Obsidian Wings

Nice And Cozy

by hilzoy

Last night, as I was writing one of my earlier posts, I read the President's most recent press conference in its entirety, and I ran across one bit that, for sheer lunacy, rivals his earlier claim that "when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked." Here it is:

"The Middle East looked nice and cozy for awhile. Everything looked fine on the surface, but beneath the surface, there was a lot of resentment, there was a lot of frustration, such that 19 kids got on airplanes and killed 3,000 Americans."

The Middle East looked nice and cozy. Right.

During the years that preceded 9/11, the Second Intifada began, the USS Cole was attacked, most of the countries in the region were brutally repressive, India and Pakistan had their first ground war since both acquired nuclear weapons, and -- well, I could go on, but you get the point.

Nice and cozy, indeed.

Fort Irwin On The Tigris

by hilzoy

The New York Times is unusually depressing today. In addition to the story I wrote about in my last post, there's an article about jihadis flowing from Iraq out into the rest of the world. I didn't know, for instance, that in the recent battle in northern Lebanon, "as many as 50 veterans of the war in Iraq" were fighting with Fatah al-Islam against the Lebanese Army. And there's more:

"Militant leaders warn that the situation in Lebanon is indicative of the spread of fighters. “You have 50 fighters from Iraq in Lebanon now, but with good caution I can say there are a hundred times that many, 5,000 or higher, who are just waiting for the right moment to act,” Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident in Britain who runs the jihadist Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, said in an interview on Friday. “The flow of fighters is already going back and forth, and the fight will be everywhere until the United States is willing to cease and desist.”

There are signs of that traffic in and out of Iraq in other places.

In Saudi Arabia last month, government officials said they had arrested 172 men who had plans to attack oil installations, public officials and military posts, and some of the men appeared to have trained in Iraq.

Officials in Europe have said in interviews that they are trying to monitor small numbers of Muslim men who have returned home after traveling for short periods to Iraq, where they were likely to have fought alongside insurgents. (...)

In an April 17 report written for the United States government, Dennis Pluchinsky, a former senior intelligence analyst at the State Department, said battle-hardened militants from Iraq posed a greater threat to the West than extremists who trained in Afghanistan because Iraq had become a laboratory for urban guerrilla tactics.

“There are some operational parallels between the urban terrorist activity in Iraq and the urban environments in Europe and the United States,” Mr. Pluchinsky wrote. “More relevant terrorist skills are transferable from Iraq to Europe than from Afghanistan to Europe,” he went on, citing the use of safe houses, surveillance, bomb making and mortars.

A top American military official who tracks terrorism in Iraq and the surrounding region, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said: “Do I think in the future the jihad will be fueled from the battlefield of Iraq? Yes. More so than the battlefield of Afghanistan.”"

We're providing one kind of training to the Iraqi Army. But we're providing a different, and probably much more valuable, kind of training to al Qaeda and other terrorists. One of our army's most important training facilities is the National Training Center at Fort Irwin CA, which Global Security describes as "the only instrumented training facility in the world that is suitable for force-on-force and live fire training of heavy brigade-sized military forces. The realistic training provided at the NTC assures soldiers are adequately prepared to protect and preserve US interests here and abroad." Both the National Training Center and its Opposing Force are, by all accounts, absolutely superb. So why should we keep this sort of training to ourselves? Doesn't that give us an unfair advantage over the terrorists? Why not let them refine their techniques by providing them with their very own analog of Fort Irwin, where they can hone their skills in live fire force-on-force exercises against the very best the US Army has to offer?

Remember: as President Bush says, if we weren't fighting them there, we'd be fighting them here, and David Gregory's children would be in danger. What he failed to add, of course, was that if we fight them there, then we stand the very same chance of fighting them here; the only difference is that there will be a lot more of them, and they will be a lot more skilled and much better trained.

'Why Are We Still Here?'

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness. (...)

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period with this 83-man unit, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.

They had seen shadowy militia commanders installed as Iraqi Army officers, they said, had come under increasing attack from roadside bombs — planted within sight of Iraqi Army checkpoints — and had fought against Iraqi soldiers whom they thought were their allies.

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sgt. First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.” (...)

On April 29, a Delta Company patrol was responding to a tip at Al Sadr mosque, a short distance from its base. (...) When the battle was over, Delta Company learned that among the enemy dead were at least two Iraqi Army soldiers that American forces had helped train and arm.

“The 29th was a watershed moment in a negative sense, because the Iraqi Army would not fight with us,” Captain Rogers said, adding, “Some actually picked up weapons and fought against us.”

The battle changed the attitude among his soldiers toward the war, he said.

“Before that fight, there were a few true believers.” Captain Rogers said. “After the 29th, I don’t think you’ll find a true believer in this unit. They’re paratroopers. There’s no question they’ll fulfill their mission. But they’re fighting now for pride in their unit, professionalism, loyalty to their fellow soldier and chain of command.”"

As if that weren't enough for one story, here's the part that really got to me:

"Their many deployments have added to the strain. After spending six months in Iraq, the soldiers of Delta Company had been home for only 24 hours last December when the news came. “Change your plans,” they recall being told. “We’re going back to Iraq.”

Nineteen days later, just after Christmas, Capt. Douglas Rogers and the men of Delta Company were on their way to Kadhimiya, a Shiite enclave of about 300,000."

Nineteen days? Nineteen days??? It would be hard to ask this of our soldiers for a war that was worth fighting. But we are asking it of them because Bush decided to go for his surge -- a strategy that neither his own generals nor almost anyone else thought would work, and whose main recommendation seemed to be that it would allow him to go on avoiding the need to admit that the war is lost for another eight months or so. I hope he enjoys delaying the inevitable, given what other people are paying for it.

This Week In Hysteria

by hilzoy

This week, the FDA approved Lybrel, a contraceptive that enables women to stop menstruating. Predictably, this produced a flood of concern about the cosmic implications of it all, even though, as I understand it, the decision to include a week of placebos so that women who are on the pill would have periods was made because several decades ago, women found it less disconcerting. (Similarly, when the first cake mixes were developed, they had powdered eggs in them, but tests showed that people preferred to add their own eggs, since it made them feel as though they were actually baking.) What's truly perplexing is that a lot of the sillier things are written by women. For instance:

"It's unclear whether women will embrace this new pill, which contains the same formulations of estrogen and progestin used for birth control pills for decades, but its arrival marks yet another step toward the blurring of the genders.

As 21st century women dominate the universities and continue to climb the executive ladder, and metro-sexual men explore their feminine side, it's harder to define what it means to be a woman."

Um: no, it's not:

"Main Entry: wom·an
1 a : an adult female person"

See how easy? Even those of us who are contributing to the blurring of the genders by taking up university positions can manage that. We are not confused, even though, according to the author, "it is menstruation that has historically set women apart from men." Luckily for women who are pregnant, nursing, or menopausal, there are certain other telltale signs: breasts, a vagina, a uterus, pregnancy, no Y chromosomes. So most of us manage to figure out that we are not men even when we aren't having our period. Although Lybrel does seem to have led one woman to get confused about women's separate identities:

"On matters concerning the female reproductive system, it's important to remember J.S. Bach. Specifically, Anna Magdalena Bach, the second, highly fecund wife of history's most potent composer."

Honestly: you can't make this stuff up.

But the strangest of all is this segment from Fox News. Watch the face of the woman from NARAL as she slowly realizes just how nutty her counterpart from the Abstinence Clearinghouse is. ("I want more babies! More babies! We want more babies!")

Meanwhile...

Memorial Day

by hilzoy

The New York Times has a horribly sad article today, which is unfortunately all TimesSelect. Excerpt:

"The sniper fired. It was a clean shot, if there is such a thing. And down for good fell another American soldier.

His name was Sergeant James Dean, but everyone called him Jamie. He was the farm boy who fished, hunted and tossed a horseshoe like nobody else. He was the guy at the end of Toots Bar, nursing a Bud and talking Nascar. He was the driver of that blue Silverado at the red light, his hands on the wheel, his mind on combat horrors that made him moody, angry, withdrawn.

Now here he was, another American soldier, dead. Only Sergeant Dean was killed at the front door of his childhood home, the day after Christmas and three weeks before his redeployment, shot by a sniper representing the government for whom he had already risked his life in Afghanistan. His wife and parents received the news not by a knock on the door, but by gunfire in the neighborhood.

“If they had just left him alone,” says his wife, Muriel."

More below the fold.

Just. Shoot. Me. Now.

by hilzoy

Via TPM, here's an article from Congressional Quarterly. It contains what the author describes as a "hilarious story" from Patrick Lang:

"It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon’s worldwide spying operations.

In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.

One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus.

Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.

“He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me.

“He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’

“He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’

“And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’

‘That’s too bad,” Feith said.

The audience howled.

“That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.”"

Hahahahaha! Here's another:

"“I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him — this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, ‘You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.’

“He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They’re going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there’s going to be a massive insurgency.’”

“He said, ‘No, no, they’ll be glad to see us,’” Lang continued. “This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.’

No, Lang told Wolfowitz, “that’s not gonna happen. It’s just an impossibility. They’re not like that. They don’t want to be us.”

Not everyone agrees with all of Lang’s views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful."

Heck, not just experts. I could have told Wolfowitz that (a) most people don't like having their countries occupied, even when they hate their present ruler, and (b) if I had to make a list of people least likely to be exceptions to this rule, Arabs would be at or near the top. I mean, I imagine that are cultures somewhere in which honor is not a big thing, and people don't much mind what others might regard as humiliation, but Arab culture is not one of them. Likewise, I imagine that there might be peoples somewhere, perhaps in some isolated valley in New Guinea, where people have no previous experience of being colonized or occupied, and thus will not tend to equate us with their previous colonizers. Again, however, Iraqis are not that people, and they did not much care for their previous encounters with, say, the British.

This is not rocket science. But how someone who couldn't figure this out on his own, and who apparently didn't bother to listen to people who could, managed to get into a position of power in our country is a mystery that passeth all understanding.

***

UPDATE: When I said that "I imagine that are cultures somewhere in which honor is not a big thing, and people don't much mind what others might regard as humiliation, but Arab culture is not one of them", I did not mean to imply that Americans would not mind this. We would, and one of the most startling failures Wolfowitz displays in the conversation recounted above is (apparently) not having so much as tried to imagine how he would feel if the United States were invaded by some other country. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that we were governed by a truly odious American whom we loathed, we would bitterly resent some other country deciding, for reasons of its own, to occupy us.

What I did mean was that of all the countries in the world about which to think that they would welcome being invaded and occupied, Iraq would have to be pretty near the bottom of the list. That it would be stupid to think this about any country I took to be obvious; that's why I said that "most people don't like having their countries occupied, even when they hate their present ruler." That Iraq was not just unlikely to be an exception to this rule, but likely to mind occupation to an even greater than usual degree, was the point of the next bit.

Artur Davis . . . Linguistic Badass

by publius

I didn’t watch the entire Goodling hearing (about 60%), but I had two quick impressions. First, Monica Goodling pretty much handed the House Judiciary members their asses. She was impressive, frankly. Second, the preparation of the Democratic committee members was disgraceful. They were woefully unprepared, and apparently unaware of those strange little creatures sometimes called follow-up questions. With one exception – Artur Davis (D-AL) (Orin Kerr noticed him too).

I can’t take credit for catching this -- a friend (commenter kovarsky) directed me to both Davis’s questioning and his resume. And it’s impressive stuff. Davis is a Democrat from Alabama – double Harvard, and a former Assistant US Attorney. And it shows. It wasn’t just that Davis efficiently obtained the most damaging testimony, it was the way in which he did so. Looking closely at the mechanics of his examination illustrates that he is a skilled, experienced questioner (and a master of linguistics). More below the flip.

The Vote

by hilzoy

I am horribly, horribly disappointed by the Democrats' capitulation. I think I agree with publius that this will be a long-run loser for the Republicans, but it's the Republicans' willingness to give Bush whatever he wants, not anything we did, that makes it so. And besides, I don't think this should be about politics in any case. A pretty large part of me also agrees with Keith Olbermann's comment from last night. (Worth watching, if you haven't seen it already.)

And yet, as I said before, I also really worry that if the Democrats had not passed a bill that Bush was willing to sign, he really might have left the troops to run out of money, or ammunition, stranded in Iraq, and blamed it on us. This would have been wrong: the President obviously has it in his power to ensure that the troops are safe. But, equally obviously, just because something is wrong doesn't mean this President will not do it, any more than the fact that no remotely decent person would imperil our soldiers to score political points means that this President would not do so. On this point I agree with Olbermann completely:

"And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness—your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs—you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don’t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands. (...)

Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally—first, last and always—that the troops would not suffer.

A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing Brigades into a ‘second surge,’ but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe—even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.

Well, any true President would have done that, Sir.

You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so."

That's right. He did. And I see no reason to assume he wouldn't have gone on doing so, even at the risk of their lives. Which is why, on reflection, I find that what I am mad about is not the fact that some Democrats voted for this bill. I mean, does anyone here sincerely believe that the reason Murtha voted for it is that he's insufficiently opposed to prolonging the war? Instead, it's three things.

First, the fact that this is the choice anyone was given. I fail to see how this could possibly be the best the Democrats could have done. Because:

Second, the Democrats did not take this opportunity to clarify the issues for the next round of funding, or even to force Bush to say increasingly implausible things about how the war is going. The point here is not to gain political advantage; it's to do as much as possible to put us in a position to do better next time. For instance, I think Murtha's readiness requirements and limits on length of deployment would have been good: they can be waived, but only if the President explains in each case why the national security requires it.

The thing I'm angriest about, on reflection, is something different, namely: the fact that the Democrats never so much as tried to make their case the way they should have. For starters, they should have been out there making Olbermann's point: that there is absolutely nothing in any funding cutoff they would have passed that requires the President to leave the troops stranded. (I mean, it's not as though they were going to pass a bill that explicitly precludes him from spending any money to get the troops home safely, for instance.) If they ended up stranded, that would have to be because this President chose to strand them.

For another, they should have been hammering away at the fact that they were not actually proposing to cut off funds. The Republicans and the media have consistently portrayed passing a funding bill that Bush doesn't like as "failing to provide money for the troops." His remarks when he vetoed the last bill were downright surreal:

"We need to give our troops all the equipment and the training and protection they need to prevail. That means that Congress needs to pass an emergency war spending bill quickly. I've invited leaders of both parties to come to the White House tomorrow -- and to discuss how we can get these vital funds to our troops. (...)

Here in Washington, we have our differences on the way forward in Iraq, and we will debate them openly. Yet whatever our differences, surely we can agree that our troops are worthy of this funding -- and that we have a responsibility to get it to them without further delay."

You'd never know that when he said those words, he had just vetoed a bill that provided the very funding he was talking about.

And throughout this period, while anchors on CNN were joining with Republican political operatives in describing the passage of a supplemental appropriations bill as "denying funds for the troops", what were the Democrats doing? In altogether too many cases, they were saying the same thing. They certainly weren't doing what they should have been doing, which was saying, as often as it took to get the point across, that voting to provide funds is not the same as not providing funds, and that if funds ended up not being provided, that would be because the President chose to veto the bill that provided them.

The reason I think that the Democrats should have been hammering away at these two points -- that the Democrats were providing money for the troops, and that since the President would always have enough money to get them home safely, if they found themselves in peril, that would be because he had put them there -- would not have been to score political points. I have no aversion to political points, especially when they're true, but on this question, political points are not the issue. It's rather that this is the best way I can think of to shift the terms of the debate in such a way that Bush found it as hard as possible to stick to his line, and Republicans in Congress found it as hard as possible to support him. If we had done that, we might have managed to prevail; and even if we hadn't, we would have done all we could.

That's what I'm really angry about: less that we folded today, but that we folded months ago.

Voter ID DATA!

--by Sebastian

I found an interesting dataset from the bipartisan Election Assistance Commision.  So far as I can tell from the murky backstory, this report was not adopted by the Commission because neither side liked parts of its conclusions (there are hints of the Administration not being thrilled either).  And I can see why, there are all sorts of things for both sides of the standard story to hate.   Voter ID Report (warning big PDF file).

I learned lots of things I didn't know.  For example, were you aware that 10 states let you get by with just stating your name to vote?  I didn't either! 

I won't try to oversummarize, but there is quite a bit of information.  Essentially they tried to analyze how different voter qualification requirements change voting participation.  And there are soundbites for everyone! 

All my discussion will be from appendix C which most directly addresses the data and which forms the backbone of the report.  Appendix C begins on page 68 of the PDF.  Page number references will be from the PDF not listed page numbers. 

First the table showing mean turnout using the aggregate county level data for each state.  (footnotes to indicate some concern that the methodology--which uses voting age population estimates--fails to factor in adults who are ineligible to vote). 

Table 1 – Variation in 2004 State Turnout Based on Voter Identification Requirements

Maximum Requirement           Minimum Requirement

State Name 64.2 %                 State Name 63.0 %

Sign Name 61.1 %                   Sign Name 60.8 % 14

Match Signature 60.9 %           Match Signature 61.7 %

Provide Non-Photo ID59.3 %     Provide Non-PhotoID59.0 %

Provide Photo ID 58.1 %           Swear Affidavit 60.1 %

Average Turnout for All States 60.9 %

This appears to show a massive 3% drop from just being forced to sign your signature as a form of ID and an additional 3% drop from being forced to provide a photo ID.  Photo ID advocates probably aren't happy with this chart. 

But of course there are complications (p.24):

Voter identification requirements are just one factor that might affect voter turnout.  Multivariate models that take into account other predictors of turnout can paint a more complete picture of the relationship between voter identification requirements and turnout. This analysis estimated the effects of voter identification requirements in multivariate models that also took into account the electoral context in 2004 and demographic characteristics of the population in each county. While the model takes account of several important variables, statistical models do not capture all the messiness of the real world. It is a simplification of a complex reality, and its results should be treated with appropriate caution. The model also took into account such variables as:

• Was the county in a presidential battleground state?

• Was the county was in a state with a competitive race for governor and/or the U.S.

Senate?

• Percentage of the voting-age population in each county that was Hispanic or African-

American 22

• Percentage of county residents age 65 and older

• Percentage of county residents below the poverty line

Another contextual factor to consider is voter registration requirements, such as the deadline for registration. As states set the deadline farther away from Election Day, the task of remembering to register to vote becomes more challenging. Thus our model takes into account the number of days between each state’s registration deadline and the election. The dependent variable in each model using the aggregate data was voter turnout at the county level, with turnout calculated as the percentage of the citizen voting-age population that voted in the 2004 election. The results of this modeling suggest that the stricter voter identification requirements of matching one's signature to a signature on file with election authorities or presenting a nonphoto ID are associated with lower turnout compared to turnout in states that required voters to simply state their name, holding constant the electoral context and demographic variables. Contextual factors, such as whether the county was in a battleground state or whether that state had a competitive race for governor and/or U.S. Senate, were associated with increased voter turnout. The time between the closing date for registration and the election was correlated with a slight negative effect on turnout. As the percentage of Hispanics in the county’s population increased, turnout declined. The percentage of senior citizens in the county and household median income were associated with higher turnout. The percentage of African-Americans in the county did not have a significant effect in the model. The percentage of senior citizens in the county and household median income showed a positive correlation with turnout. In this aggregate model, the percentage of African-Americans in the county was not associated with a significant difference in turnout.

This leads to another table (p84):

Table 4. Predicted probability of voter turnout – full model

Maximum requirement           Minimum requirement

State name 0.917                  0.915

Sign name 0.899                    0.902

Match signature(N.S.)            (N.S.)

Non-photo ID 0.890                0.890

Photo ID 0.888                        ---

Affidavit    ----                      0.875

Total difference from “state name” to “photo identification” or “affidavit” 0.029 0.040 N 54,973 Figures represent the predicted probability of registered voters saying they voted as the identification requirement varies stating one’s name to providing photo identification or an affidavit, with all other variables held constant. N.S. = nonsignificant coefficient in the probit model.

I find this table interesting because the politically interesting comparison is NOT the difference between "state name" and "photo identification".  What is interesting to me is that the move from "Sign Name" to "Photo ID" is a very small step in turnout and that it is far less than the step from "State Name" to "Sign Name".  Also interesting is the fact that non-photo ID has almost as strong an effect as a photo ID. 

Other interesting findings is that ethnicity can effect the results, but not as predicted.  Controlling for African Americans did almost nothing to the fit.  On page 76 we learn an astonishing to conventional wisdom:  "Voter identification requirements also influenced turnout among Black voters, but to a lesser extent relative to white voters."  Also, "Of the maximum voter identification requirements, only the non-photo identification requirement reduced turnout compared to turnout in states that required voters to state their names. 

In a statistic most likely to cause a huge fight about what it means, "Hispanic voters were 10 percent less likely to vote in non-photo identification states compared to states where voters only had to give their name."  Some will argue that this suggests that a huge number of Hispanic voters are ineligible, while others will argue that having any documentation requirement whatsoever seems to discriminate against Hispanic voters.  The data doesn't resolve the question.

The report accurately concludes:  "The data examined in this project could not capture the dynamics of how identification requirements might lower turnout.  If these requirements dampen turnout, is it because individuals are aware of the requirements and stay away because they cannot or do not want to meet the requirements."  But we now now the magnitude of the question.  Forcing people to sign their names reduces turnout by about 2%.  Photo ID reduces it an additional 1%.

That is a greater dampening effect than I would have guessed though much less than I had heard touted. 

We also learned that the racial effect is almost nil with respect to African-Americans but is huge with respect to Hispanics.  That isn't the conventional wisdom at all, and is interesting fodder for both sides of the debate. 

The most interesting question for me is, what is the marginal effect on Democrats and Republicans?

Another interesting question would be "does this persist over time?" or "do people get used to a set of rules and adapt?"

And big chicken me, I'm off to a volleyball tournament tomorrow at 4 in the morning (here I come Denver) so I won't be participating in the discussion except for later tonight.      

Monica Goodling

by hilzoy

I've been listening to Monica Goodling's testimony while I do other things, and it has done very little so far to clarify any of the underlying questions the US Attorney scandal has raised. She has admitted asking political questions, like how people voted, during job interviews for career appointees, and while she scrupulously avoided claiming that Paul McNulty perjured himself before Congress, she did say that she believed not just that his testimony was inaccurate, but that he was aware of the truth when he gave it. But she has not said anything to clear up the central question: who put the US Attorneys on the firing list, and why? What she has said just confirms the sense that there was nothing that remotely resembled a good decision-making process. TPMMuckraker:

"Here's Monica Goodling explaining the process behind the firing of U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden. At a November 27, 2006 meeting with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general and others, Goodling said that DAG Paul McNulty raised a concern about Bogden being on the list. Is there a problem with Bogden, McNulty asked, or is there just a general sense that we could do better?

According to Goodling, Kyle Sampson replied, "“I think it’s a general sense, a general kind of sense that we could do better.” After that, everyone looked to the attorney general, she said, and "I think he nodded and said 'OK.'" So there you go."

This is how they decided whose career to end?

Since Goodling, like everyone else so far, denies any knowledge of how various names came to be on the list, it still seems to have emerged by a process of spontaneous generation unsullied by any actual human agency, the way people once believed that mice were spontaneously generated from rags and dust.

Watching her testify, I found myself marveling once again at the people who seem to have had actual power in the Justice Department. Goodling strikes me as different, in this respect, from Sampson or Gonzales, both of whom left me wondering why anyone would have hired them at all, for any position. It seems clear why someone would have hired Goodling. She seems smart, capable, and diligent: in a word, she's everything you could possibly want in an administrative assistant. She gives the impression that you would need only to point her in the general direction of a project to be researched, or a relatively clear task to be completed, and she would carry it out very well.

I mean: I would love to have someone like Monica Goodling working for me. The barely subdued chaos of my desk would be replaced by a well-organized set of binders with colorful tabs. There would be to-do lists and cheerful post-it notes. My email would be answered on time. It would be wonderful.

She's also smart in a different way, one that reveals itself in what strike me as very careful answers to her questions. A number of times she has been asked whether she knew of something, and she answered: I have read the press reports. If you think about it, that doesn't fully answer the question. And I might have missed it, but I didn't hear anyone ask the follow-up question: did you know about it from any source other than the press? She struck me as a person to whom it would be essential to ask those questions. And knowing how to give questions that are not fully responsive, and that are moreover very guarded if you pay attention to them, while always seeming completely forthcoming, and to maintain this for hours on end, is not an easy thing to pull off. She did.

What she seems to lack is any sense at all of the bigger picture, and any kind of judgment or wisdom. I didn't get any sense from her testimony that she was aware that there was a big picture, or that thinking about it was something one might consider doing. Or rather: maybe she thinks about the really big picture, i.e. God and His will; what I didn't see was any sign of the kind of big picture in which one might find things like a concern for justice, for the integrity of institutions, for the rule of law, or for the proper role of legal institutions in our society. Perhaps this is in part because she is trying to minimize her role, but I think it's more than that. In any case, the absence of any apparent thought about the broader implications of anything is more complete than that concern would explain.

And that, in turn, means that while she'd be good at a number of different jobs, you'd want to keep her as far away as possible from any position in which she had not just to implement plans agreed on by others, but to make policy or personnel decisions herself. Putting her in any such position seems to me to be roughly on a par with putting me on an NBA team: it would draw on few of her strengths and expose all of her weaknesses.

If she were older, or had had a distinguished career, that might explain why she found herself in such a position. Sometimes, by dint of doing all their previous jobs well, people do work their way out of all the jobs that draw on their strengths, and find themselves promoted to a level for which they are completely unsuited, and at which their weaknesses suddenly stand exposed. But that can't be what happened with her. She's only 33. So how she found herself in a position of real responsibility, with hiring and firing authority over career prosecutors, at the Department of Justice is a real mystery. Not as much of a mystery as the rise of Mssrs. Sampson and Gonzales, since unlike them, Monica Goodling actually seems to have strengths, but a mystery nonetheless.