Obsidian Wings

Open Thread: Expanded Quotable Comedies Edition

by Eric Martin

Rob Farley wants to know if Anchorman really is the most quoted comedy of the last decade.  I say the question is too restrictive and would rather point out that The Big Lebowski is likely the most quoted comedy ever.  At least for the folks I run with.  Which isn't saying much.

Monty Python's Holy Grail would make that short list as well.   In terms of new blood, Hangover is beginning to influence the vernacular.

What say youse?

Multipass

by Eric Martin

This is just extremely, extremely wrongheaded:

A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure. [...]

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.

“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.

Aside from the tea bagging hysteria this will generate (despite profound silence from that same cohort with respect to the freedom-infringing Arizona law), and the political costs to be paid, this is just plain bad policy from a civil liberties perspective.

It's a lose-lose, which explains why Democratic leadership found it so attractive.

Ears and Noses Will Be the Trophies of the Day

by Eric Martin

First, noted "libertarian" Glenn Reynolds (not his only such defense of the indefensible of course):

A reader says he’s suprised to see me support the Arizona bill. Well, I really don’t — that is, I don’t know if I’d have voted for it if I were in Arizona. I’m mostly reacting to the fact that — as demonstrated by Linda Greenhouse — the opposition displays that special combination of self-righteous outrage and bone-deep ignorance that really sets me off.

Next Daniel Larison:

The dispiriting part of all this is that hating liberals more than loving liberty is hardly a new phenomenon. Unfortunately, it has defined a large part of postwar conservative politics all along. As Prof. Lukacs wrote in his “The Problem of American Conservatism” 26 years ago: “Many American conservatives, alas, gave ample evidence that they were just conservative enough to hate liberals but not enough to love liberty.” What we have seen over the last ten years is a tendency to make loathing for liberals the thing that truly matters, and usually liberty becomes important to most conservatives only when it is useful to berate liberals. To the extent that liberals have defended constitutional liberties against anti-terrorist government intrusions, it is the latter that most conservatives have embraced. It is not just that loathing for liberals exceeds love of liberty, which might be true for members of all kinds of ideological movements, but that love of liberty becomes almost entirely contingent on whether or not it can be marshaled in opposition to liberals.

Sad but true in all-too-many instances - the politics of spite is an insidious beast.  

How Come I End Up Where I Started?

by Eric Martin

Unremarkably, the Obama administration has not been able to turn around the slide in Afghanistan, and the prospects going forward are bleak:

A Pentagon report presented a sobering new assessment Wednesday of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, saying that its abilities are expanding and its operations are increasing in sophistication, despite recent major offensives by U.S. forces in the militants' heartland.

The report, requested by Congress, portrays an insurgency with deep roots and broad reach, able to withstand repeated U.S. onslaughts and to reestablish its influence, while discrediting and undermining the country's Western-backed government. [...]

The new report offers a grim take on the likely difficulty of establishing lasting security, especially in southern Afghanistan, where the insurgency enjoys broad support. The conclusions raise the prospect that the insurgency in the south may never be completely vanquished, but instead must be contained to prevent it from threatening the government of President Hamid Karzai.

The report concludes that Afghan people support or are sympathetic to the insurgency in 92 of 121 districts identified by the U.S. military as key terrain for stabilizing the country. Popular support for Karzai's government is strong in only 29 of those districts, it concludes. [...]

At the same time, Taliban shadow governments, which can include courts and basic social services, have strengthened, undermining the authority of the Afghan government, according to the report.

Taliban leaders also have undermined the credibility of the central Afghan government by leveling accusations of corruption -- many of them accurate -- against local and regional officials, the report said. Information operations and media campaigns are a particular strength, the report said.

The only question that remains is just how much money will we blow through, how steep will the opportunity costs we incur be by prolonging the distraction and just how much blood will we spill in our stubborn refusal to acknowledge that America, like all foreign powers, is ill-equipped to impose a system of government on a foreign population.  At least not within any reasonable measure of the costs and benefits in the current context.

The difficulties associated with regime change and regime re-creation via foreign interloper are only amplified in a locus like Afghanistan where there are stark cultural differences between the domestic and imported populations, there is an abiding suspicion of foreign interference (with historical justification), regional powers are playing spoiler in pursuit of their own vital interests and where there is an absense of institutional foundations upon which the government structure we envision could be grafted even under the best circumstances.

Engage this thought exercise: Just what can we reasonably and realistically expect to accomplish in Afghanistan?  What would a winning end game even look like?

Despite the dearth of answers to those questions, and regardless of harsh reality that has been reminding us of its dictates regularly over the past 8+ years, we are pouring good money and lives after a misguided mission creep in an effort to bolster a corrupt and unpopular regime in its endeavor to consolidate control over a country with a tradition of decentralized rule, complete with large swathes of the population that prefer the insurgent forces' to the government in Kabul. 

All the while, we have been killing tens of thousands of Afghans (both innocent civilian and insurgent), conducting extrajudicial nigh raids (pursuant to which innocent Afghan civilians, as well as insurgents, are detained, tortured and sometimes killed) and setting up black prisons to house detainees from night raids and other incarcerations all in the name of liberating a country, bringing democracy and, perversely, protecting its population.

This is not going well.  This will not end well.  Our moral compass is severely off-kilter. We are sustaining significant damage to our fiscal soundness, military preparedness and overall standing, while terrorizing large portions of the Afghan population, in the pursuit of a fool's gambit that has become so vague and so ethereal that few can even articulate a realistic objective anymore.

Things I don't understand

-by Sebastian

I don't have much to say on this.  I'm mostly just drawing attention to something that I had assumed had stopped under the Obama administration, but apparently hasn't.

They are still using sensory deprivation during transport of the Gitmo prisoners:  cite

Omar Khadr’s pre-trial hearing this morning experienced an unexplained hour-long delay. Court officers filtered in at 10 a.m., without a certain important individual: Omar Khadr.

Prosecution promptly called a Marine Corps captain, Laura Bruzzese, to testify that she informed Khadr at 5:15 a.m. that there was a hearing scheduled for this morning. Khadr had a blanket over his head and complained of pain in his left eye, which has been sightless after an injury sustained during his 2002 capture in Afghanistan. She had him escorted to the infirmary, where he received an eyedrop for the pain, and in Camp Delta security officers attempted to load Khadr into a van to transport him to court. Part of that transfer involved putting what Bruzzese called “Eyes and Ears” on Khadr: blackout ski goggles and earmuffs to block out his senses while in transit.


Only Khadr refused. When Bruzzese asked him why he wouldn’t wear the Eyes and Ears — standard operating procedure for transiting a detainee, she testified — Khadr responded, “The only purpose is to humiliate me.” Under cross-examination, she testified that the van used for transport has no windows. Khadr wouldn’t, in other words, be able to understand where he was going even without the Eyes and Ears.

So ummm, what the heck?  Why are we still doing that?  Are we afraid that the prisoners will be able to tell their defense attorney about the inside of the van?  About the secret route into the courthouse?  What is going on?  

Magic America!

by Eric Martin

John Cole spotted something interesting in the media's coverage of recent revelations of widespread torture in Iraqi government prisons: the New York Times, Washington Post and NPR all use the word "torture" to, rightly, describe the type of abuse endured by the detainees in question.

While that might seem like a mundane observation (media outlets using vocabulary accurately!), it is noteworthy because those same news organizations have been careful to use sanitized euphemisms to describe the torture committed by U.S. personnel under Bush administration policies.  The Times went as far as to enlist Public Editor Clark Hoyt to explain the bold decision to use the word "brutal" when describing the "methods of interrogation" - not to be confused with torture. 

This, and numerous other examples, establish that the Times, Post and NPR are more comfortable using the word torture to describe that variant of prisoner abuse when the acts are perpetrated by Iraqis, Iranians or some other (out-of-favor) foreign faction. 

We, however, are the United States of America and we don't torture.  Please adjust the facts, and the diction, accordingly.

Trust but Verify

by Eric Martin

Quelle surprise:

A Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation's financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages in exchange for lucrative fees.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold a detailed hearing on Friday, where its chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., will introduce e-mail records in which executives from Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service acknowledge compromising the integrity of ratings to win business from big Wall Street firms.

"They did it for the big fees they got," Levin told reporters on Thursday after outlining the broad strokes of what he'd pursue Friday when he puts current and former ratings agency officials on the hot seat.

The documents to be released Friday confirm what a McClatchy investigation revealed in October _ that pressure from top ratings-agency executives to retain market share and the fees that it brought meant that ratings on complex deals were malleable. Some fees were as high as $1.4 million.

Investors trusted ratings to give them guides to the quality of financial products such as bonds, but many of the bonds rated as top-quality in the recent crisis turned out to be junk. The fallout was a housing collapse that triggered a global financial crisis.

This type of fraud is nothing new, and will occur again with increasing regularity unless real regulations are put in place - with actual teeth - in order to curb bad behavior.  The allure of multi-million dollar fees is too great to rely on the willpower and better angels of the actors involved to ensure good behavior.  Recognition of the irresistible allure of power and money, and the frailty and corruptibility of humans, was forefront in the minds of the framers when drafting the Constitution and crafting the system of checks and balances that form the backbone of our political structure. 

 

The same principles should guide the implementation of common sense reforms and regulations.  Unfortunately, the same enormous sums of money that lead our financiers astray greatly influence and distort our political process, so what we are left with is in terms of reform at this juncture is a Democratic package offering decent but still too tepid fixes, and a Republican Party engaging in Orwellian doublespeak that accuses the reform package of doing the exact opposite of what it achieves. 

 

Obviously, reforms and regulations can be taken too far, but that has not been a recurring problem plaguing the U.S. economy in recent decades.  Quite the contrary, it has been slack regulation that has allowed for serial gaming of the system, often with catastrophic results, dating back to the first major stock market crash almost a century ago.  While legislation had been applied as prophylactic, the repeal of Glass-Steagall once again exposed vulnerabilities.

 

The credit agency fraud referenced above (and the related Goldman Sachs malfeasance) is not unlike the spinning, laddering and pumping scandals that rocked the big investment banks circa the tech stock bubble bursting of approximately a decade ago (as discussed here).  The next time will be no different but for the details unless the Democrats (and maybe even one or two Republicans - wouldn't that be nice?) get serious about establishing parameters that better ensure greater transparency and fair play. 

 

A well-conceived, rules-based framework would, in itself, encourage healthy investment - both from domestic and foreign sources - as investors could have restored faith in the markets as sound vehicles for realizing returns on investment, rather than exotic speculative gambling parlors with increasingly esoteric vehicles that can payoff big when you're "in the know" about the latest racket, but can bankrupt the unsuspecting and lead to global calamity when the cards come tumbling down. 

 

And the cards always come tumbling down when the only real checks on the system are the good faith of bankers, investors and financial institutions with all those billions of dollars sloshing around before their eyes.

Do Count Your Chickens...

by Eric Martin

May I recommend that the Republican Party run on a promise to repeal the recently passed healthcare reform, what with its provisions cracking down on rescission and denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions:

One after another, shortly after a diagnosis of breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. First there was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. Later, Robin Beaton, a registered nurse from Texas. And then, most recently, there was Patricia Relling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky.

None of the women knew about the others. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders -- more than any other health insurance company in the United States.

The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.

They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.

Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. WellPoint declined to comment on the women's specific cases without a signed waiver from them, citing privacy laws.

That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as "rescission," for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.

But WellPoint also has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies, federal investigators told Reuters. The revelation is especially striking for a company whose CEO and president, Angela Braly, has earned plaudits for how her company improved the medical care and treatment of other policyholders with breast cancer.

Free markets are, by definition, more efficient than government programs which leads to better outcomes for everybody, across the board as incentives always line up in a seamless conjunction:

The cancellation of her health insurance in June 2008 forced Robin Beaton to delay cancer surgery by five months. In that time, the tumor in her breast grew from 2 centimeters to 7 centimeters.

Two months before Beaton's policy was dropped, Patricia Relling also was diagnosed with breast cancer. Anthem Blue Cross of Kentucky, a WellPoint subsidiary, paid the bills for a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.

But the following January, after Relling suffered a life-threatening staph infection requiring two emergency surgeries in three days, Anthem balked and refused to pay more. They soon canceled her insurance entirely.

Unable to afford additional necessary surgeries for nearly 16 months, Relling ended up severely disabled and largely confined to her home. As a result of her crushing medical bills, the once well-to-do businesswoman is now dependent on food stamps.

I suppose one could blame these women for not realizing that all they needed to do was bring a few chickens to their respective oncologists/surgeons in order to get the care they needed, but that wouldn't be nice.

Snark aside, kudos to Murray Waas for covering these stories (see, also, Waas' coverage of a similar scandal involving Assurant and its systematic rescission of HIV-positive customers).

(via)

The Commander-in-Chief in His Labyrinth

by Eric Martin

A recently leaked memo from Defense Secretary Gates has caused a bit of a stir in foreign policy circles due to the arguable "bombshell" lurking in the lede:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

The usual suspects have glommed on to Gates' admission as to the dearth of effective long term policies for derailing Iran's nuclear program in order to blame the Obama administration's approach for that state of affairs (Gates, who was also Defense Secretary in the Bush administration, would be the one in charge of drawing up the military's version of such plans). 

But there's a better, more fundamental reason why there is no effective, long-range policy at the ready: because there isn't one that exists (at least, not one that is within the range of what is deemed politically acceptable in Washington).  If there was an easy option, or even a feasible one, after all, why wouldn't Obama's predecessor have availed himself of it during his full 8 year tenure?

Nevermind the facts, though, there's political hay to be made.  So Obama's critics on the right go about either re-writing, or writing off, recent history in order to attempt to distinguish Obama's approach from Bush's, and then blame the former for the current predicament even though there is far more similarity and continuity than difference.  

The results are clear, if damning, for Bush/Cheney: the administration's policies vis-a-vis Iran did nothing to significantly slow the progress of its nuclear program. In addition to fighting a massively counterproductive war that greatly enhanced Iran's stature in the region by eliminating its main regional foe, Saddam's Baath regime, while tying down U.S. military assets in a vulnerable position, the Bush team combined bluster, lack of engagement and ineffectual sanctions to achieve nothing.

Obama has begun to slowly unwind that war (while escalating another to Iran's West east), toned down the bluster a bit (though not entirely), dabbled in engagement (but not in any meaningful sense) and is currently chasing his own version of not-quite-crippling sanctions. The results will likely match the Bush team's output. 

Both administrations seem to recognize the futility of military options, even if some elements within and without each enclave remain willfully blind.  In the Times story cited above, there's this tidbit from top brass that the hawks aren't quite as focused on: 

Separately, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote a “chairman’s guidance” to his staff in December conveying a sense of urgency about contingency planning. He cautioned that a military attack would have “limited results,” but he did not convey any warnings about policy shortcomings. [emphasis added] 

Despite these warnings, and others, many of those making the most noise about the Obama administration's "failure" are doing so as a means of framing the inevitability and necessity of military strikes.  However, those attacks could and likely would lead to a massive escalation that the U.S. is ill-advised to engage at any time - let alone now with two massive commitments and other vulnerabilities.  Not that logistical constaints, the counsel of military brass and other reality based concerns have ever been an impediment to the warmongering class. 

At the very least, the pro-war set, and the GOP in general, will whistle past the Bush administration's lack of results and blame Obama's emphasis on "engagement" and pursuit of "diplomacy" in order to discredit non-bellicose means, and weaken a political opponent.  However, Obama never really undertook a comprehensive and earnest attempt to "engage" the Iranian regime, address and account for its vital interests and take the necessary steps to begin to explore a way to forge a workable modus vivendi that would do much to obviate Iran's desire to obtain the deterrent effect of near-nuclear weapons capacity (or at least reduce anxiety if it eventually did regardless). 

Unfortunately, "diplomacy" has been used as a means of encircling Iran in its defensive crouch, rather than attempting to coax it out of that position.  As Daniel Larison points out in the context of Obama's sanctions shopping and the futility thereof:

This has always been the problem behind Obama’s “engagement” policy, which has had precious little to do with actually engaging Iran in a sustained way. Obama wanted to change the means the U.S. used to pursue the same unreachable end, namely the elimination or severe limitation of Iran’s nuclear program. What the administration and its hawkish critics have been unable to see is that it is the end, not the means, that needs to be changed. Acknowledging this would force Iran hawks to admit that pretty much everything they have said about Iran policy has been wrong.

And in a prior post:

This is why the administration should never have gone down the path of pursuing new sanctions: the administration has committed itself to a policy mechanism that will not yield the results it wants. There is no sanctions regime short of embargoes that would be seen as acts of war that could conceivably compel Iran to act as Washington wishes, and an embargo could easily lead to war anyway. The pursuit of sanctions will not only open the door to a hawkish Republican political challenge, which is forthcoming no matter what Obama does, but which will also contribute to the constant pressure for escalation against Iran regardless of who occupies the Oval Office after Obama’s first term ends. We have heard it all before: sanctions have been tried and they failed, and now we have no choice but to attack to prevent a “growing and gathering” threat, etc.

Of course, there is always the choice of accepting what cannot be prevented, but the administration is horrifed by the thought of being the ones in charge when Iran acquires a nuclear weapon (even though Iran is probably far away from acquiring one) and fears the political attacks that will follow if it “fails” to prevent the inevitable. All of these troubles stem from the original mistake of making the elimination or severe limitation of Iran’s nuclear program the objective of U.S. Iran policy, and instead of correcting this error upon entering office Obama redoubled our pursuit of this objective. It may be that the administration is now recognizing the degree of international indifference to the Iranian “threat” and coming to understand the impracticality and risks of imposing “crippling” sanctions. Now that it has come this far, it has trapped itself in a position in which it will not compel any change in Iranian behavior, and it will be mocked at home for its “weak appeasement” while simultaneously destroying whatever chance there was of some sustained engagement.

So round and round they go, the generals and civilian leaders in their labyrinths looking for answers in vain, and bleeding political capital for being unable to find the chimera that they pretended was there in the first place.

Foundation

by Eric Martin

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.

— Winston Churchill

I believe these are what Condoleezza Rice referred to as the "birth pangs" of democracy":

Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country's Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say.

The men were detained by the Iraqi army in October in sweeps targeting Sunni groups in Nineveh province, a stronghold of the group Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militants in the north. The provincial governor alleged at the time that ordinary citizens had been detained as well, often without a warrant.

Worried that courts would order the detainees' release, security forces obtained a court order and transferred them to Baghdad, where they were held in isolation. Human rights officials learned of the facility in March from family members searching for missing relatives. [...]

The alleged brutal treatment of prisoners at the facility raised concerns that the country could drift back to its authoritarian past.

Commanders initially resisted efforts to inspect the prison but relented and allowed visits by two teams of inspectors, including Human Rights Minister Wijdan Salim. Inspectors said they found that the 431 prisoners had been subjected to appalling conditions and quoted prisoners as saying that one of them, a former colonel in President Saddam Hussein's army, had died in January as a result of torture. [...]

"The prime minister cannot be responsible for all the behavior of his soldiers and staff," said Salim, praising Maliki's willingness to root out abuses. Salim, a Chaldean Christian, ran for parliament in last month's elections on Maliki's Shiite-dominated list.

Maliki defended his use of special prisons and an elite military force that answers only to him; his supporters say he has had no choice because of Iraq's precarious security situation. Maliki told The Times that he was committed to stamping out torture -- which he blamed on his enemies.

Three thoughts on this, each in their own way disconcerting: First, extrajudicial detention and torture (as well as summary execution and death via torture) by Iraqi government forces is not exactly a "new" phenomenon in the post-Saddam Victorious Era (but one example).  Second, it's not only the Iraqis that have been committing those types of atrocities (Abu Ghraib anyone?).  Third, the U.S. has been mainstreaming and normalizing such practices in more places than just Iraq, with the Obama administration pushing for codification and endorsement under U.S. law (see, also, Bagram, Gitmo and any number of "black sites" in Afghanistan, Europe, Diego Garcia, Southeast Asia, etc.).

In a mortifying sense, we have indeed exported our version of democracy to Iraq. 

(via)