Obsidian Wings

Dead Baby Penguins

by hilzoy

I'm as sympathetic as anyone to conservationists' complaints that people care more about threats to what they call "charismatic megafauna" than, say, the demise of some humble insect that's the linchpin of an entire ecosystem. But baby penguins are in a class of cute all their own:

(Credit: Paul Ward.)

So the news that they are washing up dead in large numbers makes me cast my normal concern for bacteria and nematodes to the wind and wail: Nooo! Not baby penguins!!!

"Hundreds of baby penguins swept from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro's tropical beaches, rescuers and penguin experts said Friday.

More than 400 penguins, most of them young, have been found dead on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro state over the past two months, according to Eduardo Pimenta, superintendent for the state coastal protection and environment agency in the resort city of Cabo Frio.

While it is common here to find some penguins -- both dead and alive -- swept by strong ocean currents from the Strait of Magellan, Pimenta said there have been more this year than at any time in recent memory. (...)

Costa said the vast majority of penguins turning up are baby birds that have just left the nest and are unable to out-swim the strong ocean currents they encounter while searching for food."

No one seems to know why this is happening; possible culprits include overfishing, pollution, and global warming.

Double Standards

by hilzoy

The NYT:

"Alarmed by the sharply eroding confidence in the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, the Bush administration on Sunday asked Congress to approve a sweeping rescue package that would give officials the power to inject billions of federal dollars into the beleaguered companies through investments and loans.

In a separate announcement, the Federal Reserve said that it would make one of its short-term lending programs available to the two companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Fed said that it had made its decision “to promote the availability of home mortgage credit during a period of stress in financial markets.”

An official said the Fed’s decision to permit the companies to borrow from its so-called discount window was approved at the request of the Treasury, but that it was temporary and would probably end once Congress approved Treasury’s plan. Some officials briefed on the plan said Congress could be asked to extend the total line of credit to the institutions to $300 billion."

Good. I'm glad the government stepped in. That said, I agree with Dean Baker that it should have stepped in with conditions:

"Apparently the government is going to hand Fannie and Freddie bucket loads of taxpayer dollars, no questions asked. The NYT reports that they will be given access to $300 billion of government loans at below market interest.

That's nice. Shareholders who would have lost all their money if matters were left to the market, may instead walk away with billions of dollars. Similarly, the top executives of these companies, who earn salaries in the millions and tens of millions of dollars, will keep collecting their paychecks.

We should all be thankful that the government intervened. After all really rich people and investment fund managers can't be expected to be able to handle their investments on their own. They need the helping hand of the government when they really screw up.

Similarly, we don't want the fate of highly paid executives to be left to market. If this happened, some might lose their vacation homes and private jets.

Some people say that we had to hand tens of billions of dollars to the country's richest people to prevent a financial collapse. This is simply not true.
We had to keep Fannie and Freddie in business, but we could have done this by putting conditions on the bailout. The government uses conditions all the time when it offers help to low and moderate income people. Unemployment insurance, TANF, food stamps, and even student loans come with all sorts of conditions.

It is only when it comes to giving money to extremely rich people that we find it impossible to impose conditions. Again, we could have told Fannie and Freddie that no executives will get more than $2 million a year in total compensation. We could have told their shareholders that they are out of luck, because that is what is supposed to happen when you invest in a bankrupt company.

Instead, we told the people who work as truck drivers, school teachers, and fire fighters that they will have to pay more in taxes to help some of the richest people in the country escape the consequences of their own stupidity. While kicking the poor is always fun for politicians, neither the Bush administration nor Congress are prepared to tell the very rich that they are on their own."

There are two reasons to take steps that both prevent Fannie and Freddie from going under and make shareholders and executives take serious hits. The first is that this is the only way to avoid moral hazard: people's tendency to take unnecessary and stupid risks when they are not going to wind up paying for them. If shareholders actually lose their money, and executives have to be content with -- sniff! -- two million a year, that might just do the trick. (Note: I'd be fine restricting compensation limits to people who are presently on board, not new hires. It's the people who got us into this who need to pay some sort of price, so that the next time around, people might think twice. I'm also open to the idea that Baker's particular suggestions are wrong. It's the principle of holding investors and executives accountable that I care about, not any one particular idea about how best to do this.)

The second is basic fairness. One of the things that really bothered me about the FISA bill was the fact that so many people who don't think twice about the fate of ordinary people under our criminal justice system were suddenly horrified at the thought that those poor telecoms, with their in-house lawyers, might be responsible for knowing what the law is, and, if in doubt, erring on the side of caution. A kid who acts as a lookout for a robbery that goes bad can be charged as an adult with felony murder, whether or not he had any idea that the law makes this possible. If he participated because he didn't want to say no to the bigger guys with guns, that might or might not get him off the hook, depending on whether his court-appointed lawyer had too many other cases to notice, whether the judge was paying attention, whether the jury didn't believe him because they thought he wore the wrong kinds of clothes (aka 'looked like a gangbanger'), and so forth. In this way, a kid who has no previous record of violence, who committed no act of violence on this particular occasion, and whose offense was having failed, on one occasion, to stand up to people who actually were violent, and who lived in his neighborhood and knew his name, can be sentenced to decades in prison.

Yet, oddly, most of the people who were sticking up for the telecoms do not have a history of caring about this sort of thing. Stranger still, the people who thought it was fine for Scooter Libby's sentence to be commuted rarely get exercised about kids like this. In fact, many of them regularly go on about how important it is to get tough on crime. And yet there they were, talking as though the fact that Scooter Libby thought he was acting in the nation's interests, and the telecoms were scared to stand up to the people who give them contracts, was enough to let them off the hook.

News Flash: A lot of people who break the law think that they have some reason for doing so. Sometimes those reasons are pretty comprehensible: a kid who deals crack because he wants to buy his kid sister some clothes that don't have holes in them, for instance, or because someone in his family has to buy groceries. But we normally think that this should not get you off the hook. Unless, of course, you happen to be a major corporation or a well-connected Washington insider. Then, of course, everything is different.

Same here: when families are losing their homes -- families they don't know, at any rate -- some people are happy to say: well, that's the price they pay for financial irresponsibility. Admittedly, some of the people who will lose everything might have been eighty year olds with mortgages that were almost paid off before that nice young man convinced them to sign those papers, but hey: people make choices, and they should have to live with them. Unless, of course, they happen to be well-paid executives. Because, of course, that's different.

I can see treating ordinary people more leniently than the powerful and well-connected. Ignorance of the law, as they say, is no excuse, but if it is to be one, surely it should be an excuse for ordinary people, not for large corporations with their own legal staffs. People need to actually lose when they make bad choices -- surely, if one were to make exceptions to this rule, one would want to start with the people who can least afford the loss, and were least equipped to understand why their choices were bad. Which is to say: you'd want to let people who signed on to mortgages that even their brokers didn't understand escape the consequences of their choices before you let off people who are paid large sums of money for their alleged expertise, and who have the wealth and connections to make sure they understand exactly what they're doing.

But there's no sense at all in doing it the other way round: insisting on full accountability when you're dealing with someone who trusted his real estate broker's assurances about what he was signing, and who really didn't have anyone else to ask, but not when you're dealing with someone who took millions in compensation from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac when things were going well, and who had the resources and the knowledge to know that getting too deeply into risky mortgages was a stupid thing to do.

Honestly, the only reason I can think of why lawmakers and people who set policy would advocate these sorts of double standards is because they don't want accountability for people like them. Which is no reason at all.

I Hate Cancer

by publius

Tony Snow is dead at 53. Heartbreaking - thoughts go out to his family.

I hope I live to see the day when we get rid of cancer -- it's taken far too much from me, and from everyone.

This Could Get Very Ugly

by hilzoy

The news about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sounds terrifying to me:

"Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the beleaguered mortgage finance companies, plummeted again on Friday morning, as senior Bush administration officials consider a plan to have the government take over one or both of the companies and place them in a conservatorship if their problems worsen, according to people briefed about the plan.

Fannie Mae stock was down 36 percent in early trading compared with Thursday’s closing price; Freddie Mac stock was down 41 percent."

And that was after big previous losses. As of right now, Freddie Mac is down over 87% from a year ago; Fannie Mae is down over 85%.

The FT has a nice, short summary of the problem:

"As house prices have fallen and foreclosures have soared across the US, the two institutions have suffered deep losses, which they have tackled by raising more capital. Many observers believe that a collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could bring the US mortgage market to a complete standstill, with severe repercussions for the financial sector and the economy as a whole.

Many investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have come to assume that the government would eventually come to their rescue because of their importance to the system. However, concern has risen recently that contingency plans for a government bail-out might involve wiping out public shareholders to minimise the cost to taxpayers, while confidence that senior debt would be protected has held up."

Bringing "the US mortgage market to a complete standstill" does not sound like a very good idea. What are the alternatives? One is a conservatorship:

"Under a conservatorship, the shares of Fannie and Freddie would be worth little or nothing, and any losses on mortgages they own or guarantee — which could be staggering — would be paid by taxpayers."

The shares that would be wiped out presently amount to about $18billion. But the liabilities we, the taxpayers, might have to assume are staggering:

"What Americans need to know is how damaging such a failure would be. This wouldn't merely be a matter of the Federal Reserve guaranteeing $29 billion in dodgy mortgage paper, a la Bear Stearns. Fannie and Freddie are among the largest financial companies in the world. Their liabilities – mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and other debt – add up to some $5 trillion.

To put that in perspective, consider that total U.S. federal debt is about $9.5 trillion, compared to a total U.S. GDP of $14 trillion. About $5.3 trillion of that debt is held by the public (in the form of Treasury bonds and the like), while $4.2 trillion is intragovernment debt such as Social Security IOUs. This is the liability side of America's federal balance sheet, and its condition influences how much the government can borrow and at what rates.

The liabilities of Fan and Fred are currently not on this U.S. balance sheet. But one danger is a run on the debt of either company, putting pressure on the Treasury and Federal Reserve to publicly guarantee that debt to prevent a systemic financial collapse. In an instant, what has long been an implicit taxpayer guarantee for both companies would be made explicit – committing American taxpayers to honoring as much as $5 trillion in new liabilities. U.S. debt held by the public would more than double, and the national balance sheet would look very ugly."

$5 trillion dollars in liabilities is a staggering amount, even when you consider that not all many of the loans we would guarantee would not go bad*, and so we would almost certainly not be on the hook for the entire amount. But if Fannie and Freddie become insolvent, it would beat the alternative, which is, as best I can tell, more or less shutting down the market for mortgages.

***

Which leads me to an important point. Unlike Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie really are too big to fail. What this means, as far as I'm concerned, is that we need to take steps to ensure that they won't fail. This, to me, was one of the huge lessons of the S&L crisis (and, for that matter, of plain common sense): when the government is on the hook when things go bad, the government should take steps to ensure that things don't.

Mark Thoma quotes Robert Reich:

"Here we have another example of socialized capitalism. The executives of Fannie and Freddie have been among the best paid in all of corporate America. We're talking tens of millions a year in CEO pay alone. Fannie and Freddie are treated like giant investor-driven entities as long as they're healthy and their investors and executives are doing well. But when they start to go down the tubes they become public entities with public responsibilities, the rest of us have to bail them out."

And adds:

"If failure of these firms endangers the broader economy, and hence threatens to impose large costs on people who had nothing to do with creating the problems, then policymakers need to step in and do what they can to prevent a downward economic economic spiral. In addition, they need to change the rules and regulations that allowed the problem to emerge in the first place, and add new rules and regulations as needed to lower the moral hazard worries going forward."

Exactly.

(NB: it's worth noting that the housing bill, which the Senate is considering today, would do just this. Better late than never. But it should have been done years ago.)

Thank You, Haley Barbour

by hilzoy

CNN:

"Prisons in Mississippi got coffee makers, pillowcases and dinnerware -- all intended for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The state's Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks took more coffee makers, cleaning supplies and other items.

Plastic containers ended up with the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration.

Colleges, volunteer fire departments and other agencies received even more.

But the Mississippi hurricane victims who originally were intended to receive the supplies got nothing, a CNN investigation has found. (...)

Jim Marler, director of Mississippi's surplus agency, failed to return repeated phone calls over several months to explain what happened.

Agency spokeswoman Kym Wiggins said, "There may be a need, but we were not notified that there was a great need for this particular property."

That doesn't sit well with most aid groups in Mississippi. "You would have to be living under a rock not to know there is still a need," said Cass Woods, the project coordinator of Coastal Women for Change.

Wiggins said that nonprofit organizations must meet federal guidelines and register with the state and that no such groups helping the needy or homeless were registered with Mississippi's surplus agency. (...)

CNN interviewed the leaders of eight nonprofits helping Katrina victims at a Biloxi, Mississippi, church used as a staging area for community groups. All said they had no idea these items were available, and most had no idea the surplus agency existed.

"We work so hard to help people in our community when the government is holding back stuff that we can use to give people," said Glenda Perryman, director of United Hearts Community Action Agency."

Thank you, Haley Barbour, for keeping the victims of Katrina in your thoughts in their hour of need.

Isn't This Reassuring?

by hilzoy

Via Effect Measure, the AJC:

"At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new $214 million infectious disease laboratory in Atlanta, scientists are conducting experiments on bioterror bacteria in a room with a containment door sealed with duct tape.

The tape was applied around the edges of the door a year ago after the building's ventilation system malfunctioned and pulled potentially contaminated air out of the lab and into a "clean" hallway."

A year ago -- and they're still relying on duct tape! Luckily, a new self-sealing door is supposed to be installed sometime between November and April. However:

"The CDC's explanations drew skepticism from some biosafety watchdogs —- especially since this is the same lab building that came under scrutiny by Congress and the Government Accountability Office last summer after the AJC revealed the building experienced an hour-long power outage and backup generators failed to come on.

"I do not believe the CDC would approve this arrangement in a laboratory other than their own," Richard Ebright, a microbiologist and biosafety expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said of the taped Q fever lab door.

The CDC is the federal agency responsible for inspecting U.S. labs —- including its own —- that work with certain dangerous germs that primarily infect humans. Because the Q fever bacteria, Coxiella burnetii, can cause disease both in humans and animals, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has secondary inspection authority.

Despite accompanying CDC inspectors on evaluations of the Atlanta lab building housing the duct-taped Q fever door, USDA spokeswoman Rachel Iadicicco said that agency's inspectors were not aware of the use of duct tape. "We will discuss this with CDC," she said.

Ebright said duct-taping a door adjacent to Q fever experiments with mice "raises very serious concerns about management. And those concerns are particularly important when one bears in mind this facility will ultimately be handling a full range of lethal pathogens —- up to and including smallpox.""

Smallpox! How lovely.

A few facts to bear in mind, as background: first, this is, as the AJC says, a new building. But this isn't the first problem it's had:

"On Dec. 18, the building was evacuated after its new medical waste incinerator was started for a test, then vented smoke into the high-containment lab area, according to internal CDC memos recently obtained by the AJC. Excessive heat caused the failure of the incinerator's bypass stack, which tore away from its anchor bolts and fire caulk, the records show.

The damaged stack was repaired in January —- under warranty and without additional taxpayer cost, CDC officials said last week. The incinerator problem has played no role in the delays, they said, and it has since been certified by state regulators and is now operational."

So far, the CDC has refused to respond to FOIA requests about the lab's safety.

Second, one might wonder why, exactly, the CDC didn't repair this earlier. One possibility is idiocy. Revere, writing about another topic entirely, says:

"My experience with CDC in recent years is that it is full of inexperienced people who don’t know what they are doing being managed by incompetent managers who spend too much time brown nosing the boss who spends too much of her time sucking up to the Bush administration. Because of bad management the professional expertise at what was once the jewel in the crown of federal public health headed for the exits as soon as their twenty years were up. There are still some terrific, dedicated scientists at CDC, but they are being submerged by mediocrity and bureaucracy."

Another explanation, which fits in with the first, is funding. In FY2006, the CDC spent (pdf) over $158.3 million on buildings and facilities. In FY 2007, it spent $134.4 million. In FY2008, the CDC requested $20 million, and got $55 million. This year, the CDC has requested no money at all for buildings and facilities. From its budget request (pdf):

"For FY 2009, CDC requests no funding for the Buildings and Facilities Program, a decrease of $55,022,000 from the FY 2008 Enacted level. In FY 2009, CDC may not be able to sustain the condition of its existing $2.8 billion owned inventory in accordance with OMB and FRPC guidelines. With available resources, CDC will prioritize its critical sustainment and improvement activities to best maintain its facilities."

These buildings include the labs where we test dangerous viruses, like smallpox, ebola, and the like. They also include the places where we do research on serious public health threats, like HIV and tuberculosis. If any of you have seen or read 'And The Band Played On', you may recall the scene where one of the main HIV researchers in the country, who worked at the CDC, was given a tiny storage closet for a lab, and was somehow expected to help stop a national epidemic with barely enough space to move, and next to no equipment. That's one thing that comes of zeroing out the CDC's building budget. Ventilation systems that malfunction and decide to vent viruses into the hallway, and budgets that can't accommodate better solutions than duct tape, are another.

This is no way to run a country.

George Carlin, RIP

by publius

George Carlin was one of my favorite comics, so I was very saddened to see the news this morning.  So I thought I'd post one of my favorite all-time Carlin bits.  It's him talking about the first Gulf War where he says that "we like war."  It's great -- and fittingly appropriate.

Flood

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post (where I also got the picture):

"CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa, June 13 -- The sun finally broke through the layers of clouds on Friday, a reassuring presence after a week of rain. But as residents in and around this eastern Iowa city surveyed their waterlogged landscape, they did not like what they saw.

"It looks like Katrina," said a man in a pickup truck who declined to give his name. He was stuck in traffic that was at a standstill for 10 miles on the interstate north of the city, gazing at the Quaker Oats factory and buildings sitting in several feet of water.

Locals said the flood that hit Iowa's second-largest city is far worse than the deluge of 1993. About 25,000 residents have had to leave, and hundreds of homes and businesses have been damaged, many of them severely.

More than 400 blocks of downtown were evacuated, including a jail and a major hospital. Water flowed like a river through downtown streets blocked off by National Guard members, and warehouses along the Cedar River were nearly submerged. Floodwater gurgled around treetops and lapped just feet below electrical wires and billboards. The Cedar River crested at 31.2 feet Thursday, 15 feet above flood stage and breaking the record from 15 years ago.

"We thought the crest would be 20 or 22 feet, and we thought we would be okay, but it was 31," Cedar Rapids Mayor Kay Halloran said.

The flooding that hit this city of more than 120,000 is just part of the hammering the Midwest has received from severe storms during the past week. Floodwaters have submerged parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Authorities have been forced to close a nearly 300-mile stretch of the upper Mississippi River to all traffic. According to the Associated Press, scores of bridges across nine overflowing rivers have been weakened or swept away.

The floods have destroyed acres of corn, soybeans and other crops, prompting worries about a spike in food prices at a time when they already have been rising. "I have real concerns about our agricultural sector," said Gov. Chet Culver (D), who declared 83 of Iowa's 99 counties disaster areas. (...)

Carpenter Phil Leidigh, 53, a Cedar Rapids native, wondered where homeless people downtown would go and said flooding hit low-income areas of the city the hardest.

"Where the flooding is, it hit the people who are already struggling, who worked their whole lives to get where they are and now have to start over," he said. "It could take years for the city to recover. They have been trying to revive the downtown, but now who knows if Debbie's Ice Cream and these other little businesses will ever come back.""

Our thoughts are with them. You can help by donating to the Red Cross, which is on the ground in the flooded areas. Thanks.

Burma: It Just Gets Worse

by hilzoy

The news from Burma gets more and more horrific:

(Image from the Washington Post.)

From the NYT:

"The top United States diplomat in Myanmar warned that the toll could rise to 100,000 if aid was not prompt. The French foreign minister, meanwhile, suggested invoking United Nations powers to force delivery of international relief supplies on the reluctant Burmese government.

The Myanmar government has so far put its official tally of the deaths from the cyclone at 22,500, of which perhaps 40 percent were children. A further 41,000 people are missing, and up to 1 million people are estimated to have been left homeless. (...)

“The situation in the delta sounds more and more horrendous,” Reuters quoted her as saying. She said many people had died when the storm struck while they were sleeping, and they were either drowned or swept out to sea. Earlier in the day, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said that the United Nations should invoke its “responsibility to protect” civilians as the basis for a resolution to allow the delivery of international aid even without the permission of the military junta.

Despite the emerging scale of the disaster, the Myanmar government has let in little aid and has restricted movement in the delta, aid agencies say. It has not granted visas to aid workers, even though supplies are being marshaled in nearby countries like Thailand. (...)

A United Nations official in Bangkok, Richard Horsey, said on Wednesday that “thousands of bodies” were floating in nearly 2,000 square miles of the flooded delta. And in the capital, Yangon, prices in the market were reported to be doubled for rice, cooking oil, charcoal and bottled water. Much of Yangon is reported to be without power, so residents could not use their pumps to obtain drinking water from wells."

AP:

"Local aid workers started distributing water purification tablets, mosquito nets, plastic sheeting and basic medical supplies.

But heavily flooded areas were accessible only by boat, with helicopters unable to deliver relief supplies there, said Richard Horsey, Bangkok-based spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid.

"Most urgent need is food and water," said Andrew Kirkwood, head of Save the Children in Yangon. "Many people are getting sick. The whole place is under salt water and there is nothing to drink. They can't use tablets to purify salt water," he said."

I listed some organizations who are getting aid to Burma in my last post on the subject. The NYT and Washington Post have more extensive lists.

Burma

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"The death toll from a powerful cyclone that struck Myanmar three days ago rose to 22,500 Tuesday, with a further 41,000 people still missing, the government said, and foreign governments and aid organizations began mobilizing for a major relief operation.

Shaken by the scope of the disaster, the authorities said they would delay a vote in the worst affected areas on a new constitution that was meant to cement the military’s grip on power.

The death toll was the latest in a steadily escalating official count since Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar early Saturday, devastating much of the fertile Irrawaddy Delta and Yangon, the nation’s main city.

At a news conference in Yangon, the minister for relief and resettlement, Maung Maung Swe, said 41,000 people were still missing in the aftermath of the cyclone, which triggered a surge of water inland from the sea.

“More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” he said, in the first official description of the destruction. “The wave was up to 12 feet high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages. They did not have anywhere to flee.”

A spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program said that as many as one million people might have lost their homes and that some villages were almost totally destroyed."

You can help by donating to the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, Save The Children, UNICEF, or the World Food Programme, all of which are providing assistance in Burma.

Our government, meanwhile, has decided this is a good time to play politics:

"The United States, which has led a drive for economic sanctions against Myanmar’s repressive regime, said it would also provide aid, but only if an American disaster team was invited into the country.

The policy was presented by the first lady, Laura Bush, along with a lecture to the junta about human rights and disaster relief.

“This is a cheap shot,” said Aung Nain Oo, a Burmese political analyst who is based in Thailand. “The people are dying. This is no time for a political message to be aired. This is a time for relief. No one is asking for anything like this except the United States.”"

The government in Burma is horrible. But that is no reason to attach these sorts of conditions to assistance in the face of disaster.

Read It And Weep

by hilzoy

Via Bitch Ph.D., the WSJ:

"A collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Her husband, Jim, and three sons found a small source of solace: a $700,000 accident settlement from the trucking company involved. After legal fees and other expenses, the remaining $417,000 was put in a special trust. It was to be used for Mrs. Shank's care.

Instead, all of it is now slated to go to Mrs. Shank's former employer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Two years ago, the retail giant's health plan sued the Shanks for the $470,000 it had spent on her medical care. A federal judge ruled last year in Wal-Mart's favor, backed by an appeals-court decision in August. Now, her family has to rely on Medicaid and Mrs. Shank's social-security payments to keep up her round-the-clock care.

"I don't understand why they need to do this," says Mr. Shank on a recent visit to the nursing home, between shifts as a maintenance worker and running a tanning salon. "This girl needs the money more than they do." Mrs. Shank, who needs help with eating and other basic tasks, spends more time alone since Mr. Shank had to let her private caregiver go. At some point, he says, she may have to be moved from a private to a semi-private room in the nursing home where she lives.

The reason is a clause in Wal-Mart's health plan that Mrs. Shank didn't notice when she started stocking shelves at a nearby store eight years ago. Like most company health plans, Wal-Mart's reserves the right to recoup the medical expenses it paid for someone's treatment if the person also collects damages in an injury suit."

As far as I can tell from the article, the damages Mrs. Shank (or rather, a trust set up for her care) collected were not supposed to cover the medical care Wal-Mart had already paid for. They were for her loss, which is ongoing, and which will continue to cost her family both economically and in other ways. And this isn't uncommon in catastrophic cases:

"In cases like the Shanks', where injuries and medical costs are catastrophic, accident victims sometimes can be left with little or none of the money they fought for in court. Health plans are increasingly adopting language such as Wal-Mart's, which dictates that it is to be paid first out of any settlement, regardless of what remains for the injured person. Moreover, the victim is responsible for all legal costs in pursuing the suit.

"It's especially in the catastrophic cases that people are almost never fully compensated," says Roger Baron, a professor of law at the University of South Dakota and a specialist in health-plan law. "And then their health plan, that's been collecting premiums from them all this time, wants to take it away?""

I support any reasonably well-designed plan that will provide affordable health insurance to all Americans, but given a choice, I prefer a single-insurer plan (basically, there is one insurer who insures everyone, and it's the government. Sort of like universal Medicare.) There are a number of reasons for this, including the advantages of integration and administrative savings. But one of them is that in a world in which there was no question who was going to pay for Mrs. Shank's care, no one would try to weasel out of it in this way. As things are, many patients and their families have to go through this horrific nightmare of figuring out who is responsible for what, and whether what they need will be approved, at the very time when they least need that kind of stress.

I recall someone who used to clean my house. She and her husband were hardworking, good people. She had not signed up for her own health insurance because his employer provided good coverage, and it was cheaper for them to enroll in his plan as a couple. But then one day he was in an accident on a motorcycle, and his leg was shattered. His health insurance paid for the first of a series of operations, but guess what? He couldn't do his job after the accident, so he was let go. That, of course, meant that he and his wife lost their health insurance, which in turn meant that they had to pay, out of pocket, for the rest of the operations (I think there were nine in all, but I could have the number wrong) that he needed to put his leg back together. They applied for various forms of assistance, and were rejected by several because they were insufficiently poor. They burned through their savings before they were done, but they also had to spend a lot of time and emotional energy that they didn't have trying to slog through one bureaucracy after another, trying to find someone who could help.

Eventually -- I am not making this up -- she went to work at Wal-Mart, because she could work the night shift and care for her husband during the day. They never did get their savings back: savings they had worked for over a lifetime.

This happens because our system of insurance is so fractured that it's unclear who will end up paying for what. There are a lot of wonky reasons to prefer a single-insurer model, but there are also reasons like this one: our present system is just inhumane. f you aren't convinced yet, consider the punchline to the WSJ story:
Here's the punch line:

"In August last year, U.S. district judge Lewis Blanton sided with Wal-Mart, ruling that when Mrs. Shank signed on to Wal-Mart's health plan she was obligated to abide by its terms.

The ruling came six days before the Shanks' 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed in September last year in Iraq shortly after he arrived in the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division.

"I wanted to give up at that point, tell Wal-Mart they won," Mr. Shank says, but his lawyer, Mr. Graham, said he'd continue with appeals.

Mrs. Shank went to Jeremy's funeral. But because of memory problems due to her injuries, she gets confused about what happened. On a recent morning, she cried several times and asked what had happened to her middle son. Mr. Shank says that he obtained a divorce from Mrs. Shank this year, partly because of advice from a health-care administrator that she might be more eligible for public aid as a single woman. Mrs. Shank, who has been declared incompetent by a court, hasn't been informed of the divorce by her family."

Obviously, I don't hold our health care system responsible for the fact that the ruling came right before the Shanks' son was killed. But I think that no one should ever have to divorce his wife in order to get care for her. Ever. Not in my country.

Where's The Gratitude?

by hilzoy

I was just going to ignore Pat Buchanan's screed on the subject of Obama's speech -- in many ways, its title, "A Brief For Whitey", tells you everything you need to know about it. However, on reflection, I did want to highlight one bit:

"First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. (...)

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?"

I'm not going to focus on the idiocy of going on about how grateful blacks should be to whites without so much as mentioning the two centuries of slavery, the century of peonage and terrorism, and the fact that when blacks finally won civil rights, it was hardly due to a spontaneous surge of generosity on the part of whites. I take it that's all too obvious to be worth saying. What I do want to focus on is the peculiar idea that things like "welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs" constitute things whites did for blacks. Because that's just false. Ta-Nehisi Coates:

"There is a lot wrong here, but one central thread of errant logic undergirds it all. Buchanan, like most racists, doesn't actually believe that African-Americans are Americans. This isn't an interpretation, Buchanan's argument that white Americans, in the form of social programs, have done more for black people than any group (including presumably the entire Civil Rights Movement!) assumes that black people have never paid any taxes for those programs. He quite literally doesn't categorize black people as Americans, but useless layabouts who've never contributed anything to the country."

Taking Buchanan's errors one by one:

What's In a Name?

by publius

Megan McArdle:

So JP Morgan has agreed to buy Bear Stearns at $2 a share. As others have already pointed out, this is, from the point of view of the shareholders, just barely better than bankruptcy. Talk of a bailout of the bank is silly--this wasn't a bailout; it was an orderly winding-up of business.

Hmm, $30 billion credit lines by any other name smell just as bailout-ish to me. The rest of her post, however, is quite reasonable. Why not just call a spade a spade though? This was a bailout. McArdle thinks it led to a reasonably good outcome. Ergo, she thinks a government bailout worked (or at least provided a decent outcome among many potential bad ones -- for now).

UPDATE: There is a larger point here -- one unrelated to McArdle (again, I liked her post other than that one sentence). One of the more frustrating challenges the progressive movement faces is that the public is blind to the various and often invisible ways that government has improved people's lives. For instance, I doubt "small government" advocates spend much time thinking about why the public currently enjoys free schools, clean air, weekends, subsidized roads, Social Security, non-contaminated food, etc. All of these benefits, though, resulted from government action following intense political battles.

This is getting way beyond Bear Stearns, but the quickest way to shatter the current Reagan paradigm is to rehabilitate the idea of government in the public's mind. Indeed, one of the long-term costs of Bill Clinton's political strategy of the 1990s was that it implicitly discredited the benefits of government action. I don't blame him - he did what he had to do under rough circumstances. But to really shift the paradigm for good, progressives need to make the public understand that government can and has been a force for good (when it's done right, obviously).

Thus, if the government has acted to help the markets here, we should say so. Unapologetically.]

All News Stories Must Converge

by hilzoy

I missed this when it first came out a month ago, on (cough) Valentine's Day. It's an op-ed by Eliot Spitzer on the federal government's attempt to prevent states from responding to what would eventually become the subprime mortgage crisis. Read it and weep.

"Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye. (...)

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation."

Bear Stearns

by hilzoy

All I have to say is: wow:

"Bear Stearns, pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by what amounted to a run on the bank, agreed late Sunday to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase for a mere $2 a share, narrowly averting a collapse that threatened to cascade through the financial system.

The price represents a startling 93 percent discount to Bear Stearns’ closing stock price on Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.

Bankers and policy makers raced to complete the deal before financial markets in Asia opened on Monday, as fears grew that the financial panic could spread if Bear Stearns failed to find a buyer. (...)

Reflecting Bear Stearns’s dire straits, JPMorgan agreed to pay just $236 million for the firm, a figure that includes the price of Bear’s soaring headquarters on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. At $2 a share, JPMorgan is buying Bear Stearns for a third of the price at which the troubled firm went public in 1985. Only a year ago, Bear’s shares fetched $170. The cut-rate price reflects deep misgivings about the firm’s prospects.

JPMorgan said it was guaranteeing the trading obligations of Bear Stearns and its subsidiaries, effective immediately. “JPMorgan Chase stands behind Bear Stearns,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Bear Stearns’s clients and counterparties should feel secure that JPMorgan is guaranteeing Bear Stearns’s counterparty risk.”

The companies said that the Federal Reserve would provide special financing in connection with the transaction and that the Fed had agreed to fund up to $30 billion of Bear Stearns’s “less-liquid assets.”"

For context: Bear Stearns' stock was selling at $30 at the close of business on Friday. That was a lot lower than the nearly $80/share at the beginning of this month, but a lot more than the $2/share that JPMorgan is paying. Bear Stearns' office building is valued at $1.2billion, or just over five times what Morgan will pay for the company in its entirety.

Wow.

PS: if anyone knows a good explanation of the current economic problems -- a sort of overview, neither way oversimplified nor requiring extensive knowledge of economics, especially the more technical parts -- please let me know. I don't really have a good grasp of it.

And One More Thing...

by hilzoy

The Army's unwillingness to accept openly gay soldiers has always struck me as not just bigoted, but incredibly dumb. Placing heterosexism ahead of national security looks even dumber than ever at a time when the Army is having a lot of trouble recruiting and retaining people. But it's not just gays the Army doesn't want. It's not even gays and transgendered people. If you actually read the Army's Standards of Medical Fitness (pdf), you'll discover that the Army seems to have a truly bizarre devotion to the idea that only men and women with absolutely, completely normal genitalia and reproductive systems can possibly defend us in time of war. Among the people who do not meet its standards:

• Women who experience unusually heavy menstrual bleeding, or bleeding at irregular intervals, or no periods at all.


• Women born without a uterus.


• In men, "Current absence of one or both testicles, either congenital (752.89) or undescended (752.51) is disqualifying."


• And, for both men and women: "History of major abnormalities or defects of the genitalia such as change of sex (P64.5), hermaphroditism, pseudohermaphroditism, or pure gonadal dysgenesis (752.7) or dysfunctional residuals from surgical correction of these conditions is disqualifying."

Undescended testicles??? Unless I am very, very wrong about what exactly service in the military involves, I can't see that an undescended testicle would affect a soldier's ability to perform his duties. I checked to see whether undescended testicles might lead to some more severe problems later; apparently, they reduce fertility, which is hardly the Army's concern, and increase the odds that one will get testicular cancer. But since the Army accepts smokers, I can't see that this explains why they disqualify recruits with undescended testicles. As far as I can tell, the only remotely plausible explanation is that the Army has decided to constitute itself as a Defender of Binary Gender Norms. And that seems like a pretty stupid thing to do during wartime. Or ever, for that matter.

"Last year, the Army had to grant waivers to nearly one in five recruits because they had criminal records." If they're willing to overlook criminal records, I imagine that they're probably granting waivers to people with undescended testicles as well. But that's only a stopgap measure: the real question is: why on earth does the Army care whether or not its soldiers have undescended testicles in the first place? Why not just ask whether a soldier is physically able to do his or her duty, and leave it at that?

This Is Your Army, Breaking

by hilzoy

We hear a lot about how the war in Iraq is "breaking the Army." But while I have used that metaphor, I've never been comfortable with it. It's not as though one day we will hear a loud snap and find the Army broken in two. We will not get up one morning, flip a switch, and discover that the Army doesn't work any more. We will not have to hire a tow truck to drag it off to war. Whatever goes wrong with the Army, it won't be like that.

For one thing, there is no sharp, discontinuous transition between an "unbroken" Army and a "broken" one: the kind that happens when a plate shatters, a fuse blows, or a motor finally gives out. For another, a "broken" Army will still be able to function, more or less. It's hard to imagine circumstances in which virtually no one could be induced to join the Army, not even by very large recruiting bonuses; and as long as there are people willing to serve, we can expect that they will show up to work, more or less follow orders, and stand ready to fight if asked. So there is no sharp contrast between an "unbroken" Army, which works, and a "broken" Army, which doesn't.

What we are doing to the Army is less like breaking something, and more like slowly degrading its ability to perform its tasks to an unacceptable level. It's a gradual process, one that does not provide us with clear points at which we can look at the Army and say: well, now it is well and truly broken. It's not like breaking a chair or a statue. It's more like this (h/t Kevin Drum):

"Young officers (...) are leaving the Army at nearly their highest rates in decades. This is not a short-term problem, nor is it one that can simply be fixed with money. A private-sector company or another government agency can address a shortage of middle managers by hiring more middle managers. In the Army's rigid hierarchy, all officers start out at the bottom, as second lieutenants. A decline in officer retention, in other words, threatens both the Army's current missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its long-term institutional future. And though many senior Pentagon leaders are quite aware of the problem, there's only so much they can do to reverse the decline while the United States maintains large numbers of troops in Iraq.

In the last four years, the exodus of junior officers from the Army has accelerated. In 2003, around 8 percent of junior officers with between four and nine years of experience left for other careers. Last year, the attrition rate leapt to 13 percent. "A five percent change could potentially be a serious problem," said James Hosek, an expert in military retention at the RAND Corporation. Over the long term, this rate of attrition would halve the number of officers who reach their tenth year in uniform and intend to take senior leadership roles.

But the problem isn't one of numbers alone: the Army also appears to be losing its most gifted young officers. In 2005, internal Army memos started to warn of the "disproportionate loss of high-potential, high-performance junior leaders." West Point graduates are leaving at their highest rates since the 1970s (except for a few years in the early 1990s when the Army's goal was to reduce its size). Of the nearly 1,000 cadets from the class of 2002, 58 percent are no longer on active duty.

This means that there is less competition for promotions, and that less-able candidates are rising to the top. For years, Congress required the Army to promote only 70 to 80 percent of eligible officers. Under that law, the rank of major served as a useful funnel by which the Army separated out the bottom quarter of the senior officer corps. On September 14, 2001, President Bush suspended that requirement. Today, more than 98 percent of eligible captains are promoted to major. "If you breathe, you make lieutenant colonel these days," one retired colonel grumbled to me.

The dismay of senior leaders at this situation pierces through even the dry, bureaucratic language of Army memoranda. In an internal document distributed among senior commanders earlier this year, Colonel George Lockwood, the director of officer personnel management for the Army's Human Resources Command, wrote, "The Army is facing significant challenges in officer manning, now and in the immediate future." Lockwood was referring to an anticipated shortfall of about 3,000 captains and majors until at least 2013; he estimated that the Army already has only about half the senior captains that it needs. "Read the last line again, please," Lockwood wrote. "Our inventory of senior captains is only 51 percent of requirement." In response to this deficit, the Army is taking in twenty-two-year-olds as fast as it can. However, these recruits can't be expected to perform the jobs of officers who have six to eight years of experience. "New 2nd Lieutenants," Lockwood observed, "are no substitute for senior captains.""

An organization like the Army, which cannot replace losses from its officer corps by raiding other firms' managers, cannot survive these kinds of problems without paying a very heavy price. Officers who should have been passed over for promotion will instead be given command responsibilities they cannot perform. They may endanger their troops, or lead people under them to quit in frustration, or, at worst, actually lose wars:

"But the greatest concern is how the exodus of the best and brightest will affect the Army's long-term capacity to win wars, counter threats, and keep the peace. Today's lieutenants and captains are the pool from which three- and four-star generals will be chosen twenty years from now. If the sharpest minds aren't in that pool, we could wind up—to put it bluntly—with a senior leadership of dimwits."

People sometimes talk about "doing what it takes in Iraq", or "giving the surge a chance", as though such choices had no actual downside; as though letting George W. Bush have his way on Iraq policy was like letting your child pursue some wildly improbable but ultimately harmless dream. "Why not let him try?", they say, as though he were a teenager hoping to become a movie star, or me trying to make the NBA. This is obviously crazy: nothing about Iraq is harmless. Our soldiers are dying in Iraq; our money is being spent there; our resources are being diverted away from places like Afghanistan, where they might have done a lot more good. And, to top it all off, we are doing damage to our Army that will take decades to undo, and that might prevent us from responding adequately the next time we face a real threat, rather than one that exists only in Bush and Cheney's imaginations.

They Come To Casablanca ... And Wait ... And Wait ...

by hilzoy

From the NYT, h/t Gary:

"Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.

Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.

But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.

The agency’s new plan to hire at least 150 new appeals judges to whittle down the backlog, which has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000, will require $100 million more than President Bush requested this year and still more in the future. The plan has been delayed by the standoff between Congress and the White House over domestic appropriations.

There are 1,025 judges currently at work, and the wait for an appeals hearing averages more than 500 days, compared with 258 in 2000. Without new hirings, federal officials predict even longer waits and more of the personal tragedies that can result from years of painful uncertainty.

Progress against the backlog, if it happens, cannot undo the three years that Belinda Virgil of Fayetteville has worried about her future since her initial application was turned down. Tethered to an oxygen tank 24 hours a day because of emphysema and life-threatening sleep apnea, Ms. Virgil lost her apartment and has alternated between a sofa in her daughter’s crowded house and a friend’s place as she waits for answer to her appeal."

One of the things that tends to get lost in the wrangling over domestic appropriations is that there are plenty of cases, like this, in which it ought to be uncontroversial that we should raise spending. If appeals to decisions to deny benefits take over 500 days on average, that is simply too long. The obvious way to address this problem is to hire more appeals judges. This will cost money, but it will save people who will, in fact, eventually be found to deserve benefits from losing their homes, their credit ratings, their everything. Hiring more judges ought, therefore, to be a complete no-brainer, and the fact that it is caught in the political crossfire should be a source of shame to us.

While we wait for politicians capable of addressing these problems, we can take at least one simple step to help alleviate the consequences of this nightmare: give money to Gary Farber, who is caught in it. Gary has convenient buttons at the top of his blog that allow you to donate once, or (preferably) subscribe for the amount of your choice. Either will help him survive the appeals process. They will also help to postpone the day when he has to ask again, and if you think about what begging for money must be like, minimizing it is in itself a good reason to give. So if you haven't already done it, now would be a good time.

Thanks.

The Gods Must Be Petty

by publius

I’d like to say that I find Governor Perdue’s emphasis on prayer to address droughts baffling. But I don’t. I understand it completely. Growing up Southern Baptist, I regularly prayed until about midway through college when I turned into a freedom-hating Bolshevik surrender monkey. But even if I understand where he’s coming from, it’s still strange. Although it’s a seemingly harmless practice, it logically implies the existence of a sadistic, cruel and petty God. Indeed, as people like Hitchens point out with characteristic tact, much of Christian doctrine – I now realize – assumes precisely this sort of God.

There are a couple of aspects to this implied petty cruelty (with respect to prayer). The first is simply that God apparently causes these events (drought, coal mine collapse, sick child, etc.) in the first place. Looking specifically at Georgia, praying for rain obviously assumes that God has some sort of control over the weather. Thus, he either caused the drought, or allowed it to happen. And once caused, the act of prayer assumes that God could step in and end it.

It’s interesting that religious people – including me at one point – tend to ignore causation when praying for help. Bad stuff just sort of happens, but then the benevolent God might be persuaded to fix it if we ask him. It’s like a bit like asking Oswald if he would be so kind as to bring JFK some bandages.

And that leads to the second aspect of the pettiness – the vanity. The act of prayer assumes that, before acting, God has to be sufficiently flattered to step in and stop these harmful conditions. The implication, of course, is that those who don’t flatter him are out of luck. Thus, it’s almost more disturbing if prayer does work because, if it does, it means the universe is ruled by a petty vain deity.

I’m not saying this is necessarily irrational, I’m just saying that – if true – God doesn’t seem particularly worthy of our praise. (The same is true for anyone who requires worship to avoid an eternity of fiery torture.) I’m sure the Catholic literature (which is much more robust and intellectual than its Protestant counterpart) has a rich history of debate on this point. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to see how God comes off looking good, much less worship-worthy.

But amateur theology aside, there’s a more significant real-world problem with Perdue’s actions. Fighting droughts require practical water conservation policies. For instance, Brad Plumer – the most underrated blogger on the nets – writes about how our energy policy contributes to water shortages in the Southeast. And if we are currently living in the age of the Oil Wars, the Water Wars may be right around the corner as global warming sharply reduces supplies for billions of people.

These are serious, life-and-death policy concerns. That’s why relying on prayer is more than a harmless aside. It distracts from the reality that fixing problems requires human effort – human political effort to be precise. By relying on prayer, Perdue (and others) can avoid the political costs of conservation reform by (implicitly) blaming God for the problems. For this reason, maybe these prayers annoy God too. Calling for prayer shifts the blame from human actors to celestial ones. And last I checked, the Big Guy ain’t on the ballot next fall.

(One last aside, prayer can be therapeutic – much like meditation or reflection. This post doesn’t use prayer in that sense.)

Why Defend Reagan on Race?

by publius

Let me heartily endorse Krugman and Herbert’s respective takedowns of David Brooks on St. Reagan and race. Even excluding Philadelphia (which shouldn’t be excluded), Reagan’s race-baiting is beyond dispute. It happened too often, for too long, and too systematically. The more interesting question is why modern-day defenders of the Order of St. Reagan (like David Brooks) continue to whitewash it. Why not just say, “Yes, that part was shameful, but that’s not the complete picture.” Let’s just be honest about it.

The answer, I think, hits upon a much larger and more interesting theme. Modern conservatives – the majority of which are certainly not racist – have successfully ignored the racist foundations of much of modern conservative political power and even thought. It’s not so much that the doctrines remain racist today – or that they lack non-racist interpretations. It’s that they are historically rooted in racist backlash. In this respect, Reagan’s dark side is simply one part of a much larger pattern.

The more conventional argument about ignoring race relates to the idea of race as “The Great Contradiction.” Quite literally, since the founding of this country, race has “contradicted” the American ideal. In 1776, we were the slave-holding nation that fought a war for liberty. In 1789, we created the most modern, rationalist, democratic government in history, but one that reduced black people to 3/5 of a person. We erect statues and monuments to great men, who happened to own slaves. In World War II, we rightly fought a war against hideous doctrines, while we tolerated Jim Crow. During the Cold War, we wrapped ourselves in rhetorical cloaks of freedom, while churches burned in Birmingham. Even today, we praise American markets and prosperity, while hurricanes (ever so briefly) force our eyes upon urban black poverty.

This is important stuff, but it’s not really what makes Brooks’ op-ed so significant. What’s significant is that Brooks – like so many before him – is trying to ignore the debt of modern conservatism to race. To be 100% clear on this, I am not accusing Brooks – or conservatives more generally – of being racist. I don’t think they are. The problem today is less racism, than an unwillingness to deal honestly with the consequences of prior racism (check out this old Legal Fiction piece on post-racism for more). Rather than coming to terms with this reality and moving on (like Mehlman did, to his credit), Brooks is pretending it didn’t happen.

Most obviously, Republican political power today rests on the race-based realignment that George Wallace first exploited. That’s why the term “Reagan Democrats” should actually be “Wallace Democrats.” Nixon and then Reagan both ruthlessly exploited white resentment to reshift the map. If you think these efforts don’t matter, check out how the bloc of Southern states voted in the 2000 and 2004 elections.

But more abstractly, much of modern conservative doctrine has foundations in racial issues. The clearest example is state rights and federalism. It’s true that progressives used states rights at times (e.g., to attack anti-labor federal judges in the early 20th century). But for pretty much all of American history (and certainly from 1948-88), it was code for race issues. Today, one can be a good federalist without thinking of race at all. But that doesn’t change the history of the ideology.

Paging LGM

by publius

Stay classy, Ann Althouse.

(I seem to remember that her line of argument worked well in third grade. Althouse, however, is foolishly ignoring other piercing weapons in the third-grade insult arsenal. For instance, never underestimate the power of a good "oh yeah, well you have cooties," or "oh yeah, well your mama [insert undesirable characteristic]."

Mercy... Uncle...Etc.

by publius

If the liberal blogosphere collectively stipulates that everything Scott Beauchamp said was wrong, can we stop hearing about it? What if I personally send every conservative blogger $20?

We give. Seriously. White flag. No more. Mercy.

UPDATE: I should say that while I (intentionally) don't know much about it, this in no way endorses the Malkinite masses' view. I doubt he's a speaking-freely soldier these days. But regardless, I don't care. Just make it stop. Uncle.

UPDATE 2: This is actually turning out to be pretty hilarious. Even K-Lo -- ! -- pretty much concedes these documents say nothing other than Beauchamp wants to be left alone. No retraction at all it seems. Oh well, maybe next time guys. I hear there's a paraplegic 6-year old cancer patient on a respirator somewhere currently enjoying free medical benefits.

Why Coulter is Better Than Malkin

by publius

If you haven’t read Michelle Malkin’s odd, rambling response to Ezra Klein’s debate challenge, it’s well worth the price of admission. Not so much for the substance, but for the sheer rage dripping from it. It’s also interesting from a psychological perspective. In fact, Malkin's response distinguishes her in interesting ways from Ann Coulter, who tends to get (wrongly) lumped together with Malkin in people’s minds. But Coulter is actually far more interesting, even if her writing is substantively more objectionable.

I’m obviously speculating, but I think Coulter is essentially an act. She’s extreme, sure. What she says is abhorrent, agreed. But I think she’s carved out a niche for herself where her interests aren’t necessarily aligned with the conservative movement. She’s a self-promoting outrage artist -- her goal is not to promote an agenda but to stoke the fires. For instance, I have no doubt she was nothing but ecstatic about the public reception to her Edwards comments.

The point is that when Coulter sits at home at night, I suspect she conceives of herself as an entertainer. A shock-artist, sure -- and someone who is deliberately offensive. But, an entertainer nonetheless. And more to the point, she knows what she’s doing. She’s fully in control.

Malkin, on the other hand, is a completely different animal. On some level, she fancies herself a serious, populist, investigative journalist. Her ambition is much greater than Coulter’s. For instance, she’s traveled to Iraq. She drives out to see the Frosts' house. She wants to break and advance stories like Rathergate, Beauchamp, etc.

Kevin Drum made the very astute point that the whole SCHIP uproar was not merely the rotten core surfacing, but was an attempt to relive the glory days of Rathergate. That was their moment -- the formula they use to obtain maximum glory. And that’s what Malkin wanted to accomplish. She desperately wanted to break news; to shame the hated press; to defeat those awful Dems.

Unlike Coulter, Malkin is on board with the movement. She’s a true believer. And she believes in herself as well -- she (subjectively) sees herself as having journalistic integrity, dedication to facts, etc. That’s why she’s gone off the deep end with this SCHIP stuff. The pushback has touched a nerve and it’s clearly getting to her. If Malkin only cared about stirring up outrage, she wouldn’t be this upset.

Coulter, by contrast, is smarter and far smoother. She couldn’t care less about any pushback -- she wants the pushback. That’s why it’s rarer to see Coulter engage in defensive, rage-filled rambling. Attacks don’t make her mad -- even if she’s factually wrong. She’s not a believer in the cause, or her journalistic integrity -- she’s an entertainer. Malkin, however, does care on some level. She craves to be respected. And she knows on some level that she’s been knocked down on the canvas -- and she’s deeply embarrassed. But, she’s decided to double down rather than acknowledge the mistake and move on to other battles. It’s as if she were the commander-in-chief or something.

Point Malkin

by publius

I originally agreed with Ezra Klein on this whole SCHIP business. But after reading this measured, articulate, and well-reasoned post, I think Malkin convinced me.

In all seriousness, that post is either the most brilliant conceptual art in the history of blogging, or it's the most rage-filled sputtering nonsense I've ever read (and I've read a lot of blog posts).

Why Armenia?

by publius

Somebody help me out with this Turkey/Armenian resolution. I feel like I’m missing something. It seems like such a colossally stupid thing to do. Turkey is a key ally, and this is a particularly important time for good relations. I’m not saying that should excuse human rights violations. But it did happen decades ago – it’s not like there’s an urgent pressing need for this (as opposed to say the horrors in Congo). What is more urgent is that Kirkuk may well explode soon, and Turkey/Kurdish tensions are simmering. Why gratuitously piss off Turkey?

I guess I’m most curious about the underlying politics driving this. I can understand the vote in France – I assume it had anti-EU undertones. But here, it seems weird that the whole thing is being driven by high Armenian populations in a couple of congressional districts (yes, Pelosi is one -- but is that enough?). Also, I know the Armenians have their own lobby, but are they really this powerful? So powerful that Congress will act even if it jeopardizes stability in northern Iraq.

What am I missing here? I feel like I’m watching Syriana having missed the first half hour.

[UPDATE: David Schraub has more - and takes a different view.]

The War

by publius

Ken Burns’ “The War” will likely trigger a new round of Greatest Generation celebration and WWII retrospectives. It’s strange -- I haven’t really heard any of it yet, but it’s already exhausting me. Those thoughts, however, make me feel ungrateful and guilty -- so I go through a self-imposed Maoist self-confessional and grudgingly reaffirm both my gratitude and my own generation’s hopeless inferiority. That, in turn, makes me irritated again at the “greatest” generation. And so it goes.

Eventually I stop and ask -- why the hell am I thinking this? It’s World War II – history will probably remember it as America’s greatest collective achievement. After much internal debate, I think I’ve figured it out. My irritation about WWII worship has nothing to do with WWII. It’s about Iraq. It’s always about Iraq.

Let me say up front that I am not belittling our sacrifices or achievements in World War II. With the possible exception of ending slavery, winning that war is our nation’s greatest achievement -- the crown jewel thus far of the American experience. My frustration, then, isn’t with the war -- it’s with the political use of the war in modern times. Remember that the war itself is conceptually distinct from the modern political effects of WWII celebrations 60 years later. Thus, criticizing how people use (or think about) the war today in 2007 is not criticizing the war itself, or the soldiers who fought that war.

With that disclaimer in mind, I’m beginning to wonder whether the unambiguous celebration of WWII causes more harm than good. What bothers me is that many of the sentiments underlying modern WWII worship are the same that led our country to march blindly into Baghdad in 2003. Specifically, there are at least two ways WWII -- as conceived today -- is unhelpful in this respect.

First, it is a celebration of war. Wars, however, should not be uncritically celebrated. We should be solemnly grateful for the result, and we should honor the courage -- but these are different things than celebrating war itself. War is always a horrible thing, even when it’s absolutely necessary (as it was then).

Modern remembrances too often make the act of war seem more romantic than it is. If WWII taught us anything, it’s that we should try our best to avoid war. Its horrors and devastation were simply beyond words. But instead of seeing those horrors and resolving to stop war, many Americans today see WWII as a vindication of war itself. Because war was necessary in that instance, it becomes necessary in all instances.

When neocons (et al.) cite Roosevelt and Truman, they’re generally trying to use necessary war from the past as an all-purpose justification for wars everywhere “evil” lurks. Sadly, the public (at least when they’re scared) seems to agree. Mass acceptance of war as a foreign policy tactic was one reason the administration could sell Iraq so easily. The American people didn’t put up much of a fight.

Second, WWII (as conceived today) tends to reinforce the image that America is an unambiguously good actor. One of the most dangerous tendencies in American thought is to treat foreign policy as a morality play in which we represent the Platonic ideal of good. To be sure, I love America. I love Big Macs and Elvis Presley. I believe in our underlying institutions, and I’m thankful that I was born here. I love my parents too -- but it doesn’t mean they’re perfect. You can criticize your parents even while you love them. The same is true for America.

No matter what you think of America, it’s done some terrible things in its history -- even in WWII. Putting aside the atomic bomb, there’s the fire-bombing of Tokyo. And Dresden. Beyond the war, there's the fact that we had state-sponsored apartheid for practically all of our history. That’s not to say America doesn’t have its good sides too. Of course it does. The freedom to write this blog is but one example.

The point though is that we need a measured, more realistic view of our selves and our own goodness. We need more humility. The lack of humility -- i.e., our excessive self-confidence in our goodness -- is one reason why Iraq was such an easy sell. For too many people, when our military does it, it can’t be wrong. (This view often stems from conflating emotional attachment to individual soldiers with support of the broader military policy itself. It's important to keep these distinct though).

Again, WWII was a great achievement. But it doesn’t make war the answer, and it doesn’t make us unambiguously good. In fact, treating the war more realistically -- understanding its horrors -- is a greater tribute to our soldiers past and present than treating it like a simple morality play.

*[To be fair, Burns claims his documentary shows these horrors. My critique, however, relates to the public conceptualization of WWII, not so much Burns’ documentary.].

Pirate Broadband for Burma?

by publius

Whatever else it’s accomplished, the Myanmar regime is vindicating Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith’s argument in Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. The book