Obsidian Wings

Jackson Will Resign

by hilzoy

Via TPM, the WSJ:

"Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to announce his resignation Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, a decision that will deal a blow to the Bush administration's efforts to tackle the housing and mortgage mess.

The exact reasons for Mr. Jackson's decision couldn't be learned. The secretary has been beset recently by allegations of cronyism and favoritism. Earlier this month, two Democratic senators, Patty Murray of Washington and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, sent a letter to President Bush urging him to request Mr. Jackson's resignation, arguing that the distraction has made him ineffective.

Mr. Jackson has consistently denied wrongdoing."

This is excellent news. (For background, see here.) On the other hand, much as it delights me to see Jackson leave office, it's a pretty bad time not to have a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development:

"The news is a setback for the Bush administration and its efforts to combat the housing and mortgage mess. HUD, usually out of the spotlight, has been at the heart of the administration's attempts to ease problems for homeowners. Although Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has taken the lead on many initiatives, Mr. Jackson has been a partner on many, including programs such as Hope Now, an administration-backed industry plan to loosen the terms on hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages.

HUD also runs the Federal Housing Administration."

Take-home lesson: don't appoint dreadful people in the first place. Then they won't have to resign at the worst possible moment.

Meet McCain's Economics Advisor

by hilzoy

I'm late getting to John McCain's speech on the housing crisis, in which he promised to do next to nothing to help homeowners, to convene a meeting of accountants, to cut taxes, and, in a surprising break with most economists here on planet earth, to respond to the present financial problems by cutting regulation [UPDATE: as von notes, this is McCain's response to what he calls "an explosion of complex financial instruments that weren't particularly well understood by even the most sophisticated banks, lenders and hedge funds" As von correctly notes, McCain does propose new regulation on mortgage lenders. END UPDATE.] The idea that overregulation is at the heart of our present predicament might seem counterintuitive. But the fact that McCain believes it is a lot easier to understand when you realize that his chief economic advisor and general campaign co-chair is Phil Gramm, who seems never to have met a financial regulation he didn't want to destroy.

Gramm, who has been described as "McCain's econ brain" and "the expert he turns to on the subject," didn't just oppose financial regulations in general. He helped to create the conditions for the mortgage crisis, and others, in quite specific ways. Lisa Lerer at Politico has more:

"The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil. (...)

A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.

Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more then $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs."

The 1999 bill that Gramm sponsored overturned the Glass-Steagall Act, which (among other things) separated investment banks from ordinary banks. Gramm's bill was an enormously important piece of financial legislation, and by allowing banks and brokerages to merge, it set in place some of the conditions that hampered scrutiny of mortgage-backed securities, and made the damage from the present meltdown harder to contain. As Paul Krugman wrote last week:

"I’d argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Mr. Gramm to make this crisis possible."

Isn't that comforting?

But Gramm isn't just involved in this economic meltdown...

Nomination - Stupidest Quote of 2008 (Thus Far)

by publius

God help us if this isn't a lie (emphasis mine):

Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser [said] “Would you rather have the Maliki government in control, or the Iranian-backed special groups in control, or Al Qaeda in control?”

Weekend Bleg - To Mac or Not to Mac

by publius

So I'm thinking of becoming a cool kid and getting a Mac notebook. But I'm not sold yet. For one, I love my right clicking. Two, I'm worried about Windows compatibility (though I've been told that's no longer a problem). Plus, I don't really do audio/video editing, etc. So that's the question - are they really worth it?

Iraq: Roundup

by hilzoy

This is not good at all:

"U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in the vast Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, and military officials said Friday that U.S. aircraft bombed militant positions in the southern city of Basra, as the American role in a campaign against party-backed militias appeared to expand. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the Sadr City fighting, as U.S. troops took the lead.

Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of U.S. weapons, along with the Mahdi Army's AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.

The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets. The Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite rival of Maliki, appeared to have taken the brunt of the attacks; fighting spread to many southern cities and parts of Baghdad."

And this just makes it worse:

"Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.

In Basra, three rival Shiite groups have been trying to position themselves, sometimes through force of arms, to dominate recently approved provincial elections.

The U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said that they believe Iran has provided assistance in the past to all three groups: the Mahdi Army; the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Iraq's largest Shiite party; and forces loyal to the Fadhila Party, which holds the Basra governor's seat. But the officials see the current conflict as a purely internal Iraqi dispute.

Some officials have concluded that Maliki himself is firing "the first salvo in upcoming elections," the administration official said.

"His dog in that fight is that he is basically allied with the Badr Corps" against forces loyal to Sadr, the official said. "It's not a pretty picture.""

It's made even less pretty by the reports that Iraqi forces are holding back and letting us take the lead, or not fighting at all, or switching sides:

"Abu Iman barely flinched when the Iraqi Government ordered his unit of special police to move against al-Mahdi Army fighters in Basra.

His response, while swift, was not what British and US military trainers who have spent the past five years schooling the Iraqi security forces would have hoped for. He and 15 of his comrades took off their uniforms, kept their government-issued rifles and went over to the other side without a second thought."

So: Maliki launched an assault on the Mahdi Army without telling us. [UPDATE: Eric Martin says: don't take the claim that we weren't told at face value. He's right. END UPDATE] We're not sure why he did this, but it appears to be about internal Iraqi politics. And yet, for some reason, our forces are heavily involved, and possibly taking the lead.

More below the fold.

Read It And Weep

by hilzoy

Via Bitch Ph.D., the WSJ:

"A collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Her husband, Jim, and three sons found a small source of solace: a $700,000 accident settlement from the trucking company involved. After legal fees and other expenses, the remaining $417,000 was put in a special trust. It was to be used for Mrs. Shank's care.

Instead, all of it is now slated to go to Mrs. Shank's former employer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Two years ago, the retail giant's health plan sued the Shanks for the $470,000 it had spent on her medical care. A federal judge ruled last year in Wal-Mart's favor, backed by an appeals-court decision in August. Now, her family has to rely on Medicaid and Mrs. Shank's social-security payments to keep up her round-the-clock care.

"I don't understand why they need to do this," says Mr. Shank on a recent visit to the nursing home, between shifts as a maintenance worker and running a tanning salon. "This girl needs the money more than they do." Mrs. Shank, who needs help with eating and other basic tasks, spends more time alone since Mr. Shank had to let her private caregiver go. At some point, he says, she may have to be moved from a private to a semi-private room in the nursing home where she lives.

The reason is a clause in Wal-Mart's health plan that Mrs. Shank didn't notice when she started stocking shelves at a nearby store eight years ago. Like most company health plans, Wal-Mart's reserves the right to recoup the medical expenses it paid for someone's treatment if the person also collects damages in an injury suit."

As far as I can tell from the article, the damages Mrs. Shank (or rather, a trust set up for her care) collected were not supposed to cover the medical care Wal-Mart had already paid for. They were for her loss, which is ongoing, and which will continue to cost her family both economically and in other ways. And this isn't uncommon in catastrophic cases:

"In cases like the Shanks', where injuries and medical costs are catastrophic, accident victims sometimes can be left with little or none of the money they fought for in court. Health plans are increasingly adopting language such as Wal-Mart's, which dictates that it is to be paid first out of any settlement, regardless of what remains for the injured person. Moreover, the victim is responsible for all legal costs in pursuing the suit.

"It's especially in the catastrophic cases that people are almost never fully compensated," says Roger Baron, a professor of law at the University of South Dakota and a specialist in health-plan law. "And then their health plan, that's been collecting premiums from them all this time, wants to take it away?""

I support any reasonably well-designed plan that will provide affordable health insurance to all Americans, but given a choice, I prefer a single-insurer plan (basically, there is one insurer who insures everyone, and it's the government. Sort of like universal Medicare.) There are a number of reasons for this, including the advantages of integration and administrative savings. But one of them is that in a world in which there was no question who was going to pay for Mrs. Shank's care, no one would try to weasel out of it in this way. As things are, many patients and their families have to go through this horrific nightmare of figuring out who is responsible for what, and whether what they need will be approved, at the very time when they least need that kind of stress.

I recall someone who used to clean my house. She and her husband were hardworking, good people. She had not signed up for her own health insurance because his employer provided good coverage, and it was cheaper for them to enroll in his plan as a couple. But then one day he was in an accident on a motorcycle, and his leg was shattered. His health insurance paid for the first of a series of operations, but guess what? He couldn't do his job after the accident, so he was let go. That, of course, meant that he and his wife lost their health insurance, which in turn meant that they had to pay, out of pocket, for the rest of the operations (I think there were nine in all, but I could have the number wrong) that he needed to put his leg back together. They applied for various forms of assistance, and were rejected by several because they were insufficiently poor. They burned through their savings before they were done, but they also had to spend a lot of time and emotional energy that they didn't have trying to slog through one bureaucracy after another, trying to find someone who could help.

Eventually -- I am not making this up -- she went to work at Wal-Mart, because she could work the night shift and care for her husband during the day. They never did get their savings back: savings they had worked for over a lifetime.

This happens because our system of insurance is so fractured that it's unclear who will end up paying for what. There are a lot of wonky reasons to prefer a single-insurer model, but there are also reasons like this one: our present system is just inhumane. f you aren't convinced yet, consider the punchline to the WSJ story:
Here's the punch line:

"In August last year, U.S. district judge Lewis Blanton sided with Wal-Mart, ruling that when Mrs. Shank signed on to Wal-Mart's health plan she was obligated to abide by its terms.

The ruling came six days before the Shanks' 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed in September last year in Iraq shortly after he arrived in the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division.

"I wanted to give up at that point, tell Wal-Mart they won," Mr. Shank says, but his lawyer, Mr. Graham, said he'd continue with appeals.

Mrs. Shank went to Jeremy's funeral. But because of memory problems due to her injuries, she gets confused about what happened. On a recent morning, she cried several times and asked what had happened to her middle son. Mr. Shank says that he obtained a divorce from Mrs. Shank this year, partly because of advice from a health-care administrator that she might be more eligible for public aid as a single woman. Mrs. Shank, who has been declared incompetent by a court, hasn't been informed of the divorce by her family."

Obviously, I don't hold our health care system responsible for the fact that the ruling came right before the Shanks' son was killed. But I think that no one should ever have to divorce his wife in order to get care for her. Ever. Not in my country.

Chain Of Fools

by hilzoy

This is pretty extraordinary:

"Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation."

That's a pretty impressive list of problems, if I ask me. Could it possibly get worse? Well, yes. I left out the entire domestic violence angle, and the bit about the head of the company having a forged driver's license that would have made him ineligible for contracts if he hadn't gone into a diversion program for first offenders. That's a tangent. This is the main point:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Judicial Review

by publius

One of the themes of the John Adams mini-series is the tension between the passions of the mob and the rule of law. We tend to forget – spoiled by 150 years without domestic war – just how precarious the line between civilization and anarchy can be. As 1770s Boston illustrated, mobs can rise quickly and do terrible things. In watching this tension play out on HBO, it reminded me of my own evolution regarding the “rule of law” (the concept). Ironically enough, the George W. Bush era has made me far more conservative on legal matters than I once was. Specifically, Bush has made me more of an Adams man than a Jefferson one.

As a law student, legal realism made a deep impression on me. To be perfectly blunt, I thought law didn’t matter. Constitutional law in particular seemed like one giant fraud – it was nothing more than political preferences cloaked in an impenetrable linguistic façade of legalisms. It was no accident that conservative judges tended to line up on different sides than liberal judges. Nor was it an accident when sweeping constitutional changes occurred with new administrations. [What’s particularly annoying about conservative jurisprudence is not so much that it’s political, but the obnoxious self-righteous denials that it is even slightly political. Their positions (which practically all align with their political views) are not policy preferences but simply “interpretations” of a “static” constitution, or the will of the framers, or whatever.]

In short, law was politics – nothing more. The rule of law was a convenient fiction. And recent events seemed to support that skepticism. Bush v. Gore remains to this day a naked exercise of illegitimate judicial power-grabbing. The audacity of 5 individuals to stop the election for the President of the United States burns me to this day. They should have all, frankly, been impeached for that (if not tarred and feathered – though that apparently really burns). Bush v. Gore was the ultimate vindication of legal realism’s predictions. It happened in 2000. I entered law school in 2000. So it goes.

Nicholas Kristof Says The N Word

by hilzoy

No, not that one. The one that is, for a Democrat, the worst insult of all:

"Yes, Hillary Rodham Clinton may still have a chance of winning the Democratic nomination. But it’s probably smaller than the chance that a continued slugfest will hand the White House to John McCain. (...)

Mrs. Clinton’s chances of winning are negligible, barring some major development.

Meanwhile, the big winner of the Democratic fist-fighting is Senator McCain. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that 19 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters said they would vote for Mr. McCain in the general election if Mrs. Clinton were the nominee. More startling, 28 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said they would defect to Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama were the nominee. (...)

If Mrs. Clinton can run a high-minded, civil campaign and rein in her proxies, then she has every right to continue through the next few primaries, and the Democrats might even benefit from the bolstered attention and turnout. But if the brawl continues, then she and her husband may be remembered by many people who long admired them as having the same effect on Mr. Obama this November that Ralph Nader had on Al Gore in 2000.

Do the Clintons really want to risk becoming the Naders of 2008?"

That is exactly the right question for the Clintons to ask themselves. The superdelegates, on the other hand, should ask themselves a different question, namely: do they want to go on enabling Clinton now that she has become the Nader of 2008?

At the outset, we had a number of fine candidates for President. One of them is now overwhelmingly likely to go to the convention ahead in pledged delegates and the popular vote. You can play with Slate's Delegate Counter here; I put in some truly Clinton-friendly numbers -- PA 65-35, WV 75-25, NC for Obama 53-47, Puerto Rico 67-33, etc., etc -- and Obama still came out ahead by over 70 delegates. Ben Smith runs down her chances at taking the popular vote here. They look pretty slim to me.

The superdelegates have every right to vote any way they want. But I can't see them deciding to give the nomination to a candidate who isn't ahead either in pledged delegates or in the popular vote absent some genuine disaster befalling the Obama campaign. Provoking that disaster is, therefore, Clinton's only remaining winning strategy. Jake Tapper talked to an anonymous Democratic Party official:

"What will she have to do to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, in order to eke out her improbable victory?

She will have to "break his back", the official said. She will have to destroy Obama, make Obama completely unacceptable.

"Her securing the nomination is certainly possible - but it will require exercising the 'Tonya Harding option.'" the official said. "Is that really what we Democrats want?""

No. It's not.

I'm sure that Senator Clinton believes she is doing the right thing by staying in the race. If I had to guess, I'd say that Ralph Nader thought he was doing the right thing by running for President in 2000. He wasn't right then, and Clinton isn't right now.

If the party leadership won't stage an intervention and try to get her to withdraw, that's just one more reason to conclude that we need new leadership.

It's 3am. Do You Know Where Joe Lieberman Is?

by hilzoy

Harold Meyerson:

"It is 3 a.m., and the stillness of the White House night is shattered by the ringing of the red phone. President John McCain, rousing himself from a deep sleep, turns on the light and picks up the receiver. A U.S. embassy in a Middle Eastern country, he is told, has been blown up, and al-Qaeda is taking credit.

McCain takes a deep breath. "Character counts, my friend," he says. "Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb Iran."

There is a rustling of blankets, and, brushing aside Cindy McCain, a concerned Joe Lieberman rises from the bed. "Not Iran, Mr. President," he says. "They hate al-Qaeda."

"That's right," the president says. "I remember now." He sighs with relief. "Good thing you're here every night, Joe."

But suppose, dear reader, that John McCain becomes president and Joe Lieberman doesn't bunk with the McCains on a nightly basis. How easily should the rest of us sleep?"

Not easily at all. When what sanity your foreign policy has depends on the presence of Joe Lieberman, of all people, things have gotten pretty scary.

Besides, it's not as though McCain is only confused about foreign policy. Think of all the people who would have to be hidden under the covers just in case something came up. Economics isn't McCain's long suit, so I suppose Douglas Holtz-Eakin would have to be nestled in their somewhere, along with someone to correct McCain's little slips on science and public health. Luckily, his ignorance of history probably won't get him in trouble in the middle of the night, so historians everywhere can sleep easier knowing that they will not be called on for special White House duty.

Still, with all the important topics on which McCain seems to be either confused or ignorant, that bed could get pretty crowded.

***

UPDATE: The NSN has a good fact check on McCain's foreign policy speech. The gist of it (with which I agree): sounds very nice; what a pity McCain's actual policies make his stated approach impossible.