hilzoy

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

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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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

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

Missouri Family Values

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by hilzoy From the AP, via Atrios: “An attempt to resume state spending on birth control got shot down Wednesday by House members who argued it would have amounted to an endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles. Missouri stopped providing money for family planning and certain women’s health services when Republicans gained control of both chambers of … Read more

What’s at stake

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by Katherine

To explain what  I think is at stake with the Feingold censure resolution, I was going to write a post explaining the legal theory that links the NSA program and the torture scandals. It turns out that several months ago Marty Lederman (who I like to think of as the head of the OLC-in-exile) explained it more clearly than I can:

Their argument — just to be clear — is that FISA, and the Torture Act, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the federal assault statute, and the War Crimes Act, and the 60-day-limit provision of the War Powers Resolution — and even the 9/18 AUMF itself (to the extent it is read, as it ought to be, as in some respects limiting the scope of force — and treaties governing the treatment of detainees, and (probably) the Posse Comitatus Act, and who knows how many other laws, are unconstitutional to the extent they limit the President’s discretion in this war. In OLC’s words — written just one week after the AUMF was enacted — neither the WPR nor the AUMF, nor, presumably, any other statute, "can place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response." "These decisions," OLC wrote, "under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make."

This is the legal theory that originally justified the NSA program. It is exactly the same legal theory that John Yoo relied on when he calmly told Jane Mayer: “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. [Congress] can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” 

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Cheat Sheet

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by Katherine

The current debates over the Feingold resolution and the NSA surveillance program & the ongoing debate over the torture scandals involve a lot of convoluted legal arguments about executive power. It can get really difficult and frustrating for non-lawyers to sort them all out. (Actually it can be that way for lawyers too, but lawyers get three years of instruction in legalese & then get paid to read and write it for a living, It’s a lot worse for everyone else.)

To make this a little easier, I’ve prepared a handy-dandy little guide for decoding the administration’s arguments and reassurances on these topics:

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Profiles In Courage

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by hilzoy

A list of co-sponsors of S.RES.398, “A resolution relating to the censure of George W. Bush”

None
[Updated: Tom Harkin]*.

Via Liberal Oasis, a list of Senators currently serving who co-sponsored S.RES.44 (106th Congress), “A resolution relating to the censure of William Jefferson Clinton”:

Democrats:

Daniel Akaka
Max Baucus
Byron Dorgan
Dick Durbin
Dianne Feinstein
Daniel Inouye
Jim Jeffords
Ted Kennedy
John Kerry*
Herb Kohl
Mary Landrieu
Carl Levin
Joe Lieberman
Blanche Lincoln
Barbara Mikulski
Patty Murray
Jack Reed
Harry Reid
Jay Rockefeller
Chuck Schumer
Ron Wyden

Republicans:

Pete Domenici
Mitch Mcconnell
Gordon Smith
Olympia Snowe

The text of the bill censuring Clinton appears below the fold, so that you can recall the gravity of his offenses, and the seriousness with which these senators regarded Presidential lawbreaking a few short years ago. If one of your Senators is among these modern Solons, it might be worth calling and asking him or her to explain the difference between Presidential law-breaking then and now.

[UPDATE: Thomas (the government’s official site for bills) still lists no cosponsors (as of 11:20pm, 3/15/06). On the other hand, firedoglake lists Harkin, Kerry, Boxer and Menendez as supporting Feingold’s censure motion. Make of this what you will.]

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The Rest Of The Abu Ghraib Photos

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by hilzoy They’re up at Salon. Go see what got Donald Rumsfeld his Presidential Medal of Freedom. I’m only posting one, which is work-safe: There’s a mentally deranged detainee, wrapped in foam, sandwiched between the two litters this soldier is sitting on. Think about it.

About Morality

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by hilzoy

Once upon a time, I went to a gathering of liberals and conservatives that was intended to promote dialogue and understanding between the two groups; and I was struck by the fact that whenever someone learned that I was an ethicist, they immediately assumed that I was a conservative. This seemed odd to me: it was several decades over a decade* ago, before ‘moral values’ had emerged as a political term, and at that point I couldn’t imagine why anyone would suppose that conservatives had a lock on moral values.

(This was not just partisanship, or a reflection of the fact that my moral beliefs underwrite my political views. It was also due to my having spent several decades being lectured by conservatives about my “excessively idealistic” views — e.g., about how it was silly to think that we shouldn’t support, say, Guatemala in the early ’80s “just” because it was murderous and repressive. It was genuinely surprising to discover that the very people who had made these arguments were regarded as champions of morality.)

These days it’s more obvious why someone might think that. But it’s deeply regrettable. There is a straightforward moral case to be made not just against the current crop of Republican politicians, but also, I think, for liberal values. But as long as we cede moral language to conservatives, we will not be able to make this case effectively. Nor will we be able to speak to the legitimate fears of people who (correctly) think that morality is extremely important, who are worried that it’s under seige, and who (mistakenly) suppose that only conservatives are willing to speak up for them, or that defending morality involves an obsession with preventing gay marriage, or something like that.

If we want to reclaim moral language, however, we need to get comfortable with the idea of making moral judgments. Some of you already are, of course, but some of the reactions to my Evil post made me think that some of you are not. Therefore, I have written a short primer. It’s meant for those who are not fully comfortable making moral judgments, or using the language of morality. Many of you probably don’t need it. It also contains only the issues that happened to occur to me. I’ll write about others on request.

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Censure

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by hilzoy Russ Feingold has announced that he plans to submit a resolution censuring President Bush for authorizing surveillance without the warrants required under FISA, for not briefing the full Intelligence Committee on the program as required by law, and for misleading the American people about it. I agree with Reddhedd: “It’s a gutsy move, … Read more

Conservative Principles: An Illuminating Test Case

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by hilzoy Via Effect Measure: the House has voted to override state food safety labeling requirements: “The House approved a bill Wednesday night that would wipe out state laws on safety labeling of food, overriding tough rules passed by California voters two decades ago that require food producers to warn consumers about cancer-causing ingredients. The … Read more

Claude Allen

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by hilzoy

As you probably already know, Claude Allen, who was President Bush’s top domestic policy advisor until a couple of months ago, when he resigned ‘to spend more time with his family’, has been arrested:

“A former top White House aide was arrested on Thursday in the Maryland suburbs on charges that he stole merchandise from a number of retailers, the police in Montgomery County, Md., said Friday.

The former aide, Claude A. Allen, 45, was President Bush’s top domestic policy adviser until resigning last month. Known as a rising conservative star, he previously served as deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, and in 2003 the White House announced its intention to nominate him to a seat on the federal appeals court based in Richmond, Va. Democrats raised questions about the nomination, and it never came to a vote.

The police said Mr. Allen was seen on Jan. 2 leaving a department store in Gaithersburg, Md., with merchandise for which he had not paid. He was apprehended by a store employee and issued a misdemeanor citation for theft, said Lt. Eric Burnett, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Police Department.

A statement issued on Friday by the police said store employees saw Mr. Allen fill a shopping bag with merchandise and put additional items into a shopping cart. He then sought, and received, a refund for some of the items and left the store without paying for others.

The Police Department said that as a result of an investigation it opened after the initial incident in January, it found that Mr. Allen had received refunds of more than $5,000 last year at stores like Target and Hecht’s. Mr. Allen was arrested on Thursday and charged in connection with a series of allegedly fraudulent returns. The police said he was charged with a theft scheme over $500 and theft over $500.

“He would buy items, take them out to his car and return to the store with the receipt,” the police said in the statement. “He would select the same items he had just purchased and then return them for a refund.””

This is a strange, strange story.

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