Political MoJo

Crying Wolf

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| Wed Sep. 21, 2005 11:53 AM PDT

In Salon, Maia Szalavitz reports that the U.S. drug czar's office has cooked up a new scare campaign, telling everyone that pot causes schizophrenia. See ads like this one. Of course, despite the fact that marijuana use has increased at a fairly, um, healthy clip since the 1930s, the percentage of schizophrenics in the general population has stayed constant. So, you know, the link might not actually be that solid. Anyway, this would all be very humorous except that it has real effects on the credibility of serious health warnings. Methamphetamines, for instance, actually can cause psychosis—but, of course, no one is going to listen to a government that's already making hysterical claims about pot and mental illness.

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Why Not Roberts?

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| Wed Sep. 21, 2005 11:24 AM PDT

Via Shakespeare's Sister, it looks like Pat Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, will vote to confirm John Roberts. Says Leahy: "All of us will vote this month but only later will we know if Judge Roberts proves to be the kind of chief justice he says he would be, if he truly will be his own man." What?

This gets at the heart of what's wrong with Leahy's whole stance. All through the hearings, it was pretty clear that Roberts answered precisely zero questions about his stances on just about anything. He refused to comment on past case, or future cases, or hypothetical cases, or even the ideas inherent in the cases themselves. It was, as many have pointed out, a farce. The thing is, there's no reason it has to be this way. As Emily Bazelon pointed out in Slate, Roberts should have answered the damn questions: "Nothing in any legal code or judicial canon of ethics supports the broad stance against answering questions."

Now granted, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton nominee, also was very fond of taking the "Judicial Fifth" during her confirmation hearings, but the only thing to be said about that is that she was wrong to do so. Letting Roberts' evasiveness pass sets a terrible standard for the future. I would imagine—although who knows for sure—that the White House has gleaned a relatively clear picture of Roberts' views during its interviews with him. The public, along with the Senate, has not. Ted Kennedy has said he didn't know enough about Roberts to confirm him: "At the end of the four days of hearings, we still know very little more than we knew when we started." I doubt Kennedy would vote to confirm no matter what. Nevertheless, that, and not Leahy's position, is exactly the right precedent to try and uphold.

Louisiana hurricane evacuation money never spent on hurricane evacuation

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| Tue Sep. 20, 2005 6:45 PM PDT

In 1997, Congress ordered FEMA to develop a hurricane evacuation plan for New Orleans, but somehow, the money wound up in the coffers of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Commission. A report produced by the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission turned out to be about the needs of the Causeway through the year 2016.

No one is able to say how or why the $500,000 allocation ended up with the Causeway Commission. In 1999, Congress directed FEMA to consult with the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, as well as the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development. The federal Department of Homeland Security printed a million evacuation maps for the state, which were part of Louisiana's successful contra-flow traffic plan during the Katrina evacuation.

The first phase of the Hurricane Pam tabletop project did not address all of the state's evacuation needs. A spokesman for the Louisiana Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness has stated that he knows nothing about any FEMA funds allocated to the state prior to the Hurricane Pam project.

The 24-mile Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is the world's longest bridge.

Using Nuclear Weapons

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| Tue Sep. 20, 2005 11:22 AM PDT

Nadezhda has a long and very worthwhile post on the Pentagon's draft revisions to its doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons. Officials now seem to be walking back from earlier proposed changes that "would allow commanders to seek presidential approval for using atomic arms against nations or terrorists who intend to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against the United States, its troops or allies," although the debate still appears to be ongoing.

Paydays and Predators

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| Tue Sep. 20, 2005 10:50 AM PDT

Via TPMCafe comes a new report from the Center for Responsible Lending on how the payday lending industry exploits low-income borrowers. Here's how a typical exchange might work in, for instance, Texas:

A borrower writes a check to the lender for the principal and interest. According to the center's example, for a $325 loan, the borrower writes a check for $377, the principal plus $52 in interest. The money is typically due two weeks later, an APR of more than 400 percent in this example.

If the borrower does not have the $377 when it is due, they can pay another $52 fee. This does not pay down the principal; it pays to keep the loan afloat. According to the center's study of the industry nationwide, "the average payday borrower pays $800 to borrow $325."

Cracking down on rogue lenders seems like the obvious solution here. A better policy solution, though, as outlined by Anne Kim of the Progressive Policy Institute, would simply be to get mainstream banks to offer the sort of services—check-cashing, payday lending, etc.—that are in high demand among low-income families, making it easier to regulate predatory lending. As was noted after Katrina, poor families often don't have bank accounts; but this is less because they don't understand how banks work—as many suppose—and more because mainstream banks simply don't offer much in the way of actually useful services for those low-income families. Payday-lenders, check-cashers, and pawnshops, on the other hand, do, and tend to proliferate in poorer areas. But because these services are so small and unregulated, they end up charging exorbitantly high fees and stripping billions of dollars in wealth away from low-earners. Vicious cycle ensues.

Outer-Circle Cronyism

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| Tue Sep. 20, 2005 10:44 AM PDT

Noam Scheiber has a nuanced take on cronyism in the George Bush and Michael Brown era:

[I]f you happen to think bureaucracies are structurally incapable of improving people's lives, and if you have contempt for the kinds of people who reside in them, then you have two choices: You can either slash the bureaucracy and refund taxpayers' money, or you can reconcile yourself to the existence of bureaucracy and run it as a patronage operation. (If, by definition, a bureaucracy can't get any less competent, you might as well make appointments that benefit you personally or politically.)

He notes that all administrations have some degree of cronyism—every president brings in close friends and trusted advisers to the White House, because they need people they can rely on. What distinguishes the Bush administration, and what distinguished the Reagan administration, was what Scheiber calls "outer-circle cronyism":

The focus here isn't so much on handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates--that is, to one's own cronies. It's on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, which increases the scale of the cronyism exponentially. The Clinton administration was relatively free of this pestilence. (Clinton's appointments were largely meritocratic even when they involved people in his extended social network.) The Bush administration is infested with it.

I think he's being too easy on the Clinton adminstration (see this piece for some Clinton crony nostalgia), but "infested" is apt for the current regime. One big fear here is that enough ineptitude among government bureaucracies will make enough people believe, eventually, that government bureaucracies simply can't work, and that "slash the bureaucracy " is the way to go. Not everyone thinks this is the likely outcome of the Bush era: In the Wall Street Journal today, Stephen Moore argues the party of Reagan is fast becoming the party of Roosevelt and big-government liberalism: "FEMA, despite its woeful performance, will grow in size and stature. So will the welfare state. Welcome to the new New Dealism of the GOP." It's a common prediction, and it has some validity—after Bush's Katrina speech, any conservative who advocates scaling back government will be situated far outside the political mainstream—but I worry that the eventual fallout from all this cronyism and dysfunction will be yet another Reagan-esque backlash, similar to the small-government backlash that came after the Nixon administration. The backlash is never sustainable in the long run—people fundamentally like having the government do stuff for them—but in the short run it pushes the country ever further to the right.

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Will the North Korea Deal Hold?

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| Tue Sep. 20, 2005 10:08 AM PDT

In more encouraging news, Michael Levi offers reasons think that the tentative deal reached with North Korea may be more permanent than the 1994 Agreed Framework struck by Bill Clinton:

[P]erhaps the most important difference between yesterday's agreement and the 1994 arrangement is that this is a six-party deal--giving the administration hope that its four partners will now be invested in holding North Korea to its obligations.

The American security guarantee has changed in subtle but interesting ways, as well: Whereas in 1994, the Clinton administration pledged to issue a formal guarantee, this time the Bush administration has insisted on a statement of its present intent. On the other hand, while in 1994 the Clinton administration only promised to refrain from nuclear attacks, the Bush administration has ruled out attack by any means. Finally, while the 1994 Agreed Framework contained a roadmap for future nuclear cooperation, with specific actions on both sides triggering future steps, the present agreement lays out a more vague vision for subsequent action.

If the six-party bit does in fact hold up and prove more durable than the Agreed Framework, then the White House was right about insisting on them, and his critics—including both John Kerry and this writer—were wrong. Although it still raises the question: why did China only now start pressuring North Korea after years of (apparently) shrugging its shoulders? Simon World argues that for the Chinese, "The North Korean problem turned from an asset to a liability," and makes a good case.

On the other hand, we're not exactly out of the nuclear woods yet. North Korea now seems to be demanding light-water reactors from the United States before it will abandon its nuclear program. Previously, Condoleeza Rice denounced—perhaps rightly—this sort of deal, where "the benefits were up front and the North Korean actions were later." But maybe everyone should just take Christopher Hill's advice: "Life is too short to overreact to every statement coming out of Pyongyang."

Today in Appointments

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| Tue Sep. 20, 2005 9:52 AM PDT

This is getting ridiculous. First the president tasks one his top homeland security advisers with investigating the breakdown in… homeland security:

President Bush has named Frances Fragos Townsend, his domestic security adviser, to lead an internal White House inquiry into the administration's performance in handling Hurricane Katrina, Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman, said Monday.

The White House investigating itself and all. Townsend's previous work includes "recently overseeing the reorganization of the nation's intelligence services," a process that, from all appearances, mainly consisted of installing Bush loyalists into key posts and tossing out the dissidents. She does throw up a damn good smokescreen, however: check out this old Dan Froomkin piece catching Townsend in a filibuster when asked about the White House's inflated al-Qaeda statistics. In other news, the administration may have—although there's a lot of confusion on this front—floated a career veterinarian's name, Norris Alderson, to head up the Office of Women's Health at the FDA, before settling on the eventual nominee:

An FDA veteran trained in animal husbandry who spent much of his career in the agency's Center for Veterinary Medicine, Alderson quickly became the subject of active and largely negative comment on the Internet and elsewhere. The Office of Women's Health serves as a liaison with women's health groups and as an advocate on women's issues; critics said that a man with a primarily veterinary background could not properly fill the role.

What is wrong with these people?

Aid still not getting to hurricane survivors, but there is plenty of frustation

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| Mon Sep. 19, 2005 4:35 PM PDT

According to the Mirror, hundreds of tons of food shipped from Great Britain for Hurricane Katrina survivors have been blocked from distribution. The NATO ration packs, which have been declared unfit for human consumption, are in a warehouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to the newspaper. The packs, which cost millions of dollars, are the same ones British soldiers eat in Iraq, and they have been approved by NATO for consumption by members of the American military.

Food from Spain and Italy is also being held by the FDA, which is supposedly trying to work out a plan to distribute more of the donated food.

It is unknown what, if any, FEMA's role is in the British rations situation. Ice, however, is another matter. On August 29, Cool Express, a Wisconsin company, was asked by FEMA to haul ice for hurricane relief. Seventy-five trucks were loaded and sent to the Gulf Coast, but their drivers were then sent to places like Idaho and Pennsylvania to await instructions. Late last week, the trucks were still scattered across the country, while FEMA continued to order ice.

On September 9, FEMA also ordered 970 wire crates from PetsMart to help rescue starving animals. Over the next four days, the agency changed the order, cancelled it, reinstated it, put it on hold, and then demanded the shipment. When PetsMart tried to deliver the cages to a New Orleans naval base, it was turned away. Eventually, the driver was admitted, but he drove 152 miles around the base, all day long, trying to find someone who would accept the order.

To this day, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco is wondering what happened to the 500 buses promised by FEMA right after the storm hit New Orleans.

FEMA officials failed to show up last week for a meeting with the citizens of Slidell, Louisiana. The next day, they also failed to show up for a meeting with the citizens of Mandeville. In that case, however, they sent a contractor from Texas. Mandeville citizens stood in line for hours, waiting to fill out applications. Later, they were told that the applications were invalid and that they should go home and apply to FEMA by phone or online.

This morning, a FEMA representative said that the $2,000 grant promised to all hurricane victims may not actually be a grant, but could turn out to be a loan. Hundreds of applicants have already had their requests for the $2,000 turned down because they had returned to their houses and therefore "were not displaced."

Wal-Mart By the Numbers

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| Mon Sep. 19, 2005 2:29 PM PDT

For pure, unbridled Wal-Mart bashing, this compilation (PDF) of figures, studies, and talking points from the Brennan Center for Justice has all the information you need. It's not fair and balanced, but has some great tidbits as: "In a study of over 3,000 counties, researchers found that counties with more Wal-Mart stores had a larger increase (or a smaller reduction) in the poverty rate between 1987 and 1999 than did counties with fewer or no Wal-Mart stores."

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