Later On

No real surprise, but interesting. Sharona Coutts and Seth Hettena in ProPublica:

Financial firms showered nearly $1 million in political cash on the United Food and Commercial Workers union in California while a top union leader sat on the boards of big public pension funds in the state, an analysis of campaign finance records shows.

Sean Harrigan [2], the union’s former executive director, is now under scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has charged several firms and individuals with making improper payments to win investments from pension funds in New York and New Mexico.

Harrigan, 62, stepped down from the board of the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension [3] system last month in response to the SEC inquiry into his dealings while at the fund. He was appointed to the LA fund in 2005 after serving as a trustee and board president at CalPERS from 1999 through late 2004.

His lawyer, Mark Byrne, said in a prepared statement that Harrigan is cooperating with the SEC inquiry and that, "as far as Mr. Harrigan is aware, no one has been provided favorable treatment, or penalized, for giving or not giving" to the union.

Harrigan’s union, however, pulled about a third of the $3 million it raised from 2001 to 2006 from players in the financial industry. About $500,000 came from donors who had business dealings with CalPERS, then the nation’s biggest pension fund [4].

Other major unions in California received few, if any, campaign contributions from investment or money management companies, a review of donations shows.

Campaign contributions have figured in a wide-ranging investigation [5] of pension fund kickbacks in New York, where Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued an indictment naming several prominent investment firms that allegedly took part in a vast pay-to-play scheme.

Among them is Wetherly Capital Group, a Los Angeles firm that earns fees by introducing money managers to pension funds. Wetherly paid Harrigan a consulting fee three years ago, disclosure filings show.

None of the financial companies contacted about the UFCW contributions would comment about …

Continue reading. 

And he’s right:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) tweets:

The fraudulent Iranian election has mobilized opposition to the Mullah regime; the U.S. should back them, now’s the time for a regime change

Arrrrgggggh why am I screaming into the wind on this. Why not just announce that we’re going to convert them to Christianity? Do we want to undermine the opposition as Western puppets? Sensibly, the National Iranian American Council responds:

Rohrabacher has the honor and distinction of representing one of the highest concentrations of NIAC members in any district in the country, yet his comments are absolutely contrary to the overwhelming opinion that we have been hearing from Iranian Americans.

Meanwhile, according to @micha– uh, I mean Time’s Michael Scherer, President Obama just told the Iranian opposition, “They should know that the world is watching.”

I’m corresponding with a high-school classmate who is now strongly conservative. He brought up a talking point, which Snopes readily debunks:

Pelosi’s use of a big jet for travel

Interestingly, Snopes has their style sheets set so you can’t copy text. But the article is worth the click.

Doesn’t this sound intriguing?

News from the Empire
by Fernando Del Paso

A review by Lorna Scott Fox

In the central states of Mexico, you see many brown campesino faces lit by green or hazel eyes. Locals say this is the only legacy of the French Intervention of 1862-67, when an army with its fair share of rapists and torturers tried to take over the country for its own good in the name of civilization, modernity and empire. On that occasion, "empire" was the official description. Mexican conservatives, horrified by the election in 1858 of a progressive Zapotec Indian, Benito Juarez, to the presidency, sent a delegation to Europe to ask the Austrian archduke Maximilian, brother of Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph, whether he’d like to come over and be emperor of Mexico. Maximilian demurred at first, preferring to go to Brazil for a spot of entomology. But under pressure and with financial sponsorship from yet another emperor, Napoleon III (who had already sent in the troops, ostensibly to force Juarez to resume debt payments, in reality to get his hands on the silver mines in the north while the United States was distracted by civil war), this classic frustrated younger son agreed to emigrate to the New World, relinquishing all rights to the Austrian succession.

Maximilian and his wife, Princess Charlotte of Belgium, were enthroned in 1864. The French, bolstered by Austrian and Belgian battalions, were on a roll: they had captured the capital the year before, and went on to take other cities. Juarez’s government had retreated to Chihuahua. Only a year later, however, Republican forces began to push back. The new geopolitical situation was in their favor. Maximilian was isolated, having proved too liberal for his original backers in Mexico and too imperial to win over the progressives. Juarez was being armed by the United States, which as a salvo to France’s flagrant challenge of the Monroe Doctrine, refused to recognize the puppet monarchy and sent 50,000 troops to the border in 1865. Napoleon III, bankrupted by the imperial couple’s fancy tastes as well as the costs of the war, and facing a new Prussian and Russian threat to the east, lost interest in Maximilian — especially after the Empress "Carlota," as she now wished to be known, turned up in Europe to beg for funds and seemed, embarrassingly, to have gone mad. The French pulled out. Maximilian dithered. After fleeing the capital he was captured, possibly betrayed by an insider, in the town of Queretaro and executed, along with two of his Mexican generals, in June 1867.

Such are the bare bones of the story. But they are so deeply buried in the rich and bulging flesh of News From the Empire that I had to resort to Wikipedia to locate them with any certainty. Published in 1987, Fernando del Paso’s third novel is a specimen of the Latin American new historical novel, whose greatest exponent is no doubt the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, and the best known, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. During the second half of the twentieth century, the perennial fascination with identity and the tangle of European, indigenous and African roots that feeds Latin American culture was intensified by the approach of the quincentenary of the "Discovery" in 1492. The many fictionalized reworkings of historical episodes tended to be anything but positivist investigations, however. A quantum spirit prevailed, dubbed "Borgesian" in homage to the Argentine master. Its tenets included the unascertainable, relative nature of reality; the efficacy of distortion and exaggeration; the simultaneity of time; the infinite mirrorings of intertextuality and the dialectic between linear experience and a cyclical spiral of repetitions. That’s why one often has to go elsewhere for some idea of what is broadly agreed to have happened; and you’d certainly do better to know the story before tackling this particular book.

News From the Empire contains twenty-three chapters. The first and last, plus the odd-numbered ones in between, are voiced by Carlota addressing the dead Max from Bouchout Castle, where she was kept until her death in 1927, and dated that year — allowing her to mix memories and fantasies with evocations of the dizzyingly different world of the early twentieth century. The even-numbered chapters are subdivided into three parts of various formats: dialogue, testimony, oral reminiscence, third-person narrative, stream of consciousness, letters and such. These scenes, while roughly chronological, break up the story into glimpses and sideshows, discourses and mannerisms, like a veritable inventory of baroque literary tricks. Given the prismatic elusiveness of the parts, it’s hard to develop an overview along the way, and we must wait till the end for del Paso to tell us — apparently in his own voice — what he thinks about it all.

The gleeful account by a patriotic camp follower of the battle of Camaron,

Continue reading.

Jeff Stein in Congressional Quarterly:

A half century ago the CIA could bring down an Iranian prime minister with a few rent-a-crowds, well placed payments to key generals and a pliable replacement.

Could it do the same today?

Not likely, but events in Iran have often contradicted the prognostications of Westerners, especially at the CIA.

In August 1978 America’s premier spy agency assured President Jimmy Carter that Iran was "not in a revolutionary, or even pre-revolutionary situation."

Right.  Six months later, chanting "Death to America," Islamic revolutionaries drove the U.S.-backed shah into exile. 

On Monday tens of thousands of Iranians marched into central Teheran again, this time chanting "Death to the Dictator," evidently in reference to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s proclamation of a reelection landslide — if not to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself.

The marchers torched cars and buses. Shots were fired, killing one demonstrator and wounding others.

In a press conference, Ahmadinejad, clad in his customary windbreaker, blithely compared the demonstrators to unruly fans after a soccer match, who sometimes had to be "given tickets" for unruly behavior.

No one, least of all Ahmadinejad, should be completely surprised if the powers that be toss him overboard. The next two weeks will be critical.

"I think it depends on three factors," Tel Aviv-based Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar told Voice of America.

"Number one, how senior are the people who are going to become involved in the demonstrating; the more senior they are, the more people will become encouraged. Number two; if the demonstrations spread to other cities. I think the more cities that become involved, the more the leadership will take notice. 
"And, also, number three; the duration of this. If this continues for another two weeks, I think the Supreme Leader [Khamenei] will have a serious situation on his hands. Until then, we should sit down and watch the developments and see what the Supreme Leader says," Javedanfar said.

What should the CIA do? …

Continue reading.

From the Center for American Progress:

Newly declassified documents show that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammad said he lied about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden after being subjected to torture. "I make up stories," Muhammad said when talking about his reaction to the techniques personally authorized by President Bush. When told to reveal the location of bin Laden, Muhammad said he would relent and say, "Yes, he is in this area." This information "underscores the unreliability of statements obtained by torture," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, the group that fought for the release of the documents. The documents also undercut Vice President Cheney’s assertion that torture techniques resulted in "first-rate intelligence." According to the documents, which  include transcripts of Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Gitmo, detainee Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, said the CIA told him that "they had mistakenly thought he was the No. 3 man in the organization’s hierarchy and a partner of Osama bin Laden." "They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’" Zubaydah said. Ben Wizner, the ACLU’s lead lawyer in the lawsuit, said there was no reason to keep the reports of detainee abuse secret. "There is only one explanation for the continued suppression. It is not to protect national security, it is to protect the CIA from accountability," Wizner said.

Indeed, the best idea I’ve heard is to tie the minimum wage to Congressional salaries, so that an increase in the latter increases the former proportionately. And certainly Congress doesn’t casually give themselves salary increases, but only when necessary. </irony>

But here’s another idea by John Cranford in Congressional Quarterly:

Some economic disputes seem destined to be decided in a political setting, and no amount of economic theorizing or empirical work will knock one set of opponents or the other off its position, at least not for very long.

Such is the case for the periodic fights that arise over the federal minimum wage, an issue that once again is rearing its head.

In one corner stand those who contend that setting a floor under wages is necessary to support higher earnings for a large share of the workforce and to promote increases in consumer spending by the neediest of households. In the other corner are those who say a federally mandated minimum wage leads to lost jobs — particularly for teenagers and most particularly for black teenagers — and to failed businesses, and that it merely adds to the current sad state of the labor market.

Both sides are so sure of the rightness of their viewpoints that they refuse to consider the other’s. And if the consequences of this stalemate weren’t a pendulum swing in policy that unsettles workers and companies alike, it would be easy to dismiss the posturing as another reason why Washington is a mess.

But the result of these political fisticuffs is that the country goes through long periods when the federal minimum wage, which was established during the Great Depression, is allowed to stagnate. That doesn’t help the workers who see their purchasing power diminished over time by inflation. And it really doesn’t help employers who periodically get slapped with big wage increases because politicians decide they finally have to act.

You have to wonder why both sides wouldn’t rather have a stable minimum wage that rises incrementally with inflation — much like Social Security benefits do. But no, political games are more fun.

In real terms, the federal minimum wage has never been higher than it was in 1968. And in 2006, after a decade without any increase at all, its value was barely half as large as it was 38 years before.

That’s why two years ago the newly empowered Democratic Congress forced President George W. Bush to accept a three-step increase that totaled $2.10 an hour, beginning in July 2007. Next month, the final step will kick in, and workers paid the minimum will earn $7.25 an hour. When inflation is taken into account, the minimum wage will be the most in a quarter century. But it was still higher in real terms for the 26 years from 1956 to 1982.

The looming fact of this scheduled increase has caused the minimum wage battle to be engaged again from both sides: Some conservatives want to block the final installment, while liberals want to try again to push it higher still.

Not surprisingly, both sides contend that the persistent recession and rising unemployment justify their position.

Conservatives say …

Continue reading.

Interesting column by Dean Baker:

The Obama administration is having a tough time getting its request for $108 billion for the IMF through Congress. Bank bailouts are rapidly losing popularity. And bailouts of foreign banks are probably even less popular than bailouts of U.S. banks.

But, NPR is rushing to the rescue. It had a piece this morning telling listeners that it was important to get the IMF more money to help the poor countries of the world. The piece never mentions the fact that the bulk of the IMF lending at present is going to East European countries, not the developing world.

The basic problem is simple. The West European bankers proved to be every bit as stupid as the Robert Rubin-Citigroup crew in dishing out loans. The main outlet for their bad loans was Eastern Europe, where they made enormous loans denominated in euros.

It is very difficult for the countries of Eastern Europe to maintain their exchange rates against the euro without large amounts of assistance. However, if they let their currencies fall against the euro, then the default rates on the loans from Western European banks will explode.

Of course West Europe is rich enough to bail out its own banks, but the governments in countries like France and Germany know that their people will not stand for this sort of handout. In steps the IMF, with a big assist from NPR, which managed to not even mention East Europe in the piece.

NPR made one major misrepresentation that is worth noting. It referred to a "global savings glut" which it attributes to developing countries’ fears that the IMF won’t have enough resources to bail them out in a crisis, and therefore their need to self-insure. WRONG!!!!!!

Developing countries only began to accumulate massive amounts of foreign exchange (i.e. savings) after the East Asian financial crisis in 1997. There was no talk at the time about the IMF not having enough money. Rather, the explicit motive of most of these countries was to accumulate enough reserves that they would never need to turn to the IMF for a bailout.

The conditions that the IMF imposed on the East Asian countries …

Continue reading.

The economist Dean Baker in TruthOut:

It may not be as exciting as the Thrilla in Manila, but its outcome will have far more impact on the lives of tens of millions of families across the country. The story is straightforward. President Obama had stepped up to challenge the insurance industry in order to reform the health care system in the United States.

    Specifically, he is proposing to create a public health insurance plan, like Medicare, that people would have the option to buy into. Ideally, this would ensure that everyone had a good health insurance option available to them and provide real competition to the existing private plans.

    For the private insurers, competition is the crux of the problem. Insurers don’t want to have to compete with a well-run public plan. That’s not how they make money. The most effective route for a private insurer to make money is to avoid insuring people who get sick, not by providing good care for those who need it.

    If workers and their employers had the option to buy into a well-run public plan, instead of dealing with the Aetna, Cigna and United Health types, tens of millions would take advantage of this option. In spite of the industry’s propaganda, the public sector actually provides health insurance more efficiently than the private sector.

    Medicare’s administrative costs are equal to about 2 percent of what it pays out to providers. For private insurers the ratio over expenses to payments is typically over 15 percent. Blue Cross of North Carolina, which was prepared to take the lead in bashing President Obama’s plan, boasts that its ratio is now under 20 percent. This compares to an expense to payout ratio of more than 25 percent earlier in the decade.

    It is easy to see why private insurers have such high costs. Their top executives boast paychecks that run into the millions or even tens of millions of dollars. They have large marketing and advertising costs, and don’t forget the dividends to shareholders. It is understandable that they would be upset about competing with a public plan that doesn’t have these expenses.

    The competition with a public plan would hit insurance industry profits in two ways. First, fewer customers means less profit. If 20 to 30 percent of the industry’s customers migrated to a public plan, profits will drop by 20 to 30 percent, other things being equal.

    But, it gets worse. In order to avoid losing even more customers, the private insurers will almost certainly have to …

Continue reading.

From David A. Fahrenthold writing in the Washington Post:

Man-made climate change is already lifting temperatures, increasing rainfall, and raising sea levels around the United States — and its effects are on track to get much worse in the coming century, according to a report released this afternoon by federal scientists.

The report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” covers much of the same ground as previous analyses from U.S. and United Nations science panels. It finds that greenhouse-gas emissions are “primarily” responsible for global warming and that rapid action is needed to avert catastrophic shifts in water, heat and natural life.

What’s different this time is the report’s scope — at 196 pages, the report attempts to present the fullest picture yet of the threats to the United States — and its timing.

It comes out as Congress is considering a mammoth bill that would impose the first national cap on emissions, and then seek to reduce them sharply over the next 41 years.

That bill, supported by Obama, has spurred some Republicans to say that they are not certain climate change is happening. It has also been criticized, from both sides of the aisle, as a measure that would impose significant new costs on energy use and manufacturing.

Though not explicitly a response, today’s report says that the evidence of global change is “unequivocal.” And, in language stripped of the usual scientific jargon, it sketches out some of the costs of doing nothing to bring down emissions.

“The projected rapid rate and large amount of climate change over this century will challenge the ability of society and natural systems to adapt,” the report says.

The report was unveiled at a news conference including John Holdren, Obama’s chief science adviser, and Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Among its findings: …

Continue reading.

Very good point made in article by John Donnelly in Congressional Quarterly:

The U.S. government’s case for embargoing the release of photographs said to depict abuse of detainees rests largely on a questionable claim that disclosure of the images would endanger U.S. troops.

President Obama and many members of Congress from both parties support withholding the release of the photos, because senior military officers have persuaded them that their release would trigger violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The generals have said the result would probably be more dead American soldiers and Marines, because that is what happened in Iraq in 2004, after the publication of photos showing abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

But Defense Department data and independent experts confirm there is no clear link between the Abu Ghraib scandal and violence in Iraq. To the contrary, U.S. troop deaths were cut approximately in half in the month after the abuse photos broke in the last week of April 2004. Attacks on coalition forces were higher in the first weeks of April than they were in the 14 weeks after the scandal broke,

When violence and troop deaths rose significantly in later months, it was due to a variety of factors, not just Abu Ghraib, experts said. These included a power struggle among sects and resistance to coalition troops from former Baathists, terrorists and other armed groups.

“There is so much more that was at play in Iraq in 2004,” than the Abu Ghraib affair, said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism program director at Human Rights Watch.

Drawing a connection between the Abu Ghraib photos and the lethal violence that occurred afterward in Iraq “is opinion, not analysis,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The American Civil Liberties Union has sought since 2003 to see the photos of prisoners at various U.S.-run facilities abroad. The group won the first round in court in 2005 in New York’s Southern District. The judge in that case, Alvin K. Hellerstein, did not see a clear risk to troops from the photos’ potential release. Besides, he said, terrorists do not need more photos of abuse to justify their attacks .

“Of course, national security and the safety and integrity of our soldiers, military and intelligence operations are not to be compromised, but is our nation better preserved by trying to squelch relevant documents that otherwise would be produced for fear of retaliation by an enemy that needs no pretext to attack?” he wrote in his decision.

In 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit affirmed the lower court decision.

Obama had originally said he would make the photos public. But after hearing from military commanders, he reversed himself and now says he will take the case to the Supreme Court, because publication of the photos would “put our troops in greater danger.” …

Continue reading.

This video is via a McClatchy story you can read here. The link takes you to their Iran feed.

From the Center for American Progress:

Few issues are more pressing to President Obama right now than health care reform. As the New York Times recently reported, Obama has decided to "exert greater control over the health care debate," with an "intense push for legislation" that includes "speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers." Yesterday’s speech to the American Medical Association (AMA) was a major part of this effort, since the group recently registered its opposition to the creation of a public insurance plan — a key plank of Obama’s health reform efforts. "The public option is not your enemy, it is your friend," Obama told the nearly 500 attendees at the address. Indeed, as The Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky has explained, the public option remains the best way to "restore competition into the consolidated health insurance market, lower health care premiums, lead the way in innovation, and improve health quality." (The Wonk Room has put together a document debunking the top myths about the public option here, and the Center for American Progress Action Fund has a new analysis showing how few health insurance choices most Americans currently have.)

DOCTORS SUPPORT A PUBLIC PLAN: The AMA is opposed to the creation of a public health insurance option, claiming that it "threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans." While the organization has tried to walk back its criticism, it still seems to oppose the essential aims of a public plan: the ability to negotiate cheaper rates with providers and push private insurers to do the same. Obama’s speech yesterday before the AMA’s House of Delegates — "the burial ground of health overhaul efforts past" — was thus widely anticipated. In fact, he is the first president to address the group since Ronald Reagan in 1983. In the speech, Obama stayed firm in his commitment to a robust public option. "Insurance companies have expressed support for the idea of covering the uninsured — and I welcome their willingness to engage constructively in the reform debate. I’m glad they’re at the table," Obama said. "But what I refuse to do is simply create a system where insurance companies suddenly have a whole bunch more customers on Uncle Sam’s dime but still fail to meet their responsibilities." Not all doctors are on the AMA’s side. Although the group still calls itself the "house of medicine," only about half its members are actually practicing physicians and the group "represents maybe 20% of physicians in this country." Indeed, doctors nationwide have begun to distance themselves from the AMA. Doctors For America — a grassroots organization representing doctors in all fifty states — recently issued a statement and hosted a conference call in support of a robust public option.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adriel Bettelheim in Congressional Quarterly:

When President Obama brought his campaign to retool the U.S. health care system to the American Medical Association, his pitch wasn’t just directed at the more than 2,000 AMA members assembled in a Chicago hotel for the annual meeting of the influential doctors lobby.

Obama was simultaneously speaking to a broader segment of voters that polling indicates is still ambivalent about his plan to extend medical coverage to all Americans and put the health system under greater government control.

Though many Americans are frustrated with delays and inefficiencies in the health delivery system, Democratic polling suggests that as many as three-quarters of adults are generally satisfied with their insurance plans. Many of those individuals are risk-adverse and convinced that changes on the order of what Obama is talking about will ultimately cost them more.

A Rasmussen Report poll released Monday found that Americans are evenly split over the idea of creating a government-run insurance plan to compete with private health plans, as Obama has proposed. Only 32 percent of respondents believe that the addition of a public sector insurance option would reduce the cost of health care.

To address these negative perceptions, Obama used the speech to issue a three-pronged message. He stressed that his plan will reduce costs for individuals, expand coverage choices and at the same time, curb medical inflation that he says is threatening to bankrupt the economy.

Obama said critics who contend he is intent on engineering a government-run health system aren’t telling the truth. And to tamp down concerns he is quick to embrace expensive solutions to society’s problems, Obama elaborated on a series of cost-saving measures his administration identified that would deliver nearly $950 billion of savings that could be applied toward an overhaul.

The details of an overhaul plan will begin to emerge in coming days, when the Senate Finance Committee releases a draft in anticipation of a markup beginning June 23.

“If we fail to act, premiums will climb higher, benefits will erode further, the rolls of the uninsured will swell to include millions more Americans,” Obama told the AMA members on Monday. “So to say it as plainly as I can, health care is the single most important thing we can do for America’s long-term fiscal health. That is a fact.”

To punctuate his pitch, Obama dangled a potential sweetener for the group. He indicated he’s ready to incorporate measures to discourage medical malpractice lawsuits into an overhaul package. Obama echoed what many doctors and their supporters in Congress have long contended: that the fear of litigation is prompting physicians to engage in “defensive medicine,” by ordering an excessive number of tests and taking other steps to insulate themselves from potential suits. [As noted elsewhere, almost all medical malpractice suits are caused by medical malpractice; the way to reduce the number of suits is to take aggressive steps to put an end to malpractice, including revoking the licenses of physicians who are repeatedly guilty of malpractice. – LG]

“I recognize that it will be hard to make some of these changes if doctors feel like they’re constantly looking over their shoulders for fear of lawsuits,” Obama said. “I want to work with the AMA so we can scale back the excessive defensive medicine that reinforces our current system, and shift to a system where we are providing better care, simply — rather than simply more treatment.” …

Continue reading. From an earlier post on this blog:

Numerous Public Citizen Reports have shown that the real medical malpractice problem is medical malpractice. Little progress has been made since the IOM reported in 1999 that nearly 100,000 deaths occur annually as a result of medical error. It is not pretty to say, but doctors and nurses make preventable mistakes that kill more people in the U. S. every year than workplace and automobile accidents combined. Medical errors cause needless pain and suffering for thousands of innocent patients and their families. Much of this harm is caused by a small handful doctors. This means that a directed effort in policing negligence would go a long way toward both saving lives and reducing the cost of medical malpractice insurance.

And anesthesiologists have shown that it’s possible to take steps to prevent malpractice.

Interesting that the debate is now public. The military makes a practice of hiding any mistakes. Here’s the story in McClatchy, reported by Nancy Youssef:

Defense Department officials are debating whether to ignore an earlier promise and squelch the release of an investigation into a U.S. airstrike last month, out of fear that its findings would further enrage the Afghan public, Pentagon officials told McClatchy Monday.

The military promised to release the report shortly after the May 4 air attack, which killed dozens of Afghans, and the Pentagon reiterated that last week. U.S. officials also said they’d release a video that military officials said shows Taliban fighters attacking Afghan and U.S. forces and then running into a building. Shortly afterward, a U.S. aircraft dropped a bomb that destroyed the building.

However, a senior defense official told McClatchy Monday: "The decision (about what to release) is now in limbo."

Pentagon leaders are divided about whether releasing the report would reflect a renewed push for openness and transparency about civilian casualties or whether it would only fan Afghan outrage and become a Taliban recruiting tool just as Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal takes command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Two U.S. military officials told McClatchy that the video shows that no one checked to see whether any women or children were in the building before it was bombed. The report acknowledges that mistakes were made and that U.S. forces didn’t always follow proper procedures, but it does little to reassure Afghans that the U.S. has done enough to avoid repeating those mistakes.

During his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month, McChrystal promised to review U.S tactics and what more could be done to minimize civilian casualties.

The chief investigator has briefed Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the report, and other top defense officials, including Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are reviewing an unclassified version of it for possible release.

The airstrike, in western Farah province, …

Continue reading. The airstrikes are having a negative effect. "Collateral damage" sounds mild, but when it means that most of your innocent family, including children were killed, I think the normal response is rage.

Very interesting review of three books on the healthcare crisis. The review, from 2006, is by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, and it begins:

Can We Say No? The Challenge of Rationing Health Care
by Henry J. Aaron and William B. Schwartz, with Melissa Cox
Brookings Institution, 199 pp., $44.95; $18.95 (paper)

The Health Care Mess: How We Got into It and What It Will Take to Get Out
by Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein
Harvard University Press, 320 pp., $26.95

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System
by John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel P. Kessler
American Enterprise Institute/Hoover Institution, 130 pp., $18.00

Thirteen years ago Bill Clinton became president partly because he promised to do something about rising health care costs. Although Clinton’s chances of reforming the US health care system looked quite good at first, the effort soon ran aground. Since then a combination of factors—the unwillingness of other politicians to confront the insurance and other lobbies that so successfully frustrated the Clinton effort, a temporary remission in the growth of health care spending as HMOs briefly managed to limit cost increases, and the general distraction of a nation focused first on the gloriousness of getting rich, then on terrorism—have kept health care off the top of the agenda.

But medical costs are once again rising rapidly, forcing health care back into political prominence. Indeed, the problem of medical costs is so pervasive that it underlies three quite different policy crises. First is the increasingly rapid unraveling of employer- based health insurance. Second is the plight of Medicaid, an increasingly crucial program that is under both fiscal and political attack. Third is the long-term problem of the federal government’s solvency, which is, as we’ll explain, largely a problem of health care costs.

The good news is that we know more about the economics of health care than we did when Clinton tried and failed to remake the system. There’s now a large body of evidence on what works and what doesn’t work in health care, and it’s not hard to see how to make dramatic improvements in US practice. As we’ll see, the evidence clearly shows that the key problem with the US health care system is its fragmentation. A history of failed attempts to introduce universal health insurance has left us with a system in which the government pays directly or indirectly for more than half of the nation’s health care, but the actual delivery both of insurance and of care is undertaken by a crazy quilt of private insurers, for-profit hospitals, and other players who add cost without adding value. A Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government directly provides insurance, would almost surely be both cheaper and more effective than what we now have. And we could do even better if we learned from “integrated” systems, like the Veterans Administration, that directly provide some health care as well as medical insurance.

The bad news is that Washington currently seems incapable of accepting what the evidence on health care says. In particular, the Bush administration is under the influence of both industry lobbyists, especially those representing the drug companies, and a free-market ideology that is wholly inappropriate to health care issues. As a result, it seems determined to pursue policies that will increase the fragmentation of our system and swell the ranks of the uninsured.

Before we talk about reform, however, let’s talk about the current state of the US health care system. Let us begin by asking a seemingly naive question: What’s wrong with spending ever more on health care? …

Continue reading.

I have to share with everyone the comment that Nicholas Schofield made to this post:

This book is a truly great book. The singular directness of the writing is perfectly balanced with an elegance of style which makes it an exemplar of outstanding history-writing for all non-fiction writers. Like all great history writers Watt is first and foremost a magnificent story-teller. And the speed and directness of his writing rests on his profound understanding of the personalities involved in the drama. It is not about dates and places, it is about people. Watt is in the same league as Barbara Tuchman and Alan Moorehead in this remarkable ability to ‘get under the skin’ of the people he writes about. He places the reader at Woodrow Wilson’s elbow and all the others. So true was it said by Somerset Maugham: you don’t write because you wish, you write because you can! And Richard M Watt could and can. This is a book which should be read by everyone wanting a rattling good yarn and yet wanting a depth of understanding as well. Because, on putting it down, you understand why Hitler arose and from that all our present woes. So, The Kings Depart provides a deep insight into how the modern world was made. Brilliant, exceptional and one would wish that it were 1000 pages longer. Richard M Watt, I salute you.

He mentions Moorehead, and let me highly recommend The Blue Nile and The White Nile for your reading pleasure. Totally enjoyable and fascinating.

I’m growing used to the thing, and it’s extremely nice that it keeps one’s place in each of several books being read: I can jump from book to book, always arriving at the place where I stopped reading.

I also am at last able to read some books I’ve had on PDF but whose length made it difficult to read at the computer—and printing out two or three hundred pages on loose sheets of paper doesn’t produce anything that would provide a good reading experience. For example, I’ve long had on my computer a copy of the (highly recommended) book The Authoritarians (PDF at the link), but only now that I’ve downloaded it to my Kindle DX am I finally reading it. It’s very good, too.

Downloading is trivial: plug the USB cord into Kindle and computer, go to Windows Explorer, and drag the files you want onto the Kindle. It will also play MP3 files (through headphones or two small speakers), so I also downloaded some reading music. Barney Kessel at first, but that was a little too up-tempo, so some Bill Evans instead. It occurs to me that the CD Jazz for a Rainy Day and the others in that series might be just right.

BTW, Barney Kessel and Charlie Christian were both born in Oklahoma: two of the greatest jazz guitarists from the same state. (Not to mention Lee Wiley, the chanteuse.)

All in all, I’m getting happier with the Kindle DX. The Younger Daughter pointed out a good fantasy novel (basically, Patrick O’Brian with dragons—like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), and reading that has calmed me down a lot: it’s enjoyable, and it is getting me used to the new device.

One of my failings, I realize, is that I think I can adopt something new and have it "fit" immediately. I have to learn that it takes time to adjust and absorb new tools and new behaviors, and that I should expect a gradual accustomization: as Carol Dweck says, I need to work toward a "growth mindset." (Great book: Mindset, by Carol Dweck.)

An exceptionally smooth shave today. I picked Figaro because of a comment Bryan made to an earlier Figaro post—he has a cat named Figaro (“Figgy”), which was the name for a series of family cats when The Wife was growing up.

At any rate, the Figaro came through wonderfully—this is a very nice soft shaving soap. The Rooney Style 3 Size 1 did a fine job, as did the Futur carrying a previously used Bolzano blade: lots of good crackling sounds as the stubble was cut. And TOBS Mr. Taylor’s is a favorite aftershave.

It’s always good to begin the day doing something you thoroughly enjoy.

The Party of No continues its ideological fight. Ian Millhiser in ThinkProgress:

In April, ThinkProgress noted that Republicans were blocking an increasing number of President Obama’s nominees to pursue ideological witch hunts and to facilitate self-interested horse trades. Two months later, a number of key nominees are still waiting and Senate Republicans are bottling up dozens more of Obama’s nominees in order to delay action on key Obama agenda items like health care and climate change legislation by consuming one of the most precious resources in the Senate: floor time. Roll Call explains:

Reid came to the floor three times Wednesday and several more times throughout the week to plead with his Republican colleagues to stop holding up a growing number of President Barack Obama’s appointees. The Majority Leader’s appeal was his most forceful yet, and aides say he has no plans to abandon the effort anytime soon.

“I would hope that people would search their conscience and try to get these done,” Reid said, explaining that procedural motions that he could employ to clear the nominees would eat up too much floor time. “It would take until the summer, until we finish the July recess and beyond, for us to get this done, filing cloture on every one of these. I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Absent unanimous consent from all senators, no issue may be considered by the full Senate unless it is given time on the Senate floor for debate. Although such a debate can be cut off by a cloture motion — a vote receiving the support of 60 senators — such a motion itself consumes floor time. Thus, by indiscriminately objecting to President Obama’s nominees, a single senator can effectively force Reid to choose between confirming essential government personnel or advancing health care reform, cap and trade, the federal budget or anything else on the Senate’s agenda. Floor time is limited and Senate conservatives are running out the clock to ensure that nothing gets done.

Among the nominees conservatives are holding hostage are Dawn Johnsen, President Obama’s exceptionally qualified nominee to head the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Harold Koh, a leading expert in international law who is nominated to be the chief legal adviser to the State Department, and Judge David Hamilton, a court of appeals nominee currently being blocked because of false claims that he gave preferential treatment to Muslims in favor of Christians.