Month: January 2006

by Charles

In thinking about an Iran with enriched uranium and atomic bombs in the near future, all sorts of questions have bubbled to the surface.  The answers are my best educated guesses.  If you have different answers, tell my why. I’m just trying to mentally work this through.  In no particular order:

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by hilzoy

I remember the day my attitude towards William Weld shifted from a mild dislike to active antipathy. It was back in the mid 80s, when Weld was Governor of Massachusetts. He had recently proposed a drastic change in Massachusetts’ housing policy, which, many people feared, would lead to a lot of people winding up homeless. (I think it was a drastic curtailment of section 8 funds, but I could be wrong. I was spending a lot of time with housing policy wonks back then — a bunch of very smart, very well-informed people, mostly centrists, to whom good evidence-based policy mattered a lot more than ideological correctness — and they were all terrified about what the change would do.) One day Weld was asked about the possibility that his program would leave a lot of families homeless, and he said, in this absolutely cavalier way, that if it turned out that a lot of people were thrown out onto the street, he’d just change the program back the next year. (The ‘cavalier way’ is crucial here: I could imagine someone expressing doubts about the program, and explaining why he’d chosen to support it in a way that did justice to the problems it might cause. That would not have disturbed me in the same way. What bothered me was that Weld’s response was not thoughtful; it was flippant.)

As though just changing the program back again would be enough. As though that would make things all better again.

I thought: consider a family who were, as they say, working hard and playing by the rules, who were just barely making ends meet with help from Section 8 (or whatever it was), and who, as a result of this change, lost their home. Consider the effects on their children, who have to try, somehow, to get their homework done in a van or a homeless shelter. Consider the fights that might erupt between the parents as a result of the stress and misery of trying to figure out how to keep their family together on the streets. Marriages break up over less, and it’s hard to imagine that the stress alone wouldn’t take a serious toll on everyone around, including the kids. Consider the humiliation, for the parents, of having to take their kids to shelters and food banks, and the cost to the kids whenever one of their classmates asked: so, where do you live? (This is supposing they stayed in school. If not, consider the cost to them of dropping out or missing large chunks of school time.) Consider the impacts on their health of life on the streets. Think of all the damage that living on the street would do to a family.

Now imagine William Weld saying: Oops! my bad!, and changing the program back. This family might reapply for assistance, and in a few years might get it. But an enormous amount of damage would have been done to them in the meantime. Life on the streets is not good for anyone, especially for children. You don’t have to be some sort of miracle of empathy to recognize this. And the contrast between the thought of that damage and Weld’s completely cavalier attitude to it just enraged me.

I feel the same way about Medicare Part D. Because a lot of the damage that will be done to people as a result of Medicare Part D is like the damage done to a family by becoming homeless in this respect: you can’t just wave a magic wand and make things better again once you realize your mistake. The damage is permanent, and it cannot be undone. And that makes the thoughtless, cavalier way in which this policy was written and adopted completely outrageous.

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by hilzoy

As I’m sure you all know by now, the introduction of Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit has been an unmitigated disaster. As of last Saturday, a dozen states had declared public health emergencies because of it, and over twenty have stepped in to make sure seniors get the drugs they need. The new benefit is unbelievably confusing. One of the main reasons for choosing one of the plans it offers over others is that that plan covers all the medications you’re actually taking; yet while the insurers who offer those plans can change which medications they cover every month, seniors are locked into those plans for a whole year. And, my favorite detail of all, the government is forbidden to either compete against private companies by offering its own plan, or to bargain for lower prices on drugs.

The rollout of the plan has had its own share of problems. “Dual eligibles” — those who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid — have thus far had their prescriptions covered under Medicaid. Now, all of them have been enrolled in one or another plan, and will supposedly be exempt from many of its costs. The trouble is that neither the information about their new plans nor the fact that they are eligible for low co-pays seems to have found its way onto the system’s computers.

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by hilzoy

The NSA program to eavesdrop on American citizens was, according to George W. Bush, a limited program that only monitored the phone calls of genuine, certified Bad People:

“This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner,” he told reporters. “These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches.”

And:

“”If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we’d like to know why.””

Apparently, the FBI agents who had to track down the leads generated by the NSA wiretaps saw things a bit differently:

“In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about “whether the program had a proper legal foundation,” but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a “vital tool” against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved “thousands of lives.”

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

“We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism – case closed,” said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.””

And for this it was worth violating the privacy of an unknown number of Americans, instructing government agencies to violate criminal law, and asserting that the President has powers more commonly associated with dictators? Sheesh.

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Even though intellectually, I know I might lose this argument, if I’m honest, I have to admit that viscerally I object to the mass media public humiliation of people arrested for lewdness. I know plenty of people believe it’s a good deterrent to breaking laws against such behavior, but given these folks will have enough shame and guilt to deal with in explaining to their families and workplace, it seems overkill in the deterrent department.

Recently the pastor of a Tulsa church was arrested for propositioning a male police officer posing as a prostitute. The media are running stories on it and trying to highlight the hypocrisy of it because he’s made anti-gay-marriage statements. You can google the story based on the info I’ve provided, if you want to, but in the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I won’t add to this poor guy’s public scolding, at least not by name.

What made me think it’s time to voice my objection to the practice of public humiliation via mass media were the details of his case. He apparently had spoken out against same-sex marriage (but then so have some known homosexuals), but he also supported a Southern Baptist Convention directive urging its 42,000 churches to befriend gays and lesbians. Of course he reportedly encouraged that in order to try to convince gays that they can become heterosexual "if they accept Jesus Christ as their savior and reject their ‘sinful, destructive lifestyle,"’ which I object to because it’s harmful and wrong-headed, but it seems to me this fella may have really just wanted to believe that might be true too much more than he wished to harm anyone else. I can only imagine the loneliness that drove him to proposition someone he thought was a prostitute.

Of course, I’m projecting here, but my propensity for empathy is why I find the high-tech Scarlet Letter approach so obscene.

This next example is tougher because it includes people who might have actually hurt children, but still we recently watched in horror as NBC’s increasingly sloppy and sleazy journalistic offering, Dateline, aired a hidden camera investigation where they sent folks pretending to be under-aged children into chat rooms who eventually gave the address of the home where they had the cameras set up as a rendezvous point. Once someone entered the home, NBC ambushed them and recorded their excuses for being there. Now, of course, any adult who would actually show up needs to be watched carefully and possibly arrested, but what made NBC think it was their right to air their faces and voices before these folks had been officially accused of or convicted of a crime? Seriously, we were as equally disgusted with the reporting as we were the men who showed up. In fact, we were so disgusted by the reporting it made us feel somewhat sorry for the men who showed up, and so no degree of trying to excuse the reporting as a public service holds water IMO.

The police are professionals. I know they often use the media to help them do their jobs, but there are certain aspects of believing that someone is innocent until proven guilty that demand we let the police do their jobs with some degree of privacy for the accused and even the convicted. Yes, the public has a right to know when someone has been accused/convicted of a crime, but there should still be some degree of dignity (for ourselves, at least, if not the accused) that accompanies the distribution of such information.

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