Month: March 2007

Random Snippets

by

by hilzoy

(1) Did George Will really, truly mean to equate Paul Krugman and Ann Coulter? It sure sounds like it:

“There are the tantrums — sometimes both theatrical and perfunctory — of talking heads on television or commentators writing in vitriol (Paul Krugman’s incessant contempt, Ann Coulter’s equally constant loathing).”

I can’t wait to see what Krugman quotes Will thinks are even remotely comparable to such highlights of the Coulter oeuvre as: “”My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building”, or “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee.”

Besides, Paul Krugman is a very, very good economist. As far as I can tell, his attitude towards the Bush administration comes mostly from the fact that they have been systematically mendacious about an area of policy he knows an awful lot about; and the fact that he was angry earlier than most people just reflects the fact that he, unlike a lot of commenters, actually knows a major area of policy well enough to know when people are lying about it. The day Ann Coulter wins the second most prestigious prize in economics (after the Nobel), or any remotely comparable academic award*, I will personally post a video of myself singing a Kyrgyz translation of Bob Dylan’s “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” while wearing a tutu and standing on my head.

I do not own a tutu. Heck, I don’t even own a video recorder. I can’t think, offhand, how I would get “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” translated into Kyrgyz. Yet somehow I’m not too worried. A miracle of composure in the face of danger: that’s me.

(2) Via David Kurtz, writing at TPM, the Las Vegas Sun has the US Attorney scandal quote of the day:

“On Dec. 7, having just returned from Washington, D.C., Bogden took a call of a different kind from Mike Battle, director of the executive office for U.S. attorneys at the Justice Department.

Bogden recalled the conversation Friday: “He says, ‘Dan, it’s time to step down. They want to go in another direction.’

“I say, ‘Well, what direction is that?’

“He says, ‘Dan, I don’t know.’ “

Bogden was blown away.”

“Dan, I don’t know.” Gotta love it.

The LA Times (via Kevin Drum) has another article on Bogden’s firing, and the Washington Post has one on Margaret Chiara. Neither can figure out what they were fired for.

(3) And now for something completely different: the journal Current Biology has an article called ‘Metacognition in the Rat’, arguing that rats are capable of metacognition — the ability to know stuff about what you know. Here’s the abstract:

” Here, we demonstrate for the first time that rats are capable of metacognition — i.e., they know when they do not know the answer in a duration-discrimination test. Before taking the duration test, rats were given the opportunity to decline the test. On other trials, they were not given the option to decline the test. Accurate performance on the duration test yielded a large reward, whereas inaccurate performance resulted in no reward. Declining a test yielded a small but guaranteed reward. If rats possess knowledge regarding whether they know the answer to the test, they would be expected to decline most frequently on difficult tests and show lowest accuracy on difficult tests that cannot be declined. Our data provide evidence for both predictions and suggest that a nonprimate has knowledge of its own cognitive state.”

‘Knowing that X’, in this context, means something like: being able to respond differently depending on whether or not X is true. Thus, for instance, pigeons can be trained to tell the difference between photographs with and without trees, or water, or human beings, and even the difference between paintings by Monet and Picasso. (Great sentence from the abstract: “Furthermore, they showed generalization from Monet’s to Cezanne’s and Renoir’s paintings or from Picasso’s to Braque’s and Matisse’s paintings.”) And they’re quite sophisticated about it:

“Walcott recalls a study by Richard Hernstein at Harvard. The pigeon kept insisting that a slide contained a human face. None of the investigators could see it — just a house with a hedge. “Finally, somebody spotted a small child looking out the hedge!””

In the sense in question, these pigeons know whether or not a picture has a person in it or not, etc. Knowing that you know something, in this sense, just means something like: being able to respond differently depending on whether or not you know something. does not mean anything like: being able to think about this explicitly, still less something like: being able to consider the evidence for X and assess it. Still, metacognition had been thought to be confined to much more complicated animals than rats, so this is quite interesting.

(4) And how are you?

UPDATE: (5) Snark of the Week, If Not the Year: Wolcott on Jonah Goldberg.

Read more

An Odd Wrinkle

by

by hilzoy

Via Dan Froomkin, here’s an article from the National Journal:

“White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove may have forfeited potential claims of executive privilege over the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys — if he communicated about the matter outside the White House e-mail system, using his Republican National Committee e-mail account or RNC equipment. Or at least that’s a legal possibility posed by rapidly advancing electronic technology and the evolving work habits of busy White House officials.”

Actually, while I am not a lawyer, I don’t think this is a particularly good argument: surely what matters for executive privilege claims is whether or not someone is advising the President, not what email system he’s using. [UPDATE: In comments, the clear consensus is that I am wrong.*] The more interesting part comes later:

“According to one former White House official familiar with Rove’s work habits, the president’s top political adviser does “about 95 percent” of his e-mailing using his RNC-based account. Many White House officials, including aides in the Political Affairs Office, use the RNC account as an alternative to their official government e-mail addresses to help keep their official and political duties separate. Although some White House officials use dual sets of electronic devices for that purpose, Rove prefers to use his RNC-provided BlackBerry for convenience, the former official said.

No original e-mails or documents created by Rove have emerged among the more than 3,000 pages of communications offered to Congress in its probe of the attorney firings, although several e-mails from other White House and Justice Department officials containing references to him were among the documents provided. (…)

President Bush pledged this week to “release all White House documents and e-mails involving direct communications with the Justice Department or any other outside person, including members of Congress and their staff, related to this issue.” The president, echoed by White House Counsel Fred Fielding in a March 20 letter to lawmakers, said that any congressional interviews with White House officials or voluntary surrender of e-mails and materials by the president will not disclose communications between or among White House officials. That would eliminate voluntary disclosure of possible e-mail discussions between Rove and Miers, and between Rove and Jennings or other White House aides who frequently use BlackBerry devices and may have conducted official White House business using their RNC e-mail accounts. Bush said on Tuesday that he would go to court, if necessary, to “oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.”

If Rove or other White House officials used RNC e-mail to discuss the prosecutor firings or the subsequent controversy — and if their discussions went to e-mail recipients who use the White House servers — their communications are captured and would be considered presidential records owned by the American people for purposes of eventual public disclosure under the Presidential Records Act, by virtue of both subject matter and official position, according to the archives expert.

White House and RNC spokespeople did not respond to National Journal questions about Rove’s use of the RNC e-mail system and the preservation of communications he created on its equipment. The former White House official, speaking on background, said that although the RNC had a policy to purge e-mails after a short period of time, Rove’s e-mails on its system and those of a few other White House aides in sensitive positions were preserved by the RNC “to protect Karl.” Even with a policy of deleting e-mails from servers, information-technology experts say, organizations rarely erase data entirely.”

The law governing presidential records is here. Presidential records include documents “relating to the political activities of the President or members of his staff” that “relate to or have a direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President” (US Code 44:22:2201:2A). The Presidential Records Act requires that they be preserved. The White House has a system for doing that:

“(T)o fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.”

The law does not, as far as I can tell, set out any penalties for not preserving presidential records, presumably because, well, Presidents are supposed to take care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and all that. It is not legal for Rove to use a server whose contents are periodically purged; and speaking as an academic, it’s horrible to think that all that history is being put in jeopardy.

Moreover, as this dKos diary points out, it could also be a serious security risk. Do you think that the US Government has installed all the things it uses to keep White House communications secure on the RNC servers? Would that even be legal? (I hope not: I don’t really want my hard-earned tax dollars going to beef up security on the RNC’s computer network — or the Democrats’ either. That’s not what we pay taxes for.) If the RNC’s communications aren’t secured, however, then Karl Rove has found one more way to compromise national security.

Honestly: I have had more than enough of people in this administration acting as though the rules just don’t apply to them.

Read more

Message to Petraeus, Part II: Information Ops Overhaul Overdue

by

by Charles

In my earlier post, I touched on the importance of information operations (IO) in Iraq, noting that it is one of the five main pillars of a successful counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. In that light, I mentioned the travails of Michael Yon, who is doing important work in reporting what is happening on the ground, yet is being shut down by a petulant general. In the cross-posted thread, Bob Owens from Newsbusters.org showed up and named names:

The General who wants to silence Yon is Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks. In 2005, Brooks was the the lead Public Affairs Officer (PAO) for the United States Army. The stories that got Yon in trouble with Brooks were Proximity Delays and Gates of Fire. Proximity Delays got Yon in trouble, and in Gates of Fire, Yon picked up a rifle and joined combat to help LTC Erik Kurilla, who had been shot three times by an insurgent while CSM Robert Prosser was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with another insurgent. For inserting himself into battle (which violated embed rules) to help fallen American soldiers, and then having the gall to write about it, Brooks tried to kick Yon our [out] of Iraq.

Brooks is back in Iraq, this time as deputy commanding general – support for Multinational Division-Baghdad, and he still obviously carries his grudge against Yon. I confirmed last night with Michael Yon that it is this same General Vincent K. Brooks that sent Yon the email threatening to kick him out of Iraq.

Following his RUBS post, Yon writes a lengthy entry that merits a full read (Warning: Graphic images).

Read more

Doesn’t Look Good

by

by hilzoy The Washington Post: “Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys, according to new documents released last night, a disclosure that contradicts Gonzales’s previous statement that he was not involved in “any discussions” about the dismissals. Justice Department … Read more

US Attorneys: More Why (Special Rove Edition)

by

by hilzoy

A couple of days ago, I advanced the following explanation for part of the US Attorney purge:

(a) The provision allowing Bush to appoint US Attorneys without Senate confirmation was slipped into the PATRIOT Act to benefit Tim Griffin, who replaced Bud Commins as US Attorney in the Eastern district of Arkansas.

(b) Griffin is normally described as a protégé of Karl Rove, which he is. But his specific area of expertise is opposition research: digging up dirt on one’s political opponents. He was the head of opposition research for the Bush 2004 campaign.

(c) The reason the administration wanted to make Tim Griffin a US Attorney in Arkansas was to send their chief opposition researcher to the state where Hillary Clinton, then the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, had spent most of her adult life; and to send him not as a campaign employee but as a US Attorney with subpoena power.

Is this explanation true? I don’t have any evidence of it. I suspect that if it were true, there would not be any evidence. But it makes sense, both because the administration has in fact appointed its chief oppo researcher to the US Attorney’ job in Eastern Arkansas, and because it fits Rove’s modus operandi. (See below.) And if it is, it’s very, very bad.

According to the US Attorneys’ Manual, US Attorneys have all sorts of powers. You can read about the ones related to criminal law here. One of them is, of course, the power to indict and prosecute people. That’s a risky power to abuse, however: when you actually have to present your case, it’s a lot easier for people to see that you don’t have one. The power to investigate doesn’t suffer from these limitations: it’s easy to say that despite your earlier suspicions, you didn’t happen to find enough to prove your case. In the interim, however, your opponent will be under a cloud: s/he’s the object of a Federal Investigation, people will say; where there’s smoke, there’s fire. By the time they discover that the “investigation” didn’t actually go anywhere, the election might be over, and the person whose honor you have dragged through the mud might have lost.

Just think what fun an opposition researcher with subpoena power could have in Arkansas. There are crowds of people who know the Clintons in Arkansas, and any of them could profitably be investigated for fraud or insider trading or — heck, why not? — child molestation or serial murder. It would take a certain amount of ingenuity to come up with just the right investigations — investigations that managed to remind people of Whitewater and Monica and all that without being, well, obvious about it; but that, no doubt, is where the artistic side of an opposition researcher comes into play. And while this sort of thing requires more of a certain kind of deviant brilliance than normal US Attorney work, it’s a lot easier in other respects, since there’s no need for even the slightest bit of evidence that the person you propose to investigate and smear is actually guilty of anything.

I can’t tell you how angry the thought of someone doing this makes me. It was wrong when Hoover kept files on his opponents. It was wrong when Nixon launched IRS audits of people he decided were his “enemies”. Any time the law enforcement powers of the state are used for political purposes, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

Naturally, this wrong thing turns out to be one of Karl Rove’s favored tactics…

Read more

Supplemental: Passed

by

by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “The House of Representatives today passed a $124 billion emergency spending bill that sets binding benchmarks for progress in Iraq, establishes tough readiness standards for deploying U.S. troops abroad and requires the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq by the end of August 2008. The bill promptly drew … Read more

Vonnites Of Von-Nation, Rejoice

by

by von (of course) I WAS QUITE flattered to be asked to provide a profile for Norman Geras, who has profiled a good chunk of the blogosphere at Normblog.  Geras is one of the better bloggers around, and his site is well worth a visit. In any event, the profile is here if you’re interested. 

Supplemental

by

by hilzoy

Apparently, the Democratic House leadership has finally got the votes to pass the Iraq supplemental bill, which appropriates money to continue the Iraq war subject to certain restrictions*, and requires the withdrawal of all troops by September 2008. Republicans oppose it, as do some liberal House members, who oppose any bill that appropriates money for the war. Others have come round, and concluded that voting for a bill with a clean deadline for withdrawal beats opposing it.

I wholeheartedly support this bill. It took me a while to conclude that the situation in Iraq was hopeless. I thought (and think) that we have a serious responsibility to the Iraqi people, and I wanted us to live up to it, and I hoped against hope that the competence of the military would somehow prevail against the incompetence of the administration. Eventually, though, even I had to give up, and ever since I have wanted us to get out, possibly leaving some force over the horizon. I realize that we can’t just withdraw in a headlong, disorganized way; that moving this many troops, while keeping those who are still there safe, is a complicated logistical undertaking, and takes time. Fine. But I’d rather it be done as soon as possible.

The Democrats are in a miserable position. Thanks to Bush’s inept prosecution of the war, there are, basically, no good options at all. And if they try to do anything at all, they will probably get blamed for whatever happens next — and whatever happens next will undoubtedly be awful. Moreover, any attempt to use the “power of the purse”, which we are forever being told is our only option, would open us to the charge of cutting off the troops. If Democrats cared only about political astuteness and not at all about either our country’s interests or about Iraq, then the thing to do would clearly be to make some gesture that makes it seem as though they’re trying, but that is doomed to failure. That way everything is still Bush’s fault.

There are things that fit this description a lot more clearly than what the Democrats are actually doing. Bush would veto any bill that sets a deadline for Iraq, so that’s a given. But if the Democrats passed a straightforward bill that says: we must be out by September 2008 (or whenever), then Bush could veto it with impunity. By attaching these conditions to an appropriations bill, they’re making it more likely that they will, in fact, succeed. One way or another, an appropriations bill has to pass. If it doesn’t, the Iraq war will simply run out of money. And if Bush vetoes it, he’ll have to be counting on some members of Congress to back down from their position. I’m not sure I’d take that bet, in his position. He seems to me to have infuriated the Congress over the US Attorneys issue, and while normally I wouldn’t expect Congress to stick to its guns, there is, I think, a decent chance that they might.

In any case, this should be interesting. I wish it weren’t: I wish we were not in Iraq at all, and could have nice dull debates about water rights. In politics, boring is good. But we’re not living in boring times.

***

*I’ve pasted the restrictions in the bill below the fold. It took me a while to find them, so I thought I’d spare everyone else the trouble. Plus, I thought OCSteve might want to see the actual restrictions on deployments.

Read more