Later On

Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

According to press reports, investigators from a Mt. Sinai School of Medicine project funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Growing Up Healthy in East Harlem,” find higher levels of endocrine disrupters, mostly phthlates and bisphenol A, among obese girls (age six to eight) in East Harlem, as compared to girls who are not obese.   The actual research does not appear to be published yet – I can’t find it on the Epidemiology website – but the EPA’s site provides the latest report on the project.

Endocrine disrupters are widely used in food and beverage packaging materials, as well as things such as cosmetics, shampoos, lubricants, and paint. As I explained in earlier posts, federal agencies have been taking a hard look at such substances, particularly bisphenol A.  Their interim conclusion: such chemicals pose no harm at current levels of intake.

While waiting for more research or regulatory action, a group called As You Sow has asked …

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From Obama Foodorama:

After the National Black Farmers Association announced an April 28 rally in front of the USDA to protest a variety of discriminatory USDA policies (particularly in lending practices), Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has acted rapidly. He’s publicly reassured the NBFA that their issues will be addressed by the agency, and effective immediately, the Secretary has granted greater authority to the USDA’s Office of Civil Rights. This will include ensuring that all discrimination complaints are in a single database, time limits and protocols for dealing with discrimination complaints, and ensuring that complaints are uniformly collected. Why is this important? Historically, complaints against USDA don’t go beyond a farmer’s local farm bureau office—a huge problem if you’re in the rural South.

In a presser, Secretary Vilsack also pledged:

• The Agriculture Department will review more than 14,000 civil rights complaints that have been filed against the agency since 2000.
• Create a task force to review a sample of the complaints filed in the last nine years, supported by an independent legal counsel.
• Temporarily suspend foreclosures under the department’s farm loan program to review loans involving possible discriminatory conduct.

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Simple and useful. Via Lifehacker.

Very interesting post at Information Dissemination: Observations of an Armchair Admiral. It begins:

I have read Tom Rick’s new book The Gamble twice, and I highly recommend it. Both times I read the book, I paused when I read the following paragraph.

“But Fallon prided himself on being a strategic thinker, a sense he may have developed because there was little competition in that arena in the Navy, which in recent years has tended to be weak, intellectually, aside from its elite counter-terror force in Special Operations, which is practically a separate service. It is difficult, for example, to think of a senior Navy officer who has played a prominent role in shaping American strategy since 9/11, or of an active-duty Navy officer who has written a book or essay as influential as those produced by the Army’s Col. H.R. McMaster, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, and Lt. Col. John Nagl.”

At the United States Naval Institute Blog, Steeljaw Scribe posts this paragraph, and offers up some comments by Peter Swartz of CNA as a counter argument. For the record, Peter Swartz is a friend of mine, a reader of this blog, and someone whose opinion I respect a lot. The question is whether Tom Ricks is right, that there is little competition as a strategic thinker in the Navy, and if he is accurate to suggest where strategic thinking exists the competition is weak intellectually.

I think Peter Swartz makes a good argument that there are several brilliant folks part of the broader maritime strategy discussion contributing ideas, but I don’t find his argument in regards to competition in the strategic thinking community of the active duty Navy compelling at all…

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Mike Lillis reports this:

Many conservatives live in fear of the Democrats’ plans for health care reform, and they’ve been proportionately critical of the possibility that Democratic leaders will lean on reconciliation — the budget procedure that prevents filibusters — to get it done.

But not Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Speaking to ABC News today, Ryan, who’s the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, said that the recent elections leave Democrats every right to push their health care agenda, by reconciliation or otherwise.

From The Note:

“It’s their right. They did win the election,” said Ryan, R-Wis. “That’s what I tell all my constituents who are worried about this. They won the election. They did run on these ideas. They did run on nationalizing health care. So, you’re right about that. They have the votes with reconciliation. They nailed down the process so that they can make sure they have the votes and that they can get this thing through really fast. It is their right. It is what they can do.”

“They hold the power, and they’re probably going to exercise it.  We don’t like it because we don’t like what looks like the outcome,” he added.

Interesting column by Madison Powers in Congressional Quarterly:

For anyone who remembers Watergate, the unfolding story of U.S. involvement in torture and other unsavory information-gathering activities — sometimes referred to euphemistically as “enhanced interrogation techniques” — has taken a familiar turn. Once one bit of previously classified, or otherwise publicly unavailable, information comes into public view, a cascade of follow-up stories ensues.

The snowball effect is inevitable and no matter how many people — current and former administration officials, members of congress, and members of the military and various intelligence agencies — have a vested interest in letting this story go away, it just won’t die.

When one new set of details emerges, new questions arise. Who was involved? What was the extent of their involvement? What did they know and what should they have known, given their positions of authority? How far up the governmental ladder did involvement go? And, of course, who along the way tried to make sure that the story would not get out or only some highly misleading part of the story would see the light of day?

The last few weeks have been extraordinary in what we have learned and from so many angles. There is every reason to expect that the surprises will keep on coming. Consider just a small sample.

The first bombshell pertaining to CIA interrogation practices was contained in a report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (IRCR) printed last month in the New York Review of Books.

The previously confidential IRCR report was leaked, and for most of us, it was the most detailed, documented account thus far of the methods of interrogation the CIA had used on “high value detainees” held in the agency’s detention program and ultimately sent to the Guantánamo facility. The report, however, was not news to many in a position to act on the information it contained. It had been sent to the CIA’s general counsel in February 2007.

What the Red Cross report confirms is …

Continue reading. Just last night I was thinking that this scandal has the feel of Watergate: a slowly growing crescendo of revelations and a growing scandal that seems to have history-making proportions.

Kate Hopkins divulges the secret over at Accidental Hedonist. Good to have in your bag of tricks as we move into grilling season.

Annie Lowrey of Foreign Policy magazine has put together a useful timeline, which begins:

In the past 10 days, the revelation of once classified memos and Senate reports has greatly elucidated how torture happened. This timeline shows the key relevant legal and military events. New information is marked in italics.

2001

September 11: Afghanistan-based terrorist organization al Qaeda attacks the United States. Nearly 3,000 people die.

September 14: A congressional resolution authorizes U.S. President George W. Bush to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to combat the countries and groups behind 9/11. Vice President Dick Cheney promises that the United States will use "any means at our disposal" to combat terrorism.

September 16: In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Cheney says the government will need to work through "the dark side." He continues: "We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion. …It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal." 

September 17: Bush gives the CIA the authority to kill, capture, and detain al Qaeda operatives. The CIA lays plans for secret overseas prisons and special interrogations.

September 25: Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo submits …

See the whole thing.

No real surprise. The story by Andrew Revkin in today’s NY Times:

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action…

Continue reading. A year or so ago a commenter suggested that we could simply trust big business. I don’t think so.

Erasmic is an inexpensive shaving stick from the UK: very good lather, utilitarian fragrance. The Rooney Style 3 Size 1 fits my shaving style better than the Size 2, I must say. The Merkur HD, doughty warrior, did a fine job, and Geo. F. Trumper’s Spanish Leather aftershave was just the ticket.

And I washed all the dirty dishes and have a nice cup of hot tea.

Tom Ricks has some interesting posts—and even more interesting comments—concerning his proposal that the Army, Navy, and Air Force Academies be shuttered. (But not the Coast Guard Academy: interesting.)

Rather than try to excerpt these, let me just list them and recommend that you read them, including comments.

Closing the academies and war colleges (II)

Jumping from the Ivy League to olive drab (II)

Closing the war colleges and the academies (III): Who said this?

Does West Point produce good leaders?

From Ivy League to olive drab (III): what happens once they’re in

The academy strikes back

Data on different sorts of officers

A good article by Michael Tomasky in the Guardian:

From the second I read the sentence, I knew there was something fishy about it. Many years’ experience in reading and then looking into rightwing canards set off the usual alarm bells in my head. So I know how these things work. But even I was shocked after I looked into the truth of the matter.

My daily readings led me to an interview with Newt Gingrich in Christianity Today. The former speaker was asked whether opposition to tax increases was an adequate "uniting message" for his party. Gingrich replied that there had to be more to the party’s story. For instance, he said:

You have Obama nominating Judge Hamilton, who said in her ruling that saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK. You’ll find most Republican senators voting against a judge who is confused about whether you can say Jesus Christ in a prayer, particularly one who is pro-Muslim being able to say Allah.

That seemed, frankly, ridiculous. I happened to know that the "Hamilton" in question was from Indiana and had a reputation as a moderate-to-liberal jurist. I also happened to know that "her" first name was David, so Gingrich could not get even this basic fact straight (obviously, he assumed, only some sort of Wiccan lesbian could deliver such a ruling!). So I wanted to know more.

I Googled around, and sure enough, ..

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Mr. Drum:

When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes.  We know what’s right, we know what’s wrong, and even if there’s a price to pay we can’t shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing.

But when the subject is torture, suddenly it’s all about carefully weighing the costs and benefits.  Having an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves.  Understanding the context of what happened.  It’s just not possible to flatly say that waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions are barbarisms unfit for use by a civilized country.  It’s much more complex than that.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

I don’t agree with this column by Michael Dorf, but I thought it was interesting and worth reading:

Last week, the Justice Department released four previously secret memoranda that the Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC") under President Bush had issued to the CIA. The memos provided an ostensible legal basis for abusive interrogation techniques that were used, during the Bush Administration, against detainees suspected of terrorism. In a statement accompanying the memos’ release, Attorney General Holder also announced that the Obama Administration would not bring federal criminal charges against government officials who acted in reliance on the memos, and would defend them against any international charges and civil lawsuits. Interestingly, Holder’s statement did not explain what, if anything, the Administration plans to do with respect to the people who designed the policy and wrote the memos.

At least six of those people—David Addington, Jay Bybee, Douglas Feith, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes II, and John Yoo—face the possibility of criminal charges being lodged against them by Spanish investigating judge Baltasar Garzón and by others elsewhere overseas. Meanwhile, some American commentators (mostly on the political left) have argued that these and other current and former government officials should be charged criminally in a U.S. court. Yesterday, President Obama told reporters that he would leave the decision whether to bring charges to the Attorney General "within the parameters of various laws."

Criminal charging decisions are indeed partly a matter of reading the applicable laws. But prosecutors, including the Attorney General, also have discretion, and it is hard to imagine that political considerations would not play some role in the determination whether to seek indictments arising out of the detainee abuse. As I shall explain below, those political considerations make it unlikely that anybody will face domestic criminal charges for torture.

If the Obama Administration ultimately decides not to initiate prosecutions against anybody who designed, justified, or carried out the Bush Administration’s program of detainee abuse, then it ought to consider issuing pardons to all such persons. As I will explain below, doing so would at least have the virtue of acknowledging that wrongs were committed.

The Memos’ Justification for Detainee Abuse

Even before the latest release of memos, it was widely known that the Bush Administration had used waterboarding and other coercive techniques in an effort to extract information from detainees. The newly-released memos are nonetheless significant because they show both how systematic the Bush program of cruelty was, and the lengths to which the Administration went to justify it. The techniques for which the Administration sought legal authority included: nudity; facial immobilization during interrogation; face slapping; abdominal slapping; cramped confinement; stress positions; water dousing; prolonged sleep deprivation; and waterboarding…

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Senators often (generally?) work to protect their home-state contributors rather than promote the national interest and the greater good for the public. While I view the government as having a mission to counterbalance the power and influence of big business, Senators seem generally to view their mission as helping big business do whatever it takes to get bigger. From a story by Mike Lillis:

The House is set to take up a credit card bill on the floor as early as next week — with some White House sponsored amendments expected to be offered during debate. That bill is likely to pass without much resistance (84 House Republicans voted for the same bill last year). In the Senate, where a similar bill barely squeaked out of the Banking Committee last month, success is much less certain. Indeed, protectionist Democrats like South Dakota’s Sen. Tim Johnson and Delaware’s Sen. Tom Carper have a history of voting with the famously regional credit card issuers, leaving consumer advocates all but certain that the Senate bill will need a good deal of watering down to pass the upper chamber.

Johnson and Carper will, of course, say that they are doing their duty to stymie any national initiative that might threaten their biggest donors. So it goes.

The full story, though brief, does contain a statement by President Obama on his principles for the credit-card industry. The principles are good, but the Senate does have its priorities.

Via Dan Froomkin:

Eat them all. Here’s the story:

A handful of ravenous, venomous lionfish, a species native to the western Pacific, were spotted off North Carolina in 2000.

Turns out they like it here. A lot.

The lionfish population has exploded at a pace unlike anything scientists have ever seen from an invasive fish species in this part of the world. They are appearing in huge numbers from here southward into the Caribbean and are so plentiful that divers off the North Carolina coast routinely find up to 100 on a single shipwreck.

"If you go deeper than 100 feet, they’re ubiquitous now," said Paula Whitfield, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Beaufort. "They’re absolutely everywhere."

Little research has been done on lionfish, and researchers at NOAA’s Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research in Beaufort are rapidly becoming some of the world’s leading experts as they respond to worried fisheries managers. It’s feared that the newcomers are making life harder for already struggling popular commercial reef fish such as grouper and snapper by stealing their food, seizing their turf and eating their young.

"They’re eating everything," said Lisa A. Mitchell, executive director of Reef Environmental Education Foundation, a Florida nonprofit group that is helping several Caribbean governments deal with the influx of lionfish. "They could wipe out entire reefs."

The odd offshore interloper has joined the growing list of harmful species spread by global commerce, climate change misguided humans, such as zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, and the fire ants and Japanese stilt grass that are problems in the Triangle and elsewhere.

There are so many lionfish off North Carolina already that scientists don’t think it’s possible to eliminate them, but hope there may be ways to at least control the population. The researchers are joining forces with sport divers and even culinary instructors from Carteret Community College to see if the critters can be kept in check with spears, nets and tartar sauce.

Lionfish, it turns out, have a sweet, white meat similar to the tasty groupers and snappers they are threatening…

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Well worth watching. The Chesapeake Bay was a national treasure. I hope it can recover.

Yet again Congress shows loyalty to contributors. Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

It’s one of the central components of the Democrats’ plans for reforming the finance industry this year, and among the most vital, supporters say, for protecting consumers from abusive lending practices in a tumbledown economy. Yet as Congress advances legislation reining in the most abusive credit card traps, both the House and Senate proposals have been watered down in recent weeks so that the protections likely won’t help card users for more than a year.

The delay — a concession to the banks, who oppose the changes — means that Congress’ reforms likely won’t arrive anytime sooner than the Federal Reserve’s new credit card rules, scheduled to take hold in July 2010. It also leaves consumers hung out to dry at an unwelcome time, as the recession deepens, unemployment rises and card issuers raise fees and interest rates on even their most reliable customers. Many observers wonder why, if some credit card practices are indeed unfair and deceptive — some say criminal — Congress isn’t acting more quickly to eliminate them. Some consumer advocates say the delay is yet another example of lawmakers prioritizing the banks above working families amid the downturn.

“While we expect the Fed to be weak and buckle under bank pressure, there is no excuse for Congress pandering to the banks and delaying implementation of legislation to stop practices that hurt working families,” Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, wrote in an email. “Every day of delay is millions of dollars in unfair fee income. Every day of delay means more families cannot buy things to stimulate the economy (or save to buy things later), as they are forced to pay usurious credit card interest rates.”

The debate arrives as Democratic leaders are pushing legislation to restrict some of the finance industry practices that have been largely blamed for the current economic turmoil. Credit card reform is just one item on a list that also includes proposals to tighten regulations on mortgage lending and grant homeowners the option of bankruptcy to prevent foreclosure. But the power of the finance industry to sway Congress is never to be underestimated. Indeed, the mortgage bankruptcy bill has been stalled in the Senate for weeks, and reportedly faces an uncertain future despite robust support from Democratic leaders, including President Obama. The delay in the credit card reforms is just the latest example of what happens when leadership goals smack headfirst into political reality — and a lobbying juggernaut.

That spells bad news for credit card users, as …

Continue reading. There’s a lot more, and it gets worse.

Congress is truly broken. I suggest that election campaigns be paid for by public funds (using a formula based on characteristics of the district (for Reps) or state (for Senators): population, cost of media in that locale, and so on. Then contributions to elected officials should be made illegal. Of course, Congress would have to pass such a law, and Congress for the most part will do anything for money, so it won’t happen.

UPDATE: And now read what’s happening as a result of the above. It’s not good.

Very interesting post by Spencer Ackerman, which begins:

As I mentioned, Marcy has a question about something from retired FBI agent Ali Soufan’s op-ed in The New York Times. Soufan’s whole op-ed is about how a joint FBI/CIA team interrogating Abu Zubaydah from March to June 2002 yielded valuable intelligence. But Jay Bybee’s Office of Legal Counsel memo from August 1, 2002 is predicated on the proposition that the interrogation regime that Soufan and his colleagues employed was unsuccessful, and needed to be enhanced. Marcy wants to know:

So who lied to Bybee about what facts the CIA had in its possession?

Presuming that Soufan’s account is accurate — and when he testifies, as he inevitably will, before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it’s going to be as powerful as Jim Comey’s May 2007 public indictment of the Bush legal team, so it better be public is all I’m saying — then someone had to communicate to Bybee a misrepresentation of what was going on during the initial, pre-torture interrogation.

George Tenet’s memoir is unclear on who did this, and probably deliberately, saying only that after Abu Zubaydah’s late-March 2002 capture, “we opened discussions within the National Security Council as to how to handle him, since holding and interrogating large numbers of al-Qa’ida operatives had never been part of our plan.” (That’s page 241 of At The Center Of The Storm.) It’s easy enough to figure that the CIA’s then-top lawyers, Scott Muller and John Rizzo, were the ones communicating directly with Bybee. But someone must have been giving them information about what was happening at the CIA safehouse in Thailand where Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation took place — and suggesting that the interrogation wasn’t going well.

One guess is James Mitchell…

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