Obsidian Wings

How About a Seven Month Vacation Instead?

by publius

It’s hard to explain just how silly I think the media’s manic obsessive focus on Jeremiah Wright has been. I’m not a big fan of the guy, but neither do I feel the need for ostentatious Maoist denunciations to show tmy bipartisan street cred. He should simply be ignored -- there’s no reason he should ever be elevated to the top story of the news cycle.

But that said, couldn’t he wait until after the primary to begin his public image rehabilitation tour? Or if he’s too vain for that, how about at least waiting until after Indiana?

In My Other Life...

by hilzoy

I do stuff like this:

"Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.

The proposed ban is the result of a two-year effort by the group, the Association of American Medical Colleges, to create a model policy governing interactions between the schools and industry. While schools can ignore the association’s advice, most follow its recommendations.

Rob Restuccia, executive director of the Prescription Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating conflicts of interest in medicine, said the report would transform medical education. (...)

Drug companies spend billions wooing doctors — more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.

So companies have for decades provided faculty and students free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even ghost-wrote research papers for busy professors. (...)

With Dr. Roy Vagelos, a former Merck chief executive, serving as the task force’s chairman and the chief executives of Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Amgen and Medtronic on the roster, some who advocate for greater restrictions on industry influence in medicine predicted that the report would be weak.

They were wrong.

In addition to the gift, food and travel bans, the report recommended that medical schools should “strongly discourage participation by their faculty in industry-sponsored speakers’ bureaus,” in which doctors are paid to promote drug and device benefits.

It recommended that schools set up centralized systems for accepting free drug samples or “alternative ways to manage pharmaceutical sample distribution that do not carry the risks to professionalism with which current practices are associated.” It suggested that schools audit independently accredited medical education seminars given by faculty “for the presence of inappropriate influence.” And it said the rules should apply to faculty even when off-duty or away from school.

Speakers’ bureaus and drug samples are pillars of the industry’s marketing operations, and many medical school professors have resisted efforts to restrict them. Only a handful of medical schools presently bar faculty members from serving on speakers’ bureaus, so if this recommendation is widely adopted, it could transform the relationship between medical school faculty and industry, and it could change substantially the way medical education is routinely delivered."

The full report is here (pdf).

Theme Of The Day: Incoherence

by hilzoy

Since I have this quaint idea that I should decide who to vote for based on my best judgment about who would -- oh, I know this will sound hopelessly naive, but: who will do the best job, I love it when thoughtful people who know what they're talking about actually survey the various candidates' proposals and evaluate them. Just in case any of you share this peculiar taste, a few links about John McCain. First, a quick one: Michael Berubé went through all the candidates' disability policies recently, and when he got to McCain, he came up empty. (The whole thing is very much worth reading; the bit about McCain is at the very bottom.) You've got to ask yourself one question, disabled people: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punks? Because with McCain, you'll be taking a leap into the unknown.

Next, Reed Hundt, ex-chair of the FCC, looks at McCain's tech policy:

"Notwithstanding his tenure as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, where I first met him (and where I recall clearly that he used to have opinions), he has only two planks for a communications sector platform and none at all for information technology more generally. First, he is against "taxes that threaten [the Internet, because it is an] engine of economic growth and prosperity." So what taxes are those? He doesn't say. Does he oppose taxes on cable or telephone companies, which are the engines that drive Internet access? He doesn't say. Does he oppose sales taxes on products sold through e-commerce, which is the issue that has often been debated in Congress? He doesn't say.

Second, we find that "John McCain Will Ban New Cell Phone Taxes. John McCain understands that the same people that would tax e-mail will tax every text message - and even 911 calls. John McCain will prohibit new cellular telephone taxes." So does this mean he supports old cell phone taxes and won't repeal them? Who are the people who threaten to tax text messages or 911 calls? He doesn't say. I can't imagine who proposes, for instance, to tax a free call to a first responder. What is McCain thinking?

And that's it for his campaign's communications and information technology policies. If anyone can find any other evidence of positions on these topics, please do share it with me. (...)

McCain opposed the goal of connecting all Americans to telephone service, doesn't support having a national broadband policy that provides any way for rural or lower income people to get Internet access, didn't vote for the competition-providing Telecommunications Act of 1996, opposed putting the Internet into every classroom, and never seemed to care about monopoly or duopoly in any communications market. He said he wanted to auction spectrum but didn't vote for the legislation that authorized the FCC to do that. He often said he didn't like broadcasters, but he failed to stop them from postponing the end of analog television (and delaying the follow-on spectrum auction) when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

In sum, he has long appeared to be against using law, regulation, spending or tax policy to encourage competition, innovation, educational technology, or widespread access to common mediums of communication.

Nor is he any closer to an understandable, much less a wise, position when it comes to green technology ..."

Hundt then explains McCain's views on that subject, and why they make no sense at all. It's worth reading, especially since Hundt both knows what he's talking about and explains things very clearly.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria discusses one of McCain's foreign policy proposals:

"On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power. (...) In recent years, McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic, alternating between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense. His speech reads like it was written by two very different people, each one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic.

The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework. What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia, the central banker of oil, in a world in which we are still crucially dependent on that energy source?

The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives—which would make American safe and the world more secure—we need Russian cooperation. How fulsome is that likely to be if we gratuitously initiate hostilities with Moscow? Dissing dictators might make for a stirring speech, but ordinary Americans will have to live with the complications after the applause dies down.

To reorder the G8 without China would be particularly bizarre. The G8 was created to help coordinate problems of the emerging global economy. Every day these problems multiply—involving trade, pollution, currencies—and are in greater need of coordination. To have a body that attempts to do this but excludes the world's second largest economy is to condemn it to failure and irrelevance. International groups are not cheerleading bodies but exist to help solve pressing global crises. Excluding countries won't make the problems go away."

I know that none of this is nearly as important as who wears flag lapel pins and who doesn't, but what can I say? I just can't help myself.

How to Help

by publius

The international food crisis is extremely disturbing. And it pushes what was once a profoundly stupid ethanol policy into the realm of immoral. But anyway, today’s Post provides a list of organizations that are helping fight hunger if you want to do something to help.

On an aside, I’m a fairly recent new parent. One of the many, many changes that parenthood brings is a new empathy for things like child hunger and virtually any issue involving children (abuse, war zones, poverty, etc.). Before you have children, you see these stories and feel a twinge of discomfort but then it’s gone. As a parent, though, these images leave a much deeper and lasting mark. You can’t help but imagine your own child and think about how enraged, saddened and embarrassed you would be if you couldn’t, say, feed your child. It truly hits home in a profoundly personal way.

I do hope both the public and world governments take some real steps to help. Getting rid of our immoral, child-starving ethanol subsidies would be a good start.

What Is Done In Our Name

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense.

But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Mr. Hamdan has essentially been driven crazy by solitary confinement in an 8-foot-by-12-foot cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo “boil his mind.”

“He will shout at us,” said his military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Brian L. Mizer. “He will bang his fists on the table.”

His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Mr. Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. The judge is to hear arguments as soon as Monday on whether he has the power to consider the claim.

Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo’s climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for madness. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo. As military prosecutors push to get trials under way, they are being met with challenges not just to the charges, but to Guantánamo itself. (...)

The military prosecutors declined to comment on the claims about Mr. Hamdan’s condition. As is common at Guantánamo, their legal filings were not made public before the scheduled court date. But defense filings released by Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers recited some prosecution arguments.

The prosecutors argued that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.” They said that Mr. Hamdan had denied having mental problems and that he was no model detainee, spitting at guards, threatening assault and throwing urine."

Well, that certainly puts my concerns about Hamdan's mental health to rest.

It's not just Hamdan, though:

"In leaked reports in 2004 investigators for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who do see detainees, said their treatment, including solitary confinement, amounted to torture. But the Red Cross usually keeps its conclusions private.

As a result, much of what is known about current conditions at Guantánamo comes from lawyers, who visit regularly under tight restrictions. Many describe the men as depressed or delusional. Some, they say, show obvious signs of what some of them call Guantánamo psychosis.

Four detainees are believed to have committed suicide in 2006 and 2007, but the military has never released the official details.

Some of the men are increasingly paranoid and some are losing touch with reality, said Rebecca P. Dick, a Washington lawyer who visited two Afghan detainees in March. “One client said, ‘I’m talking to the ceiling now,’ ” Ms. Dick recalled.

Six detainees, according to military officials, are now on hunger strikes. They are fed liquid nutrition through tubes inserted in their nostrils daily.

Mr. Stafford Smith said one of his clients, a hunger striker, was fixated on a mathematical formula that he believed proves that he will be the next to die.

Another detainee, Mr. Stafford Smith said, has smeared feces on his cell walls. “When I asked him why he was doing it, he told me he had no idea,” Mr. Stafford Smith said."

The idea that we are driving detainees at Guantnamo insane are not new. (Recall the Uighur detainee I described here: "Abdusemet said, "I am starting to hear voices, sometimes. There is no one to talk to in my cell and I hear these voices."") Nor is it accidental. We ought not to be holding people for years in conditions calculated to drive them insane within days. In a sane world, basic decency would ensure that we did not. In this world, however, I'll settle for court orders.

"He Didn't Know Enough About The Group"

by hilzoy

Quote Of The Day:

"U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler's birthday.

Zirkle confirmed to The News-Dispatch on Monday he spoke Sunday in Chicago at a meeting of the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, whose symbol is a swastika.

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn't know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it."

Um: how can you possibly be old enough to run for Congress and not know enough to decide whether you support or oppose the Nazis?

""This is just a great opportunity for me to witness," he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn't believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn't Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party."

Unlike the actual Nazis, whose name was, well, the National Socialist German Workers Party.

You might be thinking: well, not everyone knows the name of the original Nazi party. Mightn't Mr. Zirkle just not have known who he was talking to?

That's Mr. Zirkle giving his speech. Somehow, I don't think ignorance is the real explanation here. Especially since he was talking about Jewish pornographers and the threat they pose to whites.

***

I always wonder how people end up like this. Was Mr. Zirkle a normal kid once? By what trajectory could he possibly have ended up giving this speech to a group of Nazis at a Hitler's birthday celebration? I can sort of understand how people become cranky conspiracy theorists who worry about fluoridation or black helicopters. I can also understand how people take deliberately provocative views to bug their parents or their community. But wouldn't you think that when you find yourself in the company of actual Nazis in front of a Swastika flag and a great big picture of Hitler, you'd realize that you had gone too far? And if that didn't make you realize that you had crossed some pretty serious lines, what exactly would?

(h/t Orac)

I Don't Need To Tell You What The Brown Water Is

by hilzoy

Watch this video.

It was made by the father of a soldier just back from a 15 month tour in Afghanistan, and it shows the conditions that soldier and his unit have to live in now that they are home. It's appalling. The worst is probably the guy standing in what looks like a latrine, mopping up several inches of sewage that seem to have appeared when the toilets backed up and overflowed. It was taken less that twelve hours after the soldier in them got back to the US. The pipes that discharge sewage gas are pretty vile as well. So is the mold.

The army responds:

"One problem was that maintenance and repairs weren't complete because the soldiers in C Company, 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, came home three weeks ahead of schedule, he said. The barracks had been empty, except for brief periods, since the company left Fort Bragg."

I sympathize, but I don't think that's at all acceptable. Before we put any soldiers at all, let alone soldiers just back from 15 months in Afghanistan, into that housing, we should have put them in hotels. If there were no hotels, we should have sent them for a couple of weeks of R&R in Las Vegas at our expense, while we worked around the clock to bring these barracks up to some minimum standard of decency. We owe them.

And yes, we do have the money. Here's the press release (pdf) for the 2009 Defense Budget Request. It "provides $515.4 billion in discretionary authority for the Department of Defense", including $3.2 billion for military housing. The DoD claims that this is enough:

"Recognizing that success in everything we do depends upon the dedication and skill of the men and women who willingly sacrifice their own comfort and safety to safeguard the freedom that all Americans enjoy every day, the Fiscal Year 2009 budget includes the resources necessary to provide the finest training, equipment and force protection for those who serve in harm’s way; the best possible care and medical facilities for the wounded, ill, and injured; a high quality of life for Service members and their families; and various incentives to recruit and retain the all-volunteer force."

When you watch that video, do the words "a high quality of life for Service members and their families" spring to your lips? Mine either.

If there are $3.2 billion dollars' worth of repairs that are even more urgent than these -- $3.2 billion that has to be spent repairing houses that are literally toxic, or might explode or collapse -- then we should probably think seriously about firing everyone involved in military housing and starting from scratch.

This is just shameful.

Africa News

by hilzoy

It's National Malaria Day. Harold Pollack points out that for a mere $10, you can buy a bed net that will save a kid's life, and keep on saving it for four years. I think that's a pretty good deal.

(Here's a good story on efforts to eradicate malaria -- its focus is DDT, but it gets into a lot more.)

Meanwhile, in other Africa-related news, the Uganda peace process seems to have collapsed while I was in Pakistan:

"The feared Ugandan rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, is building up its military capacity at a time when it is supposed to be preparing to disarm under a peace agreement, IWPR can reveal.

IWPR has investigated reports that the Lord's Resistance Army, LRA, has embarked on a wave of abductions of civilians – many of them children – from the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, CAR. This would give the paramilitary force a different kind of focus from its past as a specifically north Ugandan group fighting the government in Kampala.

Interviews with a range of sources have confirmed that hundreds of abductions have taken place in these three countries, and that the purpose is to provide new conscripts for the group. (...)

With continuing reports of LRA abductions, looting and killing in the region, hopes that the Ugandan authorities and the rebels will sign the peace deal are fading fast. Given the latest developments, it seems less and less likely that Kony has any intention of sending his troops over the Sudanese border to Ri-Kwangba, the designated assembly point where LRA members are supposed to gather ahead of the disarmament and demobilisation process set out in the agreement."

And this isn't just a Ugandan problem anymore. Recall that Sudan had a civil war between its north and south for several decades. South Sudan borders northern Uganda, and the Sudanese government, which is in the north, had backed the LRA because of its potential for use against the South. The North and South signed a peace agreement in 2005. But it's a complicated treaty, with a six year period during which the Sudanese government has to do various things that it's not clear that it's actually doing, and possible independence for the South at the end, if all goes well, which it is not at all clear that it will. With that as background:

"Some observers claim Kony is being financed by the central government in Sudan to buy weapons in order to cultivate the LRA as a potential reserve force against the military forces of South Sudan, in the event that hostilities resume.

The South Sudanese fought a protracted war against Khartoum which ended in a 2005 deal that gave them a measure of autonomy and some posts in central government, but there are real fears of a resumption in hostilities because of a national census which could, in the long run, help determine whether the south should split from the north completely."

This is not good news at all, for a region that badly needs some. (h/t UN Dispatch)

White Christmas

by hilzoy

Steve Benen asks: what if a Democrat had said this?

"Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments calling for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

"Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don't elect Democrats," Limbaugh said during Wednesday's radio broadcast. He then went on to say that's the best thing that could happen to the country."

Later, he "clarified" his remarks:

"Rush Limbaugh says he was not calling for a riot in Denver during the Democratic National Convention — he only "dreams" of it, to the tune of "White Christmas."

For a second day in a row today, the conservative talker discussed the potential for protests and power struggles at the August convention.

"Now, I am not inspiring or inciting riots. I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming of riots in Denver," he said mimicking the holiday tune."

I'm trying to figure out the difference between telling your listeners that it is their responsibility to make sure that X happens and inciting X, but somehow, it eludes me. The point of setting his reveries to "white Christmas", however, does not.

Ledbetter

by hilzoy

The Republicans successfully filibustered the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act yesterday:

"Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a measure intended to overturn a Supreme Court decision limiting pay discrimination suits in a politically charged vote certain to be replayed in the presidential and Congressional campaigns.

By a vote of 56 to 42, the Senate fell four votes short of the 60 required to begin consideration of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, named for an Alabama woman who lost a case against the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company when the court found she not did file her complaint in time. Ms. Ledbetter had been paid as much as 40 percent less than her male counterparts doing the same job, according to her allies."

The roll call is here. While McCain did not vote today, he opposes the bill.

Lily Ledbetter explains her case here (h/t FDL):

As I understand it, here's the deal: Lilly Ledbetter worked for Goodyear for nineteen years. During that time, she was paid a lot less than her male counterparts, but she didn't realize this until she got an anonymous note telling her so. (Salaries were confidential.) She sued and convinced a jury that she had, in fact, suffered wage discrimination. Goodyear appealed on the grounds that she had not filed her suit in time.

The relevant law says that "A charge under this section shall be filed within one hundred and eighty days after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred." The question the courts had to decide was: what is the "employment practice" that starts the 180 day clock? Previous courts had ruled that such practices included both the decision to pay discriminatory wages and each paycheck that reflected that discrimination. But the Supreme Court said: no, the 180 day clock starts ticking when the decision to pay someone less on discriminatory grounds is made, and if that person does not file suit within 180 days of that decision, s/he cannot file at all.

I have no idea whether this is a good interpretation of the law. I am, however, sure that whether it is or not, the law needs to be changed. Lilly Ledbetter didn't know that she was being paid less than men with the same job until sixteen years had gone by -- sixteen years in which she was being discriminated against. Moreover, the reason she didn't know is a common one: she didn't know what other people who worked the same job she did were making, so of course she didn't know that she was being paid substantially less than any of the men who were doing the same job.

If the law actually requires that people who are discriminated against have to file suit within 180 days even if they don't know they are being discriminated against, then the law should be changed: we should not require that people who have been discriminated against not only be able to prove that fact, but also have special telepathic powers, or X-Ray vision that lets them see into other people's bank accounts. If the law doesn't require telepathy, X-Ray vision, or other superpowers, then that fact should be clarified for the benefit of the Supreme Court.

That's what the law under consideration does. It was a good law, and would have rectified a real injustice. It ought to have been a no-brainer.