Later On

Via Kevin Drum. Part 1:

Part 2:

Interesting story on a poll of tea partiers in the NY Times includes this gem:

,., When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents said that the movement’s goal should be reducing the size of government, more than cutting the budget deficit or lowering taxes.

And nearly three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

Ed Brayton:

From Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor at the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, quoted by Spencer Ackerman:

"I’m not sure about Holder. Some of the folks I know and respect at DOJ think very highly of him. On the other hand, what I’ve seen on the national security front — basically adopting the same Bush-Cheney policies candidate Obama was firmly against — has been disappointing. I used to get perturbed when the ‘flip-flop’ accusation got thrown around, but it’s hard to argue that the label doesn’t fit the administration’s waffling view that military commissions are bad, no they’re good, no they’re bad again, oh wait maybe they’re good after all approach."

Ackerman says that Holder did much better in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee than he had previously and that he put his Republican critics back on their heels a bit. But there’s still this basic contradiction at the core of Holder’s position:

[Sen. Lindsay] Graham found himself more in agreement with Holder than with Sessions. He portrayed himself as a Republican who doesn’t "reject all [civilian] courts" for terrorism cases, an implicit knock at his GOP colleagues. After Holder conceded that 48 detainees from Guantanamo Bay were "not feasible to transfer [and] too dangerous to prosecute," the two men found themselves in substantial agreement over designing a system of indefinite detention with annual administrative review in addition to permitting detainees to receive habeas corpus hearings before federal judges.

So Holder is stuck having to argue in favor of civilian trials for some detainees both on principled grounds (it provides real due process and helps confirm we have the right person) and on practical grounds (it sends a message of fairness to the rest of the world and helps increase America’s moral credibility), while simultaneously arguing in favor of indefinite detention with no trials of any kind for dozens of others. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

And as Ackerman points out, there doesn’t appear to be any coherent standards for deciding which detainees get civilian trials, which get military tribunals and which get no trial at all and just get held forever:

Holder’s answer today, to the extent he gave one, was that those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, which is an elision. And elisions just raise the cynical suspicion that the real criterion is whether there’s a strong case against someone — if there is, he’ll be tried in criminal court; if not, he’ll be tried according to the more lax process rules of the commissions; and if there’s really no evidence to be brought in court, he’ll be held indefinitely without charge.

And more from that second link:

Ari Shapiro had a piece for NPR this morning quoting Jamie Gorelick, the former deputy attorney general and 9/11 Commissioner, saying she heard from unnamed Justice Department sources that the department does have a more rigorous formula for making that determination. But she didn’t know what it was. And she didn’t know why the Justice Department hadn’t released it already.

Conor Friedersdorf continues the drudgery of pointing out lies, omissions, and general bad faith in Marc Thiessen’s efforts to defend the same in the book he wrote. Thiessen really is a despicable little snot of a person. Still, he has a platform (the Washington Post, as part of its overall decline), so it’s important not to let the lies fly unchallenged. Friedersdorf’s post begins:

Over at The Corner, Marc Thiessen continues his attack on Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer who panned his book, Courting Disaster, in a scathing review that pointed out its numerous inaccurate passages. Mr. Thiessen responded to that review here. I argued that his response is unfair to Ms. Mayer.

Before I address the errors in his latest post, I want to step back for a minute and explain to Mr. Thiessen something about the larger controversy. The core of his argument, in his book Courting Disaster, and in the present exchange, is that the CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogation tactics,” — a euphemism that encompasses techniques I and many others find to be illegal torture — were indispensable to national security. As Mr. Thiessen puts it in his latest post:

I would certainly welcome it if Mayer, Friedersdorf, and all the other critics would finally come out and admit publicly that enhanced interrogations did work — that lives were saved thanks to the information the CIA program produced.

Despite his assertions, Mr. Thiessen hasn’t proved this to be so, and I want to explain why. Implicit in his work is the assumption that the CIA interrogation program “worked” so long as it can be shown that a detainee subjected to these techniques provided intelligence that saved American lives. This is a flawed metric.

One problem is that in any individual case, it is impossible to determine whether an approach other than “enhanced interrogation” could have elicited the same intelligence, or even better intelligence, something that Mr. Thiessen himself admits.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, a case where a detainee who was water-boarded gave up information that he would’ve otherwise withheld. In this circumstance, Mr. Thiessen would claim vindication, point to the American lives saved by the information, and assert it as proof that the CIA’s entire “enhanced interrogation” program “works.”

What is myopic about that assumption, and the whole body of Mr. Thiessen’s writerly output, is that overall efficacy, overall impact on American lives, and overall impact in the War on Terrorism is the actual metric that determines whether or not an interrogation program “works.”

Were I to implement an interrogation program where the CIA questioners spoke only Chinese, it might well save American lives in a single instance, when the particular detainee hails from Beijing, whereas the failure to elicit information from every other detainee would mean that, on the whole, the strategy didn’t work. Similarly, it may be the case that in a single instance, “enhanced interrogation techniques” elicited useful information, even information that saved American lives, but that other consequences of the program make clear that it was an overall failure.

What kinds of “other consequences”? …

Continue reading.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been working since 1998 to update its assessment of formaldehyde’s health risks from a "probable" to a "known" carcinogen. After years of delay, a National Cancer Institute study released last year linking formaldehyde to leukemia gave momentum to the EPA’s effort.

However, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who has strong ties to the formaldehyde industry, has been standing in the way. After the study came out, Vitter blocked the nomination of one key EPA official, urging the agency to seek an additional National Academy of Sciences (NAS) review of formaldehyde’s health risks, "a process that usually requires more time and money than the EPA’s own external peer review panel."

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson eventually relented, clearing the way for the nomination, but postponing formaldehyde’s new designation.

"Delay means money. The longer they can delay labeling something a known carcinogen, the more money they can make," said James Huff, associate director for chemical carcinogenesis at the National Institute for Environmental Health in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Vitter’s opposition is not surprising, given the generous contributions he has received from the formaldehyde industry. An analysis by Talking Points Memo last year revealed that Vitter received $20,050 from formaldehyde-producing contributors, including further contributions last year from Hexion Specialty Chemicals, Dupont, and Koch Industries, all formaldehyde producers. Even one of the Formaldehyde Council’s Washington lobbyists, Charles Grizzle, donated $2,400 to Vitter’s re-election campaign the same day the National Cancer Institute released its study.

Vitter’s shilling for the formaldehyde industry also flies in the face of his constituents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, who "claim[ed] they suffered respiratory problems after being housed in government trailers" that contained "dangerously high levels" of the chemical.

Last month, the NAS "began gathering public comments about the 13 scientists it has selected for the formaldehyde panel," but the Natural Resources Defense Council points out that two of them have ties to the formaldehyde industry.

Ed Brayton:

In yet another attempt to quell the growing criticism of their handling of priestly child abuse, the Vatican released these guidelines for how local churches should handle such allegations when they are made. The guidelines change nothing and continue to suffer from the same problem that has been there all along by giving the church the first role in deciding whether someone is likely guilty or not.

A: Preliminary Procedures

The local diocese investigates every allegation of sexual abuse of a minor by a cleric.

If the allegation has a semblance of truth the case is referred to the CDF. The local bishop transmits all the necessary information to the CDF and expresses his opinion on the procedures to be followed and the measures to be adopted in the short and long term.

Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed.

During the preliminary stage and until the case is concluded, the bishop may impose precautionary measures to safeguard the community, including the victims. Indeed, the local bishop always retains power to protect children by restricting the activities of any priest in his diocese. This is part of his ordinary authority, which he is encouraged to exercise to whatever extent is necessary to assure that children do not come to harm, and this power can be exercised at the bishop’s discretion before, during and after any canonical proceeding.

Notice the part in italics. It does not require the church to turn each and every allegation over to the police. In fact, it does not require the church to turn over any allegations to the police. It only says that the church should follow civil law in this regard. The problem is that civil law typically does not mandate such disclosure by religious officials.

There are laws on the books in most states that require anyone in a secular position of authority over children or in a position to become aware of abuse — teachers, doctors, nurses, coaches, therapists, counselors, etc — to notify the police if they have reason to believe a child is being abused. Few — if any — of those laws, as far as I know, apply to religious authorities. They absolutely should.

These guidelines are exactly backwards. The first thing the church should do with any allegation is turn it over to the police. If they want to do their own investigation and take their own action regarding the position and employment of the alleged abuser, that’s fine. But the allegations are of a crime and a determination of guilt or innocence can and should only be made by the criminal justice system, not the church.

Interesting ProPublica article by Jeff Gerth:

Backers of financial regulatory reform are gearing up for the final stretch in a yearlong effort to construct a new, streamlined architecture. But recent reports and testimony about the financial crisis suggest a crucial ingredient in any new structure is in short supply: cooperation among the watchdogs.

A proposal to eliminate one regulator seen by many as particularly weak—the Office of Thrift Supervision—could alleviate some friction. A soon-to-be-released federal examination of the Washington Mutual collapse found that OTS resisted efforts by a more skeptical regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to take a closer look at WaMu, according to an account in The New York Times.

Reform legislation pending in the Senate (PDF) would also create new agencies, including a financial stability council to assess risk and a consumer protection watchdog. To work as envisioned, the agencies would need new levels of information sharing and decision making. By contrast, history suggests agencies can be stingy with what they know and eager to point blame at sister regulators.

Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that collapsed in September 2008, presents a case in point.

A lengthy examiner’s report for the judge overseeing Lehman’s bankruptcy found that the Federal Reserve Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission kept crucial data from each other even though they had “overlapping” functions. The heads of the Federal Reserve and the SEC reached a formal sharing agreement in July 2008, but the two regulators “did not share all material information that each collected about Lehman’s liquidity.”

The SEC, asked by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to provide data on Lehman’s commercial real estate exposure and liquidity, “affirmatively declined to share” the information because it was still in draft form, the bankruptcy report found. The reserve bank never turned down an information request from the SEC, but bank officials “did not perceive any duty to volunteer” information about a $7 billion shortfall in Lehman’s liquidity they uncovered in August 2008.

The reason? The report says it was “because the SEC did not always share information” with them. One official at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York told the examiner “there was not a warm audience” for information sharing between the New York Fed and the SEC.

Read the rest of this entry »

Very interesting site created by PBS as a resource to study how healthcare reform passed and what deals were required. Should make for some interesting term papers.

Robert Wright in the NY Times:

I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me 20 years ago that America would someday be routinely firing missiles into countries it’s not at war with. For that matter, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a few months ago that America would soon be plotting the assassination of an American citizen who lives abroad.

Shows you how much I know. President Obama, who during his first year in office oversaw more drone strikes in Pakistan than occurred during the entire Bush presidency, last week surpassed his predecessor in a second respect: he authorized the assassination of an American — Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Imam who after 9/11 moved from Virginia to Yemen, a base from which he inspires such people as the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be underwear bomber.

Students of the law might raise a couple of questions: 1) Doesn’t it violate international law to fire missiles into Pakistan (especially on a roughly weekly basis) when the Pakistani government has given no formal authorization? 2) Wouldn’t firing a missile at al-Awlaki in Yemen compound the international-law question with a constitutional question — namely whether giving the death penalty to an American without judicially establishing his guilt deprives him of due process?

I’m not qualified to answer these questions, and, besides, it doesn’t really matter what the correct answers are. The Obama administration has its lawyers scurrying to convince us that the answers are no and no, somewhat as the Bush administration dispatched John Yoo to justify its torture policy. And these answers, regardless of their legal merit, will be accepted so long as Americans are convinced that being safe in the post-9/11 world requires accepting them.

One good way to stoke a sense of injustice is to fire missiles into cars, homes and offices in hopes of killing terrorists, while in fact killing no few innocent civilians.

So maybe the question to ask is whether Americans should be convinced of that — whether assassinating terrorists really helps keep us safe.

There’s no way of answering this question with complete confidence, but it turns out there are some relevant and little-known data. They were compiled by Jenna Jordan of the University of Chicago, who published her findings last year in the journal Security Studies. She studied 298 attempts, from 1945 through 2004, to weaken or eliminate terrorist groups through “leadership decapitation” — eliminating people in senior positions.

Her work suggests that decapitation doesn’t lower the life expectancy of the decapitated groups — and, if anything, may have the opposite effect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Cole in Salon:

President Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that, despite the expenditure of substantial political capital by his administration, progress may not be made on Israel-Palestine peace. The AP quoted his reply to a question about how recent successes in negotiating nuclear arms reduction with Russia — and getting 48 nations to sign on to a nuclear material security agreement — might translate into diplomatic successes elsewhere.

The two sides "may say to themselves, ‘We are not prepared to resolve these issues no matter how much pressure the United States brings to bear,’" Obama said.

Obama reiterated that peace is a vital goal, but one that may be beyond reach "even if we are applying all of our political capital."

Obama may be right. But note the implications of no progress between Israel and the Palestinians on political settlement of their dispute:

1. Iran – the primary rejectionist state in the region, will grow in power and popularity in the Middle East
2. Anger in the Arab world toward Israel and the US will grow in intensity
3. Israeli policy toward East Jerusalem could itself be the cause for a war. Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims and Christians as well as to Jews
4. Israel’s status as a de facto Apartheid state will be made permanent and the boycott movement will grow, ultimately affecting the Israeli economy
5. If the two-state solution is dead as a doornail Israel will either have to give the Palestinians citizenship or face a long and bitter struggle to make their own state in the teeth of Israeli opposition

Obama’s team tried to get Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to restart negotiations last year, but the long-suffering Abbas insisted first on a freeze of creeping Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank. That is, he insisted that Israel not be actively annexing the very territory at issue while the talks proceeded. It would sort of be like negotiating to buy a mansion from a seller who was dismantling wings of it, carting them off to his new residence, while he kept jacking up the asking price on his increasingly diminished domicile.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally agreed to an eight-month settlement freeze on the West Bank. But the offer was insincere. Building within existing settlements would continue; they would just get denser. And the parts of the West Bank Israel had illegally and unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem would continue to be settled.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Omega brush seems to be shy in this photo—but it did a fine job with the Tabac soap and a fine lather ensued. The Mühle porcelain-handled razor with a newish Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade shaved smooth and close, and a splash of Tabac finished the project. For the day.

I made it.

Deboning the thighs was easier than I expected. The boiling water needs about 3-4 minutes, unless you have a big bowl (more boiling water will have more heat—I used a small bowl (lots of tomatoes, little water) and had to re-scald them.

I made half a recipe. It looks damn good in the oven.

UPDATE: And here it is:

From Transform:

The U.S. House Domestic Policy Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), held a hearing today on the White House’s drug war budget and forthcoming 2010 National Drug Control Strategy. The Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (also known as the drug czar), Gil Kerlikowske, gave testimony. Ethan Nadlemann from the Drug Policy Alliance gave oral evidence, and his complete testimony is copied below. A brilliant performance, well worth a read:

Good morning. I’m Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading organization advocating alternatives to the failed war on drugs. I want to thank the subcommittee for inviting me to testify on ONDCP’s priorities and objectives.

It is hard to talk in detail about ONDCP’s overall strategy when their 2010 Strategy is not yet out, but there are certain things we know based on their proposed FY11 Budget Highlights and recent statements and remarks by Director Gil Kerlikowske and others.

I want to highlight four issues — ONDCP’s flawed performance measures, the lop-sided ratio between supply and demand spending in their budget, the lack of innovation in their proposed strategies, and their failure to adequately evaluate drug policies. But first a little context is required.

The predominant role that criminalization and the criminal justice system play in dealing with particular drugs and drug use in this country is unsustainable in both fiscal and human terms. Police made 1.7 million drug arrests in 2008 alone, including 750,000 for nothing more than possession of marijuana for personal use. Those arrested were separated from their loved ones, branded criminals, denied jobs, and in many cases prohibited from voting and accessing public assistance for life.

The United States now ranks first in the world in per capita incarceration rates, with less than 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of the world’s prison population. Roughly 500,000 people are behind bars tonight for a drug law violation. That’s ten times the total in 1980, and more than all of western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all offenses. More than half of federal prisoners are there for drug law violations; relatively few are kingpins and virtually none are queenpins.

Yet, despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars and arresting millions of Americans, illegal drugs remain cheap, potent and widely available throughout the country and the harms associated with them continue to mount. Meanwhile, the war on drugs is creating problems of its own – broken families, racial disparities, and the erosion of civil liberties. Few government policies have failed for so long without any serious effort to question or revise them.

U.S. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) said recently, speaking about our country’s uniquely high incarceration rate, "either we have the most evil people in the world or we are doing something wrong with the way we approach the issue of criminal justice." He went on to say "the central role of drug policy in filling our nation’s prisons makes clear that our approach to curbing illegal drug use is broken." Unfortunately, ONDCP seems unwilling to reassess this role in any meaningful way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some say because of this profile by Jeff Stein in the Washingtonian.com:

Senator Dianne Feinstein was furious. Somebody was going to pay.

“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director,” the California Democrat said coldly, standing in a marble corridor just off the Senate floor.

It was January 6, 2009. Barack Obama’s team was reaching for the levers of the intelligence bureaucracy.

By God, she hadn’t gotten to be the first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a last bastion of old bulls, by being pushed around. And she sure wasn’t going to be rolled by the national-security guys around Obama, an Illinois politician who had shown almost no interest in foreign affairs during his four years in the US Senate.

Did they really want Leon Panetta, a former California congressman whose intelligence experience amounted pretty much to sitting in on CIA briefings as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff?

And that was before Osama bin Laden and 9/11, before the Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, secret prisons, renditions, warrantless wiretapping, the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and waterboarding. And before the CIA was once again snarled in controversy, its officials hauled before oversight committees—like Feinstein’s—to explain missing torture videotapes.

Fine, Feinstein decided, you can have Panetta. But there’s a price. “My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge,” she told reporters.

A professional—not a politician. There would be no Panetta without a professional backing him up—and Feinstein had one professional in mind: Steve Kappes.

Who? Stephen R. Kappes, the spy agency’s deputy director, was a 27-year veteran of the CIA’s Operations Directorate, one of those who worked on “the dark side,” in the memorable characterization of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Kroll has a good post in which he discusses each of the five big fights, which are:

1) Shining a Light on Shadow Banking

2) The Ratings Agencies’ Conflict of Interest Problem

3) CEOs vs. Shareholders

4) The Broker Loophole

5) Skin in the Game

Kevin Drum comments on the post as well.

Steve Benen:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R) of Oklahoma recently told a group of constituents not to let Fox News warp their sense of current events. "[D]on’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good," the senator said, among other things.

The comments were not, as one might imagine, well received at the Republican cable network. Bill O’Reilly spoke to Coburn directly last night, and told the conservative senator that some of his allegations are incorrect.

"[Y]ou don’t know anybody on Fox News — because there hasn’t been anyone — that said people will go to jail if they don’t buy mandatory insurance," O’Reilly said. He added: "[W]e researched to find out if anybody had ever said you are going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. Nobody has ever said it. What it seems to me is you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn’t qualify there."

Maybe O’Reilly needs new "researchers."

November 13, 2009: Glenn Beck tells Fox News’ audience that those without coverage will "go to jail."

November 12, 2009: Beck said "there will be jail time" for those who refuse to participate in the health care system.

November 9, 2009: Dick Morris argues, "One of the provisions in the Pelosi bill is you actually can go to jail for not having health insurance."

November 10, 2009: Sean Hannity tells viewers, "Penalties for people who don’t get government-mandated health insurance, uh, jail time, a possibility?"

October 7, 2009: Greta Van Susteren says it’s "theoretically possible" that if "you can’t afford insurance for whatever reason" the government could "send you to jail."

November 10, 2009: The on-screen graphic during Fox & Friends tells viewers during a segment on the health care debate: "Comply or go to jail."

Remember, O’Reilly promised Coburn, "[W]e researched to find out if anybody [on Fox News] had ever said you are going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. Nobody has ever said it."

O’Reilly does realize that it’s not that difficult to search Fox News transcripts, doesn’t he?

From the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, the 10 worst offenses in 2010.

Aaron Weiner in the Washington Independent:

Mike’s reported on the White House’s shift away from a “war on drugs” mentality toward an increased focus on prevention and treatment. Today, National Drug Control Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske emphasized that shift in testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subpanel on domestic policy.

From a press release sent along by the Office of National Drug Control Policy:

National Drug Control Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske said today “a new direction in drug policy” is required to reduce the strain on the Nation’s economy caused by drug abuse and to improve the public health and safety of our citizens.

Testifying before the Subcommittee on Domestic Policy of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Director Kerlikowske outlined national drug control priorities and the Fiscal Year 2011 National Drug Control Budget, noting that the Obama Administration approach to drug policy is “grounded in common sense, sound science, and practical experience.”

With drug use accounting for tens of billions of dollars per year in healthcare costs, and drug overdoses ranking second only to motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, the Nation “needs to discard the idea that enforcement alone can eliminate our Nation’s drug problem,” Director Kerlikowske said. “Only through a comprehensive and balanced approach – combining tough, but fair, enforcement with robust prevention and treatment efforts – will we be successful in stemming both the demand for and supply of illegal drugs in our country.

“The forthcoming National Drug Control Strategy calls for addressing our Nation’s enormous demand for drugs by scaling up our public health policy response, integrating treatment programs into mainstream medicine, and recognizing that effective drug policy requires engagement at the community level,” Director Kerlikowske said.

He also noted that ONDCP would continue to work to “break down the silos between the prevention, treatment, and law enforcement communities– and the greatest use must be made of the finite resources at our disposal.”

The President’s $15.5 billion Fiscal Year 2011 National Drug Control Budget lays the foundation for these efforts and provides resources for five major drug control functions: substance abuse prevention; substance abuse treatment, domestic law enforcement, interdiction, and international support. The budget request specifically calls for an increase of $521.1 million over the FY 2010 enacted level, and includes a 6.5 percent increase for prevention and treatment; an increase of $73.8 million for Federal interdiction efforts; and an increase of $20.1 million for international support.