Later On

Froomkin is uncharacteristically flip in this post. The offensive part:

The White House’s first online town hall mined the discontents of a nation upset about schools, worried about mortgages and college costs, despairing over lost jobs, eager for universal health care — and, oh yes, yearning for the legalization of marijuana.

Okay, the marijuana question was a good example of the downsides of Internet voting. But overall, I would say that this experiment was a roaring success.

If you look through the comments, you will quickly see that Froomkin’s attitude (and Obama’s) was not well received. It was a serious question, but within the Beltway, the thing to do is to make fun of the question and hope it goes away.

Very disappointing.

Stopped by the library to pick up a couple of young adult novels written in Spanish. One was Como Agua Para Chocolate.

I got four duck legs to try this recipe by Mark Bittman:

Braised Duck With Green Beans, Thai Style

Yield 4 servings

Time 1 1/2 to 2 hours

If you can find duck legs in the store, go with those. If you can buy only a whole duck, the procedure for cutting it up is almost identical to that for cutting up a chicken. The joints are a bit trickier to find, but they are in the same places.

• 4 duck legs or 1 duck, cut into quarters
• Salt and pepper
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1 tablespoon minced ginger
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 or 2 small chilies, seeded and minced, or crushed red chili flakes to taste
• 1 1/2 pounds green beans, trimmed
• 1 tablespoon sugar, or to taste
• 2 tablespoons nam pla or soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons lime juice, or to taste
• Coarsely chopped fresh cilantro leaves for garnish, optional

1. Remove excess fat from duck or duck legs. Season with salt and pepper, and put in a skillet that will fit it comfortably; turn heat to medium, and cover. Check once you hear sizzling: duck should be simmering in its own fat and exuding liquid. Adjust heat to create a steady simmer.

2. Once bottom browns, turn. Eventually liquid will evaporate and duck will cook in fat only; at this point, lower heat and continue to cook duck, turning once in a while, until it becomes tender, about an hour.

3. Transfer duck to a plate. Pour off all but a couple of tablespoons of fat. Turn heat to medium high, and add onion; cook, stirring occasionally, until it softens, about 5 minutes. Add ginger, garlic and chilies and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds. Add beans and sugar and turn heat to high; cook, stirring occasionally, until beans begin to brown, about 5 minutes.

4. Add 2 tablespoons water and nam pla or soy sauce. Put duck on top of bean mixture and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook until both beans and duck are very tender, 15 to 30 more minutes, adding a little more water if necessary to keep mixture moist. (You can prepare dish in advance up to this point; cover and set aside until ready to eat, then reheat.) Uncover and stir in lime juice; taste and adjust seasoning, then sprinkle with cilantro and serve.

I see I didn’t get the green beans. Oh, well: the duck legs have to thaw overnight anyway.

A top constitutional scholar says, "Yes" in an interview with Naomi Wolfe. Ms. Wolfe begins:

In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo’s memos outlining the destruction of the republic.

The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.

It was as if Milton’s Satan had a law degree and was establishing within the borders of the United States the architecture of hell.

I thought this was — and is — certainly one of the biggest stories of our lifetime, making the petty burglary of Watergate — which scandalized the nation — seem like playground antics. It is newsworthy too with the groundswell of support for prosecutions of Bush/Cheney crimes and recent actions such as Canadian attorneys mobilizing to arrest Bush if he visits their country.

The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.

As a non-lawyer, was I completely off base in my reading of what this meant, I wondered? Was I hallucinating?

Astonished, I sought a reality check — and a formal legal read — from one of the nation’s top constitutional scholars (and most steadfast patriots), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of defending the detainees and our own liberties.

Here is our conversation:

Naomi Wolf: Michael, can you explain to a layperson what the Yoo memos actually mean?

Read the rest of this entry »

Very interesting presentation. The intro:

Nearly all of the economic analyses we see today have as their basic premise a view that the current financial crisis is a temporary aberration. We will have a V or U shaped recovery, especially if enough stimulus is applied, and the economy will soon be back to Business as Usual.

I believe this assumption is basically incorrect. The current financial crisis is a direct result of peak oil. There may be oscillations in the economic situation, but generally, we can’t expect things to get much better. In fact, there is a very distinct possibility that things may get very much worse in the next few years.

In this post, I will put together some of the pieces I see. This post is based on a presentation, so includes more than the usual amount of graphics. The post repeats many things I have said before, but I wanted to bring more of the pieces together into more of an overview article. This is a link to a PDF version of the presentation. This is a link to the PowerPoint version.

Worth reading:

A few things struck me in the “resignation letter” of Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit. (People don’t normally forward their letters of resignation to The New York Times)

First, of course, is his justified sense of outrage at having been abandoned by his boss, AIG chief Ed Liddy, before Congress and at having his bonus essentially taken away. “Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.”

But a few other sentences stand out in my mind as emblematic of the mindset that has created some of this mess.

“I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G.” The list of who to vilify grows ever smaller. Even colleagues in the financial products unit are determined to distance themselves from the credit default swaps. These were highly profitable products produced by highly compensated (and, I would guess, much celebrated) people when times were good. Now, it would appear that a handful of largely anonymous—and now departed—executives are responsible for AIG’s downfall, not an institution that fostered and rewarded a culture of risk.

“The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation.” This is the argument that …

Continue reading.

Very interesting:

Kalan Gazar, Afghanistan – In this remote area amid the rough-hewn mountains of northern Afghanistan, a man gingerly steps forward at a village assembly.

"Why did you spend so much money on cement?" he asks village leaders – the first time he has so openly questioned authority.

They check their records and reply: "The cement is high quality, and it was the best deal we could find."

The man sits back down, apparently satisfied.

This bland exchange – one of many at a meeting where local officials must defend their use of public funds – is part of a ground-breaking program to bring accountability to a nation ranked one of five most corrupt by Transparency International, a corruption watchdog. The problem extends from top officials to local village leaders, and it’s fueling anger at the government and building support for the insurgency.

Now, villagers trained by an international nonprofit are tackling corruption at the local level through "social audits." They gather to …

Continue reading.

Interesting:

Sled dogs competing in the Iditarod, which ended Tuesday, are among the most energy-efficient creatures on Earth, with a capacity to run hundreds of miles day after day without showing the normal signs of fatigue.

Could their fat-burning prowess help uncover ways to prevent and treat obesity in type 2 diabetes?

Michael Davis is on the trail to find out. Davis, a professor at Oklahoma State University who has studied exercise physiology in sled dogs for a decade, recently completed the first phase of research examining how dogs that train for the 1,100-mile Iditarod become "insulin-sensitive" and convert fat to energy so proficiently.

"If we can figure out what exercise is doing to start the process, then we may be able to find how it can be applied to everyone, whether or not they are physically able to exercise," he says…

Continue reading.

Associated Press:

Ice cover on the Great Lakes has declined more than 30 percent since the 1970s, leaving the world’s largest system of freshwater lakes open to evaporation and lower water levels, according to scientists associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

They’re concerned about how the milder winter freeze may affect the environment. But they’re also trying to come to terms with a contradiction — the same climate factors that might keep lake ice from freezing might make freezing more likely if lake levels drop due to evaporation.

Scientists at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich., say global climate change can be at odds with regional climate patterns. Accurately measuring ice cover across a lake system that spans 94,000 square miles in two countries is no small task, they say.

Their studies show that although the amount of ice cover can vary substantially from year to year, the overall coverage on the world’s largest system of freshwater lakes is diminishing, especially in the deepest, middle portions of Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior.

"The deeper the water, the greater the heat storage from summer, and it freezes later than the shallow areas," research Ray Assel told The Plain Dealer. "Now, increase the air temperature and the lake takes in more heat and stores it longer, to the point that many of the midlake areas are freezing over less."

Assel’s records indicate that ice formation at nearshore areas has decreased less than on the deepest parts.

Evaporation from open water can cause heavy lake-effect snow inland.

Researcher Jia Wang said ice loss can cause other problems, including…

Continue reading.

Particularly with healthcare IT?

Even when their products are implicated in harm to patients, manufacturers of healthcare information technology (HIT) currently enjoy wide contractual and legal protection that renders them virtually “liability-free,” writes Ross Koppel, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in the March 25th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The current system needs to be changed so that all liability does not rest entirely with physicians, nurses, hospitals, and clinics, even when these users of faulty HIT scrupulously follow vendor instructions, according to Dr. Koppel’s piece, co-authored with David Kreda, a software designer.

The HIT industry avoids liability by relying on a legal doctrine known as “learned intermediaries” that holds physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and healthcare technicians responsible for HIT errors because are presumed to be able to identify—and correct— medical mistakes generated by software faults.

“HIT vendors claim that, because they cannot practice medicine, clinicians should be accountable for identifying errors resulting from faulty software or hardware,” said Koppel. “But errors or lack of clarity in HIT software can create serious, even deadly, risks to patients that clinicians cannot foresee.”

In one example,

Read the rest of this entry »

Wall Street hasn’t come up with any ideas, Andrew Sorkin points out:

FOR the last several months, Americans have looked to Washington to lead them. But where’s the leadership on Wall Street?

There is an enormous opportunity for a C.E.O. to come forward with a plan to reform the financial system and pledge a change from business as usual. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, has been the most outspoken of his peers during the crisis — and has done an admirable job addressing the issues — but he has been more focused on helping instill confidence in the economy and the health of his own firm. John Mack, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, has shown glimpses of public leadership, at one point apologizing for the crisis by saying, “We are sorry for it.”

But the public could particularly benefit today from a forceful voice of reason and change within the industry, proposing how to remake the world of finance in a sensible way, driven not by populism but by practicality and a sense of fairness.

It’s worth noting that most Wall Street C.E.O.’s are being advised by their legal and public relations teams to keep their heads down or risk provoking more public outrage. But there is the flip side to that coin: reasoned leadership may generate a reasonable response, helping the industry pre-empt what it fears most — additional government regulation.

So in that spirit, here’s a five-point plan to refashion Wall Street. A plan that would be best sold by Wall Street itself…

Continue reading. Interesting plan.

From the Associated Press:

The Obama administration is proposing an extensive overhaul of financial regulations in an effort to prevent a repeat of the banking crisis last fall that toppled once-mighty institutions and wiped out trillions of dollars in investor wealth.

Officials said the administration will seek to regulate the market for credit default swaps and other types of derivatives and require hedge funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was scheduled to outline the proposals in testimony Thursday before the House Financial Services Committee.

Administration officials provided details of the administration’s plan before the testimony only on condition of anonymity.

The program the administration was presenting to Congress will also include …

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Mike Lillis  of the Washington Independent has the story:

President Obama made headlines last month when he announced a budget wishlist eliminating a number of budget gimmicks used by Washington policymakers to, in effect, purposefully lie to the country about how much the government will collect and spend.

Breaking from previous administrations, Obama’s budget acknowledged that fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will actually cost money; it conceded that big pay cuts for doctors treating Medicare patients would never be realized; it admitted that tens-of-billions of dollars in revenues generated by the alternative minimum tax would never be collected because Congress steps in each year to prevent millions of middle class families from paying the tax. (This year, the AMT patch arrived in the stimulus bill — at a cost of $70 billion. All of it borrowed.) And, rather than projecting the figures out for only five years (like President George W. Bush made a habit of doing), Obama’s budget looked 10 years ahead, to lend a better picture of the fiscal imbalances that loom further down the road.

Leave it to Congress to bring some of those gimmicks back.

Both Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) this week are considering spending proposals of their own, rife with some of the very tallying dishonesties that have plagued the past. An editorial in The Washington Post today has a concise rundown.

The congressional budgets, The Post points out, look ahead only five years. They eliminate $250 billion included in Obama’s budget for more Wall Street bailouts, though the lawmakers “have no reason to believe it won’t be needed.” And Spratt acknowledges only one year of funding for the AMT patch — not the required five — while Conrad includes only three years of AMT money.  The Post offers an explanation:

…

Continue reading.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

When President Obama declared early in his presidency that he plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, that was hardly the end of the matter. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder must now figure out what to do with the 240 or so people still held there. And perhaps no cases cry out more urgently for attention than those of the young men abducted abroad as teenagers, and now held at Gitmo for more than six years.

As I’ve written previously, for some, that’s more than a quarter of their entire lives.

To keep the pressure on the administration to do something about this, Human Rights Watch today sent a letter to Holder, setting out some of the more gruesome details of the men’s cases — and the fact that their treatment appears to violate international standards of juvenile justice.

According to Human Rights Watch: “International treaty law and accepted juvenile justice norms require governments to provide children (defined as persons under the age of 18) with special safeguards and care.”  Juveniles are supposed to be held for the shortest time possible; their cases should be handled as “speedily as possible”; and rehabilitation should be the primary goal. They’re also supposed to be separated from adults, allowed contact with their families, and be given special care and rehabilitative assistance.

That’s not happening.

Among the men who were picked up as children and are still being held at Gitmo are Mohammad El Gharani, arrested when he was 15-years-old in a mosque in Pakistan on evidence a judge later said was too thin to justify holding him; Mohammad Jawad, …

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I’ve been emailing Mark Kleiman, who knows drug policy well and supports (so far as I can tell) continuing the drug policy we now have: prohibition. On the other hand, he does not want to return to prohibition of alcohol. I asked about the arguments that support his case, and he directed me to his own book, Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, and also the the Summer 1992 issue (Vol. 121, Number 3) of Dædalus, a special issue on "Political Pharmacology: Thinking About Drugs." I was able to order a secondhand copy of that, as well. I also discovered this interesting site: the Schaffer Library of Drug Policy.

I’ll do some reading and report back.

No human judgment in the loop. Expect more “collateral damage” (i.e., civilian deaths) if we field these. The story by Robert Boyd of McClatchy:

The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control.

The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons.

“The trend is clear: Warfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct,” Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, wrote in a study commissioned by the Army.

“The pressure of an increasing battlefield tempo is forcing autonomy further and further toward the point of robots making that final, lethal decision,” he predicted. “The time available to make the decision to shoot or not to shoot is becoming too short for remote humans to make intelligent informed decisions.”

Autonomous armed robotic systems probably will be operating by 2020, according to John Pike, an expert on defense and intelligence matters and the director of the security Web site GlobalSecurity.org in Washington.

This prospect alarms experts, who fear that machines will be unable to distinguish between legitimate targets and civilians in a war zone.

“We are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill,” said Noel Sharkey, an expert on robotics and artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, England…

Continue reading.

Very interesting article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande. It begins:

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting:

Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator.

One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.

As gatekeeper to Obama, Emanuel now plays a critical role in addressing the nation’s mortgage woes and fulfilling the administration’s pledge to impose responsibility on the financial world.
Emanuel’s Freddie Mac involvement has been a prominent point on his political résumé, and his healthy payday from the firm has been no secret either. What is less known, however, is how little he apparently did for his money and how he benefited from the kind of cozy ties between Washington and Wall Street that have fueled the nation’s current economic mess.

Though just 49, Emanuel is a veteran Democratic strategist and fundraiser who served three terms in the U.S. House after helping elect Mayor Richard Daley and former President Bill Clinton. The Freddie Mac money was a small piece of the $16 million he made in a three-year interlude as an investment banker a decade ago.
In business as in politics, Emanuel has cultivated an aggressive, take-charge reputation that made him rich and propelled his rise to the front of the national stage. But buried deep in corporate and government documents on the Freddie Mac scandal is a little-known and very different story involving Emanuel.
He was named to the Freddie Mac board in February 2000 by Clinton, …

Continue reading.

Glenn Greenwald has, as usual, quite a good column, from which I excerpt just a part in the middle:

… Does anyone really doubt any more that the predominant characteristic of our political culture is "the incestuous relationship between governments and large [] corporate conglomerates"?  Yet another former Goldman Sachs official and long-time derivatives advocate who played a major role in the repeal of key banking regulations, Gary Gesner, is now poised to become Obama’s chief of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the body charged with regulating commodities and financial futures.  The sleazy, central role Goldman Sachs has played in the events of the last six months — from their current CEO’s still-unexplained presence with Paulson (its former Chairman) and Geithner (protegé of its other former Chairman, Robert Rubin) as the AIG bailout was designed to the massive government windfalls that firm has received (including from that very AIG bailout) — is merely illustrative of how our Government has long functioned and continues to.

Yves Smith last night noted the rather extraordinary (though unsurprising) development that the very institutions that played such a critical role in the crisis — Citibank and Bank of America — are now using TARP funds they received not to extend more loans (the ostensible purpose of the bailout), but rather, to buy up more and more of the very distressed assets that Geithner insists they need to be relieved of, because they now know that, under Geithner’s plan, they will be able to sell them at a substantial profit courtesy of public funds (i.e, the Government will buy those crippled assets at well above their current market price).  As Smith puts it:  "So not only are they seeking to extract far more than was intended even with the already generous subsidies embodied in this program, but this activity is also speculating with taxpayer money. . . .Welcome to yet more looting."

Despite the limitless gorging on public funds by the very oligarchs (government owners) who caused the financial crisis in the first place, the predominant sentiment from our establishment media now is that Obama needs to force ordinary Americans to "sacrifice more." Back in 2006, Jonathan Schwarz wrote this very prescient post predicting that the U.S. would soon adopt the type of so-called "structural adjustments" which, through the IMF, we repeatedly forced upon other heavily indebted, defaulting nations:  whereby we would demand that they pursue solutions that further enriched their economic elites while massively cutting the social spending that provided the barest of safety nets to their ordinary citizens.  As Schwarz put it yesterday in citing highly revealing comments by Tim Geithner at a CFR conference this week: …

Marion Nestle has a useful post:

When it comes to food, defining “healthy” is a major preoccupation of food companies these days.  Marketers are falling all over each other trying to label food products with numbers or symbols to convince you that their products are better-for-you choices.  These, as I keep saying (see posts under “Scoring systems”), are about marketing, not health.

Now, the Strategic Alliance, the component of the Oakland-based Prevention Institute devoted to “promoting healthy food and activity environments,” has produced a working definition of a healthful food.  Its report, Setting the Record Straight: Nutritionists Define Healthful Food (PDF), applies three principles:  Healthful food should be (1) wholesome, (2) produced in ways that are good for people, animals, and natural resources, and (3) available, accessible, and affordable.

This is a food system definition that makes scoring systems unnecessary.  “Wholesome,” says this document, means foods that are minimally processed, full of naturally occurring nutrients, produced without added hormones or antibiotics, and processed without artificial colors, flavors, or unnecessary preservatives.

I wonder how many of those highly processed products in supermarket center aisles can meet this definition?

From the Report:

Marisa Taylor for McClatchy:

The first sign of trouble with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s new surveillance planes surfaced almost immediately. On the way from the manufacturer to the agency’s aviation headquarters, one of them veered off a runway during a fuel stop.

The malfunction last spring was only the beginning. A month later, the windshield unlatched in mid-flight and smashed into the engine. Then, in a third incident on the same plane, a connection between the propeller and the engine came loose and forced an emergency landing.

In January, after less than 10 months of operation, the cascade of mechanical problems forced the DEA to ground the planes.

The planes recently were scheduled to be "cannibalized" so the DEA could sell the parts and recover as much of its money as possible.

The story behind why the DEA sought out the three planes, only to become the second federal agency to give them up, illustrates the pitfalls of "black," or classified, budgeting in which Congress approves tens of billions of dollars for intelligence agencies outside the public’s view.

The twin-engine planes, manufactured by Schweizer Aircraft, likely came out of an even more shadowy funding provision known as "black earmarks," according to government officials with knowledge of the contract. The officials asked to remain anonymous because the planes, known as "Shadowhawks," received funding secretly.

Lawmakers often earmark projects to score sought-after contracts for companies back home.

The idea is to encourage cutting-edge research and development that wouldn’t otherwise get approval during the ordinary budgeting process. During the regular and more transparent budgeting process, earmarks can sometimes pay for worthwhile projects, experts said.

Black earmarks, however, receive almost no scrutiny. Even worse, there’s little accountability when the technology doesn’t work.

The lack of transparency has led to some staggering boondoggles. In 1991, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the troubled A-12 Avenger II after the secret aircraft program consumed nearly $3 billion of taxpayers’ money.

In one of the most notorious cases, former California Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham is serving just over eight years in prison for taking bribes in exchange for secretly steering classified contracts to favored companies. A congressional report concluded that the contracts totaled $70 million.

Despite calls to end it, lawmakers have continued the practice…

Continue reading. This is part of the iron triangle—the military-industrial-Congressional complex that Eisenhower warned about.