Obsidian Wings

John, with all due respect, have you gone f--king insane?

by von

Even though Michelle Malkin reports it straight, I prefer to believe that John Hinderaker is engaging in some Swiftian satire in his double-barreled blast on the MSM's reporting on Katrina.  The alternative, of course, is that Hinderaker is f--cking insane.  He writes:

It's time for some accountability here. The conventional wisdom is that no one performed particularly well in the aftermath of Katrina--not local, state or federal authorities, and not considerable numbers of private citizens. But it now appears clear that the worst performance of all was turned in by the mainstream media. Congress should promptly investigate, and try to get to the bottom of the following questions: ...

No one is defending the MSM in these here quarters, friend; but the "worst performance" in Katrina's wake was that of the MSM?  Worse than Nagin's decision to leave New Orleans school buses useless and flooded, when they could have been ferrying trapped residents out of the city?  (You couldn't find drivers, you say?  Next time, start looking before the hurricane strikes.)  Worse than the finger pointing, the game of everyone-but-me-is-to-blame, played by Nagin on up?  Worse than FEMA's belated response?  Worse than a thousand dead?  Exactly whom did the MSM kill, John?  (FYI:  "our innocence" is not an acceptable answer.)

Yes, let's have Congress hold "hearings" to "investigate" the media.    'Cause we Republicans are all in favor of meaningless Congressional hearings, and prattling on in general.  Lean and mean government?  Don't want it; what we want is gover-tainment.  It'll be a killer show.  I'll bring the popcorn.

Please, please let this be satire.  I'm willing to accept that John Hinderaker says the occasional stupid thing, but I'm unwilling to accept that he's the Colossus of Idiotarianism, Eighth Wonder of the World, standing proudly over the fair seas of blog-topia.

And, so, it comes to this.

For those interested in trenchantism, read the always-readable Hilzoy on HIV and AIDs.  For those looking for meandering bloviating that goes nowhere, there's more below the fold.

A Horrible Story

by hilzoy

From the LATimes:

"Christine Maggiore was in prime form, engaging and articulate, when she explained to a Phoenix radio host in late March why she didn't believe HIV caused AIDS. The HIV-positive mother of two laid out matter-of-factly why, even while pregnant, she hadn't taken HIV medications, and why she had never tested her children for the virus.

"Our children have excellent records of health," Maggiore said on the Air America program when asked about 7-year-old Charlie and 3-year-old Eliza Jane Scovill. "They've never had respiratory problems, flus, intractable colds, ear infections, nothing. So, our choices, however radical they may seem, are extremely well-founded."

Seven weeks later, Eliza Jane was dead.

The cause, according to a Sept. 15 report by the Los Angeles County coroner, was AIDS-related pneumonia. These days, given advances in HIV care, it's highly unusual for any young child to die of AIDS. What makes Eliza Jane's death even more striking is that her mother is a high-profile, charismatic leader in a movement that challenges the basic medical understanding and treatment of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Even now, Maggiore, a 49-year-old former clothing executive from Van Nuys, stands by the views she has espoused on "The Ricki Lake Show" and ABC's "20/20," and in Newsweek and Mothering magazines. She and her husband, Robin Scovill, said they have concerns about the coroner's findings and are sending the report to an outside reviewer. "I have been brought to my emotional knees, but not in regard to the science of this topic," said Maggiore, author of an iconoclastic book about AIDS that has sold 50,000 copies. "I am a devastated, broken, grieving mother, but I am not second-guessing or questioning my understanding of the issue.""

(Belated) Happy Birthday, John Marshall!

by hilzoy

CharleyCarp notes in comments that yesterday was the birthday of chief Justice John Marshall, who gave us judicial review of federal and state laws, the doctrine that the federal government can do things that further, but are not explicitly included in, its enumerated powers, and various other constitutional doctrines whose importance is hard to overstate. He was 250 years old yesterday.

Happy (belated) birthday!

Still More Torture

by hilzoy

Human Rights Watch has a new report of detainee abuse in Iraq. (It has been covered by various newspapers, including the NYTimes and the Washington Post.) If anyone still believes the 'few bad apples' theory, these reports should test their faith. These are not untrained reservists. They are regular soldiers from the 82nd Airborne. According to HRW and their testimony:

"The soldiers came forward because of what they described as deep frustration with the military chain of command’s failure to view the abuses as symptomatic of broader failures of leadership and respond accordingly. All three are active duty soldiers who wish to continue their military careers. A fax letter, e-mail, and repeated phone calls to the 82nd Airborne Division regarding the major allegations in the report received no response."

One of the soldiers, a captain, spent seventeen months trying to clarify what sort of treatment was permissible, and to report this abuse through the chain of command, without success.

Some excerpts from the account of 'Sergeant A', who gives the clearest picture of the abuse itself (note: PUCs are Persons Under Control, i.e. prisoners):

"We got to the camp in August [2003] and set up. We started to go out on missions right away. We didn’t start taking PUCs until September. Sh*t started to go bad right away. On my very first guard shift for my first interrogation that I observed was the first time I saw a PUC pushed to the brink of a stroke or heart attack. At first I was surprised, like, this is what we are allowed to do? This is what we are allowed to get away with? I think the officers knew about it but didn’t want to hear about it. They didn’t want to know it even existed. But they had to. (...)

The "Murderous Maniacs" was what they called us at our camp because they knew if they got caught by us and got detained by us before they went to Abu Ghraib then it would be hell to pay. They would be just, you know, you couldn’t even imagine. It was sort of like I told you when they came in it was like a game. You know, how far could you make this guy goes before he passes out or just collapses on you. From stress positions to keeping them up f*cking two days straight, whatever. Deprive them of food water, whatever.

To “F*ck a PUC” means to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. (...)

Guard shifts were four hours. We would stress them at least in excess of twelve hours. When I go off shift and the next guy comes we are already stressing the PUC and we let the new guy know what he did and to keep f*cking him. We put five-gallon water cans and made them hold them out to where they got muscle fatigue then made them do pushups and jumping jacks until they passed out. We would withhold water for whole guard shifts. And the next guy would too. Then you gotta take them to the john if you give them water and that was a pain. And we withheld food, giving them the bare minimum like crackers from MREs [Meals Ready to Eat, the military’s prepackaged food]. And sleep deprivation was a really big thing.

Someone from [Military Intelligence] told us these guys don’t get no sleep. They were directed to get intel [intelligence] from them so we had to set the conditions by banging on their cages, crashing them into the cages, kicking them, kicking dirt, yelling. All that sh*t. We never stripped them down because this is an all-guy base and that is f*cked up sh*t. We poured cold water on them all the time to where they were soaking wet and we would cover them in dirt and sand. We did the jugs of water where they held them out to collapse all the time. The water and other sh*t… start[ed] [m]aybe late September, early October, 2003. This was all at Camp Mercury, close to the MEK base like 10 minutes from Fallujah. We would transport the PUCs from Mercury to Abu Ghraib. (...)

On their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all US soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the f*cking cook. He shouldn’t be in with no PUCs. The PA came and said to keep him off the leg. Three days later they transported the PUC to Abu Ghraib. The Louisville Slugger [incident] happened around November 2003, certainly before Christmas.

People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could f*ck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week. The PA would overlook it. I am sure they knew.

The interrogator [a sergeant] worked in the [intelligence] office. He was former Special Forces. He would come into the PUC tent and request a guy by number. Everyone was tagged. He would say, "Give me #22." And we would bring him out. He would smoke the guy and f*ck him. He would always say to us, "You didn’t see anything, right?" And we would always say, "No, Sergeant."

One day a soldier came to the PUC tent to get his aggravation out and filled his hands with dirt and hit a PUC in the face. He f*cked him. That was the communications guy.

One night a guy came and broke chem lights open and beat the PUCs with it. That made them glow in the dark which was real funny but it burned their eyes and their skin was irritated real bad."

(Parenthetically, how did we get to the point where people think that beating up prisoners is an acceptable way to deal with stress, but that stripping them, in an all-male camp, would be a bit too close for comfort to the edge of a real taboo?)

Nervous About the Numbers

by Charles

With all of the budgetary numbers flying around in the wake of Katrina, I did a little number crunching myself, but rather than just see the short term, I looked back the last twenty five years in five-year increments and then looked forward to 2010 (full disclosure:  I'm a CPA by training, not an economist).  Given the longer perspective, there are both encouraging and excouraging aspects to our fiscal future.  First, the spreadsheet, using CBO historical and projected figures:

Moral Clarity Strikes Again

by hilzoy

Via Mark Kleiman, the latest example of moral values in action:

"President Bush decided Wednesday to waive any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Washington's closest Arab ally in the war on terrorism, for failing to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers."

Why should a little detail like slavery interfere with a beautiful friendship?

(Note: I understand the need to make tough choices. I might take a different view of this if Saudi Arabia were, say, moving heaven and earth to root out al Qaeda. But it is not.)

Pork And Domestic Violence

by hilzoy

There are lots of plans to cut pork floating around, though in all likelihood all that will be adopted are token gestures. (When NASA announced Monday that it would be spending $100 billion to send people to the moon, I said: huh? Now? I have since concluded that it was announced so that it could be cut, with great fanfare. But if we're going to go in for gimmicks, why stop there? Why not announce that we're going to spend $500 trillion to send people to Jupiter, and then announce that we're going to realize huge savings by cutting that?) The best start, I think, would be to eliminate these two tax cuts, scheduled to take effect in January. 97% of these tax cuts would go to people making over $200,000 a year, and 54% to people making over a million dollars a year. The savings, over the first ten years that they will be fully in effect, would be $146 billion. This we can do. (The DLC has endorsed this.)

A Republican plan, "Operation Offset", is here (pdf); it proposes savings of about $526 billion over 10 years. As Matt Yglesias points out, the largest chunk of savings comes from Medicaid, which is to say: from denying health coverage to very poor people. Ezra Klein adds that Medicaid is hardly in a position to take these cuts, since a lot of health care for victims of Katrina is being paid for by the very program the Republicans propose to cut. Think Progress has a liberal alternative, focussing on repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, cutting farm subsidies, and cutting several weapons systems.

You can come up with your own plan using this budget simulator: I almost eliminated the entire federal deficit on my first try, and that despite the fact that I didn't cut the war in Iraq. (Here's why not.)

And then there's Porkbusters: an attempt by bloggers to identify pork ripe for slicing. I really like the idea of this. And I really like Slarti's having gone through the parts of the highway bill that concern Florida. I think this is great. However: there has to be some sort of quality control over the suggestions. For example: Porkbusters currently lists all spending under the Violence Against Women Act as pork. Why? The person who added it to the list explains:

"Since actual help for bona fide victims of domestic violence does not exist anywhere in these programs, why not start with one of the most damaging and money-wasting programs we have in the US? The only people this would negatively affect are those who benefit from VAWA now -- the people and agencies who run these clearly inefficient and counterproductive programs."

Ha ha ha. A joke, right? Wrong.

Ahh Love...We Value It in Foreigners

So I've been over at RedState having the same tired argument I've been having for years now about how insulting it is as a gay American to be told we're not being treated like a second-class citizen with regards to the marriage issue because our right to marry is intact. We just have to marry someone of the opposite sex.

I understand that most folks who are on the fence tend to withdraw from the argument, back into a more conservative stance, if the rhetoric gets too heated (that's natural, I realize), but I've got to get this out of my system once and for all.

Again, the argument forwarded by those opposed to gay marriage when the subject turns to rights is that the state is not denying gay Americans any rights, because we're just as entitled to marry someone of the opposite sex as the next American is.

To support this claim, however, they must then explain why it is that intimacy is not a requirement for a marriage to be considered "valid" in this country. In other words, marriages of convenience are legal, and if a gay American wants the benefits of marriage, no one will stop them from getting married (even to a stranger, even someone they have no intention of consummating the relationship with, or even living with) in order to secure those benefits.

This implies that the state places no value on the emotional commitment of the couple to each other, at least not enough to legislate against loveless marriage between strangers. And since that is legal, so the arguments go, gays are not being discriminated against.

There's a small problem with that, however, in that the state does in at least one instance make it crystal clear that loveless marriage between strangers is not equal to marriage between a committed couple. That instance is when one of the spouses is not a citizen. In those instances, the couple must prove to the government that theirs is a "real" marriage, that they entered into marriage in "good faith":

The Party Of Fiscal Conservatism

by hilzoy

In a recent comment, Edward wrote: "What we're learning is that the only party in favor of fiscal responsibility is the party out of power." With respect, this is not true. There is one party that has a consistent record of fiscal responsibility over the last few decades, and one party that has a consistent record of fiscal irresponsibility. It's important to be clear on this, especially since, as I prowl around the conservative blogs, I see various expressions of relief that for all his grand promises the other night, at least we can count on Bush not to engage in the sort of irresponsible spending that Democrats might propose. There is a myth out there according to which Democrats are the party of "big government", while Republicans are normally the party of fiscal conservatism, a party which is having an unfortunate momentary lapse. This is just not true.

Historical data on the budget deficit is here (and here as a percentage of GDP). Here are tables for discretionary spending in dollars and as a percentage of GDP. Here is historical data on the public debt from 1950-2000 and 1997-present. And here is data on the size of the Federal workforce from 1960-2000. This is all government data; it does not come from murky partisan sources. I have checked the graphs that follow against these figures; I present them so that you can too.

Here is a graph of the deficit over the last 35 years, in current and constant dollars:

As you can see, not only was Clinton's presidency a time of real fiscal responsibility; so was Carter's (check out the constant dollar graph.) By contrast, while the tax bill of the mid 80s helped a bit, the general trend under Republicans has been towards greater deficits, and George W. Bush has been a complete budget-buster.

Ha ha, you may say: Clinton, being a Democrat, was undoubtedly a big spender, who was saved from bloated deficits only because the booming economy allowed tax revenues to mask the fact that he was spending money like a drunken sailor. Um, no (pdf):

As you can see, under Clinton discretionary spending scarcely rose at all. As a percentage of GDP, it shrank from 8.2% in 1993 to 6.3% in 2000. If you look here, you'll see that domestic discretionary spending has increased more than twice as fast under George W. Bush as it did under Clinton -- and that's only through 2004; it doesn't include anything related to Hurricane Katrina, or even the pork-laden highway bill. It was also virtually unchanged, as a proportion of GDP, under Carter.

I could go on -- here, for instance, is data on the size of the Federal civilian workforce, excluding the Postal Service, from 1960 through 2000. Amazingly enough, it shows that between 1993 and 2000, this number dropped by 372,812 employees, or about 17.3% of its 1993 total. (Remember Clinton's 'Reinventing Government' program? It worked.) But the Federal civilian workforce also barely rose under Carter -- it grew by about 1,000 people per year, as opposed to about 7,500/year under Reagan.

One last statistic: as best I can figure it, using the debt data linked above, during the time that Reagan and the two Bushes were in office, the Federal government racked up about 68% of our current outstanding debt. While Clinton and Carter were in office, by contrast, it only accumulated about 23%. (I suspect this understates the difference between the two parties: I counted all of 1993 as Clinton and all of 2001 as Bush II, even though in both cases the budgets they started out working with had been passed under their predecessors. Clinton was more fiscally responsible than Bush 1, so sticking him with debts incurred under a Bush 1 budget hurts him; he was, of course, dramatically more responsible than Bush 2, so counting debt incurred under a Clinton budget to Bush 2 helps Bush.) The Republicans have been in office for 17 years, while the Democrats have only 12 between them, but that doesn't come close to accounting for their different records: per year, Republicans racked up about twice as much debt as Democrats.

Democrats support fiscal responsibility when they are out of power, and they not only support it but enforce it when they are in power. Republicans claim to support both fiscal responsibility and lower taxes when they are out of power, but their record in power completely belies the idea that they are committed to fiscal discipline. The idea that Republicans in power have anything at all to do with fiscal responsibility is a myth, and we should not believe it.