"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
by hilzoy Bush is proposing to cut health care for veterans: “At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half — if the White House is serious about its … Read more
by hilzoy Reality has joined the ranks of losers and defeatists. From the Washington Post: “Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week’s bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad’s main … Read more
by hilzoy It’s never happened before — for some reason, the world has yet to be consumed with curiosity about which books I’ve read lately, etc. As always, though, Gary defies popular opinion ;), so here goes: Four jobs I’ve had: Killing little baby banana trees by injecting them with kerosene (can’t have too many … Read more
by Charles Rolling Stone has a lengthy and interesting piece on Scientology. It took the writer, Janet Reitman, nine months to do her investigation and she appears fair-minded yet skeptical, covering some of the theology, the history, the practices, the facilities and the people. If you challenge certain tenets, you may be viewed as "counterintentioned". … Read more
by hilzoy We are in need of an open thread. I’m too busy to write anything substantive now, but this I can manage. Special bonus: what I was up to in the UK.
by Charles CNN provides another perfect example of the mainstream media talking down the war in Iraq and trying transform to spin good news into negative news. The scary title: Pentagon: Iraqi troops downgradedNo Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support Followed by the ominous first three paragraphs: The only Iraqi battalion capable of … Read more
by Charles Although Ayatollah Sistani called for calm in the wake of the terrorist attack on the al Askiriya shrine, it was too much of a political opportunity for al Sadr and his Mahdi militia. As the New York Times noted, the area hit hardest with retaliatory attacks was Sadr City. Voices inside Iraq are … Read more
by Charles Michael Totten was in northern Iraq, putting his fascinating observations to laptop. Totten starts with his alighting in Erbil (and follows up with a photo gallery and entries here and here), then presents a cool photo gallery of the northern Iraq countryside, then talks a little Kurdish politics, then he moved on to … Read more
by Charles Way back in August 2004 or thereabouts, US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that a genocide was occurring in Sudan. So far, little has been done to stem the Arab-on-black, Muslim-on-Muslim murders of hundreds of thousands and displacement of millions by Khartoum’s surrogates, the Janjaweeds. There was a ceasefire in Darfur, but … Read more
–by Sebastian Holsclaw David Irving was recently sentenced to three years in prison for Holocaust denial. The man is a moral idiot. He is a Holocaust denier, racist and a modern Nazi sympathizer. But he ought not be in jail. I say that not because I respect his views in any way–they are intellectually and … Read more
by hilzoy
Jane Mayer has an extraordinary article in the New Yorker today. It’s on the efforts of Alberto J. Mora, then the general counsel of the Navy, to work against the interrogation policies detailed in the various ‘torture memos’. It’s worth reading in its entirety, and I won’t try to summarize it. I will, however, highlight a few themes below the fold.
by hilzoy
Regardless of where you stand on the NSA wiretap issue, it’s a matter that cries out for Congressional hearings. It concerns important constitutional principles — the rule of law, the separation of powers, and of course the fourth amendment. The best you can say about its legality is that it’s debatable. And a failure to inquire into it would leave unchallenged the idea that the President can do what he likes without bothering to tell anyone, except for a few members of Congress sworn to absolute secrecy.
One of the committees best suited to hold such hearings is the Intelligence Committee. Its members know a lot of classified information, and are therefore in a good position to assess the administration’s claims. Moreover, they have a reputation for discretion. And yet it’s still completely unclear whether or not Congress will hold any. This is largely due to its chairman, Pat Roberts, whose hometown newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, just wrote (h/t War and Piece):
“Roberts seems prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and possible violations of law.
That’s not oversight — it’s looking the other way.”
According to the Washington Post, last week Jay Rockefeller introduced a motion to hold hearings. The White House put pressure on committee members, but after a counterproductive call from Andy Card to Sen. Olympia Snowe,
“Snowe contacted fellow committee Republican Chuck Hagel (Neb.), who also had voiced concerns about the program. They arranged a three-way phone conversation with Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.).
Until then, Roberts apparently thought he had the votes to defeat Rockefeller’s motion in the committee, which Republicans control nine to seven, the sources said. But Snowe and Hagel told the chairman that if he called up the motion, they would support it, assuring its passage, the sources said.
When the closed meeting began, Roberts averted a vote on Rockefeller’s motion by arranging for a party-line vote to adjourn until March 7. The move infuriated Rockefeller, who told reporters, “The White House has applied heavy pressure in recent weeks to prevent the committee from doing its job.””
Pressure indeed.
by hilzoy
Glenn Greenwald has written another great post (actually, a lot of them, but this is the one I’m writing about.) He’s writing in response to a post by Captain Ed, who claims that “FISA came into being to regulate peacetime surveillance by the federal government, as an antidote to Nixonian abuses of power that had nothing to do with the conduct of war.” Greenwald notes that that’s not true, since FISA contains an entire section called “Authorization during time of war”; and since it was passed in response to Nixon’s spying during the Vietnam war, not during peacetime. (In an update, Captain Ed acknowledges this.)
But Greenwald then adds this:
“But beyond these self-evident factual errors in Captain Ed’s argument is a more fundamental and pervasive falsehood which is being peddled with increasing frequency to justify the Administration’s law-breaking. It is the notion that restraints on the Executive Branch generally, such as those mandated by FISA or ones prohibiting the incarceration of Americans without due process, are now obsolete because they were the by-product of some sort of peaceful, enemy-less, utopian era which no longer exists.
This world-view is staggering in its revisionism. FISA was enacted in 1978. I did not think there were many people, if there were any at all, who actually believe that 1978 was a time of “peace.” Most people — and I would have thought this was true particularly for “conservatives” — tend to see that period as the height of a war which we call the “Cold War,” where we faced an “Evil Empire” trying to achieve world domination in order to impose its tyrannical ideology. In fact, we spent the entire decade after the enactment of FISA engaged in a massive build-up of our military forces, and we even tried to find a way to build a space-based shield around our country in order to repel incoming missiles. Accordingly, how can it possibly be argued that Americans banned our Government from eavesdropping on us in secret only during times of peace?”
This is true, and it’s important. I was thinking of it a few weeks ago. I was eating lunch, turned on CSPAN, and as luck would have it, a speech by President Bush was on. I usually find the President’s speeches unwatchable, since they consist of sentences like “You know, what some people don’t understand is, our enemies are really bad people.” But on this occasion, for whatever reason, I watched it. And what struck me was that if I had no knowledge whatsoever of current events — if, for instance, I had just beamed in from another galaxy — he might sound persuasive. As it was, though, it was so completely detached from reality that it was downright surreal. And so I kept listening, in wonderment, as this speech appropriate to another world entirely moved from one bizarre claim to another, leaving me wondering whether it was me or the President who had gone through the looking glass.
And what started me wondering was this statement:
“You know, a lot of us grew up thinking that oceans would protect us; that if there was a threat overseas, it really didn’t concern us because we were safe. That’s what history had basically told us — yes, there was an attack on Pearl Harbor, obviously, but it was a kind of hit-and-run and then we pursued the enemy. A lot of folks — at least, my age, when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked. And in that we got attacked, I vowed then, like I’m vowing to you today, that I understand my most important priority. My most important job is to protect the security of the American people.”
Just savor this bit: “when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked.”
That just can’t be true.
by hilzoy Via Nathan Newman at TPMCafe: Unite Here is launching a campaign to raise wages of hotel workers in upcoming contract talks. These are good times for hotels: according to the Wall Street Journal (12/8/05; sorry, subscription required): “Despite a flurry of devastating hurricanes as well as higher prices for gasoline and airline tickets, … Read more
by Charles
There was a really good dKos diary on Africa, but my computer automatically updated Windows and re-booted, and it was lost it before I could bookmark it. Dang it! I tried to find it and failed, not realizing there are around 200 dKos diaries posted every day, and that dKos has a clunky search function. Oh, well. Another good work into oblivion. Too bad, because it was a gold nugget in a morass of angry partisanship. [Update: Tim found the link (thanks), and more narrative is below the fold at the end.]
A few days ago, economics professor William Easterly wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled The West Can’t Save Africa. More accurately, western governments can’t send money to African governments and expect problems to be solved. Easterly makes the case that individual Africans, with the help of accountable non-governmental aid organizations, can make significant improvements to their environs. His more expanded thesis here. An excerpt:
Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is only one major area of the world in which central planning is still seen as a way to achieve prosperity – countries that receive foreign aid. Behind the Aid Wall that divides poor countries from rich, the aid community is awash in plans, strategies, and frameworks to meet the very real needs of the world’s poor. These exercises only make sense in a central planning mentality in which the answer to the tragedies of poverty is a large bureaucratic apparatus to dictate quantities of different development goods and services by administrative fiat. The planning mindset is in turn linked to previously discredited theories, such as that poverty is due to a "poverty trap," which can only be alleviated by a large inflow of aid from rich country to poor country governments to fill a "financing gap" for poor countries. The aid inflow is of course administered by this same planning apparatus.
This is bad news for the world’s poor, as historically poverty has never been ended by central planners. It is only ended by "searchers", both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work, all of this in an unplanned, spontaneous way. Examples of searchers are firms in private markets and democratically accountable politicians. There is a robust correlation (0.73) between economic and political freedom, on one hand, and economic development, on the other hand.
To describe why centralized aid plans (such as proposed by Jeffrey Sachs) don’t and won’t work, Larry White uses the Underpants Gnomes analogy, courtesy of South Park.
Gnomes Business Plan
Phase 1: Collect underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: ProfitSachs Africa Plan
Phase 1: US taxpayers give (more) money to sub-Saharan African governments or multinational aid agencies, "directed to specific needs".
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Africa embarks on cumulative growth.
by hilzoy Maher Arar’s case has been dismissed. You can read Katherine’s summary of the case here, a press release from Arar’s attorneys here, and the decision itself here (pdf). I’ve read the decision, but do not feel competent to address the legal issues it raises. (Most of them involve things like jurisdiction and standing.) … Read more
by hilzoy
Kevin Drum notes this passage from the President’s health care speech yesterday, in which the President spells out some of the benefits of his new Health Savings Accounts:
“The traditional insurance today will cover your health care costs — most of your health care costs — in exchange for a high premium payment up front. The costs are generally shared by you and your employer. You may also pay a small deductible and co-payment at the time of treatment. What’s interesting about this system is that those payments cover only a fraction of the actual costs of health care, the rest of which are picked up by a third party, basically your insurance company.
It means most Americans have no idea what their actual cost of treatment is. You show up, you got a traditional plan, you got your down payment, you pay a little co-pay, but you have no idea what the cost is. Somebody else pays it for you. And so there’s no reason at all to kind of worry about price. If somebody else is paying the bill, you just kind of — hey, it seems like a pretty good deal. There’s no pressure for an industry to lower price. And so what you’re seeing is price going up. If you don’t care what you’re paying, and the provider doesn’t have any incentive to lower, the natural inclination is for the cost to go up and the insurance companies, sure enough, pass on the costs — the increase in cost to you and your employer. That’s what’s happening. (…)
For many routine medical needs, HSAs mean you can shop around until you get the best treatment for the best price. In other words, it’s your money; you’re responsible for routine medical expenses; the insurance pays for the catastrophic care. You’re responsible for paying for the portion of your health care costs up to your deductible. And so you — you talk to your doctor, you say, can’t we find this drug at a little cheaper cost? Or you go to a specialist, maybe we can do this a little better — old Joe does it for X, I’m going — why don’t you try it for Y? It allows you to choose treatment or tests that meet your needs in a way that you’re comfortable with when it comes to paying the bills. In other words, decisions about routine medical treatments are made by you and the doc, not by third-party people that you never know. And all of a sudden, when you inject this type of thinking in the system, price starts to matter. You’re aware of price. You begin to say, well, maybe there’s a better way to do this, and more cost-effective way.”
My sentiments exactly. Just the other day I was beset by a hollow, empty feeling, and I said to myself: Self, there’s a void in my life — a void that could only be filled by spending hours calling around, comparing prices for doctors’ visits and pharmaceuticals, preferably while sick. Oh, if only I could say to my doctor: Maybe we can do this a little better — old Joe does it for X, I’m going — why don’t you try it for Y?
You see, shopping for medical services isn’t like ordinary shopping. When you go to the grocery store, for instance, they make it easy for you. There are the boxes of cereal all lined up, awaiting your inspection, and all you need to do is compare the price, the percentage of your daily vitamin needs provided by one carefully measured serving, and so on, and then make your selection. Where’s the fun in that? Shopping for medical services is different: hours spent finding and tracking down the relevant physicians and getting through their daunting office staff; price discussions with hospital administrators who don’t want to tell you exactly how much anaesthesia you’ll need without an exam, and so forth. The thrill of the chase! The call of the wild! By comparison, ordinary shopping is a tame and pitiful facsimile, like shooting cage-raised quail when you could be hunting grizzlies.
You might be thinking: silly hilzoy! You can do this already! But that just shows how little you know about the thrills of shopping for medical services. It’s just no fun without a little skin in the game: the sort of skin that you only have if your medical insurance won’t cover your bills. And that’s what Bush is offering us: the chance to have the shopping experience of a lifetime, and to have it under the most deliciously grueling conditions: with our own dollars on the line, when we’re desperately ill. It’s a vision as bold and rugged as America herself; and that’s why we love our President.
***
Obviously, though, Bush wasn’t designing this solely for our enjoyment. He claims to be motivated by a desire to cut health care costs. There’s only one problem: HSAs would have a negligible impact on health care costs. To show you why, I’m going to reprint a graph I made up last time I wrote about HSAs. It’s based on 2002 data from this Kaiser Family Foundation report (see exhibit 1.11.) It shows what percentage of our health care spending is done by those who spend the most.
HSAs cover medical expenses above a certain limit, often around $5,000. Pretty much everyone in the top 50% of spenders on health care will have reached that limit. (My health care spending hit five figures in the first five days of this year, and I’m not even especially sick.) That means that any reduction in health care spending will come from that tiny little blip on the right hand side of the graph: the 50% of the public that spends least on health care. Since that part of the public accounts for only a tiny part of health care spending (3.4% in 2002), most health economists don’t think HSAs will actually save all that much.
They will, however, have other dreadful effects, which I wrote about here and here. The most important one is to gut the present system of health insurance. Moreover, a new study by Jonathan Gruber shows the following:
“I estimate that the President’s budget proposals will cost almost $12 billion dollars per year if fully phased in. I estimate that these proposals will on net raise the number of uninsured (by 600,000 persons), as those left uninsured through firm dropping of insurance exceed those who gain insurance through taking up tax-subsidized high-deductible plans attached to HSAs.”
I can hear the nay-sayers among you grumbling that in a time of exploding budget deficits, twelve billion dollars seems like an awful lot of money to pay to strip health insurance away from six hundred thousand people, and leave many more underinsured, especially since anyone who wants to be uninsured can just cancel her insurance policy. But that just misses the point. In the immortal words of Rousseau, sometimes we must be “forced to be free” — in this case, free of health insurance, which enslaves the mind, degrades the spirit, and deprives us of the ennobling experience of shopping for medical services without a safety net.
This, then, is the inspiring vision to which our President calls us: to expand the liberties our forefathers gave us beyond freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press, to one of the noblest freedoms of all: the freedom to confront medical bills alone, in fear and trembling, without the false comfort of medical insurance, with only our own wits standing between us and personal bankruptcy.
by hilzoy Salon has them. The article is here; the photos are here. (h/t matttbastard ) From the article: “The DVD containing the material includes a June 6, 2004, CID investigation report written by Special Agent James E. Seigmund. That report includes the following summary of the material included: “A review of all the computer … Read more
by Charles The words chaos and violence never seem far when the topic is Haiti. The latest election–conducted on February 7th, the first national election in years–was a positive step toward bringing representative government to the beleaguered half-island nation. Over the weekend, it looked like Rene Preval had enough votes to be elected outright. Then, … Read more
by hilzoy
John Winthrop (wonderful original spelling here):
“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. (…) For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
(…) “Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.”
“MORE photographs have been leaked of Iraqi citizens tortured by US soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. (…)
Some of the photos are similar to those published in 2004, others are different. They include photographs of six corpses, although the circumstances of their deaths are not clear. There are also pictures of what appear to be burns and wounds from shotgun pellets.”
One is below the fold.
by hilzoy My thoughts are with Harry Whittington, who (as everyone probably already knows) has had a mild heart attack. I said last night that any decent adult would stand up and take responsibility for shooting another person, rather than trying to blame his victim. You step up to the plate; you accept responsibility; and … Read more
My small contribution to Modern Art. It is entitled "Mohammed in Desert"
This was inspired by an article and cartoon I read about at the Volokh Conspiracy. More below the fold:
by hilzoy When you are involved in something bad, like, say, shooting someone, just follow these easy steps: (1) Ask yourself, did I do anything wrong? (2) If so, admit your mistake promptly. By following these simple steps, you will step up to the plate and accept responsibility, while avoiding both trying to squirm out … Read more
by hilzoy From Raw Story: “The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned. According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of … Read more
by hilzoy From the AP: “The shooting was first reported by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The vice president’s office did not disclose the accident until the day after it happened.” I wasn’t going to write about this at first, but something about this story kept niggling away in the back of my mind. I couldn’t … Read more
by hilzoy
President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are forever lecturing people who disagree with them about their pre-9/11 way of thinking. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what on earth they could be talking about. A post 9/11 mentality would, I would have thought, involve a relentless focus on attacking both terrorist organizations and the causes of their appeal, not haring off on unrelated and ill-thought-out adventures like Iraq. It would involve concentrating our resources on actually catching Osama bin Laden, not letting him slip away at Tora Bora in part because our military was already distracted by planning for Iraq. It would involve trying to secure loose nukes in places like Russia, and keeping non-nuclear countries from developing nuclear weapons, not ignoring North Korea’s extremely dangerous nuclear program — from which terrorists are far more likely to get nukes than they ever would have been from Saddam — while trying to convince the country that a country with no nuclear weapons threatened us with a “mushroom cloud”. It would have involved deft, quiet, and forceful efforts to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, not the sort of wishful thinking that led people to say that ‘the road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad’, and to bring about reform in states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It would, in short, have been diametrically opposed to everything this administration has done.
At home, it would have involved moving heaven and earth to ensure that our ports, bridges, railways, and chemical plants were secure. This administration has barely scratched the surface of those tasks. And it would have involved making a major effort to ensure that if some natural or man-made catastrophe struck again, we would be as well-eqipped to deal with it as a rich and powerful country can be. But as Katrina made painfully clear, we are not.
On Constitutional issues, I agree with Russ Feingold: the Bush administration has a pre-1776 mentality. But even on preventing and preparing for terrorism, I can’t imagine how they could possibly be more pre-9/11 than they are.
This rant was prompted by a story in the Washington Post, about a House report on the response to Katrina. As I read it, I kept thinking: this is the sort of response we could expect to a terrorist incident. It happened four years after 9/11, but as far as the Bush administration’s disaster planning and preparedness are concerned, 9/11 might as well never have happened. Either this administration just has not been trying to prepare for the next catastrophe, or it is completely incompetent, or both. In either case, it is living in a pre-9/11 world — a world in which, apparently, we don’t need to bother with boring things like disaster preparedness, we can afford to place incompetent people in charge of them, and we don’t have to bother to exercise actual leadership in times of crisis.
The report in question is by the House Republicans, who have not been known for their combative and confrontational attitude to this administration. Excerpts from the story, and more comments, below the fold.
by hilzoy So I want to flatter Charles. I tried this on HoCB, but it didn’t take, so I’m moving it here: this is a thread in which you can propose your very own tortured neologisms to describe political phenomena. Here are a few to get you started: The effects of the Bush administration’s legal … Read more
by hilzoy Murray Waas has been covering the Plame story for quite a while, and his track record is very good. Today he brings us this: “Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House … Read more
by hilzoy
For several days now, I’ve been meaning to write about the Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the NSA domestic surveillance program. I read the transcripts. A lot of it was incredibly dull — much duller than I had expected — since Gonzales seemed to stick remorselessly to a few single rules:
(a) When asked about the legal justification for the actual NSA program, repeat things the administration has already said.
(b) When asked any question about the legal justification for anything other than the actual NSA program, refuse to answer on the grounds that you have not done the requisite constitutional analysis. Do this even if the question involves a straightforward application of principles you have already enunciated.
(c) When asked any factual question, do not answer, on the grounds that it is an “operational detail”, regardless of whether or not this description is even remotely plausible.
On the whole, that made for some pretty dull testimony. However, there were some interesting and alarming bits sprinkled here and there, and I wanted to write both about them and about the administration’s truly alarming view of presidential power. Fortunately, Glenn Greenwald has written a great post about the latter topic. Below the fold, I’ll copy some of it (though you should read the whole thing), and then use a few bits of Gonzales’ testimony to illustrate.
by hilzoy Oh no: it’s back: “If you read enough numbers, you never know what you’ll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts. Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. … Read more
by hilzoy Good news: “George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said. Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the … Read more
by Charles
Last Thursday, in another lapse into Hugonoia, the Chavez goverment expelled a U.S. Embassy military official from Venezuela. Friday, Donald Rumsfeld unhelpfully triggered Godwin’s Law, mentioning that both Chavez and Hitler were "elected legally". Then the United States responded by expelling a "senior Venezuelan diplomat". Over the course of his administration, Chavez has used fears of a U.S. invasion to strengthen his military arsenal, and Rumsfeld’s words will give Chavez that much more of an excuse. Chavez is also not above triggering Godwin’s Law:
"The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush," Chavez said from a stage decorated with a huge red image of himself as a young soldier.
Why pay attention to Venezuela? The prime reason is O-I-L. With the world’s fifth largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela is a geological lottery winner and, because of this, its president has more influence than he otherwise would or should have. [Update: To be clear, "should" is my personal opinion.] A secure oil supply is in the United States’ national interest, and Venezuela has played a major role. In 2004, the U.S. imported 12.8 millions barrels of crude oil and finished petroleum products per day, of which Venezuela supplied 11.8% (Venezuela is our fourth largest source of imported oil, behind Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia). At 551 million barrels per year and prices at $60 per barrel, that means the Venezuelan goverment–via its state-owned oil company, PDVSA–receives over $33 billion in revenues from the United States (or more accurately, from oil firms in the U.S.). Total Venezuelan oil revenues in 2005 were $85 billion, so the amount from the U.S. could be much higher. We are dependent on oil, so therefore we are dependent on Venezuelan oil.
But looking at it another way, the United States is in Venezuela’s national interest. The CIA World Factbook:
Venezuela continues to be highly dependent on the petroleum sector, accounting for roughly one-third of GDP, around 80% of export earnings, and over half of government operating revenues.
Venezuela produces 3.1 million barrels per day, of which 2.1 million are exported. That means that nearly 25% of government operating revenues are financed by American-based oil enterprises, and 16% of their GDP can be traced back to the United States. Venezuela is further invested in the United States because of CITGO, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of PDVSA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Venezuelan goverment. The next time you fill your tank at the local 7-Eleven, de facto CEO Hugo Chavez should say gracias to you for adding a few more petrodollars to his government’s coffers.
But rather than gracias, the sentiments Chavez expresses towards the United States are closer to vete a cingar (WARNING: This R-rated link is not workplace safe). Chavez’s rhetoric is virtually indistinguishable from Castro’s, and if it just stayed there, Chavez would be just another loudmouth ingrate. And an entertaining one at that, since he apparently likes to parade American nutters through Caracas such as Harry Belafonte and Cindy Sheehan, giving them media platforms to bash Bush. But Chavez doesn’t stop just there.
I know we have talked almost endlessly about the militant-Muslim cartoon issue. But since I never know when to stop, I’m willing to tackle it from a slightly different angle. Joshua Marshall, whom I almost never agree with, has an interesting take on the issue here: In any case, there is a hint of the … Read more
by hilzoy
The Washington Post has an excellent story on the NSA wiretap program today. It’s worth reading in its entirety, since it has a lot of interesting details. Among the highlights (note: while the first quote here is from the beginning of the article, some of the rest appear here in an order different from that found in the article. I.e., each passage is quoted verbatim and with relevant context, but the second passage I quote appears after the third in the article itself.):
“Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as “terrorist surveillance” and summed it up by declaring that “if you’re talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why.” But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.”
This is predictable.
by hilzoy I never could figure out why so many people were so eager to conclude that Valerie Plame was not, in fact, a covert operative. It always seemed to me that that was one of those questions the CIA was much more likely to know the answer to than most bloggers (which is as … Read more
