Later On

Interesting idea: making a hip pack highly secure. Read about it.

In an email from Congressional Quarterly:

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the "former finance chief of a Texas company controlled by Nasser Kazeminy, a close friend of former Sen. Norm Coleman, said in a deposition last week that Kazeminy ordered $100,000 in fees be paid to a Minneapolis insurance agency where Coleman’s wife was employed." According to the newspaper: "B.J. Thomas, who was chief financial officer of Deep Marine Technology Inc., said that $75,000 of that sum was paid to Hays Companies even though he saw no evidence of Deep Marine receiving any consulting services from Hays. Thomas’ deposition, taken under oath on March 19 and obtained by the Star Tribune, is the first corroboration from an official at Deep Marine of allegations made by company founder Paul McKim in a lawsuit filed last year against the company." An attorney for Coleman said none of money made it to Coleman or his wife. The Senate race between Coleman, a Republican, and Al Franken, a Democrat, remains unsettled.

Publius writes in Political Animal:

Noted climatologist George Will shifted gears to constitutional law yesterday, arguing that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) (i.e., the bailout) is unconstitutional. The specific claim is that it violates the nondelegation doctrine, which holds that "legislative" acts cannot be "delegated" to other entities, particularly the executive branch.

There are at least two interesting aspects of Will’s column. First, it reminds us why it’s always important to understand the logical implications of Will’s (and his ideological comrades’) seemingly innocent legal arguments. The column sounds reasonable enough on first read. The EESA, Will argues, is too broad, and it gives the executive too much power. Fair enough.

However, the doctrine that Will wants to use to kill the EESA would have the added benefit of effectively destroying the post-New Deal administrative state. It’s always the New Deal with these people.

Today, the doctrine is essentially toothless — and hasn’t been used to invalidate a statute since the New Deal. (Good short summary on the doctrine here). But for decades, the more extreme elements of the legal conservative world have been trying to revive it from the dead. As the summary above indicates, both Thomas and Rehnquist have tried — but no such luck thus far.

It’s also no surprise that Will cites law professor Gary Lawson for support. In addition to being a "founding member" of the Federalist Society, Lawson thinks the post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional. And that’s the whole point — it’s not about the bailout, but about federal regulation more generally.

In short, this is a doctrine with extreme implications that has been pushed by the most extreme members of the conservative legal community. (And, rather wankerishly, by Cass Sunstein).

Moving on, the second interesting aspect of the column is that it illustrates the tension — if not schizophrenia — in conservative legal thought with respect to deference to the political branches…

On the one hand,  …

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Glenn Greenwald:

(1) Anyone who favors marijuana legalization just wants to get high without being hassled, and anyone who favors drug decriminalization generally is or wants to be a drug user.

(2) Anyone who opposes a return to alcohol prohibition is almost certainly an out-of-control drunk.

(3) Anyone who cares about gay marriage or advocates for equal rights for gay couples is a closet homosexual who just wants to have sex with people of the same gender.  The only reason anyone would care about that issue is if one wants to have gay sex.

(4) Anyone who believes in free speech rights for Communists obviously opposes private property ownership and craves Stalinism.  Anyone who believes in free assembly rights for neo-Nazis secretly admires Hitler.

(5) Anyone who believes abortion should be legal just wants to have reckless sex without consequences. 

(6) Anyone who advocates habeas corpus rights for accused terrorists or who opposes torture harbors sympathy for Islamic extremism and approves of indiscriminate violence against civilians.

(7) Anyone who opposes unrestrained government surveillance must be doing bad things in private that they want to hide.

(8) Anyone who believes in the freedom to practice a certain religion is probably an adherent of that religion and is motivated by a desire to practice it without interference.

Why is most everyone capable of understanding the egregious, illogical stupidity of propositions (2)-(8) — based on the bleedingly obvious premise that one can advocate the freedom to do X for reasons other than a desire to do X — while so many people embrace the equally illogical and stupid reasoning of proposition (1) as though it so self-evidently true that it requires no discussion?

I’ve already blogged the front-page story debunking the effectiveness of the torture Bush and his colleagues authorized. Dan Froomkin today has an excellent summary and links in a lot of other stories. Well worth reading in its entirety—along with the comments, many of them quite thoughtful—it begins:

Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration’s argument for torture.

That’s why Sunday’s front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.

Finn and Warrick reported that “not a single significant plot was foiled” as a result of Zubaida’s brutal treatment — and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions “triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms.”

Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush’s Exhibit A in defense of the “enhanced interrogation” procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders.

But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago — and as The Post now confirms — almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong.

Zubaida wasn’t a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn’t holding back critical information. His torture didn’t produce valuable intelligence — and it certainly didn’t save lives.

All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well.

Indeed, the Post article raises the even further disquieting possibility that intentional cruelty was part of the White House’s motive.

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Lobbyists typically have much greater influence at the state level than they do at the Federal level. The politics and business relationships at the Federal level are closely watched by many newspapers, whereas state-level politics is less heavily covered. The Sacramento Bee has started a series on the lobbying in California, but the same sort of story applies to many states. Their report begins:

Special interests spent a record $553 million lobbying California state government in the past two years.

For them, it was money well spent.

Makers of chemical fire- retardants poured in more than $9 million to kill a ban on fire-proofing chemicals in furniture that consumer groups say cause cancer.

The Morongo Band of Mission Indians used $4.39 million to muscle through a gambling deal to let the tribe add thousands of lucrative new slot machines to its casino.

The oil industry spent more than $10.5 million to influence the Legislature and state agencies. A 2007 industry association report touted that even in a Democratic-controlled Legislature, “of the 52 bills identified as priorities (in 2007), only three that we opposed were approved by the Legislature.”

Of those three, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed two.

A Bee analysis of this past two-year session found the 10 highest-spending employers of private lobbyists shelled out a total of more than $70 million working the halls of state government. They rarely lost.

“You’re fighting a mountain of money,” said former Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View. “You have an idea, and they have enormous amounts of money. Who’s going to win?”

Top lobbyists and their employers use the millions to amass armies of advocates to build alliances and cultivate relationships to influence their agenda. They buy meals and gifts and treat policymakers to Disneyland or Kings games. They amp up external pressure by blanketing their targets’ constituents with mailers and radio ads…

Continue reading. The strange thing is that virtually all of the state legislators are from safe seats: the gerrymandering here is well advanced. So they don’t need tons of money for their campaigns. You would think that they could resist lobbyists. Guess not.

Read it before installing. James Fallows writes:

Yesterday I mentioned that Xobni, an Outlook add-on that I’d tried and abandoned last year, was out in a new and reportedly much much faster version. Quickly I heard from two magazine-world big shots about their varying experiences with the program.

Below, a reaction from Barry Simon, who has reviewed software for years in PC Magazine and is author of several volumes in the “Mother of all Windows Books” series. Then, and continued after the jump, a highly cautionary tale from my Atlantic colleague Corby Kummer, known to the world as director of the Atlantic’s new Food Channel (and perennial favorite for the James Beard Award) and to me as my editor and fellow software enthusiast. Read; judge for yourself; see my “what it all means” comments at the end.

Barry Simon:

For whatever it is worth, I only started using Xobni in November, 2008. I have 1.6 GB main .pst and a total of 5 GBs of pst in my main outlook directory (going back to 2002). Xobni has indexed them all even the ones not loaded into Outlook and I’ve had no performance issues with it. It is a tool I rely on heavily although its limitations drive me crazy.

The biggest limitation is the inability to do any kind of real Boolean search. You can search for single words or phrases across all mail and can search mail to/from one person for subjects but I’ve yet to find a way to search for given words in the body of all messages to/from person x.

Corby Kummer:

I downloaded and installed [Xobni], and waited for it to index everything, during which it slowed everything to molasses. I assumed it was the initial indexing that was making everything so slow…

But even afterward, Firefox, all commands, emails, everything was terribly slow… Only advantage, the inane instructional videos featuring some kid named Adam, implied was adding information about Adam and his Facebook and Yahoo profiles, and how to telephone him from contacts list or see where he was in your calendar or LinkedIn, etc–not, in other words, a sophisticated search function.

So I uninstalled it, taking out both the program and the data files it had created; there are two check boxes, and I assumed I would have no need of the indexes in the future. I didn’t explain my reasons when after the uninstall I was brought to a screen showing a baleful dog and warned that three out of four user want to try Xobni again when–performance is improved!

Then I rebooted, to get it the hell out of my computer. And saw a blood-chilling error message: “System cannot load user profile. File has been corrupted or damaged. Please contact your system administrator if you see this message again.” Well, I only have one user profile, CKummer, and I am the system administrator. With horror I watched as the longitude-striped ThinkPad introductory map appeared, along with an offer to take me on an introductory tour of XP, and XP interface, not classic. Along, puzzlingly, with about *half* my desktop icons…

I started trying to rebuild my setting, gritting my teeth when I got the introductory Firefox screen and an offer to import (non-existent) bookmarks from IE, but then broke down when Outlook, which I found in the programs list, wanted me to set up my email accounts rather than finding my archive and loading my file structure….

So I rebooted, and everything came up again. But now I’m terrified of rebooting, and can’t figure out any changes I need to make in my user profile, which seems fine, to be sure I get my damned desktop and settings back. That’s my story, and I assume it was something Xobni did, and I would strenuously warn all your readers against it.

Anybody who thinks Corby has got it wrong, take it up with him! You know where to find him. Moral of the story for me: even when I get to a place with real internet connectivity and can download big program files, I think I will stick with my tried and true PC index-and-search utility, the trusty X1. I’ve used and liked it for years, and while it too crashes or hangs fairly often, it’s never (yet!) done so in a way that caused problems for any other program or made me lose any data. There is no quicker way to retrieve the email, the .DOC file, or the PDF that has the info you want — including, for technophiles, via elegant Boolean searches.

Interesting post by the economist Dean Baker:

The media abandoned any pretense of objectivity in pushing the original TARP back in the fall. They eagerly pushed the story that the economy would collapse if the TARP did not pass.

The media never told the public that the Fed had the ability to takeover the banks in the event of a national emergency and it had plans to do exactly this back in the early 80s debt crisis.

The media also never bothered to tell the public that the Fed had the authority to buy the commercial paper of non-financial corporations (a process it initiated immediately after Congress approved the TARP). This meant that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s claims that this market had shut down and therefore companies couldn’t pay their bills, was irrelevant to the passage of TARP.

The new line that being pushed to argue that there is no alternative to the Geithner plan is the claim that Obama would need congressional authorization to have the FDIC take over bankrupt banks.

Is that so? It’s not clear why. The law authorizes the FDIC to take over bankrupt banks. Under the law passed by Congress, the FDIC is supposed to take over Citigroup, Bank of America and other zombie banks.

It’s likely that the FDIC …

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Donald Barthelme was an interesting writer (though The Wife prefers the writing of his brother Frederick). A lengthy review of a new biography gives you a look at the person. The review begins:

When, within a year’s time, both Raymond Carver and Donald Barthelme succumbed in their fifties to cancer (Carver in August of 1988; Barthelme that next July), it was as if the reigning president and vice-president of the American Short Story had suddenly died. Both were beloved by peers and acolytes, though they struggled for readers, and each, in separate decades, had revitalized a genre that since the invention of television has been continually pronounced both moribund and in a condition of renaissance (recovering from moribund).

Both writers were inimitable even as they were widely imitated. Carver, younger, less productive, a practitioner of a spare gritty realism often called minimalism, was the junior executive. Donald Barthelme — sparkling fabulist and idiosyncratic reinventor of the genre, practitioner of swift verbal collages, also sometimes dubbed minimalism — was commander in chief. Barthelme’s particular brilliance was so original, so sui generis, despite its tutelage at the feet of pages by Joyce, Beckett, and Stein, that even his own brothers Frederick and Steven, also fiction writers of intelligence and style, wrote more like Carver.

Carver and Barthelme were hard-drinking westerners, men’s men, and alcohol and cigarettes eased their isolation (regional and existential) in a literary life amid East Coast institutions, bohemian or otherwise, though in the end both died prematurely as a result. The cultural sea changes of their adult decades were enormous and one is reminded of all the Prohibition-era addictions that were acquired by jazz agers in the 1920s, young people navigating similar renegotiations of social mores. Perhaps artists of any time tend to possess introverted dispositions that need bracing and enlivening to exude even the cool, feigned indifference preferred in Barthelme’s later 1950s jazz age. "Edward worried about his drinking," Barthelme wrote in the early story "Edward and Pia." "Would there be enough gin? Enough ice?"

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I don’t normally share Kathleen Parker’s view, but this column is quite good. It begins:

Barack Obama’s first online town-hall meeting may have been a new media success, but he lost the stoner vote.

Asked whether he would seek to legalize marijuana as a strategy to boost the economy, the usually long-winded president—who famously admitted to his own youthful inhalations—answered with little more than a dismissive “No.”

Whereupon America’s laid-back lobby recoiled in, well, withdrawal. Where was the love?

More than 64,000 viewers posted about 104,000 questions online for the virtual meeting, the topic of which was the president’s budget. Of those questions, Obama answered seven that were preselected based on interest as measured by online votes.

Apparently, a significant portion of those casting 3.6 million votes wanted to talk pot.

Obama joked that he wasn’t sure what the question’s popularity said about his online audience (snarf, snarf), but said he doesn’t think legalization is a good strategy to grow our economy.

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From the Center for American Progress:

Since Fidel Castro has stepped aside as Cuba’s leader, "there is new momentum in Washington for eliminating the ban on most U.S. travel" there and "for reexamining the severe limitations on U.S.-Cuban economic exchanges." A bi-partisan group of senators, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Human Rights Watch will reportedly "rally around a potentially historic bill to lift the travel ban" this week on Capitol Hill.

This is excellent news. The US policy toward Cuba has been ineffective and disgraceful, IMHO.

From the Center For American Progress:

Days before being inaugurated, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs was asked whether the Obama administration would end the "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" (DADT) policy, banning gays from the military. "You don’t hear politicians give a one-word answer much. But it’s ‘Yes,’" Gibbs replied. However, the administration is putting the issue on the back burner. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted that "dialogue" about the issue "has really not progressed very far at this point in the administration." He said the administration would delay any new decisions: "I think the President and I feel like we’ve got a lot on our plates right now and let’s push that one down the road a little bit." However, the DADT policy is hurting the military’s readiness. In fact, 11 Army soldiers were discharged for being gay in January alone. Releasing the figures, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) asked, "[H]ow many more good soldiers are we willing to lose due to a bad policy that makes us less safe and secure?" "A full place is no excuse for discrimination," Center for American Progress Action Fund Fellow Matthew Yglesias wrote, noting that Gates could start by simply refusing to enforce DADT. Earlier this month, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) introduced legislation repealing the DADT law.

I don’t see that repealing DADT would take a lot of time or effort. Would it not be along the lines of Obama’s allowing embryonic stem cell research: a stroke of a pen and then on to other things?

It’s a stupid policy that hurts the military, however it might comfort homophobes. Other nations don’t discriminate in their militaries and it’s not problem—and indeed, the US has homosexuals serving in the military now, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Drop the damn policy! Now!

Pretty cool idea: interesting, inexpensive, and the kitty clearly loves it.

From Obama Foodorama:

It’s certainly laudable that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack authorized the purchase of 200 million pounds of nonfat dry milk and other dairy products from dairy producers this week. These items will go in to the Food and Nutrition Service, at an economically difficult time when food banks are suffering and citizens need help.

But let’s parse the Agfreakonomics of this:

1. The nonfat dry milk that’s going into the nutrition programs was already purchased from farmers by the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation under the Dairy Product Price Support Program. In this program, CCC purchases dairy products at statutorily mandated prices. Translation: Taxpayers already gave the dairy farmers millions of dollars in subsidy money, then farmers were guaranteed high prices for their product, which they were paid by the government with taxpayer money. The six-month USDA total milk purchasing is now at 205.4 million pounds.

2. Now, the USDA/federal government will buy back the non-fat dry milk and other dairy products to aid the ailing dairy industry. Translation: Taxpayers are buying the dairy products again; essentially making a huge payout for it a third time.

3. The USDA must spend an undisclosed sum fortifying and processing the milk and dairy, and then distributing it nationally. Unfortified non-fat milk is not allowed to be served in the nutrition programs, and the purchased milk is unfortified. Translation: More Taxpayer money spent.

That’s some expensive milk!!

Who led the charge to help Secretary Vilsack create the most expensive milk in history? Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn/Bluedog), the chairman of the House Agriculture committee, rounded up a bipartisan group of 36 members of Congress to send a letter encouraging Vilsack to use USDA authority to make the dairy purchases. Rep. Peterson has been one of the most vocal critics of President Obama’s plans to cut farm subsidy payments to high-income earning farmers. A few weeks ago, in an effort to spin this controversial decision, Secretary Vilsack framed the discussion as a choice between 90 thousand farmers and 30 million hungry children. This week’s USDA purchase is a "bone" thrown to the Ag state House members who are complaining about the subsidy cuts; this is highlighted by the fact that there was a big finish to the week for dairy markets. Daily Dairy Report notes that contracts for the second half of 2009 now average $16.00, up $2.31 from a month ago. The milk purchase won’t settle the subsidy debate, but it does give farmers more federal cash, and may well keep the torches and pitchforks away from Secretary Vilsack…for a while. It’s a strategic move that’s identical to Vilsack’s suggestion to farmers that they not worry about subsidy cuts, because farmers will still get federal cash; in the future it’ll just be masquerading as green credits.

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Finding places for the people we’ve imprisoned is difficult. Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Human rights advocates are warning that unless the United States resolves some particularly thorny problems posed by almost 100 prisoners from Yemen stuck at Guantanamo Bay, President Obama will have serious problems keeping his pledge to shut down the prison camp anytime soon. The advocates are calling on the administration to prosecute in U.S. federal courts any Yemenis who pose a real threat, and to work harder to develop a plan with the Yemeni government to let the rest of them go home. Those who face a credible threat of persecution in Yemen could be resettled in another country.

The problem, described in a new report by Human Rights Watch released Sunday, involves about 99 prisoners from Yemen, many of whom have been imprisoned without charge for more than eight years. Of some 550 prisoners released from Guantanamo by the Bush administration, only 14 were from Yemen. Except for Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver convicted by a U.S. military commission and sent home last November, no Guantanamo prisoners have been returned to Yemen in the past year and a half.

Although detainees from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia far outnumbered Yemeni detainees in the Guantanamo Bay prison’s early years, about 90 percent of detainees from those two countries have been sent home. Yemenis are now the largest single group at Guantanamo, making up about forty percent of the prison population.

The reason is not that the Yemeni prisoners are any more dangerous, say human rights advocates and lawyers. In fact, about a dozen prisoners from Yemen have been cleared for release since 2005. Yet the United States has been unable to reach an agreement with Yemen on how to repatriate these prisoners and ensure they don’t join Al Qaeda or otherwise pose a threat to the United States in the future.

“The reality is that release has never had anything to do with supposed dangerousness, but rather the ability of the [United States] to work out a diplomatic arrangement with another country,” said David Remes, a lawyer who represents 15 detainees from Yemen. “Almost all the western Europeans have been released,” he said. “All the English residents have gone back. But now you have the Yemenis, and the problem with reaching an agreement is complex.”

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Following some reader suggestions, this morning I went with the Arko shave stick and the HD (Hefty Classic). The Rooney Style 1 Size 1 Super produced the usual great Arko lather, and the HD did a fine job, if a little less easily than the Slant Bar. Acqua di Parma was a great aftershave—and I have coffee already!

I’m making this recipe, but I forgot to get green beans. I’ll substitute green cabbage.

Just curious.

Scientists are beginning to tease out the mental mechanisms that predispose humans to be religious—which, of course, has nothing to do with the question of whether religions are true or whether there is a God. (If there is a God, God presumably was behind the mechanisms that make it easy to believe in God.)

New Scientist has an interesting article on the mechanisms, written by Michael Brooks. It begins:

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It’s not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it’s that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, …

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