Month: March 2006

Various Things

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by hilzoy (1) Paging von: Apparently, the Democrats agree that “at the end of the day, though, “Bush got us into this mess” is not a foreign policy,” not that that was all they were saying at the time. Now, however, they have decided to broadcast their strategy to the high heavens. Probably, no one … Read more

Knocking Out One Form Of Corruption

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by hilzoy From the WSJ (sorry; subscription wall): “Amid broad congressional concern about ethics scandals, some lawmakers are poised to expand the battle for reform: They want to enact legislation that would prohibit members of Congress and their aides from trading stocks based on nonpublic information gathered on Capitol Hill. Two Democrat lawmakers plan to … Read more

Good News From Africa: Take 2

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by hilzoy

I think I might have been too hasty a few days ago, when I wrote that it was good news that Nigeria had decided to turn Charles Taylor over to a human rights tribunal in Sierra Leone.

This is one of those issues, like not negotiating for hostages, in which it’s impossible not to be torn between one’s views about the individual case and one’s views about the right general policy to have. On the one hand, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to rejoice when any hostage is freed. On the other, if a hostage is freed because the hostage-takers managed to get what they wanted, that encourages people to take more hostages, and who could possibly want that? And this is not a question of caring more for general rules than for flesh-and-blood human beings: any hostages who are taken in the future will be just as real as those whose release is negotiated, and they are just as likely to have friends and family who suffer enormously when they are taken, and who are desperate for their release.

Similarly here. Who could possibly not want to see justice for the man whose ” crimes include the incitement of wars in four West African countries; the enslavement, rape or dismemberment of thousands of children; and collaboration with al Qaeda”? Or, to make the point another way, who is responsible for things like this:

Kiso08
(© Sebastian Bolesch/DFA/Still Pictures)?

Or this?

Conflict1

(Note: these pictures are from the civil war in Sierra Leone, which Taylor is accused of having incited, and in which a lot of children were conscripted as soldiers, and a lot of people were mutilated by Taylor’s side. I said ‘things like this’ because I don’t know that he is responsible for the kids in these specific pictures.)

But*…

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Card Resigns

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. announced his resignation this morning after nearly 5-1/2 years as President Bush’s top aide. Bush said Card will be replaced by Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. (…) Card has held the top staff … Read more

Statistics: Pop Quiz

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by hilzoy

For as long as I can remember, the degree to which our country is separated along class lines has really bothered me. It’s not just possible but easy for people who are, say, upper middle class to have virtually no opportunity to talk to people who are poor, except during commercial transactions (getting a meal at a fast-food restaurant), or when a homeless person asks them for money, or during some similarly impersonal encounter; and it’s equally possible for those who are poor not to have any meaningful contact with people who are well off.

Obviously, this matters for politics. If someone proposes a law that would primarily affect people I’m familiar with — philosophy professors, for example — it’s relatively easy for me to figure out its pros and cons. But if someone proposes a law that would primarily affect people I’m not familiar with — native Alaskans, say (in my case) — it’s an awful lot harder. So to the extent that we don’t know anything about whole groups of people, we’re likely to make much worse policy. Thus, one of my mottos has always been: cross class boundaries whenever you can. (Not, I want to add, as a sort of socioeconomic tourist; there are all sorts of other ways to do this. Working in the biker bar and in the battered women’s shelter were two of mine.)

I was thinking about this because I happened to be looking at income statistics (pdf) recently, and found that while I can imagine living on the 2004 US median household income — after all, my household consists of me and my two cats — I had a very hard time imagining managing with that income if I had a family. And I’m not nearly as fussy as, say, Tom DeLay, who once said: “I challenge anyone to live on my salary”, at a time when his salary was $158,000 a year. I do just fine on a lot less than that. As I said, I’d do just fine on our median income, as long as I didn’t have a spouse, children, or anyone else to divide the money with. Moreover, I have in my time been pretty broke, so it’s not that I just haven’t ever had to try. (The period when I was supporting myself by throwing newspapers leaps to mind. $425/month income; $225/month rent; the remaining $200 for food and gas — and gas is a necessity when your job is delivering several hundred papers a day with your car.) But I have a hard time imagining living on that income if I had, say, a family of four. And yet half of all households, presumably including a lot of families, manage to do just that.

And if that’s hard to imagine, I really, really can’t imagine surviving at the poverty level.

So here’s the pop quiz:

(a) What was the US median income for households in 2004? (For those of you who have forgotten stats: if you took all the households in the country and lined them up from richest to poorest, the income of the household in the very middle is the median income. 50% of the population makes less; 50% makes more.)

(b) What is the median income for a male full-time, year-round worker? For a female? (The figures I have are broken down by gender.)

(c) What was the poverty threshold for a family of four (two parents, two kids) in 2004? (The poverty threshold is the point below which a family officially counts as living in poverty, according to the US Census Bureau.)

(d) What percentage of Americans lived at or below the poverty threshold?

(e) What percentage of American children under 18 lived at or below the poverty threshold?

(f) What percentage of workers over 16 live below the poverty threshold?

You don’t need to give your actual answers; just see how accurate they are. I’ll be curious: I’m not posting this because I assume anything one way or the other about the results, but because I really have no sense at all of how accurate people’s views about this are, and I thought it would be interesting to find out for the unrepresentative sample that is our readership.

Answers below the fold.

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Help! IANAL (Scalia And Hamdan Edition)

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by hilzoy When I talk about the law here on ObWi, I tend to try to restrict myself to construing bits of text and applying them in fairly straightforward ways. I can do that. But mastering reams of case law, legal niceties, and all that: above my pay grade. (Literally as well as metaphorically.) So … Read more

And Speaking Of Plagiarism…

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by hilzoy Ben Domenech has company: “THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text. Putin was … Read more

Good News From Africa

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “Nigeria announced Saturday that it was ready to hand over former Liberian president Charles Taylor to a U.N. tribunal, a move that would make him the first former African head of state to stand trial for crimes against humanity. The tribunal has accused Taylor of instigating wars that devastated … Read more

Giving To Charity

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by hilzoy Tomorrow’s Washington Post has a long story on the U.S. Family Network, a supposed charity founded by one of Tom DeLay’s aides: “A top adviser to former House Whip Tom DeLay received more than a third of all the money collected by the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit organization the adviser created to … Read more

Season wrapup

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Having been busy tearing up carpet and padding, etc, and preparing the house and dinner for a birthday feast (my wife’s birthday), I hadn’t much time to pay attention to the last bits of the swimming season.

My only prediction for the day was the kind that doesn’t count: the kind that no one else hears you make.  I predicted (to myself) that Ryan Lochte would break his own 200 yard backstroke record, and of course that he did.  The new record is 1:37.68, which is about six-tenths of a second faster than his old record.  Call it about three and a half feet improvement at the touch.  Lochte also had the second-fastest leadoff leg in the 4×100 free relay, which is an amazing stat given that he’s not really considered to be a world-class sprint freestyle swimmer.  Overall Lochte had an outstanding meet, setting four NCAA records, winning three individual events and contributing greatly to Florida’s place in the team standings.  If Lochte doesn’t get the MVP award (can’t recall offhand what it’s called exactly) then there is no justice.

Other outstanding swimming today had Michigan senior Davis Tarwater scare Melvin Stewart’s fourteen-year-old 200 butterfly record; missed it by 0.06 seconds.  Georgia sophomore Sebastien Rouault also put the scare on Chris Thompson’s record in the 1650 with a 14:29.43.  He’s got 2.8 seconds to go, but he’s also got a couple of years in which to bring the time down.

Purdue (my alma mater) had an unusually high scoring day, with breaststroker Giordan Pogioli grabbing fifth place in the 200 breaststroke finals, and diver Steven LoBue earning third place in the platform diving.  LoBue also took sixth on the 3m board and seventh on the 1m board.

I don’t have access to all of the final team scores, but Auburn took first, Arizona second, Stanford third, Texas fourth and Florida fifth.  Purdue placed sixteenth overall with 59 total points.

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Onward.

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I won’t add much to what Hilzoy (1, 2) and Charles have already written regarding the circumstances of Ben Domenech’s sudden demise as the Washington Post.  But I don’t want the occasion to pass without tossing in my two cents: First, I feel sorry for the guy.  We all should.  I won’t minimize his errors, … Read more

Plagiarism 2: The Response

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by hilzoy

As I wrote last night, a lot of cases of what seem to be plagiarism by Ben Domenech have been found by various bloggers. (Comprehensive list here.) I’ve already said what I have to say about the plagiarism itself; and now, while Domenech has not (apparently) admitted wrongdoing, he has resigned. I now want to focus on the response by bloggers on the right.

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And Another One Gone…

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by Slartibartfast

UPDATE:  I predict that Tom Dolan’s NCAA, American and US Open record in the 400 IM will fall tonight (3/24) to Ryan Lochte.  He’s just qualified 2nd for the finals.

Not much time to post details, but NCAA men’s swimming began today and the records, they are a fallin’.  Peter Vanderkaay of Michigan wiped Tom Dolan’s eleven-year-old American Record in the 500 freestyle off  the board, clocking in at 4:08.60.

Next, if you’ll recall one of my few recent posts, I predicted that Ryan Lochte would bring it in the NCAA championship meets.  Here’s the headliner:

Men’s NCAA Div I. Championships, Finals: Ryan Lochte Destroys Phelps’ American Record in the 200 Individual Medley — March 23, 2006

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Plagiarism

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by hilzoy I really hadn’t intended to write another post on puzzling things conservatives have recently said or done. However, the story of Ben Domenech (aka Augustine)’s apparent plagiarism made me change my mind. If you haven’t seen it yet, here are some of the examples: * Via a dkos diary: Here’s a humor piece … Read more

Pivotal Tests

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by Charles

Afghanistan.  The trial of Abdul Rahman is an important test case for the Afghan government.  Rahman converted from Islam to Christianity sixteen years ago, but adversarial family members recently ratted him out, notifying the authorities of his switch.  Under sharia law, he could face the death penalty.  The Afghan Constitution is dissonant on the issue, expressly upholding Islamic principles but also incorporating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The outcome of the case will tell us whether the current Afghan regime is moving in the direction of Taliban II or toward a free and democratic society.  Quite frankly, the United States should not let a Rahman conviction stand.  We have too much invested in this country to let this evil affront to civilization happen.  The state prosecutor may have an out, though, declaring that Rahman may be "mentally unfit" to stand trial.  The state prosecutor has more evidence on the mental unfitness of jihadist loony tunes than Rahman, but if that’s what it takes to get out of an embarrassing situation, so be it.

Iraq.  Just as the three previous elections were pivotal moments in Iraqi (and American) history, so is the formation of its new government.  The longer it stays in limbo, the more tenuous the situation becomes.  By way of Winds of Change, British Defence Minister John Reid is concerned that delays allow terrorists and rejectionists more opportunities to destabilize.  Me, too.  I wish I could think of the right analogy, but each successful event in post-Saddam Iraq is merely one step forward to a free, peaceful, non-theocratic representative republic.  If such event fails, or fails to happen, then we move six steps backward.  This is looking like one of those moments where one more step must be had.  If not, those terrorists, rejectionists and others agitating for civil war may just get one.

Iran.  With EU3 negotiations gone nowhere and discussions underway in the UN Security Council, the next step toward stopping Iran from having an atomic bomb is direct meetings between American and Iranian officials.  The Mullah Supreme (Khameini) is amenable to talks with the United States, and we should take him up on his offer.  If Iran gets to a point where we must decide to strike or not to strike, we should be able to say that we’ve tried every avenue of recourse.

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You didn’t miss it, Kevin

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by von Picking up on President Bush’s latest speech on Iraq, Kevin Drum writes: Harry Reid, who has shown himself to be a pretty astute leader of Senate Dems, had exactly the right response: [to Bush’s speech] Three years into the war in Iraq, with that country now experiencing a low-grade civil war, it has … Read more

RNC Logic

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by hilzoy The RNC has introduced a new ad called ‘Censure’. You can listen to it on their home page, which says: “Democrats Want To Censure President Bush For Fighting The War On Terror.” That phrase doesn’t appear in the transcript of the ad; it does say this, however: “Now Feingold and other Democrats want … Read more

In Which I Grovel And Plead

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by hilzoy Katherine pointed out, in comments, that our series on the Graham Amendment is a finalist for Best Series at the Koufax Awards.. If you feel like voting for it, you know what to do. Arguments in the Uighurs’ appeal have been scheduled for early May, and I’m going to try to go. Meanwhile, … Read more

Black Bag Jobs

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by hilzoy From US News: “In the dark days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a small group of lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department began meeting to debate a number of novel legal strategies to help prevent another attack. Soon after, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to begin … Read more

Keeping Us Safe

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by hilzoy

Condoleeza Rice:

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

Tomorrow’s Washington Post:

“An FBI agent who interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui before Sept. 11, 2001, warned his supervisors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was a terrorist and spelled out his suspicions that the al-Qaeda operative was plotting to hijack an airplane, according to federal court testimony yesterday.

Agent Harry Samit told jurors at Moussaoui’s death penalty trial that his efforts to secure a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings were frustrated at every turn by FBI officials he accused of “criminal negligence.” Samit said he had sought help from a colleague, writing that he was “so desperate to get into Moussaoui’s computer I’ll take anything.”

That was on Sept. 10, 2001. (…)

“You thought a terrorist attack was coming, and you were being obstructed, right?” MacMahon asked.

“Yes, sir,” Samit answered.

Samit said he kept trying to persuade his bosses to authorize the surveillance warrant or a criminal search warrant right up until the day before the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“You never stopped trying, did you?” MacMahon said.

“No, sir,” Samit replied.”

It’s too easy to say that this shows that the FBI was dysfunctional, not that the Bush administration didn’t respond appropriately to what they knew. Part of what you do when you run an organization is to make sure that its parts work effectively: that whatever needs to happen is actually happening. In this case, the administration had been warned by their predecessors that bin Laden, and terrorism more generally, was the greatest threat facing the country. It would not have been impossible for them to try to figure out whether everyone who should have been worried about terrorism actually was, or whether the right systems were in place to ensure that information about terrorist attacks didn’t just disappear into an administrative void.

That’s what effective leadership is all about.

***

One of the things I find most puzzling about Bush’s supporters is their conviction that Bush is doing a good job of keeping us safe. There is one and only one piece of evidence to support this: the fact that we have not been attacked since 9/11. (That will, of course, be cold comfort to, for instance, the UK, Spain, Indonesia, et al.) There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is effective intelligence work. Another is that al Qaeda used up a lot of its most competent people on 9/11, or that such missions require a lot of planning and lead time.

If you look at almost any of the actual steps that might be done to protect us from future terrorist attacks, however, Bush’s record is not just bad; it’s abysmal.

  • Securing loose nukes, for instance: this administration has done a terrible job there, and we’ve allowed North Korea, voted “Most Likely To Sell Nukes To Anyone Who Wants Them”, to acquire nuclear weapons.
  • Homeland security: just check out the 9/11 Commission’s report card. It’s pretty dismal, especially when you realize that they give grades up to C- just for talking about a problem. We’re doing a miserable job on port security, critical infrastructure protection, securing chemical plants, rail security — all things that should, after 9/11, have been no-brainers.
  • Disaster preparedness: Consider the response to Katrina. Be very afraid.
  • Bioterrorism protection: We have spent a lot of money on Project Bioshield, which is widely viewed as a giveaway to pharmaceutical companies that even they don’t like. We have cut funding on the public health infrastructure we’d actually need in the event of a bioterrorist attack.

(Actually, I can’t resist posting this paragraph on Project Bioshield, from Time:

“Yet BioShield hasn’t transformed much of anything besides expanding the federal bureaucracy. Most of the big pharmaceutical and biotech firms want nothing to do with developing biodefense drugs. The little companies that are vying for deals say they are being stymied by an opaque and glacially slow contracting process. The one big contract that has been awarded–for 75 million doses of a next-generation anthrax vaccine–is tangled in controversy; it went to a California firm, VaxGen, which in its 10-year history has never brought a drug to market. In the scientific community, biodefense is viewed as yet another boondoggle that is sucking money and resources from critical public-health needs like new antibiotics and vaccines. Indeed, the consensus outside the Administration is that the program is broken before it even gets off the ground. “BioShield has failed miserably,” says Jerome Hauer, a former senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “The intent of BioShield was to attract new companies to get involved in developing countermeasures. It has not only failed to do that; it has kept a lot of other companies away because they’re so concerned about the program’s lack of focus and direction.””

Bear in mind that that program represents most of our bioterrorism preparation.)

In addition to all this, there’s the war in Iraq, which has been a disaster in terms of our national interests and our security. Below the fold, I’m going to reprint an email from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies to Steve Clemons (who posted it on his blog) that sums it up well.

So why, exactly, does anyone think that Bush is doing a good job of protecting us? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Various Things

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by hilzoy Here’s a one of those details that explains why I read Elizabeth Warren religiously: “Did you know, for example, that while you need to sweat out your credit report, the credit bureaus keep a special “V.I.P.” list of prominent citizens whose reports are specially tidied up so they look cleaner than they really … Read more

Bush Supporters: Explain This One To Me

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by hilzoy

Every so often, you run into a program that combines doing good for people who need it with thrift and economy; and it’s always a mystery to me why policy makers don’t pounce on those programs and fully fund them. Normally, one reason for not fully funding a program is cost; but in the case of spending that actually saves money over the long term, that really shouldn’t be an issue. At one point in the 90s, prenatal care was like this: providing prenatal care for pregnant women who couldn’t afford it would have saved money not just over the long term, but in the same fiscal year, by preventing babies from being born prematurely or with costly health problems, problems that the government has to pay for enough of the time to produce the cost savings. So we could have saved money by sparing children serious health problems, some of which would mar their lives. But for some reason we didn’t. What that reason might possibly have been, I have absolutely no idea: to me, it is a mystery that passeth all understanding.

Well, it’s happening again.

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Task Forces 6-26, 121 and 20

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by Katherine

Today’s New York Times has a front page article about torture by a special forces unit called Task Force 6-26 at a secret prison near the Baghdad airport. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, but here are some notable excerpts:

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

….

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit’s precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force’s name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

…..

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

And one final excerpt:

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy’s Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit’s operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein’s bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

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Why Does Donald Rumsfeld Still Have A Job?

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by hilzoy The only answer I can think of is: because George W. Bush doesn’t care enough to send the very best. Today, Gen. Paul Eaton joins the chorus of people who have worked with Rumsfeld and have nothing good to say about him. Gen. Eaton spent a year in charge of training Iraqi troops, … Read more

Corruption

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by hilzoy

Via TPM, yet another dubiously employed Congressional spouse:

“Acting as her husband’s campaign consultant, Julie Doolittle charged his campaign and his Superior California Political Action Committee a 15 percent commission on any contribution she helped bring in.

As a member of two key committees in the House – Appropriations and Administration – Doolittle is well-positioned to help contractors gain funding through congressional earmarks. Between 2002 and 2005, Wilkes and his associates and lobbyists gave Doolittle’s campaign and political action committee $118,000, more than they gave any other politician, including Cunningham.

Calculations based on federal and state campaign records suggest that Doolittle’s wife received at least $14,400 of that money in commissions. Meanwhile, Doolittle helped Wilkes get at least $37 million in government contracts. (…)

Julie Doolittle launched Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions in March 2001, two months after her husband was named to the Appropriations Committee.

The business, which is based at the couple’s home in Oakton, Va., has no phone listing or Web site. The firm has no known employees other than Julie Doolittle. The congressman’s office would not specify what previous fundraising experience she had.

Within months of its opening, the firm was receiving commissions from her husband’s campaign. Within the next two years, it was planning fundraising events for Abramoff and handling bookkeeping for the Korean lobbying group in Buckham’s office suite, where DeLay’s wife, Christine, also was working.

Federal and state campaign records show that Julie Doolittle has received nearly $180,000 in commissions from her husband’s political fundraising since late 2001.”

So, to summarize: Julie Doolittle has no known fundraising experience. Her business, which was started right after her husband landed a seat on the appropriations committee, has no office, phone listing, or other employees. Whenever someone gives money to her husband’s campaigns, however, if she claims a commission, 15% of that donation gets transferred from the campaign’s accounts to Julie Doolittle and her husband, for their own personal use. See how easy?

Moreover, John Doolittle’s seat is very safe, and his fundraising is going fine. Here are the FEC reports for his district in 2004 and 2002. In 2004, he raised $937,914. He had two challengers, an independent who seems to have raised no money, and run on a $50,000 loan, and a Democrat who raised the princely sum of $2,300, and still managed to have $237.00 left at the end of the campaign. Not exactly what you’d call a hotly contested seat, or one where a fundraiser would be needed.

Here’s an example of the sort of ‘work’ Ms. Doolittle got paid for. (Brent Wilkes, aka “Co-Conspirator No. 1”, who figures in the story that follows, is one of the contractors who bribed Duke Cunningham. More background on him here.)

“In November 2003, Wilkes held a fundraising dinner for Doolittle at ADCS’ headquarters in Poway that was catered by Wilkes’ wife, Regina, who ran a catering company based in the corporate cafeteria. The 15 guests on Wilkes’ invitation were all ADCS employees or partners on projects Wilkes was trying to get funded, together with their spouses.

Over the next four months, members of the group gave a total of $50,000 to Doolittle’s political action committee.

Federal and state election records show that Julie Doolittle claimed commissions on most of those contributions, even though there is no evidence that she planned the fundraising dinner or encouraged the contributors to donate to her husband.

No expenses related to the dinner are reflected on John Doolittle’s financial records.

Robinson, his chief of staff, refused to answer questions about that particular dinner. But in a prepared statement, he said Julie Doolittle had helped “initiate, plan and perform other administrative duties” for two dinners in the San Diego area, for which she claimed her standard fundraising commission.”

And here are all the clients the San Diego Union-Tribune was able to find:

“A search by The San Diego Union-Tribune yielded only three other clients of Julie Doolittle’s firm:

One was Greenberg Traurig, the lobbying firm that employed Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud and tax-evasion charges. The second was Abramoff’s Washington restaurant, Signatures. The third was the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council, founded by Ed Buckham, one-time chief of staff for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

The Korean group, which lobbied for improved U.S.-Korean relations, was based at the headquarters of Buckham’s Alexander Strategy Group, which dissolved in January because of negative publicity over its ties to Abramoff. Wilkes also was an Alexander Strategy client.”

So: Jack Abramoff’s lobbying firm, Abramoff’s restaurant, a group founded and run by Wilkes’ lobbyist, and of course her dear husband.

One last point. The people who bribed Duke Cunningham, Wilkes included, were defense contractors. They were paying bribes in order to get defense contracts, presumably contracts they would not have gotten in open competition. At a time when we have not managed to find enough body armor for our troops, or adequately armored vehicles for them to ride in, and when we are auditing everyone with PTSD and asking them to justify every cent of the money they get after having risked their lives for their country, these clowns thought it was appropriate to take bribes in order to induce the Defense Department to give money to contractors who would not have gotten contracts if they had had to play by the rules.

It’s shameful to bribe any government official in order to get contracts for substandard work. But it’s doubly shameful when your bribes take money away from things like body armor, and deliver substandard defense work at a time when our troops’ lives are on the line. After all, substandard defense work doesn’t just mean that (for instance) a highway will need repairs a bit sooner than it might have otherwise; it means that some kid who is only trying to do his or her duty might get killed or maimed. It was once thought that people who did this should be tarred and feathered, or strung up and hanged. I myself don’t believe in either of these punishments, for anyone. But I understand the sentiment.*

If you live in California’s 4th CD (east of Sacramento), do your best to get this guy out of office. We deserve better.

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Breathtaking New Revelations!!!

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by hilzoy Now this is funny. Via Juan Cole: the Bush administration recently released some captured Iraqi documents. Investor’s Business Daily published a column about them, containing this: “Now come more revelations that leave little doubt about Saddam’s terrorist intentions. Most intriguing from a document dump Wednesday night is a manual for Saddam’s spy service, … Read more

Open Thread: Special Chaucer Edition!

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by hilzoy Via Crooked Timber, I see that Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog. Go read. I especially liked the advice column: “My betrothed, a most wicked man, betrayed me near as bad as Tereus did Procne. His woman of choice commited, though, that villainy which women do best, and tempted him away. Presently it is … Read more

(Other People’s) Second Thoughts On Iraq

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by hilzoy

Brian Tamanaha has a good post at Balkinization. Taking Andrew Sullivan as a representative of those conservatives who are now asking themselves what they got wrong in deciding to support Iraq, he says:

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but:

The first and overarching error of neoconservatives, Mr. Sullivan, is their willingness (nay, eagerness) to use war to achieve their ideological objectives. Neoconservatives see war as a tool, perhaps messy and unpleasant, not to mention expensive, but sometimes useful.

War is the greatest horror we inflict upon one another, destroying bodies and lives, inflicting untold pain, often on innocent bystanders. War must be a last resort, undertaken with great reluctance, when no other option is available–appropriate only when necessary to defend ourselves against an immediate aggressor (as international law recognizes).

That was not the case with Iraq. Bush and the neoconservatives were bent on starting a war in Iraq for their own ideological and personal reasons and they made sure it came about. Bush’s premptive war doctrine, recently reiterated, is more of the same failure to recogize the utimate horror of war.

None of the neoconservative mea culpas I have read have recognized this true (moral and pragmatic) error of their vision and understanding, which is more fundamental than Sullivan’s three so-called “huge errors.” If neoconservatives understood that war is appropriate only as an absolutely last resort to defend ourselves against an attack, the war would never have happened–hence no WMD debacle (because there was not enough to justify war), no offending allies with our arrogance of power, and no attempt to shape another country in our own image. “

This is right. I am not a pacifist. I supported a lot of recent wars, including not just the first Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, but also at least one that didn’t happen, namely Rwanda. (Here I differ from Tamanaha: I think that war can also be justified in response to a genuine unfolding humanitarian catastrophe, as distinct from a repressive government that carried out atrocities a decade in the past.) But it is absolutely crucial to recognize what exactly you’re supporting when you support war: namely, one of the most awful things imaginable. No matter how smart our bombs and no matter how well trained our soldiers, horrible things will happen in wars. Children will be blown to bits. People whose only “crime” was to be in the wrong place in the wrong time will get caught in the crossfire. Markets will be shelled, if not deliberately then by accident: there are always accidents in wars. Families will huddle in terror as soldiers shout at them in a language they do not understand, aiming guns at them, ready to shoot if, whether from terror, malice, or sheer confusion, they set a foot wrong.

And that’s without taking into account possibilities like Abu Ghraib.

I recall once talking to an Israeli soldier who had just come back from Lebanon, and who told me the following story: a woman with a baby had approached the wire around their encampment, asking for milk for her child. The soldiers, against regulations, went to give her some. She threw the child over the fence; it was rigged with a bomb, and killed (I think) one of the soldiers. They caught her and at some point someone asked her why she had done what she did. She said: you killed my son, my husband, and my brothers; why not should I not give up my baby as well?

The soldier, whose friend had been killed for his generosity, asked: what kind of animals are these people, that they would do something like that? For better or (more likely) for worse, I thought I could at least dimly glimpse the pitch of grief that might explain it. What I couldn’t understand was: when there are stories like this between two peoples, how on earth can there ever be peace between them? How can either ever possibly forget?

The decision to go to war is not part of a chess game. It’s not an act of national self-assertion. It is, among other things, a decision to deliberately create stories like that. As I said, at times it seems to me the least horrible option. But it is essential to be absolutely clear about what you’re supporting.

But there are a few more points worth mentioning.

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Higher Taxes

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by hilzoy While I’m thinking about fiscal policy, I want to say this: if Democrats ever regain control of government, I think they will certainly let a lot of the Bush tax cuts expire, and probably raise taxes. And they will be absolutely right to do so. I don’t say this because I like higher … Read more

GOP: The Party Of No Fiscal Restraint

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “Congress raised the limit on the federal government’s borrowing by $781 billion yesterday, and then lawmakers voted to spend well over $100 billion on the war in Iraq, hurricane relief, education, health care, transportation and heating assistance for the poor without making offsetting budget cuts. On vote after vote … Read more

The Race Is On

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As I discussed here, the NCAA swimming season is soon upon us.  Correction: is already upon us. Today, the Women’s Division I NCAA Swimming Championship meet began.  Psyche sheets were published yesterday, here.  On reading them, I predicted that Kara Lynn Joyce would be setting a new NCAA record in the 50 yard freestyle.  Bingo: … Read more