Obsidian Wings

Open Thread

by hilzoy

If you haven't already seen a photo of the world's cutest baby, go to it -- and, again, congratulations to rilkefan and Mrs. R, as well as to the rilkekind for making his way to the outside world.

I just accepted an offer on my old house, which is very good news, though not nearly as important as the appearance of the rilkekind. And, amazingly enough, I have almost finished sorting the books, which is more impressive than you might think.

And one more thing: am I wrong, or did the Republicans in Congress spend last week confirming half the worst stereotypes about them? Blocking the renewal of the VOting Rights Act, blocking an attempt to raise the minimum wage (which is at its lowest point in decades), permanently repealing the Estate Tax (this still has to go through the Senate, thank God), scuttling immigration reform because the House Republicans found the Senate version insufficiently punitive, and so on, and so forth? And then, to top it all off, there are the nineteen Republicans who voted against an amendment "To express the sense of Congress that the Government of Iraq should not grant amnesty to persons known to have attacked, killed, or wounded members of the Armed Forces of the United States."

Geez.

More On Lieberman

by hilzoy

From a friend from Connecticut with some experience in low-level party politics, a very perceptive person whose judgment I trust:

"In 1980, when I was 20 years old, my parents bought me a three-piece suit. I didn’t have too many occasions to wear a suit, so when I arranged an interview with the State Senate Majority Leader for my college radio station, I put on my suit, walked across the New Haven Green and paid a call on Joe Lieberman. At the time, Lieberman had a reputation as a liberal Democrat. He was running for Congress to succeed Bob Giaimo, a defense-industry-oriented Democrat who had represented the New Haven area (and, as people said at the time, Pratt and Whitney) for years. It was 1980, though – not a good year for liberal Democrats, and Lieberman lost in the Reagan “landslide”.

When Joe Lieberman ran for Attorney General in 1982, the position was a fairly unexciting part-time post, in charge of the attorneys who represented the State of Connecticut in its various dealings. Lieberman was the first full-time A.G., and he quickly transformed the office, using it to grab exposure as a consumer advocate, among other things. He succeeded in forging for himself a public persona that wasn’t ideologically identified, and built up an impressive name recognition around the state. (He so successfully used the AG’s office as a stepping stone that since then the job has been one of the most prized in Connecticut politics.)

In 1988, Lowell Weicker came up for re-election to the Senate. As a liberal Republican (with impeccable credentials as a former member of the Senate Watergate Committee), Weicker had been able to count on his own party and strip off a segment of the Democrats who agreed with him ideologically. This has been a pretty successful formula in Connecticut, but those who have used it have always run the risk of alienating too much of their base. Throughout the 1980’s Republicans talked about mounting a conservative primary challenge to Weicker, but none ever seriously materialized. Instead, Lieberman in 1988 beat Weicker by using that same formula against him. By re-casting himself as a conservative Democrat, Lieberman was able to capture enough disaffected Republicans and independents to defeat Weicker, whom many had considered to be pretty much unbeatable.

The point of this tedious history of state-level politics through the 1980’s is that Joe Lieberman, far from being an ideological beacon to conservative Democrats throughout the years, has, in fact, tacked ideologically as time and circumstances have dictated. He ran for Congress as a liberal and lost. He rebuilt his career as a non-ideological advocate, and then, when it suited him, went at Lowell Weicker from the right.

What I have a hard time figuring out is why he didn’t tack left when circumstances dictated. I suspect that he started to believe his own press notices from the right wingers, and that he really, really wanted that Secretary of Defense job when it was dangled in his direction a while ago.

Ideology doesn’t completely explain Connecticut Democrats’ increasing rejection of Lieberman, though. While some of his positions may be out of sync with many people in his party, those same people would overcome those differences if more of them actually liked him. Unfortunately for him, that doesn’t appear to be the case. When, in the lead up to the convention, he took to the phones calling delegates for support, the question naturally arose – “I haven’t heard from you in 18 years – why are you calling me now?” The 2000 race, when he stubbornly insisted on running for Senate and Vice President at the same time (when Dick Blumenthal could have easily been elected to the Senate and kept the seat Democratic), was the height of selfishness. People remember things like that. Particularly the type of people who vote in primaries."

I also recommend this post by Mark Schmitt.

Most Inane Headline Ever

by hilzoy

"G.O.P. Decides to Embrace War as Issue", from the New York Times.

Gee, ya think?

Consider this an open thread, in which, if you feel like it, you can try to come up with an even dumber headline. Not for the faint of heart, I grant you, but we at ObWi embrace life's challenges.

Thanks, Congress!

by hilzoy

Brad DeLong is right: whoever is responsible for this should be voted out of office immediately:

"THE first thing to understand about the hybrid tax credit is that it was never really intended to reduce oil imports from the Middle East or slow the effects of global warming. The credit was created to prop up Detroit while giving conservation a nod.

Last summer, when Congress was completing an energy bill, Toyota's and Honda's hybrids were already winning people over in the marketplace, and it was clear that any tax credit would go overwhelmingly to buyers of Japanese cars. So members of Congress, with help from Detroit's lobbyists, came up with an ingenious solution. They created a cap, a maximum number of hybrids that any single manufacturer could sell — 60,000 — before a clock started ticking, causing the credits for that carmaker to begin disappearing two quarters later.

The idea, Mark Kemmer, a G.M. lobbyist, told Automotive News, was to keep any one company from getting "a runaway benefit."

Toyota hit the 60,000 mark last month, less than five months after the Jan. 1 start of the program, and the credits for its hybrid buyers will be cut in half on Oct. 1. (Because there are waiting lists for the Prius and Camry Hybrid, people who buy one in August or September may get their car after Oct. 1.) On April 1, 2007, the credits will be cut in half again. On Oct. 1, 2007, they will vanish. Honda, for its part, will probably hit the cap next year.

And the Big Three? Combined, they have sold fewer than 15,000 eligible vehicles so far, all by Ford, largely because their hybrids have not impressed buyers. Rather than building highly efficient hybrids like the Prius, Detroit has tinkered with gas guzzlers like the Chevrolet Silverado, adding hybrid technology to them so that they get slightly better mileage.

Come next year, then, the government will pay you to buy a Silverado hybrid (which gets about 16 miles per gallon) or a Ford Escape Hybrid (which gets about 26, according to Consumer Reports), but not a Prius (44) or a nonhybrid Corolla (29).

The obvious answer to this bizarre situation is to remove the caps. To their credit, Mr. Bush and a few members of Congress have called for precisely that, although it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

But I think there is a larger lesson here. In recent months, there has been a lot of talk in Washington about alternative energy sources, not just hybrids, but ethanol, fuel cells and nuclear power as well. Mr. Bush, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and others are pitching tax credits and similar financing mechanisms to give these technologies a boost.

The reality, though, is that government isn't particularly good at predicting which alternative will pan out. No single person or group is. "You can spend a lot of money on technologies that don't fit," says Susan M. Cischke, Ford's vice president for environmental and safety engineering. Remember the electric-car fad in California?

What the government can do that nobody else can, however, is set up a simple system of rewards and penalties — with the single goal of reducing oil use, regardless of the means — and then let the marketplace work it out. Economists tend to prefer a gas tax, but it's not the only option.

There is already a gas-guzzler tax written into the law that raises the price of inefficient cars, but not of sport utility vehicles or light trucks, notes Therese Langer of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Making the tax universal would have a far bigger effect than a narrow policy aimed at hybrids, and it could be balanced by tax credits for efficient vehicles of any kind. Google has a nice template: it gives $5,000 to employees who buy a car that gets at least 45 m.p.g. in the government's ratings, a threshold that only the Prius and two Honda hybrids now meet.

I know this might sound like one more nail in Detroit's coffin, but it doesn't have to be one. The Big Three have the engineering expertise to build vehicles that can go a long way on a gallon of gas. If Washington would only nudge people to buy cars like that, Detroit would start making them."

Jeez. You'd think that global warming wasn't a significant threat; that our dependence on foreign fuel wasn't a serious national security concern; that pollution didn't matter, that conservation was just a personal virtue ... oh, never mind.

This article left me with one question, though: who, exactly, was responsible for this cap? Which representatives put it in? I couldn't find that information, unfortunately, but I did uncover two new bills that would undo the caps. As the numbers indicate, HR 4409 (sponsored by Jack Kingston, R-GA, and 78 co-sponsors) is in the House, and S.2025 (sponsored by Evan Bayh, D-IN, and 25 co-sponsors) is in the Senate. You can see whether your Senators and Representatives have co-sponsored it by clicking here.

I'd recommend writing your Senators and Representatives and urging them to co-sponsor these bills were it not for one thing: these bills have other provisions, and without reading through them, could I really recommend this in good conscience? What if one of them established a state religion, or banned appendectomies, or required everyone in the US to grow hydrangeas? I mean, the provisions have nice-sounding names like "Sec. 202. Reduction of school bus idling" and "Sec. 307. Production incentives for cellulosic biofuels" and, my favorite, "Sec. 212. Reducing incentives to guzzle gas", but as far as I know, beneath those innocuous names, anything might lurk! I'd read through it, but frankly, it was hard enough to check and make sure that this meant phasing out the caps on tax credits:

"(1) IN GENERAL- Section 30D of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by striking subsection (f) and by redesignating subsections (g) through (j) as subsections (f) through (i), respectively."

(Section 30D hasn't made it into the US Code yet. Who knew it took so long? Not me, before this afternoon. Finding and parsing the relevant provision in the Energy Bill was no picnic, for a non-lawyer.)

So: if anyone wants to try to figure out whether the remaining sections of this bill are OK, I'd welcome the information ;)

*** UPDATE: The bills sound good. I posted a summary of S. 2025 here; there's a summary of all hybrid-related legislation before this year's Congress here. You can send a letter supporting the two bills I discuss in this post here. Thanks!

I also changed this to provide an easier way to find out who's cosponsoring this legislation -- no more lengthy instructions on how to navigate Thomas.

Filing Cabinets

by hilzoy

This story is a few days old, but worth thinking about nonetheless:

"United States Special Operations troops employed a set of harsh, unauthorized interrogation techniques against detainees in Iraq during a four-month period in early 2004, long after approval for their use was rescinded, according to a Pentagon inquiry released Friday. (...)

Despite the findings, General Formica recommended that none of the service members be disciplined, saying what they did was wrong but not deliberate abuse. He faulted "inadequate policy guidance" rather than "personal failure" for the mistreatment, and cited the dangerous environment in which Special Operations forces carried out their missions."

So what, exactly, did they do? Here's an example:

"General Formica found that in the third case at a Special Operations outpost, near Tikrit, in April and May 2004, three detainees were held in cells 4 feet high, 4 feet long and 20 inches wide, except to use the bathroom, to be washed or to be interrogated. He concluded that two days in such confinement "would be reasonable; five to seven days would not." Two of the detainees were held for seven days; one for two days, General Formica concluded."

Spencer Ackerman has a suggestion:

"Take all the shelving out of a typical filing cabinet. (My own office cabinet happens to be slightly smaller than the cell described here.) Now lock yourself in it for two days. You may notice you can neither stand up straight nor lie down, and crouching gets really uncomfortable extremely fast. Remember that as an Iraqi detainee, the Geneva Conventions apply to you. Now ask yourself: Why would Formica consider such treatment "reasonable" for two days? And if someone put an American soldier in such conditions for two days--or authorized doing so--what should happen to that person?"

Good questions. I'm also curious about how holding someone in a cell this size for a week could possibly not count as 'deliberate abuse' or the result of a 'personal failure', why these techniques were ever approved to begin with, and whether the people who approved them will ever be brought to justice.

One Percent

by hilzoy

I ordered my copy of Ron Suskind's One Percent Doctrine last night; and now that I'm done with my last post, I can write about some of the reviews it has gotten. (And yes, of course: Gary got there first.)

Consider this passage from the NYT:

"This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.

During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.'s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis' views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president's office and never reached the president.

Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush "plausible deniability" from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: "Keeping certain knowledge from Bush — much of it shrouded, as well, by classification — meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements."

"Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial," Mr. Suskind continues. "It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much.""

If, in the runup to the war, the President didn't bother to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, then -- well, I just don't know what to say. Note that while Suskind calls this 'plausible deniability', it's quite different from what people usually mean when they use that phrase. Normally, the idea is that you decide on a basic policy, and then you are not told about some of the things that are done in implementing it, so that you can deny knowing about them. This is sleazy and wrong, but it's entirely different from not reading the information you need to know about in order to make your decision in the first place, so that you can then deny knowing about that. That's not just wrong; it's insane -- especially when you're making a decision as momentous as going to war.

Not reading the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq means not reading the intelligence community's best estimate of how great a threat Saddam Hussein actually was. Not taking that into account before you send men and women off to die is beyond irresponsible, as is not bothering to know things like: the fact that the CIA was worried that Osama bin Laden might escape from Tora Bora. The CIA briefer who realized that no one had told Bush about this is presumably the same one the Washington Post's review describes here:

" Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful.""

And yet, oddly, we let the surrogates handle it, and bin Laden escaped. Gosh: how could that have happened?

Note something about this. In order not to know these sorts of details, it's not enough that people not tell you. If you're at all curious, or even just determined to do your job, you will ask questions like: how much of a threat is Saddam Hussein? or: how sure are we that we've blocked the exits out of Tora Bora? You might even go so far as to consult several people about the answers to these questions. If you're the President and you display even minimal curiosity, you will probably get those answers. But Bush didn't. And now Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is collapsing, and 2500 soldiers are dead. Great.

Consider this passage, from the Post's review:

"The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now.""

This, of course, was back when George Tenet and Richard Clarke were running around with their hair on fire, trying to get some attention. No wonder they failed. But hey: a lot of brush got cleared.

A lot of people have cited this passage, from the same review:

"Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. (...)

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.""

So let me get this straight. We decided that Abu Zubaydah was both comparatively insignificant and insane. The President, though he was briefed on this, says that Abu Zubaydah was an important al Qaeda operative. Since he didn't want 'to lose face', we tortured him until he began to tell us whatever he thought we wanted to hear. And then we sent "thousands of uniformed men and women" off to investigate whatever he said.

This is not the way a civilized country behaves. This is not, for that matter, the way a country with minimal standards of decency behaves. And it's also not the way a country that actually cares about preventing terrorist attacks behaves. Consider those "thousands of uniformed men and women": didn't they have anything better to do with their time? Might they not have been better employed connecting some of those unconnected dots, for instance? Was it worth pulling them off their jobs just so that the President didn't have to lose face?

Suskind's last book, The Price of Loyalty, was one of the most fascinating insider accounts of the Bush administration that I've read. When it came out, conservatives reviled Suskind and Paul O'Neill, but now that it has become clear that literally anyone who criticizes the Bush administration (with the possible exception of Pat Buchanan) gets called a liberal, some conservative readers might want to give it a second look. What's interesting about it isn't the anecdotes that got a lot of play at the time; it's the detailed portrait of the administration and how it functioned, and specifically the astonishing fact that the Secretary of the Treasury was out of the loop on economic policy. I really look forward to getting Suskind's latest.

Libertarians And Democrats: Part 3

by hilzoy

This is the third part of my response to Mona's post on Libertarians and Democrats at QandO. (First part here; second part here.) As I said before, I am not an expert on libertarianism. I will try to depict it accurately, but I have not done a huge amount of research on the foundations of libertarianism before writing this. If I misrepresent libertarianism, it's unintentional, and I hope people will correct me.

In Part 2, I argued that justice requires a set of rules governing (among other things) property, rather than ad hoc interventions to create some preferred outcome, that property is a social construct, and that no specific set of rules governing property constitutes a presumptively legitimate baseline, deviations from which require a special justification. All sets of rules are on a par, including the set that defines unrestricted property rights.

In this post, I want (finally!) to get to the question: which set of rules is just? And how does my answer to this question differ from libertarians'? I'm going to get there by deferring the question of justifying my claims; I've decided that if I don't cut to the chase, I may never get to the end of this. (Short version: Rawls.) But first, a few short notes.

Words Fail Me

by hilzoy

And since they do, I have no choice but to cash in on any credibility I may have earned on this blog and issue a direct order:

If you are somewhere where it won't be a problem for you to burst out laughing, or say "Oh. My. God." loudly, or scream, watch Connie Chung go batsh*t insane. If you are not in such a place, get to one immediately, and watch it there.

And consider that this took preparation. That dress. The piano. What I suppose I have to call the choreography. There's really no way to see this except as someone taking careful, deliberate aim at her career, her future employability, her marriage, and her status as not-yet-a-national-joke, and squeezing the trigger.

Wow.

h/t Steve Clemons.

Please, Joe Lieberman, Don't Throw Us In That Briar Patch!

by hilzoy

Every so often columnists for major newspapers decide to let someone else use them to make a point or send a message. On Sunday, David Broder placed his column at the service of Joe Lieberman, so that Lieberman could threaten to run as an independent:

"Lieberman insists he can win the primary. But he has another option. Connecticut law says that he could run as an independent, but he would have to file 7,500 signatures the day after the primary.

He says he knows of no effort to gather signatures now. But he also says, "I want to put my whole record before the whole voting population of Connecticut" -- clearly implying an independent run if he loses to Lamont in August.

Thus, a possibility John Bailey could not have imagined: A former Democratic vice presidential candidate, a three-term senator, a former state Senate majority leader and state attorney general forced to run as an independent.

"I know I'm taking a position that is not popular within the party," Lieberman said, "but that is a challenge for the party -- whether it will accept diversity of opinion or is on a kind of crusade or jihad of its own to have everybody toe the line. No successful political party has ever done that.""

This is a column that might as well end with the words: "I'm Joe Lieberman, and I approved this message." And a pretty repellent message it is.

Pathetic Attempt

It is a pathetic attempt at judging when you can't tell the difference between the art and the stand (Hat Tip Abiola at Foreign Dispatches):

Britain's Royal Academy of Art put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art.

The slate and wooden stick was actually a base meant to hold up a laughing human head made by British sculptor David Hensel.

But when the academy, which has an annual competition for its prestigious summer exhibition, received the work, the head arrived separately.

The academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London, which showcases the work of emerging artists.

"Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently," the academy said in a statement. "The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted."

Maybe the artist should just go in to plinth making?  Maybe the title should be "Ironic Laughter"?

(And the pathetic attempt in the title is really because I posted this in the pathetic attempt to attract Edward_'s attention.)