Obsidian Wings

Facts Speak Louder than Flying Bucks

I have the unpleasant task here of disagreeing with a few of my co-authors. For me they've got their priorities out of order. I conclude this from what I view as, in this overall context, splitting hairs over what constitutes a gulag in comparison to what occurs in Guantanamo. The goal of the AI report is not to bring down Bush or any of the other paranoid fantasies I'm reading across the blogosphere. It is simply to stop the acts we know are happening, regardless of whether we disagree about why they're happening. It is perhaps telling (and shameful) that seemingly all our Vice-President or President can do in response to criticism is join in the bashing of one of the world's most altruistic organizations, but, my friends, these are the facts:

TPM Cafe, And Blogs More Generally

by hilzoy

Today, Josh Marshall opened his new site, TPM Cafe. It is really, really interesting. Thus far, I particularly like America Abroad, the foreign policy section, and John Edwards' guest blog, as well as the main "Coffee House" section. (Note: in this section, a lot of the posters are commenting on one another's posts, so it helps to start at the beginning. To do this, go down to the bottom of the page and click what it confusingly called "Next n", where n is the number of posts you choose to display when you sign up. Likewise, 'previous n' gets you back to the later posts.) Good stuff which should finally lay to rest the right-wing claim that Democrats have no ideas.

I think TPM cafe is interesting in a way that goes beyond the interest of its various posts, though; and to explain why, I'm going to have to back up and say a few things about what I think of blogs in general. I am normally skeptical of claims that blogs are revolutionizing this or that. I love them, of course; and I particularly love the fact that they let anyone at all write commentary on whatever they like, and acquire an audience through the simple fact of having something interesting to say. Blogs let me know about all sorts of interesting things I would otherwise have missed, and they provide interesting commentary and insight that otherwise wouldn't exist at all. But this, while wonderful, is not (to my mind) enough to warrant all the breathless rhetoric about blogs that I periodically read.

But there is one thing that blogs can do that I think is as important as allowing everyone who has a computer to join a huge ongoing conversation, but that is not generally remarked on, and it has to do with rectifying what I see as huge informational gaps in the world of most citizens.

The Day After Memorial Day Post

By popular demand, here's a post on Memorial Day:

1. Throughout human history, some people have been fortunate enough to live their entire lives in relative peace, dealing with the ups and downs of everyday life until, hopefully at a ripe old age, they pass away, with a legacy behind them and only God knows what ahead of them. These lives were filled with securing food and shelter and what luxuries fortune alloted them; filled with celebrating births, unions, and seasonal holidays; and in between filled with fighting disease, acts of nature, injuries and perhaps their spouses or in-laws, but nothing more widespread than that.

2. But those in group 1 are the rare few. Most other humans are at some point in their lives touched by war. The fortunate among them only hear of the horrors of the front line, but few escape knowing someone, even if only by their name, who died in such conflicts. And usually war makes them re-evaluate the ups and downs of everyday life and reconsider the choices they make.

3. Still others come face to face with the horrors of war and live to remind us of the rapes, the torture, the maimings, the bombings, the degredations, and the fear. These people carry those memories the rest of their lives. Some adjust and go on to realize triumphs. Others never quite get over their experiences, moving among us as enduring symbols of those horrors.

4. And, of course, there are those who come face to face with the horrors and don't live to tell of it. Some of those people are soldiers. It's they whom we honor with Memorial Day. It's an honorable tradition, respecting those who have made the greatest sacrifice for their country. Those who have put on a uniform and marched into battle so that most of us can remain in group 2 and apsire to see our posterity live in group 1. On Memorial Day we pause to reflect. The President places a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier. We have parades. We wave to or salute the members of the armed services we encounter in the streets or buy them a drink if we meet them in a bar.

All of this serves us well. But I wish we did all that AND honored the dead in a more lasting way. I'd rather we make Memorial Day also a nationwide opportunity to reconsider the choices we make. In addition to the soldiers, I wish we honored the civilians in group 4 and those in group 3. I wish we would also focus on the horrors of war, not just the sanitized pomp and ceremony.

We celebrated Memorial Day in my house by watching "Sometimes in April." (h/t crionna). There it was in two hours of gut-wrenching drama--a depiction of war and its consequences for everyone involved: the soldiers, the politicians, the church, the civilians, the victims, the victimizers, the outside world, and the nation's own future. My partner's first reaction when the film was over, thinking of how his own country is perched on a similar precipice to the one Rwanda sat on in 1994, was to insist that school children the world over should be forced to watch this film. People should be forced to face the horrors of war before their ambitious, heartless, power-grubbing politicians lead them there under the guise of nationalism or religion or whatever. In short, Memorial Day would honor the dead best by striving to increase the numbers of our soliders (not to mention our civilians) counted among the fortunate few in group 1.

Don't Cry For Us, Argentina...

by hilzoy

After spending a delightful weekend birding, gardening, and reading about debt crises in various countries, I decided to check back in with blogs; and what should I find on Ezra' Klein's site but this truly terrifying graph from the GAO:

That expanding blue portion is debt service, and this graph shows it taking up almost all government revenues by 2040. Put another way, this graph shows somewhere around 16% of our entire Gross Domestic Product going to service our national debt. However, things are worse than this graph lets on. It assumes that all of Bush's tax cuts are made permanent, and that no other changes are made to the tax system. This means that it is not assuming a fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax, which most people think will happen, and which will reduce revenues. It also assumes that discretionary spending grows only as much as GDP, which most people think is unrealistic. In addition, if you check out the modeling assumptions, the GAO has assumed that interest rates remain unchanged. As they note, this is unlikely, especially if we rack up debt at this alarming rate. They also assume that productivity growth remains unchanged, which is also unlikely if we keep running massive deficits.

Bush's tax cuts are unsustainable, and they must be repealed. The sooner we do this the better: leaving this task for later means accumulating more debt in the interim, and thus having to raise taxes higher in the future. And this should not be an issue dividing liberals and conservatives: spending something like one seventh of our GDP on debt service is a terrible idea whatever one's political persuasion. Nor will spending cuts alone do the trick, especially if we don't want to cut one of the largest parts of discretionary spending: spending on defense and homeland security. To put the tax cuts in perspective, here's another chart, this one comparing the cost of the tax cuts, once they're fully phased in, to several entire government departments:

As you can see, we could eliminate the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development and the EPA, and still not save enough money to make up for Bush's tax cuts to the top 1% alone.

We are mortgaging our nation's future, and leaving ourselves vulnerable to really serious problems. We should stop. My party worked hard to bring the deficit down, and we put a lot of our goals on hold to do so. Now that the Republicans are in charge, they should do the same. They claim to be patriotic, but I do not see how one shows a love of one's country by bankrupting it.

The Amnesty Travesty

by Charles

Rather than respond in comments, I thought I'd write some of my thoughts here as a counterpoint to Edward's earlier post as it pertains to Amnesty International.  The sentence most meriting a response is this:

It seems to me that Amnesty's point was that as the world's remaining superpower, the US bears a bigger responsibility than North Korea or Iran to set an example.

Unless it has changed its vision, Amnesty International has no business making such a point:

AI’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.

Emphases mine.  There's no cherry-picking here, and there's no singling out a particular nation because that nation happens to be really, really powerful.  The vision of Amnesty International is one standard applied to every person.  To the extent that the leadership of Amnesty International has focused its ire on a country that has done more than any other on earth to advance freedom and human rights, it is an organization that has lost its bearings.  To put it more forthrightly, the perspective of the leadership of Amnesty International is so whacked and so skewed that it's credibility as a human rights organization is in mortal peril.  Consider the statement made by the Secretary General, Irene Khan:

The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law.

The Washington Post put it best:

Open Thread: Rilkefan Gets Married!

by hilzoy

This evening's open thread is in honor of rilkefan and, well, maybe we should say the rilkebride: we wish them all the happiness the world has to offer. Rilkefan will, I think, never be at a loss for words, so he will not need the Victorian Sex Cry Generator (via Amygdala), but someone else might, so I post it here.

Brother Rail Gun suggested a good open thread topic, other than congratulating rilkefan: vacation reading. I am currently in the middle of a book on the Argentinian debt crisis, which is boring. What about you?

On The Rules

by hilzoy

As I noted in comments last night, our posting rules prohibit incivility, and we have interpreted this as a ban on all personal attacks on posters and commenters alike, by posters and commenters alike. You can, of course, point out the factual errors and/or argumentative flaws in someone's reasoning, but you cannot call them a liar, accuse them of having no intellectual integrity, or anything of the kind. We do this because we are trying to create a place where liberals and conservatives can argue their positions with both passion and respect, and this rule is an essential part of maintaining that kind of environment.

However, I feel compelled to point out that there are many ways of getting your point across that do not involve incivility. Suppose, for instance, that I said something that you felt was disingenuous. You might begin your reply by asking me how I had enjoyed my stay in that unelectrified woodland hut or remote desert island where I had spent the past few days, getting away from the trivial concerns of the day and communing only with nature -- or so, you might add, you assumed, since I had somehow failed to notice any of the following 168 news stories contradicting one of my central claims. (Then you list them all.) Note the following features of this approach:

• You do not insult me. Moreover, the irony depends entirely on assuming, for the duration of your comment, that I merely made an innocent mistake.


• It takes much more imagination to write this sort of comment than to simply call me a liar. Exercising your imagination in this way does you good; insulting someone does not.


• This sort of comment is much more fun for everyone else to read. Insults are boring.


• If I have, in fact, been on a desert island, you have left me room to say so. The ensuing conversation will be much more pleasant than it would have been had you accused me of lying, and I then replied that I had been shipwrecked.


• If you're wrong about me, you will look dumb. This is as it should be: people who make accusations should be absolutely sure of what they're saying, and if they're wrong, it is they who should look foolish. There are few things that look more foolish than withering irony directed at someone who doesn't deserve it. When in doubt, I recommend the safer "Perhaps you didn't see this...

The real reason for this post, however, is that I wanted an excuse to cite this letter by CS Lewis to a friend who had said he would get some opera tickets, and then forgot. It is, in my view, a classic of the genre. Note the crucial rhetorical role played by the assumption that the recipient is a man of decent moral sensibilities. Of course, it only works if you're right (or if, as here, it's a joke), and if you can do a really good imitation of Samuel Johnson.

"Sir,

I have read your pathetical letter with such sentiments as it naturally suggests, and write to inform you that you need expect from me no ungenerous approach. It would be cruel if it were possible, and impossible if it were attempted, to add to the mortification which you must now be supposed to suffer. Where I cannot console, it is far from my purpose to aggravate; for it is part of the complicated misery of your state that while I pity your sufferings I cannot innocently wish them lighter. He would be no friend to your reason or your virtue, who would wish to pass over so great a miscarriage in heartless frivolity or brutal insensitivity. (...)

As soon as you can, pray let me know through some respectable acquaintance in what quarter of the globe you intend to sustain that irrevocable exile, and perpetual disgrace to which you have condemned yourself. Do not give in to despair. Learn from this example the fatal consequences of error, and hope in some humbler station and some distant land that you may yet become useful to your species." (from this book)

A Break From Your Regularly Scheduled Blogging

In part to remind myself that most of the blather over the judicial nomination wars is just that -- blather -- I've been re-reading Roger K. Newman's remarkable biography of Justice Hugo Black.  Justice Black, as some may know, nearly had his 1937 nomination to the Supreme Court derailed by rumors that he had been a member of the KKK (rumors that were, in fact, true). 

But the story of how a former Klansman became one of the great Supreme Court Justices of all time is old hat.  What strikes my fancy today is a gem hidden in the book's footnotes regarding the Roosevelt administration's apparent obliviousness to (then, Senator) Black's past in the Klan.  (The more things change ....)  As the dirt on Black came out, a reporter expressed shock to Joe Kennedy that Black had not informed FDR tha the had been a Klansman (p. 251): 

Kennedy's reply (cleaned up for publication) was "If Marlene Dietrich asked you to make love to her, would you tell her you weren't much good at making love?"

(Another gem:  Right after Justice Black was confirmed, a reporter remarked to Mrs. Black about a large family gathering that the Black's had held over the holidays.  "Yes.  Quite a gathering of the clan," she said before realizing.)

Bolton: Remixed, Revised, Reassessed

Readers of this blog know that, after some wavering, I came out against John Bolton as UN Ambassador.  Specifically:

An effective UN Ambassador must be believed.  He or she must not only be an honest broker, but must also be perceived as an honest broker.  An ambassador must enjoy the cut-and-thurst of reasoned debate and diplomacy.  Under these standards, Bolton's apparent disregard for counsel, dissent, or the facts would fatally compromise his nomination in any era.  In this era, after the unkept promise that we would find WMDs in Iraq, Mr. Bolton's failings are all the more glaring. 

Some things -- like the US's national credibility -- are larger than one man.  It may be unfair and it may be unjust, but it is in the national interest to respectfully reject Mr. Bolton's nomination, and call on him to serve his nation in a different capacity.

I hold to the view that Mr. Bolton's reputation is likely to make him a largely-ineffective UN Ambassador and, ironically, will make it almost impossible for him to do that which the President (and I) would like our UN Ambassador to do:  reform the UN.  Yet, at this stage of the game, I have to ask what, if any, benefit is brought by further delaying the Bolton confirmation vote. 

Were Bolton nominated for Secretary of State or were he the Prince of Darkness then I would gladly demand that he be blocked at every term.  But that's not the case.  Bolton is nominated for Ambassador to the UN and, for all his faults and alleged inadequacies, he is not Lucifer.  Moreover, Gregory Djerejian persuasively argues that sending Bolton to the UN is nothing like the end of the world:

Everyone who matters in Washington knows what job Bolton really wanted. That's the one Robert Zoellick currently occupies. The reason he is going to be at Turtle Bay rather than the 7th Floor is because of his alleged insubordination, his aggressive reading of intelligence, his occasional undiplomatic behavior. He's being punished, in other words, to a fashion. Add to this that he won't be in a position to adopt his preferred reading of the intel at Turtle Bay (he will present to the world community the intel he is told to present by Washington), that he is bright, that he is the President's nominee and that the President should get deference in his personnel selections (particularly in foreign policy) barring manifest showstoppers (I've read TWN pretty regularly; and haven't see one yet), that he can do a "Nixon goes to China" at the world body (one in dire need of straight talk and reformist action)--given all this I think the pendelum of opinion is swinging towards Bolton among mainstream, internationalist Republicans.

.... I've waited, I've tried to be judicious as I can, I've weighed the evidence. I've seen the Bolton brouhaha get increasingly shrill, partisan and nasty. I've seen dark, sleazy, inappropriate intimations about his personal life. I've seen a few more tales of aggressive handling of intel here and there. Yes, Armitage had to contain him robustly. He was a Cheney mole at State. But that's not an issue anymore. It's moot, really. In all this, I've seen no disqualifying smoking gun. Would I support this man for Deputy Secretary of State? No, I wouldn't. Do I think he may make a decent UN Ambassador? Yes, I do. Therefore, for what it's worth, count B.D. as a Bolton supporter as the vote nears.

I think Djerejian grossly overrates Bolton's ability to play Nixon to the UN's China:  the Chinese were willing to listen to Nixon; I sincerely doubt that most folks at the UN are capable of listening to Bolton with unjaded ears, given his reputation.  Nor will I join Djerejian in endorsing Bolton.  Yet, as the process drags out and continues to deprive the US of UN representation at a crucial time in the negotiations with Iran and North Korea -- not to mention gets nastier and sillier -- I increasingly find myself in the "don't care" category as to Bolton. 

Do I still think he'll be ineffective?  Yeah, I do:  I think the odds are that he'll fail. But odds are not certainty, and the time has come to get out of the way.  Bolton should receive an up or down vote at the Senate's next earliest convenience -- and he should be confirmed.

Chutzpah

by hilzoy

Via Angry Bear: CNN reports the following:

"Thousands of former Enron Corp. employees will share $85 million in insurance proceeds to compensate for pensions lost when the energy giant collapsed into bankruptcy, a federal judge ruled this week. (...)

Lynn Sarko, a lawyer for the former Enron workers, said the settlement money would be paid to the employees in proportion to their losses suffered from holding Enron stock in their pension portfolios.

"There will be people who get tens of thousands of dollars," Sarko said."

This is good news: at a time when people who have worked hard all their lives are being stripped of the pensions they are owed in bankruptcy proceedings, a judge actually decides to give some of a corporation's assets to its workers, who had a lot of stock in Enron not (or: not just) because of their bad investment decisions, but because of company policies:

"Enron workers ... had, on average, 62% of their 401(k) savings tied up in Enron stock. Those savings were largely wiped out because the plan offered little opportunity to diversify. Like many corporate plans, Enron's didn't allow participants to transfer stock that had been given to them as part of a matching contribution until age 50. And Enron officials actively encouraged workers to buy Enron stock. In a memo in August, Lay told employees he'd "never felt better about the prospects of the company. Our growth has never been more certain." Enron workers were further hamstrung by Enron's switching of plan administrators and freezing of all asset shifting within 401(k) accounts for at least 10 days, just as Enron stock was taking its dive. The result was ruin, as Enron sank from $90 to under $1."

But here's the amazing part of today's story:

"U.S. District Court Judge Melinda Harmon formally approved the settlement between Enron's insurers and about 20,000 former employees Tuesday despite opposition from former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay and former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling.

The two former executives, who will face criminal trial in January 2006 on charges including conspiracy and fraud at the company, had argued the funds came from Enron's corporate insurance policies that were to be used to help pay for their legal defense."

Ah. I see. The executives whose bad, and possibly criminal, decisions bankrupted the company, who sold their Enron stock while prices were still high while advising their employees to invest in it, and who then froze employee 401(k)s when the stock began to tank, think that paying for their criminal defense is more important that providing some measure of restitution to the workers whose savings they wiped out.

Obviously, Lay and Skilling should have lawyers to defend them. But it takes a lot of gall to say that when their bankrupt company's assets are being divided up, paying for their defense should be a top priority.