Morton Mintz has a good post:

In the better-late-than-never department, David S. Broder has condemned congressional Republicans for their sustained non-oversight of the Executive branch.

“It was a fundamental dereliction of duty by Congress, and it probably did more to encourage bad decisions and harmful actions by executive-branch political appointees than the much-touted lobbying influence,” Broder wrote in the Washington Post recently.

Twice in his column, though, Broder dated the dereliction to George W. Bush’s arrival in the White House in January 2001. One problem with this is that date. Another is the pass he gives to the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil contribution to the dereliction made by leading news organizations.

“For the first six years of the Bush administration,” Broder wrote, “[t]he previously anonymous aides in the White House counsel’s office and the political affairs section headed by Karl Rove…were allowed free rein to carry out whatever policy or political assignments they wished—or supposed that the president wanted done. A Congress under firm Republican control was somnolent when it came to oversight of the executive branch. No Republican committee chairman wanted to turn over rocks in a Republican administration.

“You have to feel a twinge of sympathy now for the Bush appointees…They will pay the price for the temporary breakdown in the system of checks and balances that occurred between 2001 and this year—when the Republican Congress forgot its responsibility to hold the executive branch accountable.”

In fact, the Republican Congress knowingly and willfully began to abandon—not forget—its oversight responsibilities immediately on taking control of Capitol Hill in January 1995, not January 2001. This is not news to faithful readers of this Web site, which on May 2, 2005, posted a talk I’d given to Washington Nieman Fellows “on the collapse of congressional oversight.”

The example detailed in the piece was the Food and Drug Administration. Despite a series of drug disasters that gravely or fatally harmed thousands of Americans, I wrote, the press failed for a decade “to inform the public of the prolonged, corrupt ….abdication of congressional oversight of the agency responsible for the safety of their medicines and of its causes, consequences and implications.”

Toward the end, I asked this question “[W]ere the lapses I’ve described symptomatic of a collapse of congressional oversight—and of press oversight of that oversight—in a host of other areas that bear heavily on national security and our lives, safety, health and pocketbooks?”

It’s two years later, but I’m glad David Broder answered the question.

TPMmuckraker has two articles on Goodling, and both deserve reading.

The first describes how the situation with Goodling is unprecedented:

For perhaps the first time in history, a Justice Department official has invoked the Fifth Amendment — and remains in her position at the Department. In a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today, Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and committtee member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked what the Justice Department was going to do about it.

The first order of business, they said, was to figure out who to talk to at the Justice Department about Goodling. Ordinarily, they wrote, they would ask the Department about how to proceed, so as not to interfere with a possible criminal investigation. But “the office of the Attorney General appears to be hopelessly conflicted,” they wrote. So who’s it going to be?

The senators also want to know whether Goodling will be cooperating with the internal Justice Department investigation of the firings, given that career Department employees are required to cooperate with such investigations.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School who’s handled a number of high-profile clients in his career, said that Goodling, having invoked the Fifth with regard to Congress’ investigation, is in a bind.

“It’s a very clever question, because if she does not invoke the Fifth [for the internal Justice Department investigation], then she obviously has a fundamental contradiction in her legal position. She would basically be saying that despite having a high-ranking position in the Justice Department, she will not cooperate with a coequal branch… Congress has oversight responsibiilty over the Justice Department, over Monica Goodling. It would be an obvious contradiction with her job description.”

Maybe that’s why this has never happened before. “I believe she might be the first sitting Justice Department official in history to invoke the Fifth.” Normally, he said, “the price of invoking the Fifth in this context would have been to end her career in government service.”

And yet Goodling, though on indefinite (and voluntary) leave, remains on the Justice Department’s payroll.

The second describes how Congress is responding and includes the text of Conyers’ letter, which is:

Read the rest of this entry »

Via a new shaver, I have learned about Etsy, a kind of eBay for handmade crafts. It looks quite cool, so I immediately took it out for a spin.

Glenn Greenwald has an important column today on the danger Rudy Giulani presents as a presidential candidate—and the even greater danger he would pose as president.

Isn’t it odd how the mainstream media simply ignore such issues?

Read the column. Please.

AmericaBlog lays it out clearly:

Bush just spoke to the nation, trying to convince the public to support his Iraq quagmire, and he claimed again that the surge, the escalation, was the idea of his commanders in the field, and he’s just following their advice.

In fact, all of the Joint Chiefs, the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, ALL opposed the surge.

The Bush administration is split over the idea of a surge in troops to Iraq, with White House officials aggressively promoting the concept over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intense debate.

And our commanders in the field opposed the surge, so Bush fired them and replaced them with someone who would rubber stamp his surge plan.

In devising his new strategy, Bush again turned to the neoconservatives. The so-called surge strategy is the brainchild of Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute who has never been to Iraq. And once again, President Bush dismissed the views of his military advisers. General George Casey and General John Abizaid, the commanders in the field, doubted that additional troops would make any difference in Iraq. They were replaced by surge advocates, including Lieutenant General David Petraeus, now the top commander in Iraq.

And remember, it was just a few months ago, that the commanders on the ground were SO opposed to the surge that Bush came out and said, for the first time, that he WOULDN’T listen to commanders on the ground anymore.

This all matters because once again Bush is lying to the American people in order to justify yet another failed extreme policy. He has lied about this war from the beginning, and he and his administration have lied about so many issue that it’s impossible to trust anything they say. Bush lies. He doesn’t trust the American people to know the truth. He doesn’t have the courage or maturity to take responsibility for his own actions, so he blames the generals - you see, it’s THEIR idea, not his, it’s THEIR fault, not his. “Who me?” Bush can’t ever be blamed for this infernal mess because he’s just a bystander, you understand. Only problem? It’s all one big lie.

The man is a ten year old child. It’s time to take away the car keys.

Via AmericaBlog, Juan Cole has some good info:

For all those journalists and politicians who keep insisting that there are new “glimmers” of “hope” in Iraq because of the new security plan started 6 weeks ago, here is a sobering statistic from the Iraqi government. (I’m looking at you, John McCain. See below for more on McCain).

Iraqis killed in February: 1806 (64.5/day)
Iraqis killed in March: 2078 (67/day)

As the wire services report, that is a 15% increase if figured by the month. I provided the figures, above, to show that it is an increase even if figured by the day (4%). …

(Of course, the real numbers are much higher than these government statistics suggest, since passive information gathering on casualties only catches a fraction).

While 44 Iraqi soldiers died in action, the total for US troops in March was 85. AFP is suspicious about the disparity given that US and Iraqi authorities have said that Iraqi troops are leading the security crackdown. If that were true, they should have more casualties than the Americans.

Killings in Baghdad have declined a bit, and death squad murders at night have been impeded, so that fewer bodies are found on the streets in the morning. But car bombing casualties rose. And, some of the violence was displaced from the capital to other cities, such as Baqubah and Mosul, which explains why the total is up so much. The US withdrew some 3,000 troops from Mosul last summer to concentrate them in Baghdad, and since then Mosul seems to me to have become increasingly insecure. It is Iraq’s second largest city.

So the over-all death toll has actually increased since the surge began.

Another cautionary note is that major attacks on Shiites in the capital and elsewhere seem to me to be way up. They may not take revenge immediately, but they will eventually. That the US has forced the Shiite militias off the street will be held against America, since Iraqis conclude that they are being killed because the Americans are not letting them defend themselves. …

This grandstanding trip that John McCain took to Baghdad on Sunday is another occasion for propaganda to shore up his falling poll numbers in his presidential campaign. He said, “Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I’ve been here . . . many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport, never have I been able go out into the city as I was today.”

He said that only three days after the US embassy issued an order that personnel are to wear ‘personal protective equipment’ when moving between buildings inside the Green Zone! He said it the day two suicide belt bombs were found inside the Green Zone. So he could ride in an armored car in from the airport. That’s the big achievement? What about when he gets to the Green Zone? Then he has to put on PPE to go to the cafeteria.

Read the rest of this entry »

When you try to place a photo in a Windows Word document, if you venture too near to the top of the page, the photo will jump up and stick to the top edge. You can drag it down, and it will jump up again. Infuriating.

Here’s a way that seems to fix it: double-click the photo (or right-click it and select “Format picture…”), and click the “Layout” tab. Click “In line with text”. Drag the photo (along the line of text) to the approximate location you want (for example, to the right or left margin, roughly at the line you want—you have to drag it along the line).

Then go back to Format picture, choose the Layout tab, and click the layout option you want—”Square”, for example. The picture will then stay in place.

Quirky, eh?

Apparently: Merkur’s 1904 safety-razor is a vastly underappreciated gem. I got mine out and loaded with a new Tesco blade (gift from a fellow shaver, Tescos are made in the UK and are interesting in that they have no markings at all on the blade itself: totally blank). After lathering up with some new Tabac soap, using the Rooney Style 2 Finest, I set to work and achieved the greatly satisfying perfect shave. Alum bar and then Musgo Real aftershave.

After yesterday’s little lather problem, I was careful in adding water and ended up with a lather somewhat  thicker and drier than I normally make. It worked extremely well, so I think I’ll go that direction in the future.

The 1904 has a little sort of knob at the end of its handle that, like the diagonal knob that terminates the handle of the GEM G-Bar, is just perfect when shaving against the grain. Really, a charming razor. And since it’s a three-piece razor, it comes apart to occupy little space: fine razor for backpacking, for example.

The following is a comment, but I thought it interesting enough to bring it up as a post.

I have known how to fix our medical care system for 35 years and our Social Security system for 43.

For health care, we need a single payer, national health care system that is actuarially advance funded (AAF), and then we need to set up a national database system, easily accessed online, that gives detailed information on price and quality locally and the best thinking on treatments for each illness and disease. You can only get the latter by having the former.

We would save more than 300 billion a year with the first and an additional two-thirds of the balance with the AAF.

To fix Social Security we need to replace PayGo, which gets too little investment returns to help pay the benefits, with AAF and also put strong laws with teeth in them to protect the assets and the past service accrued benefits–in other words, make the system a real defined benefit pension system instead of the fake one it is now.

The near collapse of the once mighty defined benefit pension system in private industry was caused by requiring these laws in 1974 but they had major flaws in them that have caused more than one trillion dollars to be stolen from the system.

The $300 billion + in savings will easily enable us to pay for the 47 million uninsured and at the same time Actuarially Advance Fund both Social Security and this national medical care system, thus converting monumental waste into large national savings and investment, part of which can and needs to be invested in common stocks for the returns which will benefit the US economy a great deal and in many ways.

This is long-term patient investment and little will go to future Enron’s or to other corporations that have committed malfeasance or where CEOs have been rewarding themselves like kings. The corporate scandals keep coming too, with no sign of stopping.

***

I am the one who told President Clinton how to fix Social Security in 1998 and he used it in his 1998 State of The Union Address. Thus far he remains the only politician in the world that has said the right thing.

These two problems are also global and of immense importance to fix right, lest they be privatized.

And there are bad boys with lots of money that are doing that as I speak globally—led by The Cato Institute and other right-wing groups–while here in the US Medicare privatization has been well under way since 1994, when Newt Gingrich accepted a million dollars from The Golden Rule Life Insurance Company to begin the process.

The severe Medicare cutbacks to doctors and hospitals are part of the ongoing GOP Medicare privatization strategy which began with Newt Gingrich accepting a million dollars from The Golden Rule Life Insurance Company in 1994 and had it’s origins back with Reagan’s Chief of Staff, Don Regan (former CEO of Merrill Lynch), as is the passage of Bush’s Medicare drug bill, which, of course, is a huge giveaway to the drug companies.

On the latter, the Bush people threatened to fire the Chief Actuary of Medicare, Rick Foster, whose figures were far larger than Bush’s on the cost of that bill, if he released those numbers to Congress, which is his function. He didn’t, until after the bill passed.

If any group would like me to give a talk on these subjects or better yet, if you are a newspaper or magazine rep, to write some pieces on it, I would be pleased to do so.

I am the only actuary who says this and does this because many others are too busy screwing people out of pensions (pension consulting actuaries) and trying to privatize both Social Security (life insurance actuaries) and Medicare (health insurance actuaries).

It is far and away the hardest profession to get into in the world–12 years on average to pass all the actuarial exams for Fellowship, and this is after getting your math degree—and if you speak up and object to the actions of your fellow actuaries as an active employee you will be blackballed and never get another job as an actuary—which accounts for the silence of so many good people in the face of this enormous wrongdoing.

Andy Lang, Fellow of The Society of Actuaries (FSA), Member, American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA)
1426 Springton Lane
West Chester, PA 19380
610-738-9678  andyclang@comcast.net