Current Affairs

by hilzoy

Some basics on the US Attorney story:

(1) Question: Isn’t this just like what Clinton did? Answer: no. US Attorneys are often replaced at the beginning of a new President’s first term. They are almost never replaced in midterm, like this. Here’s a Congressional Research Study:

“At least 54 U.S. attorneys appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate left office before completion of a four-year term between 1981 and 2006 (not counting those whose tenure was interrupted by a change in presidential administration). Of those 54, 17 left to become Article III federal judges, one left to become a federal magistrate judge, six left to serve in other positions in the executive branch, four sought elective office, two left to serve in state government, one died, and 15 left to enter or return to private practice. Of the remaining eight U.S. attorneys who left before completing a four-year term without a change in presidential administration, two were apparently dismissed by the President, and three apparently resigned after news reports indicated they had engaged in questionable personal actions. No information was available on the three remaining U.S. attorneys who resigned.”

So: at least two, and at most five, US Attorneys were removed from office in the middle of their terms between 1981 and the present firings. George W. Bush managed to fire more attorneys on one day than had been fired in mid-term during the previous 25 years.

(2) Question: So what? What difference does it make if the President fires people at the beginning of his term or in the middle, given that it’s probably for political reasons either way? Answer: When a President replaces US Attorneys at the beginning of his term, he is generally doing so to put in people who fit his ideology or accept his priorities, or to reward supporters. It’s a lot less likely that he will be replacing them because they have disobeyed his orders to investigate or indict someone, or to stop an ongoing investigation.

When a President replaces US Attorneys in mid-term, however, he can sack them not just for not being fully aligned with him ideologically, but for their actions on some specific case. He might want them to back off an investigation they think should be pursued, or to investigate or indict where they think there’s no evidence. And that’s a lot more serious, since it gives Presidents the power to direct the power of law enforcement at their political opponents.

Lest this seem like an abstract worry…

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by hilzoy

Until now, there have been three things that this administration has done that have reduced me to a tiny molten ball of fury: shredding the Constitution, invading Iraq, and leaving people to die after Katrina. Somehow, all the rest — even really important things, like the deficit, the astonishing failures in nuclear nonproliferation and securing loose nukes, our virtual lack of an energy policy, and all the rest — don’t make me truly livid in quite the way that these three do. Now we can add a fourth: veterans’ health care. I suppose that in the grand scheme of things, it probably matters less than failing to take any action at all on global warming, but it just encapsulates everything that drives me crazy about this administration: the heartlessness, the abject failure even to try to do right by people who manifestly deserve it at the very time when the administration’s own policies were putting their lives in danger, the complete lack of any concern for the very people who were willing to risk everything for us, and who (in general) stood by the administration even when it was utterly failing to stand by them.

Read it and weep:

“Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. “The staff sergeant says, ‘Here are your linens’ to my son, who can’t even stand up,” said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. “This kid has an open wound, and I’m going to put him in a room with fruit flies?” She took her son to a hotel instead.

“My concern is for the others, who don’t have a parent or someone to fight for them,” Karen said. “These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?”

Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. “The living conditions were the worst I’d ever seen for soldiers,” he said. “Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn’t work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops.” (…)

Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.

From Fort Campbell in Kentucky: “There were yellow signs on the door stating our barracks had asbestos.”

From Fort Bragg in North Carolina: “They are on my [expletive] like a diaper. . . . there are people getting chewed up everyday.”

From Fort Dix in New Jersey: “Scare tactics are used against soldiers who will write sworn statement to assist fellow soldiers for their medical needs.”

From Fort Irwin in California: “Most of us have had to sign waivers where we understand that the housing we were in failed to meet minimal government standards.” (…)

VA hospitals are also receiving a surge of new patients after more than five years of combat. At the sprawling James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., Spec. Roberto Reyes Jr. lies nearly immobile and unable to talk. Once a strapping member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, Reyes got too close to an improvised explosive device in Iraq and was sent to Walter Reed, where doctors did all they could before shipping him to the VA for the remainder of his life. A cloudy bag of urine hangs from his wheelchair. His mother and his aunt are constant bedside companions; Reyes, 25, likes for them to get two inches from his face, so he can pull on their noses with the few fingers he can still control.

Maria Mendez, his aunt, complained about the hospital staff. “They fight over who’s going to have to give him a bath — in front of him!” she said. Reyes suffered third-degree burns on his leg when a nurse left him in a shower unattended. He was unable to move himself away from the scalding water. His aunt found out only later, when she saw the burns.”

Paul Krugman provides context:

“For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend that it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, in 2005 Salon reported that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.

More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq the V.H.A., which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who is entitled to enroll in its health care system. As the agency’s Web site helpfully explains, veterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service connected condition or recent combat service,” will be turned away.

So when you hear stories of veterans who spend months or years fighting to get the care they deserve, trying to prove that their injuries are service-related, remember this: all this red tape was created not by the inherent inefficiency of government bureaucracy, but by the Bush administration’s penny-pinching.

But money is only part of the problem.

We know from Hurricane Katrina postmortems that one of the factors degrading FEMA’s effectiveness was the Bush administration’s relentless push to outsource and privatize disaster management, which demoralized government employees and drove away many of the agency’s most experienced professionals. It appears that the same thing has been happening to veterans’ care.

The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.

And Mr. Waxman, who will be holding a hearing on the issue today, appears to have solid evidence, including an internal Walter Reed memo from last year, that the prospect of privatization led to a FEMA-type exodus of skilled personnel.”

Remember: this is not about money. At the very same time that the Bush administration was sending troops off to fight two wars and underfunding the VA, at the very same time that it was charging wounded veterans for their meals, this administration somehow found a way to cut taxes for the wealthiest among us. It’s too much, apparently, to ask the likes of Paris Hilton to pay taxes on any money they inherit, after the first few tax-free millions. But it’s not too much to ask people who have given their health or their limbs or their minds fighting George W. Bush’s misconceived war to pay for their meals, or to live in rooms with asbestos and mold and rodents and stray syringes lying about.

This is not about money. It’s about a complete lack of decency and honor and fairness; and about the absence of even the most minimal sense of shame.

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by Charles

A little over a year ago I wrote about Hugo Chavez’s grasping quest for power in Venezuela and I thought it would be helpful to recap some of his "accomplishments" in the past twelve months.  I refer to him as a communist because, according to the Economist, he refers to himself as one.  As for him being a dictator, well, dictator is as does.  The mindset is there.  Considering the policies he is pursuing, it looks clear to me that there are strong similarities in the actions of Chavez and Mugabe and Castro.  The primary difference is that Venezuela is fortunate enough to be sitting on huge oil reserves, thus softening the damaging impacts felt from his bad decisions.  Mugabe and Castro don’t have that geological luxury, and their tenures have been much longer, so there’s been more time to see how their decisions have unfolded.  But before opining further, some examples of Chavez’s moves.

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by hilzoy

Peter Beinart has a piece in TNR about why he supported the war:

“For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did. 

When I first saw Makiya–the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein’s crimes–I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. He reminded me of the South African exiles who occasionally wandered through my house as a kid. Once, many years ago, I asked one of them how the United States could aid the anti-apartheid struggle. Congress could impose sanctions, he responded. Sure, sure, I said impatiently. But what else? Well, he replied with a chuckle, if the United States were a different country, it would help the African National Congress liberate South Africa by force.”

He also writes about why he got it wrong:

“I was willing to gamble, too–partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn’t gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn’t think I was gambling many of my countrymen’s. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It’s a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States. 

Some non-Americans did, too. “All the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the leaders and potential leaders who still survive,” wrote Salman Rushdie in November 2002, “are asking, even pleading for the proposed regime change. Will the American and European left make the mistake of being so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Saddam Hussein?” 

I couldn’t answer that then. It seemed irrefutable. But there was an answer, and it was the one I heard from that South African many years ago. It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can’t be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That’s why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force–because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it’s why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That’s not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It’s not even to say that we can’t, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we’re there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war–as they did in Vietnam and Iraq–because they think we’re deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they’re probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn’t have trusted ourselves.”

I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can’t be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.

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by hilzoy

From the International Herald Tribune:

“It sounds like some incredibly dark Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Each night before the sun sets, thousands of children march in grim procession along dusty roads that take them from their rural villages to larger towns. The children are afraid to sleep in their beds, terrified that they will be abducted by a madman who will force them into a marauding guerrilla army that hunts down their friends, families, and loved ones.

The fleeing children sleep in churches, empty schools, makeshift shelters, and alleyways. And every morning at sunrise, the children walk home, free for another day.”

These are the ‘Night Commuters’ of northern Uganda:

(photo copyright Bruno Stevens.)

For years, they have walked from their homes to the nearest large town each night to avoid being kidnapped by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which uses children as soldiers, servants, and sex slaves. Normally, there are 30-40,000 night commuters; more when times are bad.

Times have not been so bad recently, but they are about to get worse.

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by hilzoy

From Ha’Aretz (h/t TPM)

“The United States demanded that Israel desist from even exploratory contacts with Syria, of the sort that would test whether Damascus is serious in its declared intentions to hold peace talks with Israel.

In meetings with Israeli officials recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forceful in expressing Washington’s view on the matter.

The American argument is that even “exploratory talks” would be considered a prize in Damascus, whose policy and actions continue to undermine Lebanon’s sovereignty and the functioning of its government, while it also continues to stir unrest in Iraq, to the detriment of the U.S. presence there. (…)

According to senior Israeli officials, the American position vis-a-vis Syria, as it was expressed by the secretary of state, reflects a hardening of attitudes.

When Israeli officials asked Secretary Rice about the possibility of exploring the seriousness of Syria in its calls for peace talks, her response was unequivocal: Don’t even think about it.”

About six weeks ago, word first surfaced of a set of earlier, unofficial negotiations between Israel and Syria, which had resulted in a draft agreement between the two countries. The agreement provides for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, most of which would then be turned into a park accessible (without visas) to both Syrians and Israelis. (Personally, I think this is a very imaginative solution.) It also provides for demilitarization of the border, Israeli control of water rights from the Sea of Galilee and the upper Jordan, and verification. Moreover:

“According to Geoffrey Aronson, an American from the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, who was involved in the talks, an agreement under American auspices would call for Syria to ensure that Hezbollah would limit itself to being solely a political party.

He also told Haaretz that Khaled Meshal, Hamas’ political bureau chief, based in Damascus, would have to leave the Syrian capital.

Syria would also exercise its influence for a solution to the conflict in Iraq, through an agreement between Shi’a leader Muqtada Sadr and the Sunni leadership, and in addition, it would contribute to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the refugee problem.”

It goes without saying that there are always reasons to be skeptical of such things, and that even if all parties are negotiating in complete good faith, lots of things can go wrong between an initial round of unofficial talks and a final peace treaty. That said:

What could we possibly have been thinking?

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by hilzoy

One of the fun things about having a blog is that when I find an obscure story that I think ought to be more widely known, I can just write about it, and voila! my millions throngs dozens of readers all find out about it. So when I read this, I thought: hey, I should post this, for all those people who have worried about the possibility that clean, wonderful wind power could produce seafowl carpaccio as an unfortunate side effect. Apparently not:

“Uncertainty surrounding wind power’s impact on wildlife–particularly the potential for deadly collisions between birds and turbines–has tarnished its image and even delayed some wind farms. Indeed, the first large offshore wind farm proposed for U.S. waters–the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts’s Nantucket Sound–has been held up in part by concerns that its 130 turbines could kill thousands of seabirds annually. Now a simple infrared collision-detection system developed by Denmark’s National Environmental Research Institute is helping clear the air.

The Thermal Animal Detection System (TADS) is essentially a heat-activated infrared video camera that watches a wind turbine around the clock, recording deadly collisions much as a security camera captures crimes. The first results, released this winter as part of a comprehensive $15 million study of Denmark’s large offshore wind farms, show seabirds to be remarkably adept at avoiding offshore installations. “There had been suggestions that enormous numbers of birds would be killed,” says Robert Furness, a seabird specialist at the University of Glasgow, who chaired the study’s scientific advisory panel. “There’s a greater feeling now among European politicians that marine wind farms are not going to be a major ecological problem, and therefore going ahead with construction is not going to raise lots of political difficulties.” (…)

TADS was mounted on a Nysted wind-farm turbine that was situated in the most common flight path, and during more than 2,400 hours of monitoring that concluded last fall, it spotted only fifteen birds and bats and one moth flying near the turbine, and it recorded one collision involving a small bird or bat. Furness says that this provides confidence in estimations by Danish researchers that the Nysted wind farm would kill few common eiders.”

If you think about it, that’s an astonishingly small number of collisions, given that it involves 130 huge wind turbines whose blades, according to the article, can slice through the air, and thus through a bird, at 80 meters per second at the tip. It has been clear all along that a lot of birds are smarter* than we think; this is one more bit of evidence.

The humans involved are fairly clever too:

“What makes TADS practical for continuous operation is software Desholm wrote to activate recording when a warm object enters the video camera’s field of vision. According to Furness, the need to sift through thousands of hours of film was a major limitation for researchers who had previously tried infrared monitoring. He says that other automated collision monitoring that relies on vibration sensors on the blades and towers has failed to produce a reliable system. “This is the first system which has really functioned,” says Furness.”

This study will have to be repeated at different locations, and with different species, before we can safely extrapolate from it. But it’s wonderful news for those of us who care about both cutting our consumption of fossil fuel and birds.

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by publius

I’ve enjoyed the back and forth on the Iran litmus test. I think Hilzoy and Von have covered a lot of good ground, but I want to add a couple of important points.

First, everyone should be using the word “Publosonian,” as Von did. If you’re not, start. Do it now. Publosonian.

Second, and somewhat more importantly, a common assumption in the Iran debate shared across the political spectrum is that our ongoing threat of military force against Iran is necessary to keep the country honest. This assumption is essentially the “credible threat” theory that plays such a prominent role in game theory. Von expresses it well:

The possibility of attack is significant. It creates a bit of doubt — we don’t think they’ll attack, we don’t think they possibly can attack, but what if they do? Anyone who has been involved in negotiations (or litigation, for that matter) knows the value of doubt. Doubt of radical action is a sure way to keep folks honest and on point.

This is an example of an idea that is generally accurate in most situations, but inaccurate as applied to Iran. In fact, I would even argue that continuing to “credibly threaten” Iran militarily is the source of — not the solution to — many of our current problems. Frankly, the credible threat of military force is creating the conditions under which military force will become more likely.

I can’t take credit for this idea – I heard it at a policy lunch a few weeks ago. The speaker there noted several specific ways in which our ongoing military threat against Iran is actually undermining our interests, and I tend to agree to them.

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by hilzoy

A couple of weeks ago, I figured out what all the other bloggers have probably known for years: how to configure Google News to update me on all sorts of stories I normally try, unsuccessfully, to follow. It’s wonderful: so much easier than reading all sorts of newspapers trying to see whether anyone has written anything on Kyrgyzstan recently. One downside, however, is that because I created a Zimbabwe section, I’m more aware than ever of the slow-motion meltdown that Zimbabwe is undergoing. I’ll put part of Zimbabwe’s tale of woe below the fold. As you read it, bear in mind that all of these stories are from this month, and most are from the last ten days. It would be bad enough if all this had happened over a span of, say, a decade. But this is ten days.

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by hilzoy

Since I would find it unnerving to think that the Bush administration hasn’t done anything good in six years in office, I cling to the two genuinely good things I know of that it has accomplished: the peace accord in the North-South civil war in the Sudan, and the designation of 140,000 square miles of ocean as a national monument. Now, unfortunately, the first of these seems to be unravelling.

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by hilzoy

Via LGM: today, the LATimes devotes a largish chunk of its op ed space to yet another column noting the astonishing fact that some college courses have silly names, and some go so far as to study silly topics. There have been innumerable versions of this column, all of which take the same form: go through the catalogs of various colleges (or, in this case, report that someone else has), pick the courses that sound silliest, and make fun of them. Thus far, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the genre, except that by now it has become a bit stale. The problem comes when the people who write these columns try to justify their efforts by pretending that the existence of course with silly names has some broader significance.

News flash: it doesn’t.

Here, for instance, is a bit from today’s column (by one Charlotte Allen):

“The problem that the Young America’s Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn’t simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that’s a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn’t include “race, class and gender” among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on “cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion” during the age of the Bard.

The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.”

Let’s see: is it really true that the humanities have been hollowed out and replaced by crude indoctrination sessions?

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by hilzoy

Here’s some unquestionably good news: according to the Washington Post, domestic violence has dropped significantly:

“Domestic violence rates in the United States dropped sharply between 1993 and 2004 but showed recent signs of a rebound, the Justice Department reported yesterday.

The number of domestic homicides fell 32 percent from 1993 to 2004, and the frequency of nonfatal violence between domestic partners dropped by more than 50 percent, from 5.8 attacks per 1,000 U.S. residents age 12 or older, to 2.6 attacks, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Men benefited from the decline more than women, and black victims more than white women. The number of women killed by current or former partners fell from 1,572 in 1993 to 1,159 in 2004, or 26 percent. The number of men killed dropped from 698 to 385, or 45 percent. (…)

The report did not offer an explanation for the trend, but experts said it continued a decline in domestic violence recorded since 1976 and mirrored a drop in violent crime overall in the past decade.

Other theories credit increased policing, neighborhood-watch and victim-assistance programs, and awareness raised by the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

Analysts worry that declines may have bottomed out, however. Although overall rates remained unchanged between 2003 and 2004, violence against black women and white men increased slightly.”

More statistics and musings below the fold.

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