Obsidian Wings

Wanted: New Thread

by hilzoy

I have been busy for the past few days: term has started, and while I usually prepare for courses in a leisurely way, this time I've been making up for a few weeks spent on Oxycodone. (Since I'm teaching a class on, among other things, addiction, this might have come in handy, but I decided not to try to cultivate an addiction to painkillers.) This is why I've been a Bad, Bad Blogger recently. This is your new open thread, in which you can talk about whatever you want: Alito (the thought of someone with a breathtakingly expansive view of executive power on the Supreme Court just now horrifies me); the State of the Union address; whatever.

I didn't watch the speech myself, since I decided reading it would be quicker, and in any case these speeches bore me even when they are not made by someone whose words mean nothing. I just finished reading it, and I was struck by this:

"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos."

I'll leave aside the 'cloning in all its forms', which refers to reproductive cloning, which everyone wants to outlaw, but also to somatic cell nuclear transfer, an extremely useful way of deriving stem cells that I described here. (Scroll down to 'The Main Issue'.) What, exactly, does Bush mean by 'human-animal hybrids'? Any being that has human and animal parts? So much for Jesse Helms, who had a pig valve transplanted into him. (Don't laugh. Jesse Helms, like anyone who has received such a transplant, is technically a human/non-human chimera.) Does a "human-animal hybrid" mean a being that has been created not by putting a bit of animal into a human, or vice versa, but by breeding humans with animals? As far as I know, no one has proposed doing such a thing. So what does he have in mind?

Bear in mind when considering this that a lot of the very useful genetically engineered mice used by researchers have some human bit or other. They are not "human" in any morally significant sense -- they just have the odd human gene. Did Bush really mean to outlaw the Harvard OncoMouse and its various friends and relations? Or did it just make a good sound bite?

Your guess is as good as mine. Have at it.

Vital Freedom Lost In Uzbekistan

by hilzoy

Via TAPPED comes this alarming news:

"Authorities in Uzbekistan have banned fur-lined underwear after deeming it too sexy.

Sales of furry underwear have soared after temperature in the region fell below minus 20C.

But the government has now banned the lingerie saying they want to protect citizens from "unbridled fantasies" caused by wearing the soft fabric.

A textile company which makes the underwear for men and women has protested at the decision."

I can only assume that people in Uzbekistan wear baggy clothes. I don't think fur-lined underwear would provoke any remotely desirable fantasies if I were to try wearing it under my jeans. I suspect they might present laundry issues as well, though I don't think I want to follow that line of thought too far.

The same article contains news of Zimbabwean twins who believe God has ordered them to wear goat loincloths and live in a chicken run. They weren't allowed to wear their fur-lined loincloths either, though in their case the charge was indecency, not wearing clothes that might expose them to unbridled fantasies.

Oh Dear God No: Special Hamas Edition

by hilzoy

Hamas seems to have won the Palestinian elections. From the Washington Post:

"The radical Islamic group Hamas won 76 seats in voting for the first Palestinian parliament in a decade, election officials announced Thursday evening, giving it a huge majority in the 132-member body and the right to form the next government. The long-ruling Fatah movement won 43 seats.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and the rest of his Cabinet resigned, effectively acknowledging Hamas claims of a legislative majority before election officials released the results in a news conference.

"This is the choice of the people," Qureia told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "It should be respected."

The Hamas victory ends end the governing Fatah party's decade-long control of the Palestinian Authority. It also severely complicates Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' policy of pursuing negotiations with Israel under a U.S.-backed peace plan known as the roadmap, which conflicts with Hamas' platform in several key respects.

Hamas officials in Gaza City, where their victory was greatest, said the group has no plans to negotiate with Israel or recognize Israel's right to exist. Europe, Israel and the United States classify Hamas, formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, as a terrorist organization."

My attempts at analysis below the fold.

Is There Nothing This Administration Does Competently?

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.

The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.

Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.

One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.

Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.

But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.

Here's the bottom line, of course:

""What's sad about it is that, considering the destruction in the country, with looting and so on, we needed every dollar for reconstruction," said Wayne White, a former State Department official whose responsibilities included Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research organization."

Indeed. According to the latest Iraq Index (Jan. 23, 2006), crude oil production is still at 71% of prewar levels; electricity is at 88% or prewar levels, and is on for an average of 10 hours a day nationwide, but only 3.7 hours a day in Baghdad; Iraq's per capita GDP is only slightly over a thousand dollars a year; and the country still needs billions of dollars for further reconstruction.

And, of course, they won't be getting it from us.

I Smell Trouble

by Charles

There's trouble all right.  Trouble in Berkeley city.  This website spells out the next wave of malodorant activism.  Some excerpts:

• Body Odor Rights Activists of Berkeley California
• Fighting for your right to communicate naturally
• Deodorant is Barbarism!
• Body Odor can communicate what words can't. Our natural smells let others know our moods, our availability for sex, our essence, our dreams. To cover it up or wash it away is like sewing your mouth shut.
• 2006 Goals:  Destroy deodorant manufacturing plants.
• Vaginal odor rights are our next threshhold to cross.
• Oppressive douche companies must be removed from mother earth.

They're inspired by ELF and they're itching for a "lawsuit against America".  Or maybe they're just itching.  For the record, I don't use deodorant.  I also don't know if this is satire or real, but either way it made me laugh.

Alito: Designer of Our Return to Monarchy

by Edward_

I was thinking today as I read an anti-Roe advertisement in the Times that the battle over abortion is like the war against drugs...a farcical bit of theater that does very little to address the supposed moral issues involved and ultimately only serves to punish the poor. As this connection became clearer to me, I realized that I have been totally off-base about what I had assumed was the true danger behind Alito being confirmed for SCOTUS. Circuses like "the war on drugs" and abortion battles don't occupy the minds of the most powerful people in the world, not once the cameras are turned off anyway. And despite his rallying cry to the anti-Roe crowds that they "will prevail," it struck me that Bush's keen interest in Alito has nothing to do with whether or not only those who can afford a plane ticket to New York or Europe (if it comes to that) will be able to get an abortion in this country. It couldn't.

So what then? What was driving his support for this choice that he knows will further divide the nation? I had no idea.

Andrew Sullivan has some idea, however. In a column outlining the extraordinary use of "signing statements" by President Bush ("In eight years, Ronald Reagan used signing statements to challenge 71 legislative provisions, and Bill Clinton 105. [...] In five years, President Bush has already challenged up to 500 provisions...."), he illustrates why Bush has never bothered to veto a single bill during his presidency. He doesn't need to:

Questions About a Nuclear-Tipped Iran

by Charles

In thinking about an Iran with enriched uranium and atomic bombs in the near future, all sorts of questions have bubbled to the surface.  The answers are my best educated guesses.  If you have different answers, tell my why. I’m just trying to mentally work this through.  In no particular order:

In which I propose a solution

Kevin Drum had an interesting post about a subject I know things about:

Today's lecture on Republican pandering to special business interests concerns the soon-to-be-extinct legal doctrine known as "equitable subrogation." You're excited already, aren't you?

Here's the nickel explanation. Suppose you're in a car accident and you suffer a bunch of damages: medical bills, lost wages, lawyers' fees, and so forth. Your insurance company pays your medical bills, and then you sue the other guy and recover damages. What happens to the money you recover?

Your insurance company naturally thinks the first priority should be to repay them for the medical bills they covered. However, anyone who's not a paid spokesman for the insurance industry probably disagrees. After all, the insurance company has been collecting premiums for years and has enormous financial resources, while the victim is the one who's actually suffering from both physical injury and financial distress. Common sense suggests that the injured party should get first crack at the dough, and only after he's "made whole" should the insurance company get repaid. This is the doctrine of equitable subrogation.

That's fair, and it's also the law in most states. But of course, insurance companies hate it, and we all know that the insurance industry's best friend is the Republican Party. Isn't it about time for all those campaign contributions to start paying off?

You betcha! And the magic answer to the insurance industry's woes is "ERISA," a federal law that has grown since 1974 to oversee 130 million workers covered by employer pension and health plans — and oh-by-the-way, a law that sweeps away any pesky state regulation in its path. Wouldn't it be nice if ERISA were amended to get rid of equitable subrogation and give insurance companies first crack at any money recovered in legal settlements?

Back when I was a paralegal I worked for firm which specialized in insurance subrogation.  Typically subrogation involves suing the person who did the harm to get back insurance money.  A classic case would be: 

Person N negligentily starts a fire which destroys Building B.  The building was owned by O and insured by Company I.  Company I pays O for the damages (up to the limits of the insurance) and then Compnay I sues Person N to try to get some of the money back. 

This usually works ok in property cases because there isn't much in the way of general damages.  Everything is of the quantifiable "special damages" type.  (In theory, though if you want to see the problems even there you can talk to me about the case where we had to value multiple vineyard's wines when they were destroyed in a warehouse while they were aging). 

In a personal injury case, a large part of the award can sometimes be "general damages" which tend to be harder to quantify things like pain and suffering.  And one really annoying issue is that some jurisdictions or some judges won't make the jury break down the difference between the two. 

On the nuts and bolts of things, I'm really torn.  I've seen equitable subrogation where the plaintiff gets a huge recovery and still claims not to be "made whole".  Then you the insurance company has to litigate the "made whole" issue--a real waste of time and money on all sides.  It ends up being a real crap-shot with no fixed idea of what "made whole" means.  The Republicans have accurately identified a real problem with how the insurance system and tort system interface, but their proposed solution (to eliminate the whole idea of equitable subrogation) is stupid. 

If I were designing a the system  I would define "made whole" (for purposes of insurance subrogation ONLY) as some multiple of the total special damages. This would not be total special damages paid, but rather total special damages incurred. It would work like this:

You get in a car accident where a UPS driver hits your car. You total out-of-pocket expenses are $100,000. This includes medical bills, car repairs, lost wages while recovering, a rental car during repairs, etc. For some reason or other (perhaps policy limits) your insurance only covers $50,000 of that.

You sue UPS and for some reason they foolishly don't settle. You are awarded $500,000 in total damages. $100,000 for special damages (the expenses) and $400,000 for general damages (pain and suffering or perhaps punitive damages because UPS should have know this particular guy was an unsafe driver).

Let's say we set the "made whole" multiple was 3 times special damages. (This could clearly be some other number but I think 3 is probably pretty fair.) So everything until 3 times the special damages amount is not subject to subrogation. In this case the threshold would be $300,000. Money after that has to be paid back to the insurance company until their payments are fulfilled. That would be the next $50,000 after $300,000. We could also mandate that it be paid on a less than dollar for dollar basis. Perhaps the insurance company would be paid on a 50 cents per dollar over $300,000 basis until it was fully repaid.

In any case, if I were designing a system it would probably work like that--it acknowledges the reality of general damages, while not letting plaintiffs generally off the hook if they get fairly large payouts and don't feel that they are "made whole" but the recovery that they got. 

Moral Values In Theory And Practice

In theory, from George W. Bush's call to anti-abortion activists today:

"You believe, as I do, that every human life has value, that the strong have a duty to protect the weak, and that the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence apply to everyone, not just to those considered healthy or wanted or convenient. These principles call us to defend the sick and the dying, persons with disabilities and birth defects, all who are weak and vulnerable..."

In practice:

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Where Are The Right-Wing Bloggers?

by hilzoy

While I was over at Michael Hiltzik's Golden State doing research for my last post, I found another interesting post. Excerpt:

"At some point over the last few days, while researching my latest columns on the Bush Medicare fiasco, I became aware of a curious void in the harmonic fabric of commentary on the issue — as if the entire brass section had gone out for a smoke during a performance of Gotterdamerung (sic, alas).

It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. While the absolute chaos associated with the Medicare drug program’s rollout has made the front pages of newspapers across the country, inspiring governors of more than two dozen states to undertake emergency action, the right-wing blogosphere has scarcely printed one word about the program. Thousands, possibly millions of American citizens have been hurt, many of them in life-threatening ways. Patients, doctors, and pharmacists are outraged. State governments are committing tens of millions of dollars to bail out the feds.

Yet, from the right: Silence."

Hiltzik searched a lot of right-wing blog sites. Hugh Hewitt, PowerLine, LGF, Captain Ed, and more all had no posts on Medicare Part D at all. Pajamas Media had one, but it was by Max Sawicky, one of their few left-wing bloggers. He did find two right-wing bloggers who had addressed the issue:

"Eventually, however, my spade, thrust into the soft earth, sent up a hard metallic clank. Michelle Malkin, one post, January 19, quoting GOP House leadership candidate John Shadegg calling the program "one of the most disastrous things we've done." Then came Glenn (Instapundit) Reynolds: Two posts, including a comment endorsing a description of the program as a "debacle." For this, Malkin and Reynolds have to rank as the Nellie Bly and Jacob Riis of their crowd."

I can add a few more. RedState has five posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) that mention the prescription drug benefit. Admittedly, most of them mention it in passing, and all of them express disapproval of it because it's pork, not because it's bad policy. Moreover, none of RedState's posts -- and none of the ones Hiltzik found -- comment in any way on the details of the prescription drug plan itself, or of the massive problems with its implementation. Moreover, Malkin's post and three of RedState's are about conference calls with candidates for the Republican House leadership, calls in which the topic of Medicare happened to come up.

LaShawn Barber: zero. Wizbang: zero. Protein Wisdom: zero. I can't find a search engine on The Anchoress' site, but there's nothing on Medicare that I can find in any of her categories that seem even remotely relevant, or since Jan. 10. (I would have looked further back, but there are limits to my fortitude, especially since, while checking, I discovered that the Anchoress thinks she has what she calls an inner gay-man. I shudder to think what he must be like.) Polipundit has one mention of the plan in January; oddly, it first quotes this from the Washington Times: "State officials agreed to cover drug costs for poor Vermont senior citizens for a month after [the] new federal Medicare prescription drug program rejected some of their claims", and then adds:

"Nice.

I’d say that’s proof positive the federal Rx drug benefit won’t be the disaster many {non-voting} conservatives had feared.

Not that it was a good idea, mind you. Not at all. But, still, reflexive gloom-and-doom mongering never won a single election."

I'm not sure in what possible world the fact that states have to step in to fix a federal plan is good news, but hey: at least they mentioned it.

Ankle Biting Pundits has one post, which reads, in its entirety:

"Robert M. Goldberg is urging Republicans and conservatives to rethink their unhappiness about the new Medicare Part D program. I think he’s right. No, I’m not a fan of the plan, per se. But the alternative is price controls on pharmaceutical products. And if you want to see what a really screwed up healthcare system looks like, just impose price controls and watch what happens.

The question for Republicans is whether or not they are going to allow dissatisfaction with Part D to result in more socialized medicine. Obviously, I urge them that they don’t."

So who have I missed? And what accounts for this deafening silence?