Obsidian Wings

130% of the Whole

--by Sebastian

It is primary season in California.  As a result I have been treated to many campaign ads smashing candidate (and state treasurer) Angelides for wanting to dramatically raise taxes.  In these ads, Westley takes what is normally the Republican anti-tax position and drives it home with a long and pricey list of separate taxes that Angelides has proposed.  The normal dynamic when talking about government budgets involves Democrats saying that voters want bigger and better government services while Republicans whine that voters want lower taxes.  Democrats appeal to the 60% of voters who want more services while Republicans appeal to the 70% of people who want lower taxes.  Unfortunately for the country that is 130% of the whole.   

Democrat candidates may suggest that higher taxes are necessary, but they don't talk about raising them enough to cover the new programs they propose.  Republicans want to slash taxes, but never propose enough spending cuts to bring the budget into balance.  The problem is that voters are not attentive enough to economic trade-offs and that politicians exploit this by obscuring the trade-offs. 

I've been wanting to write about this depressing fact for about a month, but I didn't have anything constructive to add other than noticing it.  But recently I've read an interesting post by Jon Henke which addresses the subject. 

Government does fulfill a public demand; it also extracts a public cost. In a free market economy, we balance these competing interests with the price mechanism.

A price mechanism is the process by which a market ensures an efficient allocation of resources - as prices rise or decline, consumers react by altering the quantity demanded. Unfortunately, there's not much of a market mechanism for determining the marginal utility of additional government spending, so voters simultaneously want more benefits and lower taxes - ultimately contradictory demands. Because consumers always overdemand goods and services that are underpriced—or paid for by someone else—this helps the Party (i.e., Democrats) that promises more public benefits rather than the Party (that once upon a time) promised less.

The path forward for libertarians and fiscal conservatives, then, is accept that voters will demand benefits, but to ensure that voters feel the costs of additional government through a Price Mechanism for Government.

He suggests two important changes:  increased transparency and a floating tax rate.  The increased transparency suggestions should be able to gain traction from the left and right.  Whether you believe that the country would be better served with higher or lower service levels and higher or lower tax levels, we should be able to agree that a clearer understanding of where the money goes and how it is collected will make for better decision making.   The suggestion that each appropriation gets a separate vote is a good one though I'm not entirely sure where you would make the break for separateness purposes.  An abortion expenditure pretty clearly doesn't go with a defense appropriation, but do you have separate votes for each different highway or can you bundle a highway bill?  That question could be thorny, but could ultimately be fruitful.  A floating tax rate could do a lot of good if paired with good transparency (if you can find out why your taxes went up or down).  It doesn't even have to be a flat rate (gentle graduated taxes combined with an EITC could be progressive, less obnoxious and cheaper to administer than many welfare programs, and not deform economic behaviour much).  If something like that was implemented, I would suggest that the new rates be announced a year in advance, to facilitate planning by the electorate. 

In any case it is clear that trying to to fulfill the contradictory wishes of the electorate doesn't really work.  Food for thought on what to do about it. 

Speaking Of Identity Cards...

by hilzoy

Via TAPPED, a story from the NYT:

"The Department of Homeland Security has invested tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of labor over the last four years on a seemingly simple task: creating a tamperproof identification card for airport, rail and maritime workers.

Yet nearly two years past a planned deadline, production of the card, known as the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, has yet to begin.

Instead, the road to delivering this critical antiterrorism tool has taken detours to locations, companies and groups often linked to Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican who is the powerful chairman of the House subcommittee that controls the Homeland Security budget.

It is a route that has benefited Mr. Rogers, creating jobs in his home district and profits for companies that are donors to his political causes. The congressman has also taken 11 trips — including six to Hawaii — on the tab of an organization that until this week was to profit from a no-bid contract Mr. Rogers helped arrange. Work has even been set aside for a tiny start-up company in Kentucky that employs John Rogers, the congressman's son.

"Something stinks in Corbin," said Jay M. Meier, senior securities analyst at MJSK Equity Research in Minneapolis, which follows the identification card industry, referring to the Kentucky community of 8,000 that has perhaps benefited the most from Mr. Rogers's interventions. "And it is the sickest example of what is wrong with our homeland security agenda that I can find." (...)

The transportation worker identification card, first proposed in 2002, would be an identity card equivalent of a maximum security prison. Not only would it be tamperproof, it would eventually allow transportation workers to be positively identified by a fingerprint in less than half a second. To ensure security, the card and the automated reader at the port entrance gate would have to communicate, like two small computers.

But within months after the plans for the card were announced, Mr. Rogers started to intervene. He inserted language into appropriations bills that effectively pushed the government to use the same patented green card technology and to produce this new card in Corbin.

"The committee does not want T.S.A. to develop new technologies if existing ones, already developed by other federal agencies, are good enough," a 2002 Appropriations Committee report, signed by Mr. Rogers, said, referring to the Transportation Security Administration.

Language added in 2003, again in a report submitted in Mr. Rogers's name, urged the agency to use "existing government card issuance centers" to make the card, which Homeland Security officials said, in their view, referred to Corbin. The law blocked spending until the department bowed to the mandates.

Two former Homeland Security officials said they were confounded. They had already identified a more flexible and secure technology known as a smart card, which relies on tiny computer chips embedded into the identification card. Most other federal agencies were moving toward this approach rather than the technology used for the green card, in which data are recorded on a reflective optical stripe affixed to the card.

"It would be like saying it would be quicker to take a bicycle instead of a Toyota Corolla," said one former Homeland Security official, granted anonymity because he now works for an organization that does not permit him to speak about the matter.

Officials there said they had no choice but to follow the orders. So in 2003, at a cost of $4 million, the department hired a contractor to study both alternatives. The study concluded that the smart card approach was far superior. (...)

When tests on a smart card prototype identification card finally got under way in November 2004, the program again ran into an obstacle.

To try to speed up the work, contractors decided initially to produce the prototype cards in Pennsylvania. But Homeland Security required that the work be moved, because to comply with the Congressional mandate, it had been written into BearingPoint's contract that the card production take place in Corbin, Mr. Kayser, the Homeland Security spokesman, said.

One former Homeland Security official said that the demand, given that the card production had already started, made little sense: only about 5,000 cards would be printed as part of the test. But still, the smart card printing equipment was picked up and sent to Corbin, adding to the expense and causing another delay."

There are a bunch of other examples of bizarre demands made by Rep. Rogers for the benefit of campaign contributors and suppliers of junkets, including "a July 2005 conference and golf outing that the congressman attended in Dublin." (Rep. Rogers put language requiring the Department of Homeland Security to hire the people who paid for the 'conference and golf outing' into the 2006 Appropriations Bill. Luckily, their competitors protested, and the provision was killed.) The story must be read to be believed.

And here's the thing: this is about homeland security. I am not a fan of any sort of graft or corruption, but if it has to occur, I'd rather it be confined to highway bills and things like that. It would not be impossible for the Congressional leadership to make it known that playing these sorts of games with any program that affects defense or homeland security will not be tolerated. They could say to their members: build your bridges to nowhere if you must, but the nation's security is off limits. They could even pay them off by steering other bits of pork their way. That wouldn't exactly thrill me, but it would be a lot better than letting Rep. Rogers and his ilk prevent us from knowing that our airport and dock workers are who they say they are.

But they haven't.

The conclusion I draw from this is that for all the Congressional Republicans' talk about defending the country, they don't care enough about it to call a halt to this sort of thing.

So why we should trust them with our nation's security?

Immigration, Part 2

by hilzoy

My last post was on border security; here are the rest of my views on illegal immigration.

I think it should go without saying that it would be better if no one was in this country illegally. For one thing, it's generally better for laws to be obeyed and not broken ('generally' here is to allow for cases like Nazi Germany.) For another, the fact that there are people who are not protected by our laws, and who cannot complain about miserable wages, unsafe working conditions, or horrible labor practices without fear of deportation harms workers everywhere, either directly or by depressing the cost of legal workers.

It seems to me that any workable solution to this problem has to involve altering the incentives facing poor people in central America (and any other countries from which large numbers of people come to the US illegally.) The ideal long-term solution would be for ordinary people in central America to be well enough off that they did not feel that they had to leave their own countries in order to have a decent future. In the more immediate future, however, I see no alternative to serious enforcement against employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Why, you might ask, against employers? For one thing, they tend to be easier to catch. People can run out the back door; places of business tend to stay put. Moreover, employers already keep records of their employees, and share them with the government. They also have to check their employees' identification to make sure that they're legal. The trouble is, of course, that the kinds of documentation that they need to see are easily forged. This means that we have three choices about how to deal with this. First, we could continue to require that employers certify that their employees have these easily forge-able kinds of documentation. I assume that this will cause no change at all. Second, we could hold employers responsible when they hire illegal workers, even if those workers showed them forged papers. This would presumably inspire employers to get a lot more serious about verifying their employees' claims of citizenship, but it would also mean that employers who really had made a good-faith effort to check out their employees would still be on the hook if those employees had really good forgeries. The last option, and the one that I favor, is for the government to create a hard-to-forge national ID card, which employers would be required to check and record.

The reason we don't have a national ID card is because of concerns about privacy. Personally, however, I've never thought these were particularly compelling. If it were used only for specific purposes, like employment, then the kind of information that the government would have about us would be limited to what it got through those uses. The government already knows where I work, since it automatically collects my tax forms. I don't really see what the problem with having it collect this information in a new way would be.

I can, however, see a bunch of benefits. First, it would allow us to deal with illegal immigration in a way that was a lot harder for illegals to get around, without putting all the burden of this on businesses. Second, I can imagine it being used to make dealing with income tax more straightforward: your name and tax number could be encoded on the back; software could be written for employers that would create tax files for each employee using that information, and that would make submitting the relevant information to the government as easy as entering that employee's wage or salary. As for employees: Wes Clark had a wonderful tax proposal, and one of its features was that people with straightforward tax situations would just have to enter their earnings and the number of their children or dependents, and that would be that. (No muss, no fuss; no tax forms. The idea was that you could opt out of this and ill out the forms if you chose, and also that it wouldn't be available for people whose tax lives were complicated -- the self-employed, people with farm royalties or dividend income, etc. -- but would probably cover over half the taxpayers in the country.) I can't see why something like this shouldn't be possible; and surely having a card with your name and tax ID number in computer-readable form would help it along considerably.

If it were a lot harder to get jobs without being a citizen, then the incentives for people to come here illegally would drop. A hard-to-forge national ID card would (I think) achieve this, so I support it. But I think there's one more piece to the puzzle. As I understand it, it's next to impossible for a Mexican to immigrate to the United States unless s/he has either relatives in this country, an awful lot of money, or a very marketable skill. (I'm not sure whether or not this is true for people from other countries in central America; if it is, then everything I'm about to say about Mexicans applies equally to them.) This means that if a Mexican wants to come to this country but doesn't have any of those things, there is no real option to come here legally. As long as that's true, then it is, I think, a lot to expect of people not to try to come here illegally. If you're desperate enough to leave your home and your family to look for work, you might prefer legal to illegal immigration, but it's hard to see why you'd prefer not immigrating at all to illegal immigration, if those are your only options. For this reason, I think that this has to change.

We should allow a non-negligible number of Mexicans to immigrate legally. (Non-negligible means: enough for someone to think that coming here legally is not so wildly improbable as to be not worth considering as an option. It should not be like, say, winning at Powerball.) Then we should say: but you are disqualified from this program of legal entry if you are caught at the border, starting now. This would give Mexicans a way of coming to this country legally, as I suspect a lot of them would prefer. It would provide a real disincentive to come illegally, which would be good for us, and also good for them, since they would be a lot less likely to find themselves at the mercy of coyotes, or dying in the Arizona desert.

There remains the question of what to do with people who are already in this country. I don't know what the answer to this one is, since a lot turns on petails about how specific policies would be likely to work, and I don't know enough about that to have an informed view. Instead, I'll sketch out some of the considerations that I think should inform our response to this.

We should not provide an incentive for people to come illegally. Some people seem to think that this precludes any sort of citizenship for any of the people who are already here illegally. I don't think this is obviously true. To use an analogy: sometimes a student comes to me, weeks after a paper has been due, and tells me that s/he has been in some sort of non-paper-writing funk, but now wants to make everything OK. I normally deduct points from grades for every two days a paper is late, and sometimes, if I were to go by the book, these students are so late that they cannot make it up and pass. I will often try to come up with some solution that allows them to pass anyways; but it's very important to me both that no one think that there's an incentive not to turn their papers in on time, and also that no student be likely to think: oh, if only I had known that that was an option, I would have taken advantage of it.

But there are solutions that meet these criteria. I can ask the student to submit a twenty page research paper when the original paper was only five pages long, for instance, and then say that it will automatically be graded down significantly. If the student writes this paper and does a decent job, then s/he will pass, but no one in their right mind would think: oh, if only I had known that I could have written a paper four times as long, and then have it be automatically graded down from a B to a D -- it's unfair that only this student had that option!

Surely, I think, there must be some similar solution available for people who have been in this country for a considerable period of time. And illegal immigrants are better candidates for such solutions than students who screw up. For one thing, as I said above, while it's always possible for my students to turn their papers in on time, many people who are here illegally did not have any way of coming to this country legally. For another, while students who come to see me four weeks after the due date have usually screwed up in a major way, the motivations of illegal immigrants are not generally bad. They want, as most of us want, a chance at a decent life. They cannot have a decent life in their countries of origin. As I said, I suspect that many of them would rather come here legally than illegally, but that's not an option. So they come here illegally instead. They are wrong to do so, but we are also wrong to have left a dysfunctional system that left them no other hope of coming here, and no real penalty for taking this one, for so long.

I think we should appreciate that many of them acted not just comprehensibly, but in a way we can all recognize: they were willing to work hard, and to suffer, for the American dream. If so, then I think we should provide a solution that does not reward them for breaking the law, but that also does not involve just deporting them. We should, that is, set up some way in which they can earn citizenship, a way that should be considerably harder than the straightforward way we would make available to people who had not broken the law.

On the other hand, I am completely opposed to temporary worker programs that do not involve an eventual transition to citizenship. That, I think, is just a way of creating second-class non-citizens. It didn't work particularly well in Europe, and I see no reason why we should try it here. If we need people to work, we should be willing to make them citizens.

-- Well, that's what I think. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong ;)

Immigration: Border Security

by hilzoy

I don't know a lot about immigration. However, in advance of the President's speech, I thought I'd set out what views I have. This post will deal with border security; a later one will deal with other issues.

Absent extraordinary circumstances (like humanitarian catastrophes), every country has the right to set its own immigration policy and enforce it. I think that whatever changes need to be made in our immigration policy should be made by law, rather than (e.g.) by deciding not to enforce laws we already have. Thus, I am all in favor of doing what's necessary in order to ensure that our borders are not porous.

That said, I think that the idea of sending the National Guard to do this job is ludicrous. What on earth makes anyone think that the National Guard would be particularly good at this? And why would anyone want to send the guard just now, when it's already overstretched from the war in Iraq? Many National Guard troops are in Iraq, and it hardly seems fair to send those who are here -- troops who in many cases have recently returned from war -- off to the border. Besides, many of the units that did not deploy to Iraq were stripped of their equipment so that those who were deployed would have what they needed, and units that have deployed have left much of their equipment in Iraq:

"State-based units are short on critical equipment because guardsmen about to return from overseas assignments such as in Iraq and Afghanistan are handing off their rifles, radios and vehicles to incoming units. State officials say shortages at home of Guard equipment, such as Humvees, mean they must rely on backup assistance from neighboring states once hurricane season begins June 1. (...)

The lack of equipment is not a new phenomenon, said Jack Harrison, spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, the administrative arm of the service. Even before the terrorist attacks of 2001, non-deployed Guard units had only about 70 percent of the equipment they needed, he said.

But fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has taken an even greater toll. Last year, Guard units not on active duty had only about 34 percent of their equipment. That number has since fallen to about 26 percent, although much of the shortages have been in equipment better-suited for combat, rather than hurricane response, Harrison said. (...)

A report from the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) last year shows major gaps in equipment that could be used to respond to a hurricane or other disasters. In May 2005, Guard units here had only about 8 percent of the tractor trailers they were allotted and none of the Humvees with added armor, according to the GAO report."

I think the idea of sending the guard is a ridiculous stunt. I'm with Josh Marshall on this one:

"But all I can make of this plan to help guard the border with soldiers is that it's one more example that there is simply no gambit too craven or silly for this president not to resort to it.

My reading and reporting attention hasn't been focused on the immigration debate. But am I wrong to think that the president simply couldn't square the circle between the corporate cheap-labor forces who fund his campaigns and the cultural conservatives who supply his voters? Growing out of that failure, this 'militarize the border' hokum is the policy announcement equalivent of crawling under his desk and screaming "Help!""

One more thing: I was watching CNN yesterday, and Bill Frist was asked why we should send the National Guard rather than increasing the number of border patrol agents. He said:

"We need to increase the number of border security agents. We've done that, and we're going to continue to do that. But right now, for the short term, for all that to take effect, we have to have support, and it's a federal responsibility, and the National Guard are the people to do it."

On the same show, Stephen Hadley described the use of the National Guard as "a bit of a stop-gap as the Border Patrol build up their capacity to deal with this challenge." I think we should do what we need to do to secure the border as soon as possible. But I don't see why we need to use the National Guard as a "stopgap". It's not as though there is a short-term crisis on the border, a crisis so urgent that it would be worth taking men and women who have just returned from Iraq, and whose equipment is antiquated if it exists at all, and send them off to do a job they are not trained to do. Moreover, if there is a crisis that's this urgent, I have to ask why the Bush administration is only now getting around to dealing with it. They have, after all, been in office for over five years now, and if the security of our borders is in fact at a crisis point, that surely reflects their own bad planning.

Frank Rich Is, Indeed, Shrill

by hilzoy

Frank Rich's column in today's NYT is, as everyone says, worth reading. Raw Story has excerpted part of it, mostly from the beginning of the column. But there are three other points I wanted to flag.

Our Fierce Protector

by hilzoy

From the President's weekly radio address:

"This week, new claims have been made about other ways we are tracking down al Qaeda to prevent attacks on America. It is important for Americans to understand that our activities strictly target al Qaeda and its known affiliates. Al Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans.

The intelligence activities I have authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat. The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda terrorists and its affiliates who want to harm the American people.

Americans expect their government to do everything in its power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. That is exactly what we are doing."

Let's leave aside the obvious lies: that the NSA program "strictly targets al Qaeda and its known affiliates" (tens of millions of them, apparently, all here in the US), or that "we are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." I'm interested in the claim that our privacy is being "fiercely protected" by this administration. And I'm curious: what, exactly, is the threat to our privacy from which we are being fiercely protected? If Bush and his administration are our protectors, what exactly is he protecting us from?

There are threats to our privacy out there -- corporations amassing huge databases full of personal information, for instance, and identity thieves. But I haven't noticed this administration spending a lot of time protecting us from them. The Congress hasn't done much either: despite any number of scandals in which personal information is lost or sold to criminals, Congress is currently considering legislation that wouldn't do much to solve the problem, and might preempt much better state laws. So that can't be what Bush had in mind.

Maybe the real reason we went to war with Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was after the personal records of American citizens; and there's some deep, dark reason why the President can't tell us about it. Maybe that explains why none of his other rationales make sense: they're all just cover stories for Saddam's unmentionable threat to our privacy. Maybe our privacy is threatened by fiscal sanity, or the estate tax, or the city of New Orleans, or that fish the President caught. Or maybe the reason he likes to whack away at the mesquite on his ranch that it's a would-be invader of privacy in a very, very clever disguise.

Somehow, I don't think so.

So what is this nameless threat to our privacy from which our President is so fiercely protecting us? The only thing I can think of is: himself.

And that would give a whole new meaning to the term 'divided government'.

Open Thread: Special New Homeowner Edition

by hilzoy

It's a beautiful day. My irises are blooming, a rabbit just ran across the back lawn, and so, naturally, my thoughts turn to hot water heaters. Does anyone have any experience with demand heaters? I realize that their flow rate is lower than normal hot water heaters, but given that there's only one of me (not counting the cats, who don't take showers -- when I first got them, I used to play this game of trying to figure out what they would make of various human things, and so I would look at them, earnestly, and say: it's just an artificial tongue!), that will not be a problem, will it?

Also: any views on what would be a good color for my study? I am notoriously dreadful at picking colors: they all look so nice on those little paint chips, but I have, apparently, no talent at all for imagining how they'll look on a whole wall. However, since it's presently a really awful mustard color, I figure I can't possibly make it worse. -- But what manner of mistake should I make? A blue one? A green one? There's already a fair amount of yellow in the house, so probably not yellow. Advice appreciated.

Also, if anyone knows what makes some light colors glow while others look like icky pastels, and how to get the one rather than the other, do tell.

Or if you'd rather discuss something else entirely, have at it.

I Am NOT Affiliated With PJM!

by hilzoy

Yesterday I noted, in comments, that Pajamas Media had posted something I wrote here in such a way that it looks as though I posted it. I wrote to Glenn Reynolds about it, since it's not obvious how to contact them, and have not heard back. Today I put a note in their suggestion box asking them to alter the post, and wrote to the anonymous mailbox that comes up when you click the 'Contact Us' link. Still nothing.

I noticed something odd, though: I'm not the only one they've been doing this to. Just going back over the past few days, and limiting myself to people I doubt are affiliated with PJM, I note "posts" by the following: John Aravosis, Noam Scheiber at TNR, Jeffrey Gedmin at Die Welt, Matt Yglesias at TPM (also here), Jeralyn at TalkLeft (also here), Jacob Weisberg at Slate, Jonathan Singer at MyDD, Steve Gilliard, Orin Kerr, Andrew Sullivan, and Jon Henke at QandO.

For all I know, some of these bloggers might have affiliated with PJM and not put that cunning little pajama logo on their website. But I doubt all of them have.

As far as I'm concerned, PJM is making it look as though a lot more people are willing to hook up with them than actually are. In theory at least, they are a for-profit company, and while I have no problem with them linking to or excerpting my stuff, I draw the line at having it appear that I am participating in a site whose founders include Charles Johnson, Roger L. Simon, and Glenn Reynolds. I have asked them in private to change the post that uses my material to make it clear that someone else posted it; having failed to get a response, I'm now asking them publicly. I'm sure they would not like it if some of the rest of us started making it look as though they were posting on our blogs when they were not.

***

Update: They have now changed my post to make it clear that they're just linking me. This is fine, and I thank them for it. They're still linking to other unaffiliated bloggers in the old way -- the one I fond problematic. Most of those bloggers know about this, and can deal with it as they see fit.

News Roundup

by hilzoy

* The Senate extended the Bush tax cuts on capital gains:

"The Senate gave final approval yesterday to a five-year, $70 billion tax package that would extend deep cuts to tax rates on dividends and capital gains for two years, effectively locking in all of President Bush's first-term tax cuts through the end of the decade. (...)

The House approved the package on Wednesday, and Bush said he will sign it enthusiastically once it reaches his desk.

But with interest rates rising, the dollar falling and the budget deficit stuck at around $300 billion, tax experts warn that the tax code Bush has transformed may not survive to its Dec. 31, 2010, expiration date and that Congress may have to step in again because tax revenue will not meet all of the government's needs. "We have a train wreck waiting to happen," said C. Clint Stretch, director of tax policy at the accounting giant Deloitte & Touche."

Rather than commenting, I'll just repost a graph from the CBPP about the effects of this tax cut:

Kevin Drum also has a good explanation of a gimmick
the Republicans used in order to keep the costs of this tax cut down to a level where they could pass it with a simple majority. Short version: they increase revenue slightly over the next five years at a huge financial cost later.

* President Bush's approval ratings have now entered the twenties:

"Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an "excellent or pretty good" job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January. It compares with 71% of Americans who said Mr. Bush is doing an "only fair or poor" job, up from 63% in April. (...)

Elsewhere, roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say "things in the country are going in the right direction," while 69% say "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." This trend has declined every month since January, when 33% said the nation was heading in the right direction.

In terms of political-party identification, 48% of Republicans said "right direction" while 39% of Republicans said "wrong track." In comparison, just 13% of Democrats said "right direction" and 83% of Democrats responded with "wrong track.""

One interesting fact from the poll: Bush's favorable rating among men has dropped by ten full percentage points since April (from 38% to 28%.) By contrast, his favorable rating among women dropped only three percentage points, from 32% to 29%.

* Via TPM: The FBI has raided Dusty Foggo's house. Josh adds that CNN is reporting that they have also raided his CIA office. (And -- news flash -- they had search warrants, unlike the NSA.) It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

* Orin Kerr has posted an update on the legality of the NSA database:

"My still-very-tentative bottom line: The companies were probably violating the Stored Communications Act by disclosing the records to the NSA before the Patriot Act renewal in March 2006, although the new language in the Patriot Act renewal at least arguably made it more likely that the disclosure was legal under the emergency exception."

Meanwhile, William Arkin has a very interesting post about what the NSA is up to, including a long list of its data mining programs.

* Finally, the dollar keeps falling:

"Another week, another set of losses for the dramatically diminishing dollar, which on Friday slumped to its lowest level since October 1997 in trade-weighted terms.

The continuing sell-off came amid a series of events that should, in theory, have aided the greenback. The Federal Reserve released a broadly hawkish monetary policy statement, Thursday’s US trade data was far better than feared, and the US Treasury declined to formally cite China for currency manipulation, a ruling that would have been expected to drive further Asian gains against the dollar.

Yet sentiment has turned so decisively against the greenback that it still fell, sliding a further 1.1 per cent to $1.2879 to the euro, 2.1 per cent to $1.8897 against sterling and 1.9 per cent to SFr1.2022 against the Swiss franc, hitting new one-year lows against each, and 1.3 per cent to Y110.50 against the yen. The dollar has now lost 6-8 per cent against each of these currencies since the start of April.

The selling has been driven by two major factors. First, relative interest rate differentials continue to move against the dollar.

Despite the Fed statement, the market is only pricing in a 40 per cent chance of a June rate rise. In contrast there is increasing talk that the European Central Bank may sanction a larger-than-expected half-point rate rise next month, that Japan could initiate its first hike of the cycle as early as next month, and that the Bank of England may raise rates before the year is out.

Second, since last month’s G7 conference, markets have increasingly focused on the massive US current account deficit, some 7 per cent of GDP, and the role that a weaker dollar will almost certainly have to play in order to bring this imbalance back to a more sustainable level.

“The structural imbalances in US international trade flows remain significant and we believe forex market participants will become more concerned over the burgeoning US current account deficit and that this will contribute to a weakening dollar,” said Mitul Kotecha, head of global FX research at Calyon."

Expect interest rates to rise more than they would have otherwise, and higher prices for imports from countries that have not pegged their currencies to the dollar. And expect the attractiveness of such a peg to diminish, along with the desirability of parking one's assets in dollars, though how much they will diminish is anyone's guess.

NSA Spying: Bits And Pieces

by hilzoy

Josh Marshall is right: this part of the Post story on the NSA scandals is crucial:

"Yesterday's report in USA Today arrived as Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the president's nominee to be CIA director, faced tough scrutiny on Capitol Hill for his role in the interception of calls and e-mails between Americans and parties abroad. After the New York Times disclosed the eavesdropping in December, the White House dubbed it a "terrorist surveillance program" and said it involved only international communications by people with "known links" to al-Qaeda and its allies. The Washington Post reported in February that about 5,000 Americans had been subject to eavesdropping under the program and that nearly all of them had been cleared of suspicion.

The new report, by contrast, described a far broader form of surveillance, focused primarily on domestic phone-call records. Some of its elements have been disclosed before. The Los Angeles Times reported in December that AT&T provided the NSA with a "direct hookup" into a company database, code-named Daytona, that has been recording the telephone numbers and duration of every call placed on the AT&T network since 2001. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued AT&T over that and other alleged violations of privacy law, said the call database spans 312 terabytes, a quantity that would fill more than 400,000 computer compact discs.

Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening. The mathematical techniques known as "link analysis" and "pattern analysis," they said, give grounds for suspicion that can result in further investigation." (Emphasis added.)

Now we can add this to our handy Bush administration translation manual: To any claim that the NSA surveillance program was narrowly tailored, add: "of course, this refers only to the actual eavesdropping. Coming up with the target list, which requires accessing the records of tens of millions of Americans, is part of another program entirely."

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I also wanted to highlight this quote from Sen. Jon Kyl, about the program described in the USA Today article:

"This is nuts. We are in a war, and we've got to collect intelligence on the enemy. And you can't tell the enemy in advance how you're going to do it."

Knowing that Sen. Kyl regards tens of millions of Americans as "the enemy" certainly clarifies things.

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Finally, handy links to some good articles on the legality of the program: Orin Kerr, Glenn Greenwald, Kate Martin. The consensus view seems to be that the program does not violate the Fourth Amendment, but either has "statutory problems" (Kerr), or is illegal (Martin.) The various statutes, which are above my pay grade, are discussed and linked to in these posts. One thing I do want to mention is this: I was watching CNN while I ate dinner, and various administration types were arguing that this did not violate FISA, since the NSA just gathered data about the calls, rather than actually listening in on them. As Glenn Greenwald points out, however, FISA defines 'electronic surveillance' as various ways of capturing the "contents" of communications, and it defines "contents" not, as one might expect, to mean what the people who are communicating are actually saying, but as follows:

"''Contents'', when used with respect to a communication, includes any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication." (Emphasis added.)

So I can't see any reason to think that the NSA program, as described in the USA Today story, does not fall under FISA, along with the other statutes mentioned in the various posts I linked to.