hilzoy

It’s The Energy Anti-Plan!

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by hilzoy Check out this story from the NYT: “The Bush administration is expected to abandon a proposal to extend fuel economy regulations to include Hummer H2’s and other huge sport utility vehicles, auto industry and other officials say. The proposal was among a number of potential strategies outlined by the administration in 2003 to … Read more

Unconvincing Monologue

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by hilzoy Honestly, I did not set out to write a series of vagina posts today. But I was looking at the kittens post and saw a trackback with this intriguing text: “Can you’re mind withstand the cuteness of Left-Wing Kittens? Can you resist the pull to the dark side?!?” Obviously, I had to check … Read more

Bad Idea

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Via Majikthise, something awful this way comes: “Women from around the world flock to David Matlock’s marble waiting room carrying purses stuffed with porn. The magazines are revealed only in the privacy of his office, where doctor and patient debate the finer points of each glossy photo. The enterprising gynecologist sees countless images of naked … Read more

Nickel And Dimed To Death

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by hilzoy

From the NYTimes:

“For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents. The ceramic plates in vests worn by most personnel cannot withstand certain munitions the insurgents use. But more than a year after military officials initiated an effort to replace the armor with thicker, more resistant plates, tens of thousands of soldiers are still without the stronger protection because of a string of delays in the Pentagon’s procurement system. The effort to replace the armor began in May 2004, just months after the Pentagon finished supplying troops with the original plates – a process also plagued by delays. The officials disclosed the new armor effort Wednesday after questioning by The New York Times, and acknowledged that it would take several more months or longer to complete. (…)”

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Left And Right (Literally)

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by hilzoy It’s a hateful day here in Maryland. Both the temperature and the humidity are at nearly 100, and as a result I and my cats are flopping around, nearly braindead. So I thought I’d write about something truly pointless, namely: my troubles with left and right. I cannot, for love or money, get … Read more

Great. Just Great.

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by hilzoy From the NYTimes: “Senior Pentagon officials have opposed the release of photographs and videotapes of the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, arguing that they would incite public opinion in the Muslim world and put the lives of American soldiers and officials at risk, according to documents unsealed in federal … Read more

‘We Were Stabbed In The Back’

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by hilzoy Publius at Legal Fiction has a good post about Christopher Hitchens’ hateful article ‘Losing the Iraq War: Can the left really want us to?’ He makes this point: “As the scope of our failure and colossal misjudgment becomes more clear, I expect that bitter pro-war advocates will place an increasing amount of the … Read more

Slime Patrol: Let’s Play ‘Guilt By Association’!

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by hilzoy

I don’t know Cindy Sheehan. I have no idea what kind of person she is. She could be wonderful; she could be awful; I have no idea. Nothing I have seen to date seems to me inconsistent with her being a normal, angry, grieving mother, but for all I know, appearances could be deceiving.

I do know that I hate seeing people slimed. That’s why I decided to look more closely at this story from the New York Sun:

“But as sad as Ms. Sheehan’s loss is – and we don’t belittle it – she has put herself in league with some extreme groups and individuals.

For starters, Ms. Sheehan has been posting on Michael Moore’s Web site, writing, “We have such a strong coalition of groups. GSFP, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out and the Crawford Peace House. I talked with John Conyers today and he wrote a letter to George signed by about 18 other Congress members to request that he meet with me. I also talked to Maxine Waters tonight and she is probably going to be here tomorrow.”

It turns out that the Crawford Peace House Web site includes a photo depicting the entire state of Israel as “Palestine,” and it carries a link to a report that when Prime Minister Sharon visited Crawford, the “peace house” greeted him with an “800-foot-long banner containing all of the United Nations resolutions that Israel is in violation of.” The Crawford Peace House site also features a photo of Eugene Bird, who has suggested that Israeli intelligence was responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out all have representatives on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war umbrella group. They share that distinction with the Communist Party USA. UPJ organized the march during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York, at which a New York Sun poll of 253 of the protesters found that fully 67% of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement “Iraqi attacks on American troops occupying Iraq are legitimate resistance.” In other words, Ms. Sheehan’s “coalition” includes a lot of people who think the persons who killed her son were justified.”

This story has been cited on a bunch of right-wing blogs — notably, this post by Mark in Mexico, entitled “Communists, traitors, mentally ill flock to Cindy Sheehan.” (“Her grief and desire for retribution have caused her to allow herself to be exploited by some of the worst that America has to offer.”) Even the (fortunately) inimitable Jeff Gannon has cited it. So let’s deconstruct it.

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Why I Love The Cunning Realist

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by hilzoy Because of this (about the smear campaign against Cindy Sheehan): “There are so many side issues of shamelessness and crass opportunism in this story it makes my head spin. Think about the gall of a political and media machine “accusing” a private citizen of changing her mind (imagine that!) about an elected and … Read more

A Bad Day For Corruption; A Good Day For The Country

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by hilzoy I despise people who corrupt our democracy as much as I love our democracy itself. Therefore, I am singing glad hosannas at the following pieces of news: First: “Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday as part of a wide-ranging fraud case stemming from the purchase of a … Read more

More Bad News (Special Isfahan Edition)

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by hilzoy

From the NYTimes:

“Iran removed United Nations seals on uranium processing equipment at its Isfahan nuclear site on Wednesday, making the plant fully operational, as envoys to the United Nations nuclear agency in Vienna continued to pursue consensus on the wording of a resolution calling for the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program. The removal of the seals took place under the supervision of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, after the agency had installed surveillance cameras intended to ensure that no uranium would be diverted.

The Iranians’ move was criticized by the United States, which with Britain, France and Germany is pressing Iran to resume its voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment. The nuclear agency, based in Vienna, confirmed that Iran had removed the seals at the Isfahan plant, where a first phase of uranium conversion had begun on Monday. (…)

Signers of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty have the right to process and enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. The European Union and the United States say they are suspicious of Iran’s nuclear activities because Iran hid its nuclear program for 18 years, in violation of international law. Its existence was disclosed by an Iranian opposition group in 2002. Since then, Iran has remained in compliance with the treaty and has worked in full cooperation with United Nations inspectors, who have installed cameras in its nuclear plants and make regular visits and reports.

But the nuclear agency’s board adopted a resolution in September 2004 saying that it “considers it necessary to promote confidence that Iran immediately suspend all enrichment related activities.” The removal of the United Nations seals allows Iran to resume the second phase of the uranium conversion process, which Iran says it is pursuing for its civilian nuclear program. Production remains suspended on the more sensitive part of its nuclear fuel program, the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. (…)

The removal of the seals was part of Iran’s tough stance on its nuclear program under the conservative new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took office this week. The daily newspaper Keyhan warned Wednesday in its lead editorial that Iran would withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty if its case was sent to the United Nations Security Council. The newspaper is close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. European leaders have threatened to take Iran to the Security Council, but such a move is not on the table at the Vienna talks. Mr. Ahmadinejad has defended the resumption of work but said Iran wanted to maintain its negotiations with Europe. He also said his government would make its own proposal to end the standoff.”

Great. First North Korea, now Iran. And at this very moment, the Bush administration has notified Congress that it plans to eliminate most State Department arms control offices. Maybe they’re just thinking ahead: if things keep going the way they’re going now, by the time Bush leaves office, dozens of countries will have nuclear weapons, and we’ll be left with the much more tractable task of keeping them out of the hands of Sierra Leone.

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Ban Interstate Traffic In Nonhuman Primates

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by hilzoy

If you’re like me (oh, stop laughing) (and stop sighing with relief, too), you sometimes find yourself thinking: Gee, there must be a bunch of really good bills in Congress, bills that (if passed) would really do some good, but which are doomed to fail because the problem they address isn’t at the top of anyone’s priority list. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone would tell me about them, so that I could support them? And wouldn’t it be nice to support something that wasn’t at the center of a political fight, too? Luckily, I have found such a worthy bill, so I’m going to take advantage of my position of awesome media power and ask both of the the millions of readers who hang on my every word to support it. (If any other bloggers want to use their awesome linking powers to help, feel free. This one might die of neglect.)

H.R. 1329 and S. 1509, both known as ‘The Captive Primate Safety Act’, would make it illegal to transport primates across state lines to be kept as pets. (More exactly: it would add non-human primates to a list of “prohibited wildlife species” which it is illegal to “import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce“, except under certain circumstances that don’t include pet ownership. Click the link and look for subsection e if you’re curious.) This is a very, very good idea, on several counts.

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Election Reform In Ohio

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by hilzoy The NYT reports on an effort to reform the elections and redistricting in Ohio: “Critics of the Republican grip on Ohio politics filed petitions on Tuesday that seek a statewide vote on three constitutional amendments that would overturn the way elections are run and strip elected officials of their power to draw legislative … Read more

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.

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by hilzoy The Seattle Times has run a series of stories (the main one is here, the rest are accessible from the sidebar) on doctors being paid by Wall Street analysts to talk about ongoing drug trials: “Doctors testing new drugs are sworn to keep their research secret until drug companies announce the final results. … Read more

Krauthammer On Stem Cells

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by hilzoy

A few days ago, Katherine wrote and asked me what I thought of this piece about stem cells by Charles Krauthammer. When Katherine asks, I always try to answer; but what with one thing and another, I am only now getting around to it. I’m going to start with some minor quibbles with Krauthammer’s editorial before getting to the central issue.

Krauthammer’s basic point is this:

“Congress’s current vehicle for expanding this research, the Castle-DeGette bill, is extremely dangerous. It expands the reach for a morally problematic area of research — without drawing any serious moral lines.”

What moral line in particular does Krauthammer think should be drawn? One that would rule out this:

“The real threat to our humanity is the creation of new human life willfully for the sole purpose of making it the means to someone else’s end — dissecting it for its parts the way we would dissect something with no more moral standing than a mollusk or paramecium. The real Brave New World looming before us is the rise of the industry of human manufacture, where human embryos are created not to produce children — the purpose of IVF clinics — but for spare body parts.”

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Random Acts Of Kindness

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by hilzoy

BitchPhD, who is always worth reading, has a great post called: “Open letter to the woman working at the K-Mart snack bar”:

“Thank you so much for your kindness. I was having a sh*tty day. First I had to pour my entire change jar into the CoinStar so I would have enough money to buy gas to get home. Then I was feeling incredibly stressed and anxious, no good reason, just the depression coming on again after a couple of days of exerting myself to be social and good company. So the fact that I was having to do an eight hour drive with a little kid and no money was feeling really scary to me, and when Pseudonymous Kid fell asleep I spent two hours sobbing while I drove. Then he woke up and I stopped, and then the car overheated, which is why I pulled off the road and ended up at your K-Mart.

So thanks for seeing me pulling out the $3 I had left in my pocket in order to buy Pseudonymous Kid, who was hungry after his nap, and hot, because our car doesn’t have a/c, something to eat. And thanks for undercharging us so that I could afford to buy him a hot dog AND an icee. And thanks for telling us “not to rush” when I realized that you were ready to close up and we were still sitting in the snack area. And thanks for sitting at the next table and engaging PK in conversation and offering to get him some more ketchup so he could finish his hot dog. And thanks for telling me where a phone and a gas station were, and for asking kindly how much further we had to drive, and for wishing us luck and expressing sympathy when I said that the car had overheated. Thanks for pretending to believe me when I pretended for PK’s sake that this was no big deal and it would be fine and I wasn’t worried about it at all.

I know you couldn’t have had any idea what was going on behind all of that (…) You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. And I’ll never see you again. But you really helped me out today. Thanks.”

It’s so easy to be nice to total strangers when it looks as though they need it, and also so easy to forget and just not bother. Why don’t we do this all the time? I have no idea. However:

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“So Who Are We Honoring Here?”

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by hilzoy Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was killed in Iraq, is camping out in front of Bush’s ranch in Crawford, hoping to meet with him. I am, in general, not a big fan of camping out in front of people’s homes wanting to meet with them, though as I said before in another context, … Read more

Felafel Man Begone!

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by hilzoy Via the Poor Man, here’s Bill O’Reilly from last Friday: “If the ACLU ever wants money, it should contact the Al Qaeda fundraisers. No organization in America enables terrorism as much as the ACLU, period. It is putting your life in danger. And that is no exaggeration. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do … Read more

Thanks, Don.

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by hilzoy

Newsweek reports that we knew that Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora, but let him slip away:

“In a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”

In his book—titled “Jawbreaker”—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen’s lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book’s specifics, saying he’s awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a “strategic disaster” because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora “was not necessarily just the number of troops.””

Rumsfeld didn’t provide enough troops. That has an oddly familiar ring to it…

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More Summer Reading: Nonfiction

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by hilzoy

It struck me today that I have read a lot of good non-fiction this summer, and that some of it might be worth sharing. What I’m posting here are books that meet the following criteria:

* They have some relevance to policy.

* They are not, however, primarily “policy books” (e.g., books about what sort of environmental policy we should adopt.) Instead, they either tell stories or present relevant facts.

* They are fun to read. (Crucial.)

* The author’s politics are either undetectable or don’t get in the way of his or her accuracy. (I’ll indicate when the author’s politics are detectable. No mention of them means: I have no idea.)

I’m always looking for books like this: books that allow me to actually learn something while having fun at the same time. Feel free to add your own suggestions, or talk about cookware. (Me: cast iron, definitely. Just cook with it every day for two weeks or so, and the surface will take care of itself. I also use enameled saucepans.)

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Gloves Off

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post comes the story of how US soldiers, intelligence agents, and CIA-trained Iraqi paramilitaries beat a prisoner to death: “Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On … Read more

OH-02

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by hilzoy Is anyone besides me interested in the special election in Ohio? It’s in Ohio’s 2nd CD, and pits Paul Hackett, a Democrat, against Jean Schmidt, a Republican. From the Cook Political Report, cited on dKos: “On its face, this heavily Republican district sure doesn’t look like it should be any sort of bellwether. … Read more

Department Of Redundancy Department

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by hilzoy Via Crooked Timber and into your nightmares comes this: That’s the front cover of a forthcoming comic book based on the following premiss: “It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver … Read more

We Shall Pay No Price, Bear No Burden, Meet No Hardship… (Well, Most Of Us.)

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by hilzoy

Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton, has a great op ed in the Washington Post today. It’s about the administration’s failure to ask for any sacrifice from us to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Excerpt:

“The strategic shielding of most voters from any emotional or financial sacrifice for these wars cannot but trigger the analogue of what is called “moral hazard” in the context of health insurance, a field in which I’ve done a lot of scholarly work. There, moral hazard refers to the tendency of well-insured patients to use health care with complete indifference to the cost they visit on others. It has prompted President Bush to advocate health insurance with very high deductibles. But if all but a handful of Americans are completely insulated against the emotional — and financial — cost of war, is it not natural to suspect moral hazard will be at work in that context as well?

A policymaking elite whose families and purses are shielded from the sacrifices war entails may rush into it hastily and ill prepared, as surely was the case of the Iraq war. Moral hazard in this context can explain why a nation that once built a Liberty Ship every two weeks and thousands of newly designed airplanes in the span of a few years now takes years merely to properly arm and armor its troops with conventional equipment. Moral hazard can explain why, in wartime, the TV anchors on the morning and evening shows barely make time to report on the wars, lest the reports displace the silly banter with which they seek to humor their viewers. Do they ever wonder how military families with loved ones in the fray might feel after hearing ever so briefly of mayhem in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Moral hazard also can explain why the general public is so noticeably indifferent to the plight of our troops and their families. To be sure, we paste cheap magnetic ribbons on our cars to proclaim our support for the troops. But at the same time, we allow families of reservists and National Guard members to slide into deep financial distress as their loved ones stand tall for us on lethal battlefields and the family is deprived of these troops’ typically higher civilian salaries. We offer a pittance in disability pay to seriously wounded soldiers who have not served the full 20 years that entitles them to a regular pension. And our legislative representatives make a disgraceful spectacle of themselves bickering over a mere $1 billion or so in added health care spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs — in a nation with a $13 trillion economy!

Last year kind-hearted folks in New Jersey collected $12,000 at a pancake feed to help stock pantries for financially hard-pressed families of the National Guard. Food pantries for American military families? The state of Illinois now allows taxpayers to donate their tax refunds to such families. For the entire year 2004, slightly more than $400,000 was collected in this way, or 3 cents per capita. It is the equivalent of about 100,000 cups of Starbucks coffee. With a similar program Rhode Island collected about 1 cent per capita. Is this what we mean by “supporting our troops”?

When our son, then a recent Princeton graduate, decided to join the Marine Corps in 2001, I advised him thus: “Do what you must, but be advised that, flourishing rhetoric notwithstanding, this nation will never truly honor your service, and it will condemn you to the bottom of the economic scrap heap should you ever get seriously wounded.” The intervening years have not changed my views; they have reaffirmed them.

Unlike the editors of the nation’s newspapers, I am not at all impressed by people who resolve to have others stay the course in Iraq and in Afghanistan. At zero sacrifice, who would not have that resolve?”

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Bush To Senate, UN, World: Screw You

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by hilzoy From the NYTimes: “President Bush bypassed the Senate confirmation process today and appointed John R. Bolton as the new United States ambassador to the United Nations. The appointment, while Congress is in recess, ends a months-long standoff between the White House and Senate Democrats who deem Mr. Bolton unfit for the job and … Read more

Still Not Surprised

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by hilzoy From Newsweek: “An FBI agent warned superiors in a memo three years ago that U.S. officials who discussed plans to ship terror suspects to foreign nations that practice torture could be prosecuted for conspiring to violate U.S. law, according to a copy of the memo obtained by NEWSWEEK. (…) In a memo forwarded … Read more

The Rule Of Law

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by hilzoy Via a diary at dKos, ABC has this story: “Leaked emails from two former prosecutors claim the military commissions set up to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay are rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused. Two emails, which have been obtained by the ABC, were sent to supervisors in the Office … Read more

Energy Bill: Now With Weapons-Grade Uranium!

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by hilzoy Via a post by Russell Feingold at DKos: apparently, the energy bill that just passed both houses of Congress isn’t just a shameful grab-bag of corporate welfare provisions that does next to nothing to solve our energy problems; it also weakens our nuclear non-proliferation policies. From the Washington Post: “A provision tucked into … Read more

Our Clueless Congress Strikes Again

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by hilzoy Yesterday the House and Senate agreed on the final version of the energy bill, and today the House passed it. I gather that the energy bill contains some good provisions — I’m all for “new efficiency standards for commercial appliances from air conditioners to refrigerators”, for instance. And the conferees did manage to … Read more

Correction (Huh??)

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by hilzoy A few days ago I linked to a New York Times article that said that the Department of Defense had defied a court order to release the rest of the photos from Abu Ghraib. Anderson (in comments) points me to this correction by the Times: “An article on Saturday about a federal judge’s … Read more

Another Gloomy Iraq Post

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by hilzoy

The BBC has a story I hope is wrong, but fear is true:

“Iraq’s new police force is facing mounting allegations of systematic abuse and torture of people in detention, as well as allegations of extra-judicial killings. The minority Sunni community in particular claims it is being targeted by the Shia-dominated police force.”

According to the BBC, Human Rights Watch has collected a number of similar stories, including a novel use for power tools that I hope I manage to repress as soon as possible:

“The camera focuses on marks all over his body including what appear to be drill holes. According to Salman al-Faraji, a human rights activist and lawyer, the use of drills is common. “Most cases are quite similar, the same methods are used,” he said. “They torture them, breaking hands and legs. They use electric drills to pierce their bodies and then the killing is carried out at close range.””

One of several nightmare outcomes for Iraq has always been the emergence of a police state like Saddam Hussein’s, but with different allegiances. It is, I think, marginally better than civil war, but that’s sort of like saying that being tortured with an electric drill is marginally better than being tortured with a belt sander. And of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

In the latest New York Review of Books, Peter Galbraith has an article about Iraq that is disturbing, though not surprising. I’ve posted a longish excerpt below the fold, but it’s worth reading the whole article, since Galbraith is, in my opinion, one of the sharpest observers of Iraq around.

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