now.

We are back at work now, after taking the morning to watch the inauguration.

You can read the full text of our newest president's inaugural address here.

President Obama announced today that executive salaries, benefits, and severance packages will be capped at firms that are receiving government financial aid, on the basic premise that a firm that was in such dire straits probably needs some fiscal responsibility to get out of the situation.

"For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis isn't only in bad taste – it's bad strategy – and I will not tolerate it as president" Obama said at the White House on Wednesday.

Al Jazeera's John Terrett reporting from New York said the Bush administration had imposed some rules on how firms spent bailout payments but that they had been considered to be quite lax.

Unsurprisingly, this has sparked concern of a talent drain from firms receiving aid to those (typically smaller) firms that are not currently receiving aid. Of course, one has to wonder how talented the executives at failing firms actually are.

Given the current contraction in financial jobs even at the executive level, I'm okay with people fleeing from firms with salary caps. If they want to go from less money to no money, that's fine by me.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

I've wondered for a long time when someone's economic malfeasance would prompt death threats (or outright killings). It surprised me that the collapse of Enron, for example, did not lead immediately to someone taking a rifle to an Enron executive.

I'm not advocating that, incidentally. But it clearly reflects the way we assign risk and value damage, where it is easier to comprehend the damage to society of a violent criminal yet much harder for people to properly gauge the societal harm caused by people who are structurally disruptive, such as highly irresponsible financial players. Perhaps it might help to quantify the uptick in health problems and deaths caused by financial malfeasance, whether that's from individual bankruptcies leading to neglected health care or a systematic increase in West Nile virus due to home foreclosures.

The public furor this week has been, naturally, over the payout of significant bonuses to executives at crippled insurance giant AIG. Putting aside for the moment some excellent questions about why such an ineffective deal was made with them during the previous administration, consider the following from current AIG overseer Edward Liddy:

"We have to continue managing our business as a business -- taking account of the cold realities of competition for customers, for revenues and for employees," he commented. "Because of this, and because of certain legal obligations, AIG has recently made a set of compensation payments, some of which I find distasteful."

This reflects one of the general issues with a number of American corporations - high reward regardless of performance, and the concomitant illusion of a competition for talent. There's no quantitative basis for asserting that simply replacing the entire AIG executive structure with executives willing to take lower pay would significantly reduce AIG's performance (and as been noted, it would be difficult to actually reduce AIG's performance from its current position). It's reasonable to accept the assertion that AIG is competing for customers and revenue, but there's no reliable evidence that they have a performance-based need to compete for executives at the current level of remuneration.

On that topic, consider this piece by MIT's Dan Ariely, discussing his research on the impact of rewards on performance. Specifically:

The results defied conventional wisdom. The group offered the highest bonus did worse than the other two groups - in every single task. On top of that, the people offered medium bonuses performed no better or worse than those offered low bonuses.

...and...

We found that as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as we usually expect: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But when the task required even rudimentary cognitive skill (as we hope investment banking does), the outcome was identical to the India study: A higher bonus on the line led to poorer performance.

In these studies, when rewards clearly were not scaling appropriately with the task and the person doing the work - when they outpaced reasonable levels - performance dropped off significantly. Ariely charitably attributes that dropoff to anxiety under the pressure of added rewards, but empirically, we don't care why it happens. We care that these out-of-scale rewards for high-level financial executives may not only be competitively unnecessary, they may actually degrade the performance of those same executives.

Can Liddy or any current AIG executive offer a quantitative comparison indicating that they wouldn't be doing just fine with individuals in the financial community who are willing to take half as much pay? A quarter? I imagine there is some level of experience required, and that we don't want, say, an expert chef taking over AIG while an AIG exec tries to run a five-star kitchen, but that doesn't mean we must accept the longstanding assertion that "this pay is required to keep top talent."

The topheavy nature of executive salaries suggests that companies as a whole have been pushed away from the lean, competitive, capitalist ideal by people with an interest in sinecure over career.

Marketwatch article at Yahoo

Secretary of Defense Gates ruffled many feathers today when he proposed a 2010 DoD budget that would see significant restructuring of our military spending away from fetishized glamor projects that benefit specific defense contractors to rational choices that will help support our troops.

Specifically, Gates is proposed curtailing several programs that have seen major cost overruns and which do not address the kind of wars we find ourselves fighting, and is instead proposing expenditures to help make sure we have the appropriate manpower and equipment to actually win our wars. Most notable would be the closing out of the massively overinflated F-22 program, a reduction in missile defense, and the potential scrapping of a fleet of presidential helicopters. Money saved in these areas would instead go to acquiring littoral combat craft for the Navy, acquiring additional drones to provide necessary air support to our ground operations, and bolstering our military numbers by expanding the armed forces.

I've written before about problems in military procurement, as highlighted by the GAO in reports on poor planning and the resulting massive cost overruns. For years, military procurement has been treated as if each specific project were critical, so critical that any amount of cost and time overrun could be accepted. In contrast, Gates appears to be taking the tack that military capability in general is critical, and thus underperforming procurement efforts need to be scrapped in favor of things that we can actually deploy to support our troops.

One would imagine this would be appreciated by nominal conservatives, inasmuch as it's both patriotic and fiscally prudent. If a military project is so over-budget that we end up getting only 25% of the F-22s we projected, and years late at that, then clearly we are not supporting our troops and our national security by funneling more money down an endless hole.

Unfortunately, the response instead has been to put up a patriotic facade in the defense of cash money coming into home districts:

A bipartisan group of senators released a letter during Gates' announcement that urged him "not to allow deep cuts in U.S. missile defense programs that are critically important to protecting our homeland and our allies against the growing threat of ballistic missiles."

The letter was signed by both senators from Alaska -- Republican Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Mark Begich -- among others.

...and...

Georgia Republicans slammed President Obama for Gates' announcement about the phase-out of the F-22 Raptor, which is assembled in Cobb County, Georgia.

Rep. Tom Price, whose district includes the Raptor production facility, called the cut "outrageous" and said Obama's "priorities are deeply flawed." Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss said he was "disappointed" in the cuts and accused the administration of being "willing to sacrifice the lives of American military men and women for the sake of domestic programs."

Saxby Chambliss is a lying bastard. He doesn't care about the lives of members of our military. He cares that the bloated F-22 unit price is coming into his state. I'll go with Gates on this one - more soldiers on the ground and more drones in the air mean more dead terrorists and more live American troops. The F-22 is a fine piece of engineering, but it's not keeping our troops alive right now, and only the leverage of people like Chambliss, who value their patch of America more than American soldiers, let it bloat as much as it did.

Gates also announced that he would be shifting jobs away from private contractors to government employees, moving from a DoD workforce that is 39% private to the pre-Bush-administration level of 26%. As the GAO has highlighted, private contractors cost more than government employees. Despite the right-wing religious belief that private industry is always cheaper, the facts show us that this is frequently untrue.

Indeed, it's sickening how much this false belief undervalues the patriotism discount we receive every day from millions of government employees. After all, how much would you need to be paid to risk your life for no good reason? What if you were doing it to protect your country? It's this decision, repeated over and over again throughout the local, state, and federal government positions, that gets us skilled employees for much cheaper than we ever could from the private market.

We'll see how much of Gates' proposed budget makes it through the House and Senate intact. I encourage you to do what I'm doing, and write to your Representative and Senators to let them know that you support the Secretary of Defense in his efforts to make our military strong and effective.

Click here to contact your Senators

Click here to contact your Representatives

CNN article

If you're a typical American citizen, you're represented by one president, two senators, and one representative. Hopefully, you know who they are. Even if you do, you may not off the top of your head know how to contact them. Here's how to find out:

Click here to contact your representative

Click here to contact your senators

Click here to contact the president

Yesterday was "stupid privilege day", e.g. "tax protest day." Rather than write a lot about it myself, let me defer to a coherent writeup on why this is foolish:

There were some protests today all over the US, orchestrated by an outfit called "FreedomWorks." I heard one guy on the radio saying that he objected to paying taxes when he "doesn't get anything for his money."

I guess clean water, food that isn't full of mercury, highways, national defense, buildings that don't fall down, medicare (so you don't have to pay all your parents' medical bills when they have a triple bypass), social security (so your parents don't have to eat dog food) , kids toys that aren't coated in lead paint, breathable air (because we don't put lead in our gasoline anymore), cars that don't kill you (because the inside is all chrome which looks great but stabs you in the face when there's an accident), are worthless. I almost forgot-- storm drains and sewers that don't dump raw sewage into your work parking lot when it rains.

We've already seen the phenomenon of people who move to new communities with a lower tax rate and then complain vociferously when (1) the schools are bad and (2) the fire department can't save them from fire. Consider what your life would be like without roads, clean water, police, clean food, and the Federally subsidized research that made computers and modern medicine possible. If you're fine with giving up all of that, then I'm cool with you wanting to pull back on your taxes. We'll make a little extranational enclave for you where there's none of that wasteful government spending.

I hear there's a nice one near the Gulf of Aden.

Some people need to have their noses broken.

In response to the release of Bush-era memos that reveal that we did torture captives (which we knew) a lot (which we didn't necessarily know), various people have suggested that this fundamentally weakens our position as a nation.

In contrast, I'd suggest that torturing people in direct violation of our own morals and ethics (and probably the eight amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the Bill of Rights) has severely undermined our position in this ongoing conflict with violent extremists. It is, after all, hard to successfully promote the U.S. as a leader in morals and democracy when we're willing to toss that and lie about doing so.

What brings me back to the title of this post is Peggy Noonan's solution to the whole problem of torture - ignore it.

"It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

"Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking."

Do we suppose Ms. Noonan would appreciate the mysteries of life if someone kidnapped her and tortured her repeatedly? I'm going to guess no. Just as I'm going to guess that Noonan, like many other people who blithely call for the torture of others have shied or even run away from personal violence all their lives.

Or, in simpler terms, if someone broke her nose, she'd be panicking and calling the cops, her lawyer, and anyone else she could to help her out. She certainly wouldn't want to just "keep walking."

(This is a reposting, with permission, of an article written by attorney Timothy Y. Fong. I thought it was worth disseminating.)

I'm tired of hacks talking about laws regarding torture. I watched an interview that John Stewart did with Cliff May about torture. May is the head of a neo-con group, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. May insisted that any Geneva Convention rules against torture were irrelevant because the Geneva Convention does not apply (in his view) to captured high level Al Qaeda operatives. Once he said that he brushed off international law restrictions against torture. This was disingenuous. It was disingenuous because even if the Geneva Conventions do not apply to high level Al Qaeda operatives, the Convention Against Torture [CAT] certainly does.

The CAT is a treaty that bars torture of anyone. The US actually ratified the CAT during the administration of the notoriously liberal President Ronald Reagan. Article 2, Section 1 specifically bars torture:

Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

The CAT does not allow any exceptions for exigent circumstances.

Now, some sharp commentators will doubtlessly point out that in many cases treaties are ratified by the US Government, but do not have force of law within the United States without implementing legislation. That is true-- and the US has implemented the CAT through 18 U.S.C. § 2340. Federal law bars torture by any American, regardless of location. Individuals who torture can be punished by death. Conspiracy to commit torture that results in death can result in a life sentence. Torture that does not result in death can result in a fine and/or a 20 year prison term.

So what does this mean? When May claims that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to captured high level terrorists, he may be speaking correctly. However he is misleading people because it makes it seem as if there are no international treaty obligations against torture. There are, and they are embodied by the CAT. Furthermore, federal law forbids torture by any American of any person for any reason.

There are only two reasons that May does not discuss the fact that the CAT and federal law forbid torture. There are two possible reasons-- incompetence or an intent to deceive. If he is speaking in public about torture and our obligations, then it is difficult to believe that he has not, during his preparations and research, run across the Convention Against Torture. For example, a basic human rights cram text, International Human Rights in a Nutshell. This is available online for $27.44 and at any law school library. Presumably the President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has access to a law library, or has friends who do. Failing that, one would think that his expense account would cover ordering a book that costs less than $30.00. I could understand if overnight shipping might break his expense account and be considered a needless extravagance, but surely he could afford the book if shipped via super saver shipping. Now perhaps the neo-con movement has fallen on such hard times that May cannot afford to buy the book via Amazon. Then perhaps he could have availed himself of a Google search. A quick search for [torture human rights laws] on Google brought up, as the fourth link the HREA website, which discusses, as the fourth paragraph the convention against torture. Maybe the neocon movement is having such a hard time that they can't even afford an internet connection. If so, I can almost feel bad for them.

What seems a lot more likely is that May is intentionally obfuscating the fact that international law does bar torture. That is intellectually dishonest and undermines his case. It is dishonest because the statement can be argued to be true, i.e. some people believe that the Geneva Conventions won't apply to high level Al Qaeda prisoners. It implies that there is no international obligation barring the US from torturing a high level Al Qaeda prisoner. However, as shown above, the CAT does strictly bar torture. Thus, if May knows about the CAT (and if he is in any way competent, then he must know about it) then he is willfully deceiving Americans about our international obligations.

He is either incompetent or a liar. Either way he is a hack.

So the next time someone who watches too much TV snidely tells you that "well the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorists," just tell him that the Convention Against Torture certainly does.