Archive for March 2009
Pertinent observation by David Kurtz
Everyone keeps quoting a certain Wall Street honcho on how great Geithner’s bank plan is — without mentioning that said honcho was one of the originators of the idea.
GOP terrified of a public healthcare option
Although the GOP gives a lot of lip-service to the idea that the government cannot competently administer services—and when in power makes sure that comes true by sabotaging government agencies—they don’t really believe it. See how terrified they are of offering a government-run health plan option. If they really believed what they say, they would have no objection, since (in their view) a government-run program could never compete successfully against private programs. But in their hearts (or whatever occupies that space in Republicans) they know that a public program would be the first choice for many. From the Center for American Progress:
The Wall Street Journal reports today that "Congress is poised for a battle over whether an ambitious health-care overhaul should include a new government-run health plan to compete with private companies in the effort to cover the uninsured." President Obama and top Democrats on the relevant House and Senate committees all favor a public plan, ideas for which have ranged from a Medicare-like system to one "managed by a private contractor but in which government assumes the risk." However, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Senate Finance Committee ranking member, has said that he is "adamantly opposed" to any provision that includes a public plan, even though he indicated last week that he that might be willing to compromise with advocates of a new public health care plan. "At this point, everything is on the table," he said. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that reform with a public plan has no GOP support in the Senate. "Having talked to a lot of senators, I wouldn’t have any Republicans on the Healthy Americans Act as cosponsors if we had a public option," he said. The House is expected to include a public provision in its version of a health care reform bill and the American public appears to be on board. A new poll released today by Lake Research found that 73 percent of voters "want everyone to have a choice of private health insurance or a public health insurance plan while only 15% want everyone to have private insurance."
The law and the rights of children
Interesting FindLaw article by Michael C. Dorf, a FindLaw columnist and the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University:
Two 2008 federal appeals court rulings—one that may be on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and another that is already there—raise thorny questions of the extent to which schoolchildren enjoy the protections afforded by the Constitution to adults.
In Frazier v. Alexandre, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected a constitutional challenge to a Florida law requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance unless they have previously received written permission from their parents excusing them from doing so. Yet the Supreme Court had appeared to hold in 1943, in West Virginia State Board of Educ. v. Barnette,that schoolchildren themselves have the right to decide whether to recite the Pledge, quite apart from their parents’ wishes. Accordingly, there is a reasonable prospect that the Court will grant review of the Eleventh Circuit’s decision if the plaintiff seeks it.
Meanwhile, in Redding v. Safford Unified School District,an en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of an Arizona middle school’s strip search of "a thirteen-year-old girl accused by an unreliable student informant of possessing ibuprofen in violation of school rules" to proceed to trial. The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Safford Unified next month.
These two cases, involving alleged violations of rights under the First and Fourth Amendments, respectively, highlight a potential source of confusion in our constitutional law of children’s rights. Although it has long been accepted that children have constitutional rights, the law also acknowledges that, contrary to their sometimes creepy depiction in medieval art, children are not simply miniature adults. Rather, children differ from adults along multiple dimensions, and thus children’s constitutional rights should not simply be a "lesser" version of adults’ rights. The fact that a case involves schoolchildren thus can be a ground for granting children different rights from those we would grant to adults, but it should not automatically be a ground for granting children fewer rights than adults enjoy.
The Recent Flag Salute Case
In recent years, litigation challenging the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance has sometimes focused on its inclusion of the words "under God." Finding a defect in the plaintiff’s standing, …
Bad news about beef
I’ve mentioned that I haven’t been able to eat any beef since seeing the documentary King Corn. It’s just as well:
Eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely, according to the first large study to examine whether regularly eating beef or pork increases mortality.
The study of more than 500,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans found that those who consumed about four ounces of red meat a day (the equivalent of about a small hamburger) were more than 30 percent more likely to die during the 10 years they were followed, mostly from heart disease and cancer. Sausage, cold cuts and other processed meats also increased the risk.
Previous research had found a link between red meat and an increased risk of heart disease and cancer, particularly colorectal cancer, but the new study is the first large examination of the relationship between eating meat and overall risk of death, and is by far the most detailed.
"The bottom line is we found an association between red meat and processed meat and an increased risk of mortality," said Rashmi Sinha of the National Cancer Institute, who led the study published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
In contrast, routine consumption of fish, chicken, turkey and other poultry decreased the risk of death by a small amount.
"The uniqueness of this study is its size and length of follow-up," said Barry M. Popkin, a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. "This is a slam-dunk to say that, ‘Yes, indeed, if people want to be healthy and live longer, consume less red and processed meat.’ " …
Progress report from Marijuana Policy Project
Received via email:
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government will now defer to state governments on medical marijuana — a 180-degree reversal of the Bush administration’s anti-democratic policies.
The impact was immediate. On the day of Holder’s announcement, New Mexico announced that it had issued the first license that any state government has ever issued to a medical marijuana producer in any state. That first nonprofit provider will be able to grow and sell medical marijuana to card-carrying patients without being harassed or raided by local, state, or federal law enforcement officials.
Additionally:
- Rhode Island is poised to expand its existing medical marijuana law to allow for three nonprofits to dispense medical marijuana to registered patients.
- This November, Maine voters will consider a ballot initiative similar to what Rhode Island envisions. MPP’s polling shows the initiative is supported by 66% of likely voters.
- The Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota legislatures are debating bills to create new medical marijuana laws that allow for licensed dispensing from day one.
- In Arizona, MPP’s campaign committee will be placing a similar proposal on the statewide ballot in November 2010. That initiative is supported by 65% of likely voters.
- In California, medical marijuana is dispensed at approximately 400 collectives that are generating approximately $100 million annually in state tax revenues. They operate under a state law that allows their activity but doesn’t provide for state licensing. With federal policy improved and clarified, we expect the California Legislature to pass legislation similar to our Arizona proposal.
To fully appreciate the changes we’re seeing, compare the Obama administration’s policy to the Bush administration’s policy. In the fall of 2001, after executing the first of what would be dozens of medical marijuana dispensary raids over eight years, a spokesperson for Bush’s Justice Department said, “The recent enforcement is indicative that we have not lost our priorities in other areas since September 11. The attorney general and the administration have been very clear: we will be aggressive.”
As the World Trade Center was still literally smoldering and our country was about to launch two foreign wars, the Bush administration was crowing about how it was arresting medical marijuana patients. That policy was not only cruel, but stupid. Good riddance.
Very interesting perspective on the Kindle
I suggest that you read his entire post. The key:
In the course of looking around for various relevant arguments, I stumbled across a single blog entry that changed my mind about the device. Randall Munroe, the creator of the genius XKCD webcomic, blogged about his recent purchase of a Kindle 2. He wrote:
I’m surprised at the talk of the cost being too high. For me, the comparison is to a laptop with a cellular broadband internet card — $1440 for a standard two-year contract. The Kindle 2 doesn’t have a full web browser, but if you’re favoring text-heavy websites (news, blogs, mail, wikis), it’s perfectly sufficient. Plus, it’s a nice screen and has many-day battery life. All in all I think it’s a more-than-reasonable price for something that lets me read reddit on the street corner so as to better shout at sheeple about government conspiracies.
Shifting context: if I compare it to a stack of books, the cost is high; if I compare it, instead, to a web device — one with a full-time 3G wireless connection and no monthly fee — suddenly the price looks almost like a bargain.
Instructional videos for Method shaving
Just got this in an email:
We’ve had many requests for a visual "how-to" on Method shaving, so in an attempt to simplify the process and show those of you who can’t make it to Austin, we’ve put up some basic videos on YouTube. The first two cover building wet mix and applying it to the face. There are more to come, including in shaving the 3X cutting forms and gloss cutting. For now, watch the videos on basic mix building and let us know if you have any questions!
Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense
Via The Wife.
The Vision and Floris
The G.B. Kent BK4 quickly produced a great lather from the Floris Elite shaving soap, and the Vision, with a relatively new Gillette blade, did its usual superb job on the stubble. The mass and smoothness of this brute is amazing. The finish with Floïd was excellent—I’m getting to really like this aftershave. Just a touch of menthol, but a warm almost spicy fragrance. Great stuff.
Bad news: killing ourselves gradually
Alice Friedemann in the Ethicurean:
Ever heard of menhaden? Probably not, although perhaps you’re familiar with the fish’s other names: bunker, pogies, mossbacks, bugmouths, alewifes, and fat-backs. You may be surprised to learn they’re the most important fish in the Atlantic and Gulf waters.
Menhaden are the vacuum cleaners of our coasts, filtering up to four gallons of water a minute to extract phytoplankton (algae and other tiny plants). They grow no more than a foot long at most, yet the weight of an entire school of menhaden can equal that of a blue whale.
On land, plants are at the bottom of the food chain, eaten by many herbivores—mice, rabbits, cattle, insects, and so on. In the ocean, plants are also at the bottom of the food chain. The difference is, there’s only one main herbivore: menhaden. The other filter feeders—like baleen whales, herring, and shad—eat zooplankton (tiny animals).
This gives menhaden an extraordinary weight in the oceanic ecosystem: they are the main food source of the entire food web above, and the main species keeping the ecosystem healthy, by clearing the water of excess algae.
Unfortunately, as H. Bruce Franklin documents in “The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America,” they’re almost all gone. And one company, Omega Protein, is systematically eliminating the few that remain, for fishmeal and poultry feed.
Good news: Plan B available to 17-year-olds
A federal judge on Monday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make the Plan B morning-after birth control pill available without prescription to women as young as 17. The judge ruled the agency had improperly bowed to political pressure from the Bush Administration when it set 18 as the age limit in 2006.
The F.D.A. has 30 days to comply with the order, in which the judge also urged the agency to consider removing all restrictions on over-the-counter sales of Plan B. The drug consists of two pills that prevent conception if taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse.
Some women’s health advocates hailed the decision.
“It is a complete vindication of the argument that reproductive rights advocates have been making for years, that in the Bush administration it was politics, not science, driving decisions around women’s health,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a non-profit group that was one of the plaintiffs in the case against the F.D.A. …
For Jack in Amsterdam
British judges reveal details US wanted kept secret
Two British High Court judges revealed Monday that U.S. military prosecutors tried to pressure a former detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into a plea bargain — on charges that hadn’t been specified — that would have resulted in a 10-year sentence in addition to the years he’d already been detained.
In a previously secret annex to a ruling they made last autumn, Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones, who had access to classified U.S. documents, also revealed that American prosecutors had tried to pressure Binyam Mohamed into signing a statement that said he hadn’t been tortured and wouldn’t sue the U.S. government or its allies over his treatment in captivity.
The Obama administration freed Mohamed last month and returned him to Britain after holding him for seven years without charges, after the High Court’s initial statements provoked a public furor in Britain.
The High Court ruling, which was made Oct. 22 but hadn’t been published previously because of a treaty with the United States governing classified materials, said that Mohamed was asked to agree to a plea "in circumstances where there are no pending charges against him, where he has no idea how any new charges against him will be framed and where he is not to receive sight" of exculpatory evidence against him.
The Department of Justice referred questions Monday to the Pentagon, which had no comment. Neither did the State Department or the White House.
AIG bonuses distracting from real problems
Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:
Housing advocates are reminding us that the foreclosure crisis at the root of the economic collapse is also a long ways from ending. And the numbers are startling.
Without government help, 2.4 million homeowners will lose their homes to foreclosure this year, according to the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), an advocacy group.
Every 13 seconds another family receives notice a lender’s foreclosing on their home. That means 6,600 additional foreclosures start every day at a time foreclosure rates already are four times normal levels. A week ago, the number of families forced into foreclosure since January 1 surpassed 500,000.
The Federal Reserve reported earlier this month that home values nationwide fell $870 billion in the last quarter of 2008 alone. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, has estimated that home wealth has tanked more than $6 trillion since the housing crisis began. CRL projects that 73 million families will each lose $6,000 in home value in 2009 just for living in the proximity of foreclosed homes.
Meanwhile, housing legislation that would cut into these numbers remains stalled in the Senate over a provision, unpopular among the banks, that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of primary mortgages to help homeowners keep their homes. Credit Suisse has estimated that the bankruptcy provision alone would prevent 20 percent of all foreclosures — keeping more than 1.6 million families in their homes between now and 2013.
Claiming time restraints, Senate leaders don’t plan to take up the housing bill until after their two-week-long Easter recess, which doesn’t end until April 20. Yet Congress had plenty of time to fritter the last week grappling with efforts to clawback $165 million in bonuses to AIG — hardly a tiny sum, but it’s a rounding error relative to the cumulative wealth being lost by the country’s homeowners while the housing bill idles.
“Continued delay by Congress costs us all,” CRL warned in a statement issued today. “The sooner the Senate acts to get such legislation to the President’s desk the better for all of us.”
Anyone listening?
Harold Koh to State Dept
President Obama just announced that Harold Hongju Koh, the head of Yale Law School and a human rights official during the Clinton administration, will be the legal adviser to the State Department. That’s big news as the administration proceeds with its review of interrogations, detentions and renditions policy. Koh, recall, dramatically testified at Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation hearing to become attorney general in 2005, calling the infamous August 2002 Office of Legal Counsel memo authorizing torture “perhaps the most clearly erroneous legal opinion that I have ever read” and a “stain on our national reputation.” With Koh advising the State Department, expect a great deal of emphasis on international human rights law. It’ll be especially interesting to see what he says about the legality of rendition in particular, and, relatedly, on the repatriation of detainees to countries where they’re likely to be abused, as with the Uighurs at Guantanamo Bay that Daphne has so diligently been tracking.
Not getting it
Digby has an exceptionally good post (via Glenn Greenwald):
It seems as though I can’t click a link (or look at my morning papers) without seeing another story about the Stewart vs Cramer smackdown. And virtually everyone seems to be shocked by the fact that Cramer was so docile and unprepared when he appeared.
I don’t think it was surprising. He thought he would get one of those friendly interviews that John McCain usually gets. After all, Stewart skewers politicians but treats them rather gently when he interviews them, right? But that’s a common misreading of Stewart. He skewers a lot of different things, including politics and culture, but his primary object of derision and satire is the media and particularly the lying gasbags who populate the cable shows. It’s the whole premise of his show.
For some reason the political media establishment just doesn’t get this. Recall the bizarrely confused reaction from the villagers at that notorious Colbert White House correspondents dinner appearance. They honestly didn’t understand that Stewart and Colbert have nothing but contempt for them.
If you haven’t seen it in a while, check it out: …
So how long has it been since you reread the Aeneid?
Probably too long. Here’s a new translation that might tempt you:
Just two years ago, Robert Fagles, shortly before his death, set the bar very high for translating Vergil’s Aeneid. Yet already the scholar-poet Sarah Ruden has soared over the bar. She does this despite submission to a trying discipline. She decides to translate one-line-per-one-line, and she uses the iambic pentameter. This means not only that she gives herself less space overall (Vergil’s own 756 lines for Book One of the poem, for instance, to Fagles’s 908), but less space in any single line. She has ten or eleven syllables to a verse, where Vergil and Fagles have up to seventeen syllables. Lines beyond the five beats of iambic pentameter tend to sprawl in English, but Vergil’s hexameter is very disciplined. The wonder of his poem is that it has a melancholy melodiousness while retaining a tight aphoristic ring. Fagles often achieved the former, but rarely the latter. Ruden gets both.
She has to achieve her effects economically. At times, of course, she must sacrifice something. For instance, when a crazed Aeneas is seeking for his lost wife through the falling city of Troy, he relates:
I even dared to shout across the shadows,
Uselessly filling up the roads with grief,
Ceaselessly calling out Creusa’s name.She does not have room in that last line for the echo-effects Vergil creates:
Nequiquam-ingeminans iterumque-iterumque vocavi.
But Fagles, with greater room for maneuver, cannot equal the original either:
“Creusa!” Nothing, no reply, and again “Creusa!”
One service that translation of a masterpiece provides is reminding us how unreachable the original remains.
Ruden does open up her line a bit by adding an extra syllable at the end of the first line above. It is normal with English pentameter to have the extra unstressed syllable of the “feminine ending,” as with “shadows” above. But Ruden often adds a stressed syllable, a monosyllable following an equally stressed monosyllable (a spondee). At first I found this a little disturbing, as slowing down the run of lines. But Ruden finds many uses for that final spondee. To describe a wasting sickness, for instance, she writes:
We gave our sweet breath up or dragged our lives out.
Three lines show her metrical effects. Two stresses ending the first two lines, and the feminine ending to the third, give a sense of straining to see Dido in the underworld. Aeneas
Encountered her and recognized her dim form
Through shadows, as a person sees the new moon
Through clouds — or thinks he sees it — as it rises.That last line, its disjointed rhythmic wispiness, almost makes Dido fade again before our eyes. Ruden may be borrowing this effect from the great Dryden:
Doubtful as he who sees through dusky night,
Or thinks he sees, the moon’s uncertain light.Ruden is good at varying the iambic flow with trochaic words (in which a stressed syllable precedes one that is unstressed):
He fainted into death, like a poppy bending
Its weary neck when rain weighs down its head.The four trochaic words — fainted, poppy, bending, weary — are followed by seven numbing monosyllables.
The jerking action of lines 10.395–96 is all in the five trochees:
Larides’ severed right hand kept on twitching,
The dying fingers clutching at the sword.The shimmering effect of 7.8–9 comes from the final three trochees:
The breezes blew past nightfall, and the white moon
Lit up their course — the gleaming surface trembled.When Juno lures Turnus, Aeneas’ rival in Italy, into pursuit of a phantom shaped like Aeneas, the phantom runs aboard a ship:
The frightened, bolting image of Aeneas
Dove in….Shades of Burns’s
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie!
Ruden is so virtuosic in her use of the iambic pentameter that she can sometimes suggest the dactyls (one accented syllable followed by two unaccented) of her original without violating the English form:
….All the gods
Murmured their different thoughts, as the woods murmur,
Catching the first gusts, whisking hidden rustlings,
Speaking to sailors of the storm to come.The second line above contains only eleven syllables and five accents, a proper iambic specimen, yet Ruden is able to squeeze two unaccented syllables between almost every stressed one.
The need for economy makes Ruden bring to bear a fierce alertness before each word of Vergil…
Why not bring back the RTC?
Mary Kane in the Washington Independent:
At Housing Wire, they’re not debating the details of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s toxic assets plan that is expected to be announced today. They’re just dismissing the whole thing as a monumental waste of time and wondering about this: Why aren’t we just re-creating a model that already works? There’s one easily at hand: the Resolution Trust Corp.
Let me be as blunt as I’ve been in a awhile in this space: we need the RTC. We don’t need to clean up a few bad assets here; we need to clean up likely thousands of banks and financial institutions that made bets tied to mortgages that they never thought they’d lose on. We need to restore faith in our banking system, no different than we need to restore faith in our nation’s mortgage markets.
We have the model. The only question that remains is this: will we use it?
The RTC was created in the wake of the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s. It sold off the assets it was stuck with from failed S&L’s, and was a success in doing so. Here’s the difference between the RTC and Geithner’s plan (details here), in which the government will subsidize to investors to buy up toxic assets from banks:
This plan… isn’t the RTC — it’s not even close. The RTC pioneered public-private equity partnerships in the liquidation of real estate, yes. But don’t be fooled by the partnerships that appear likely to be unveiled here; the RTC existed to sell assets of already-seized financial institutions that didn’t have enough assets to cover their debts — not to see investors put up 3 percent equity as part of a strategy that will see the government buy and hold “assets” to maturity.
I’ve never heard a coherent explanation from the administration on why no one is pushing to use an idea that has already been proven to work. We can probably expect the RTC idea to gain more traction, as criticism of the Geithner plan rolls in.
Does Child Protective Service screen its employee? (Answer: no)
Drug possession, domestic violence, repeatedly driving drunk, assault with a deadly weapon – any one of these charges or convictions could lead child protective services workers to remove children from a home or force a parent into counseling.
But all of those crimes and many others appear in the backgrounds of employees of Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services, a Bee investigation has found.
A review of the agency’s 969 workers employed as of Oct. 1 found that at least 68 individuals – 7 percent of the work force – have criminal records in Sacramento County alone. The number is likely to be even higher because some names were too common to retrieve all criminal complaints linked to them, and records in other counties were not searched.
Although the county child protection agency has a policy to perform criminal background checks on prospective employees – and says it is alerted by the state if a current employee is arrested – the ranks at CPS include offenders convicted of such crimes as possession of heroin for sale, theft, embezzlement, spousal abuse, obstructing an officer, prostitution, and identity theft…
Banks taking care of insiders
Banks nationwide hold $41 billion in loans to directors, top executives and other insiders, a portfolio that experts say should be stripped of secrecy.
Insider lending to directors is particularly troublesome because it could cloud the judgment of people charged with protecting shareholders and overseeing bank management, the experts say.
At Charlotte-based Bank of America, those loans more than doubled last year, to $624.2 million — the biggest dollar jump in the country. The largest of them likely went to three directors or their companies. The surge came during the third quarter as credit markets froze, the government prepared to infuse banks with billions in tax dollars and the board approved the purchase of troubled Merrill Lynch.
Bank of America ranked fourth on the list of biggest insider lenders. At the top was JPMorgan of New York, which held $1.48 billion in insider loans, mostly by directors or their companies.
At No. 2, Charlotte-based Wachovia, which was sold to Wells Fargo of San Francisco at the end of 2008, finished the year with $747 million in insider loans. All of the loans were held by the bank’s directors or their companies, with just five holding the largest.
Ranking third on the list was M&I Marshall & Ilsley of Milwaukee, with $644.4 million, and Chicago’s Northern Trust was at No. 5 with $524.5 million.
Insider loans, ranging from home mortgages to multimillion-dollar lines of credit for big companies, are legal but are largely shrouded from public scrutiny.
Banks don’t have to explain increased insider lending. They don’t have to disclose individual loan amounts or terms for any insiders, including executives. Directors and their businesses, often the largest insider borrowers, are completely shielded. Directors must approve insider loans greater than $500,000, so they sometimes vote on loans for each other or the executives they oversee.
Insider favoritism is against the law. Bankers and regulators say the loans are subject to greater scrutiny to ensure insiders aren’t getting better terms and are creditworthy.
But top corporate governance experts contend that insider lending carries …
Continue reading. This is an example of why "business ethics" is an oxymoron.
