MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: March 12, 2006

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March 17, 2006

Arizona citizens mobilize to defeat factory farm control

Arizona is a major factory-farming state. At some hog-breeding farms, gestation crates are used. These two-foot wide crates keep the hogs confined to a tiny space their entire lives, much the same as hen battery cages and veal crates.

The Humane Farms Initiative was proposed in Arizona so that crates such as these would be outlawed. A similar initiative was successful in Florida, making it the first state to enact such a ban. Arizona factory farm interests fought back with Senate Concurrent Resolution 1035, which would have placed on the November ballot a constitutional amendment to require that all laws dealing with agriculture in the state of Arizona be adopted by an unnamed executive agency only. Passage of SCR 1035 would have made it impossible for the legislature to enact any control over the agricultural industry. The Humane Farms Initiative, even if it passed, would be become void by passage of SCR 1035.

Last month, the Arizona Rules Committee passed SCR 1035, but after a large number of Arizona citizens called, faxed, and emailed their senators, the resolution failed this week in the Committee of the Whole.

Surprising though it may be that Florida has led the way in banning certain of factory farming's more horrific practices, now that the citizens of Arizona have picked up the campaign, there is every reason to believe that soon, other states will begin campaigns to stop at least some of America's institutionalized cruelty against millions of farm animals.

The emotional toll of Katrina: "We are so definitely not OK."

Today's LA Times has a disturbing eye-opener on the emotional toll of Hurricane Katrina. About half a million people need some form of mental health service, at a cost to the federal government of more than $200 million.

In New Orleans, even those trained to offer solace break down easily and often: A hospital nurse, a school psychologist, a paramedic, a counselor all lose composure as they talk about Katrina.

"The truth is, we are not OK. We are so definitely not OK," said Burke Beyer, 31, who leads a federally funded team of counselors in New Orleans.

...The half-year mark should be a milestone; many locals expected recovery to be well underway. Instead, their lives are still a mess, their city is still in ruins, and they can see no end to the chaos.

"You try to adjust but you can't," said Walter L. Collins Jr., 30, a truck driver.

The article says that, nationally, calls to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline are up 60 percent since Katrina, and it has these excerpts from a recent survey of second- and third-graders, who were asked to write down their fears:

"I'm worried that I will never see my family again."

"Katrina threw my house somewhere."

"My cat is gone."

"My friends are gone forever."

"What will we do? Where will we go?"

Meanwhile, hurricane season is fast approaching, with the levee system, under repair by the Army Corps of Engineers, "susceptible to flooding with a category two [hurricane]." (At its height, Katrina was a category five.)

Congress Steps Up Fight Against Porn

Legislation introduced yesterday by Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Max Baucus (D-MT) would require all "adult websites" to have an .XXX domain, allowing parents more power to censor the internet content of their computers. The bill, called the "Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2006," specifies that any web "communication" including images, articles, recordings or other "obscene matter," including actual or simulated sexual acts and "lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast" be categorized under the .XXX domain.

Surprisingly, the bill has generated opposition from the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative organization which argues that the bill would facilitate the proliferation of the porn industry by providing it with its own domain in addition to the "cash cow" of .com sites that the industry will never abandon. The FRC believes porn destroys "marital bonds, and pollutes the minds of child and adult consumers," and would rather see the entire industry totally wiped out, rather than relegated to a specific domain. Meanwhile, The Free Speech Coalition, a "trade organization of the adult entertainment industry," opposes the bill on the grounds that it will "ghettoize content-based speech." Well, maybe they should reconsider the names of their sites, and while they’re at it, those horribly offensive pop-ups, if they are feeling sensitive to the potential ghettoization of their brand.

A difficult aspect to the Cyber Safety bill lies in the fact that a significant chunk of the $12 billion dollar internet pornography industry originates off-shore, making it considerably more difficult to regulate. Additionally, the .XXX doesn't do very much to curb the creeps and pedophiles lurking in seemingly benign chat rooms. But the bill would help regulate internet usage in libraries and schools by completely nixing .XXX sites altogether. Clearly this is just a step in the right direction, but parents also need to take a more active role and not turn their thirteen-year-olds loose on the internet.

Congress Raises the Roof on Debt

The national debt is currently $8.3 trillion , and Congress just approved a $781 billion increase in the government’s debt limit, raising the ceiling for the fourth time in Bush’s presidency. Previous increases of $450 billion in 2002, a record $984 billion in 2003 and $800 billion in 2004 have all contributed to the statutory debt limit rising more than $3 trillion since Bush took office.

Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, insists that Congress' latest approval should be a wake-up call to everyone in the House, Senate as well as the President. "The question is: Are we staying on this course to keep running up the debt, debt on top of debt, increasingly financed by foreigners, or are we going to change course?"

Can the U.S. keep up this type of spending? Economists believe the national debt is more ominous today than it was in the 80's, when hitting the one-trillion mark gave rise to national apprehension about deficits. According to Alice Rivlin, former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, "the situation now is really very different from the 1980s. As the costs of programs such as Medicare rise, we can't go on into the next decade ... still running deficits as our major way of coping… In the next decade the upward pressure on federal spending is going to be very, very large."

While the Bush administration has acknowledged that it won't come anywhere close to meeting its goals of reducing the defiict, it has no plans to let up on defense and national security spending, putting Congress in a difficult position. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) is fully aware of the astronomical pace at which the deficit continues to move. But "without an increase in the debt limit, our government will face a choice that we shouldn't make and we wouldn't want to make, a choice between breaking the law by exceeding the statutory debt limit or, on the other hand, breaking faith with the public by defaulting on our debt."

Ironically, Canada’s net worth just hit $4.5 trillion, making it worth exactly half on the U.S. national debt.

The new Paul Hackett: "Some have alleged that our president led us to war on false pretenses. I believe we should look into this."

Hilarious Daily Show clip on Paul Hackett, erstwhile Democratic congressional candidate and subject of this Mother Jones cover story and these follow-ups. Hackett recently dropped his bid for an Ohio Senate seat, claiming he'd been sandbagged by establishment Dems.

Some highlights:

Paul Hackett: "I was asked by Senator Schumer and Senator Reid and others to get out of the race.... They backed away from supporting me because they realized that I'm outspoken, that I believe in what I say and I'm willing to fight for what I
believe in."

Ed Helms: "There's your problem right there."

On today's Democratic Party:

"If you take a look back at the party of FDR ... and ... of Truman and even Kennedy. That was a party that had balls. The new Democratic Party eventually is going to have to get back to that"

By the end of the segment the "Democratic Party machine" has smoothed out Hackett's rough edges ("Try it again, but without the emotion."), and he's back on message:

Hackett: "Some have alleged that our president led us to war on false pretenses. I believe we should look into this.... I believe we should take care of our environment. That's why I'm standing in front of a river."

Voiceover: "Paul Hackett for Senate—because he won't rock the boat."

Can the WTO Alleviate Poverty?

Trade-bashing probably gets tiresome after awhile, but here's some more of it. A few months ago I looked at some research suggesting that the Doha Round of WTO talks, if completed, was likely to produce very, very tiny gains for developing countries—so tiny that they probably wouldn't offset many of the bad effects from trade liberalization. Well, now Sandra Polanski the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has put out a new study that comes to an even more dire conclusion.

Polanski's statistical model differs from previous models in a couple of ways: She doesn't unrealistically assume that developing countries will run at full employment, as most World Bank studies do, for instance. And what her model finds is pretty revealing. Basically, any of the "plausible trade scenarios" that could emerge from the talks would only produce a one-time gain to the world of $40 to $60 billion. That's nothing, really. That would only amount to pennies a day for everyone in the world—if the gains were distributed evenly, and there were no negative effects to trade liberalization.

But the gains aren't distributed evenly. There are winners and losers. In Polanski's model, the United States, the EU, Japan, and China would all benefit greatly from either the Doha or the Hong Kong liberalization proposals—China would gain anywhere from 0.8 to 1.2 percent of GDP. Many poorer countries, by contrast, would suffer pretty heavily: Sub-Saharan African countries would see a 1 percent drop in income if a liberalization agreement was reached, while Bangladesh and many countries in East Africa would lose anywhere from 0.1 to 0.5 percent of GDP.

Poorer countries, as it turns out, would be hurt by the reduction in agricultural tariffs and subsidies now under discussion. Partly this is because, as I mentioned long ago, many developing countries are net food importers, and depend on existing farm subsidies to keep food cheap. For other countries, meanwhile, the reduction of tariffs would hurt subsistence farmers, who make up the bulk of production in many developing countries, and can't compete in a "free trade" world market. And in many countries, farmers driven off their land won't be able to find manufacturing jobs very easily.

That brings us to manufacturing. Trade liberalization for manufactured goods would create some benefits, and would increase the demand for unskilled labor in many poorer countries. But that increased demand almost certainly wouldn't increase wages, partly because those developing countries won't be running at full employment—most cities will see a surplus of agricultural workers kicked off their land (which means that it's slum time).

Plus, as pointed out before, these figures omit all the costs from these WTO talks. Many developing country governments, for instance, derive a significant portion of their income from tariffs. How will they make up those lost revenues once the tariffs are slashed? By cutting social services? Running deficits? Raising sales taxes? Devil in the details. And what about the cost of WTO intellectual property agreements, which can be, in many cases, written primarily for the benefit of corporations in the United States and Europe?

The utilitarian perspective on all this is interesting, meanwhile. By one count, China has 200 million desperately poor people living on less than $1 a day, and 600 million subsisting on less than $2. Some of those people will see their lives improved—albeit very marginally—by a Doha pact. But in the countries that would lose from Doha there are roughly 267 million dollar-a-day folks, and 486 million people living on less than $2 a day. So almost as many people become worse off as become better off. Which is to say again that "Trade, not aid," is a pretty weak strategy for alleviating world poverty. And, at the very least, the Doha negotiations need to be tweaked to protect some of the poorer countries from the negative effects here.

March 16, 2006

How Lobbyists Control Health Care Policy

I believe the technical name for this sort of thing is Dingbat Kabuki. Yesterday Republicans in the Senate appeared to do something good and benevolent on the health care front when they voted to allow Medicare to use its vast bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices. The GOP had originally forbidden the government to do this when it crafted the drug benefit back in 2003, succumbing to pressure—and lavish campaign contributions—from the pharmaceutical industry. Now, however, the party seems to be scared of a senior backlash over the entire Medicare fiasco, and wants to do something.

Well, sort of. Really, though, it's extremely unlikely that anything will come of this. What the Senate actually passed yesterday wasn't in any way a binding resolution or piece of legislation. It's merely an amendment to a budget resolution that "provides only guidance for future legislation." In other words, cheap talk. A quick prediction: This measure will never make it into law. The GOP would never, ever go against the wishes of Big Pharma, and this amendment is only meant to help the party look like it's trying to fix the disastrous Medicare drug benefit. Seniors, after all, tend to have a lot of influence when midterm elections roll around. Best to try to appease them, quietly.

That's not a bad prediction. For further proof that the GOP will only ever pass bills paid for and written by lobbyists, look no further than a second Los Angeles Times story on yet another health care vote. Yesterday a Senate Committee also approved "a bill that would preempt state laws that require insurance policies to cover specific services, such as maternity care and supplies for diabetics." It's a terrible idea for, you know, actual people. Guess who came up with it.

States require insurers to cover specific services because otherwise, those insurers could end up making certain services—like maternity care and supplies for diabetics—unaffordable for certain people. For their part, insurers have always complained that all those burdensome state requirements force them to raise premiums. Maybe they have some small point, but then again, they would say that, and the insurance industry is pretty much the last industry to get the benefit of the doubt, ever. They've also been complaining for years that an epidemic of malpractice lawsuits has driven up premiums—a line that's totally false. It was never even sort of true. On the bright side, the new bill, if passed, should help pad the industry's profit margins. And Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee can look forward to fatter re-election campaign chests.

Missouri House bans contraception for poor women

The Missouri House voted yesterday to ban contraceptive funding for low-income women, and to prohibit state-funded programs from referring those women to other programs. The sponsor of the proposal, Rep. Susan Phillips, declared contraceptive services an "inappropriate use of tax dollars."

According to the Kansas City Star, the proposal does not save Missouri any money. Rather, it restricts how state agencies can spend $9.23 million set aside for public health programs for people with low incomes who do not qualify for Medicaid.

Phillips says that both Missouri Right to Life and the Missouri Catholic Conference supports her proposal. Opponents repeatedly pointed out that eliminating contraception paves the way for increased abortions, but Republicans and a couple of Democrats voted for passage.

March 15, 2006

Foreign Aid Goes to Banks, Not Poor

In Rolling Stone this month, Joshua Kurlantzick takes a look at the Bush administration's Millenium Challenge Corporation—which was supposed to revolutionize foreign aid by giving it only to countries that met certain accountability benchmarks—and discover that it's (shockingly) a mess.

The MCC, Kurlantzick discovered, is led by conservative ideologues rather than foreign aid experts, it's too understaffed to dispense all of the $5 billion it's supposed to dispense, and much of the money it does dole out ends up going to help banks and other financial interests overseas rather than to programs that directly aid the poor, like health care and education. It's the foreign aid version of trickle-down economics:

Poor nations are being told, in effect, that projects won't be considered for funding unless they can generate a profit. "Every indication they get from the MCC is that this is about economic growth," says Asma Lateef, senior policy analyst for the aid organization Bread for the World. "You have to yield economic rates of return in three to five years." But for many impoverished nations, such profitability is simply impossible. "In such poor countries, you're not going to be able to guarantee things like economic growth," says Patrick Cronin, a former U.S. AID official who helped create the MCC. "You might lose money [on projects like health and education], but you'll help people. But if you're used to making investments, you may be biased toward that instead." […]

In fact, while the MCC steers aid to business, the president has slashed funding for children's health in the world's poorest countries. "Resources for fragile states in Africa -- such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia and northern Uganda -- have been cut from last year, despite unmet needs they have right now," said Rep. Nita Lowey, who initially supported the MCC. "I find it extraordinary that the MCC model is being touted by the administration as an ideal and successful solution to poverty alleviation."

Luckily, the Bush administration seems to be on top of this stuff. The last CEO of the corporation, Paul Applegarth—who was "a Republican campaign contributor with limited experience in foreign aid"—has stepped down. His replacement? John Danilovich. Not a foreign aid expert per se, but he is "a businessman who contributed $20,000 to the Republican National Committee." It's sort of like the Bush administration's version of staying at a Holiday Inn. He should fit in just fine.

USA Today Misleads on Spending Statistics

A recent—and misleading—USA Today headline states: "Federal aid programs expand at record rate." The lede: "A sweeping expansion of social programs since 2000 has sparked a record increase in the number of Americans receiving federal government benefits such as college aid, food stamps and health care."

Sounds like out-of-control spending. But there are a couple particulars the article buries towards the bottom. Most notably, being that the expansion of services is actually due to "a rise in the poverty rate from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.7 percent in 2004, the most recent year." That's not quite how the newspaper presented the problem at first.

The Century Foundation explains why the entire article is a giant mess:

The front page graph shows enrollment in 25 "federal aid" programs is up 17 percent, increasing from 263 million to 307 million. That’s quite something, considering that there are only 300 million U.S. citizens. Oh, right, there is a note in agate type to the effect that some people participate in multiple programs. But what then is the logic behind combining numbers for age-dependent universal programs like Social Security and Medicare, to which recipients have paid dedicated taxes, with means-tested safety net programs? And if one person falling into poverty can add three, four, or five to the enrollment count of safety net programs, disproportionately elevating percentage increases, how are readers supposed to begin to make sense of what that number means?

USA Today then concludes with a quote from conservative Minnesota Rep. Gil Gutknecht, who points out social services should, in fact, not be growing since unemployment is so low. The solution? Cuts! "It's probably time to revisit food stamps and its goals and costs," he said. But Gutknecht is basing his argument on faulty statistics—low unemployment is perfectly compatible with "growing" social services so long as growing means "people are signing up for multiple problems" rather than "more total people are signing up."

Wal-Mart and Banking

In a just world, Wal-Mart would have received the corporate death penalty long ago and we'd be done with it. (For reasons why: see T.A. Frank's piece here, or the essay "Inside the Leviathan.") But given that Wal-Mart's not going anywhere anytime soon, I should say I'm fairly persuaded by David Leonhardt's two-part argument as to why Wal-Mart should be allowed to open its own banks.

A Wal-Mart banking system that becomes insanely popular isn't likely to put low-wage workers out of work—it will just hurt other banks—and it is true that many low-income families don't have checking or savings accounts because, as I reported here, of steep fees and barriers to entry. Perhaps Wal-Mart could use its magic to lower those fees and barriers and help more people get savings accounts, which in the abstract would be a good thing. (No doubt the store could figure out ways to screw borrowers over, though.)

Perhaps progressive legislators can strike some sort of compromise: Wal-Mart gets the right to open its own banking services, but in return they'll be required to offer the sorts of not-entirely-profitable services that regular banks don't ever offer yet low-income families often need—such as payday lending—that would enable many poorer workers to escape the exorbitant fees they have to endure on the secondary lending market. That seems pretty unobjectionable.

Cartoongate Continues at College

The editor of the University of Illinois student paper, The Daily Illini, was recently fired for republishing the controversial Mohammed cartoons. Accusing the board of setting a "bad precedent," Acton Gordon called the cartoons newsworthy and stood by his decision to act quickly and publish them. "We had a news story on our hands, with violence erupting about imagery, but you can't show it because of a taboo, because of a taboo that's not a Western taboo but a Muslim taboo?" he said. "That's a blow to journalism."

And he’s right. While almost every newspaper in America refused to print the cartoons, including The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, an editor in the most free and democratic nation in the world should be able to exercise his right to disseminate information. In this instance, censoring the University of Illinois from seeing the cartoons for fear of the repercussions, assumes the worst of its Muslim students. Gordon should be able to exercise his First Amendment rights, especially when publishing a cartoon that the world is both transfixed upon and retaliating against.

Gordon is planning to sue the University of Illinois, and has retained the services of Junaid Afeef, a Muslim attorney, who while deeply offended by the cartoons, does not believe that free speech can only be adopted when suitable.

Meanwhile, at the University of California Berkeley, the California Patriot, the campus’ conservative newspaper—yes, they have one—also published the two cartoons this week. Claiming to publish the cartoons "in solidarity with the Muslim people," the Patriot missed the boat by picking up the story so late. The cartoons are accompanied by an op-ed, claiming that "being offended occasionally is the price of living in a diverse, tolerant, pluralistic society." That is correct. And on the Berkeley campus that is exactly the way it was handled, as Muslim Student Association thanked “the Muslim community in standing in solidarity and ... not engaging in such provocative methods, but by aiming to educate and utilizing the situation to help spread the beautiful word of Islam."

China Propping Up Dictatorships

Tim Johnson of Knight Ridder takes a look today at how China has been propping up the military junta in Burma (now, of course, called Myanmar by those who run the country) through trade and other economic ties:

China has a habit of coddling repressive regimes. In places such as Sudan, Iran, Zimbabwe and Myanmar, all under some type of international sanction, China has stepped in with diplomatic protection, usually in exchange for market access for its goods or a stake in oil fields or other natural resources.

Yet in remote corners such as this one, snug against the hilly frontier with the nation once known as Burma, China is resisting global efforts to end a decades-old military dictatorship. How China deals with Myanmar reflects how it wields its power in the early 21st century.

It seems more than a little bizarre to refer to the Myanmar government as a "decades-old military dictatorship" without noting that the junta's currently carrying out genocide—or something very, very close to it—against ethnic minorities in the eastern part of the country. (See Nicholas Thompson's excellent report in Legal Affairs last year about one man's attempts to raise awareness about this issue.) All the same, this is a serious issue.

Both the United States and Europe have never been fantastic about promoting human rights around the world—quite to the contrary in many places. The rise of China, though, can very seriously set back attempts to put positive pressure repressive regimes, as the Financial Times reported a few weeks ago in a look at China's engagement with Africa, noting among other things that in exchange for access to natural resources, China has been willing to offer "military assistance and arms, providing equipment to countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan where other suppliers are barred by embargoes." (The conservative Heritage Foundation has a good backgrounder on Chinese activities in Africa.)

Indeed, it's no longer clear how Western powers can use trade and other economic incentives as a tool to promote human rights in Africa—if that even is ever the intention (and often it isn't). In 1999, for instance, the World Bank helped to finance a new oil pipeline in Chad with the caveat that 10 percent of revenues would be set aside for health and education. Recently, however, the Chad government violated the agreement by reallocating the resources to, among other things, defense spending—in part because of increasing skirmishes with Sudanese militias on its border, a conflict that has, in part, flared out of control because of international inaction. The World Bank responded by suspending hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans. Chinese investors probably wouldn't have done the same. So what can we expect the Chadian government to think about next time they need to go somewhere for financing?

Abizaid on our long-term vision for a military presence in Iraq

Can you say "permanent bases"? Gen. John Abizaid can.

The United States may want to keep a long-term military presence in Iraq to bolster moderates against extremists in the region and protect the flow of oil, the Army general overseeing U.S. military operations in Iraq said on Tuesday.

While the Bush administration has downplayed prospects for permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid told a House of Representatives subcommittee he could not rule that out.

..."Clearly our long-term vision for a military presence in the region requires a robust counter-terrorist capability," Abizaid said. "No doubt there is a need for some presence in the region over time primarily to help people help themselves through this period of extremists versus moderates."

Abizaid also said the United States and its allies have a vital interest in the oil-rich region.

"Ultimately it comes down to the free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our own nation and everybody else in the world depend," he said.

Last year, Joshua Hammer, writing in Mother Jones, wondered why the U.S. government was spending billions of dollars to build "enduring" bases in Iraq if it didn't plan to occupy the country for any longer than necessary. And, more recently, Tom Engelhardt brought us up to date with this piece on the "massive and ongoing" U.S. base construction there.

U.S. steps up its aerial bombing campaign

Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter confirms that, as predicted, the US has stepped up its air war in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - American forces have dramatically increased airstrikes in Iraq during the past five months, a change of tactics that may foreshadow how the United States plans to battle a still-strong insurgency while reducing the number of U.S. ground troops serving here.

A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year.

In addition to the obvious and extremely serious moral downside here--air strikes obliterate civilians in large numbers--the piece notes some practical drawbacks to relying on aerial bombings at the expense of combat patrols.

In the town of Samarra, for example, insurgents last month were able to spend several hours rigging explosives in the dome of a Shiite shrine that they later destroyed, in part because American troops patrolled less. The shrine's destruction triggered a week of sectarian violence that killed hundreds. U.S. soldiers interviewed in Samarra three weeks earlier said patrols in the city had been significantly reduced because the number of troops had been reduced by two-thirds.

(Not that the combat patrols were working out that great.) And then there's the hearts-and-minds dimension.

A tribal sheik who lives on the outskirts of the troubled Anbar town of Ramadi, who asked that he be identified as Abu Tahseen instead of by his full name out of fear of possible retribution, said that the strikes create more insurgents than they kill because of the region's tribal dictates of revenge.

"They (the Americans) think: `As long as there are resistance fighters operating in this spot, we will wipe it out entirely,'" Abu Tahseen said, using the term for insurgents favored by Iraqis sympathetic to their cause. "As you know, our nature is a tribal one, and so if one from us is killed, we kill three or four in return."

Good for Knight Ridder for taking the elementary trouble to compile the statistics from press releases provided by the U.S. Central Command. Though the U.S. air war in Iraq has gained a bit more media attention since Seymour Hersh took it up in the New Yorker last December, the topic is generally little covered--except by the likes of Dahr Jamail and Tom Engelhardt.

March 14, 2006

Israel's Iran options?!

Crazy talk on Iran by way of the Jerusalem Post:

The Pentagon is looking into the possibility of Israel launching a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. In the past months there were several working-level discussions trying to map out the possible scenarios for such an attack, according to administration sources who were briefed on these meetings.

...One of the questions Pentagon analysts are grappling with is how an Israeli attack - if launched - would affect the US and its forces in the region and whether it would force the US to follow with further strikes in order to complete the mission. The US is also discussing what could be the possible avenues of retaliation Iran would take against US's forces and interests in the region.

Well, I don't think you have to grapple very long before concluding that the Iranian response--in Israel as in Iraq--would be fairly robust; and that the Iranians are not apt to make any great distinction between Israeli and U.S. aggression. (Why start now, after all?)

Elsewhere, in congressional testimony, an expansive Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy recently considered loopy options short of all-out airstrikes.

If force were to be necessary, the options are much broader than an air raid like that which Israel mounted in 1981 against Iraq’s Osiraq reactor. For instance, Israel put a stop to Egypt’s missile program in the early 1960s by arranging the sudden premature death of German scientists working on those missiles in Egypt. Iran’s nuclear program is a series of sophisticated, large industrial plants which could encounter industrial accidents.

Women, Men, and Money

According to this month's Money Magazine, finances still cause strife in many marriages.

Okay, so this shouldn't be news to anyone. But what is notable is that the majority of the couples surveyed divide their financial responsibility along very traditional gender lines. Women tend to be responsible for determining daily spending while their husbands plan long-term investments, retirements etc. According to the magazine, dividing duties up this way doesn’t necessarily foster communication:

[M]en and women had dramatically different ideas about who does what with the family finances, and what their partners care about. Husbands were especially clueless, tending to underestimate how much women care about almost every financial issue, from investing and saving for retirement to paying off debt. A hundred years after Freud, and men still don't know what women want."

Some other fun facts from the Money survey:

Seven out of ten respondents said money causes more fights than sex or even in-laws.
Only 27 percent of men think their wives prioritize putting their assets in the "right investments." In reality, almost half of women responded that they actually do care -- almost equaling the percentage of men who say they care.
45 percent of men think it’s important to hoard cash in case of emergencies, while 67 percent of women think it’s vital.
In families where the woman is the primary breadwinner, 4 out of 10 wives control most of the investments. This is almost double the number of women who take the reins when the husband is the earner.

So what is happening? Are those 67 percent of women hoarding more cash because they have, historically, earned less than men? We hear over and over that women make 76 cents on every dollar earned by men. That statistic is somewhat open to question, partly because it fails to take into account critical differences in education, experience and, other factors that impact earning potential. A man and woman with identical backgrounds, education, and family dynamics will not automatically receive a 24-cents-on-the-dollar difference in pay. Disparity in earnings is a more complicated issue than can be captured in one statistic.

Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research calls the 76 cent figure "a good measure of inequality, not necessarily a measure of discrimination." In order to really identify what part of the wage gap is due to direct discrimination, all the other factors like performance, education and market forces need to play into the equation. The bottom line is that discrimination does prevent professional women from rising to equally high paying jobs of stature in the workplace. But the 76 cent figure, by being so sweeping and generic, doesn't always help clarify the problem of equal pay.

Go here to see 39 professions where women earn a higher paycheck.

States Take On Electoral College

If you're one of those (totally awesome) people who are obsessed with improving our electoral system, this should come as good news. The New York Times reports on an innovative new state-level campaign to abolish the electoral college:

Past attempts to abolish the Electoral College by amending the Constitution have run into difficulty. But National Popular Vote, which includes several former members of Congress, is offering an ingenious solution that would not require a constitutional amendment. It proposes that states commit to casting their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. These promises would become binding only when states representing a majority of the Electoral College signed on. Then any candidate who won the popular vote would be sure to win the White House.

Come to think of it, had John Kerry won 60,000 extra votes in Ohio in 2004—or not been robbed by Diebold, if that was, you know, the case—and won the presidency while losing the popular vote, there finally would have been a serious bipartisan push to abolish the electoral college. (Okay, that wouldn't have been the only upside to a Kerry victory, but still.) Now no one seems to care, though.

Bear in mind, the possibility that a popular-vote winner could lose an election isn't the only downside to having an electoral college. (Among other things, it forces presidential candidates to pander only to a few select "swing" states.) I tried to lay out the full case against our totally outdated and arbitrary way of picking presidents a while back and still think most of that still holds up. It's not the biggest problem in the world, but it would be nice to fix it finally.

Iraq Body Count Continues to Rise

The bodies of 87 people were discovered in Iraq over the last twenty-four hours. All were killed execution-style, with 29 of them found partially naked in a stacked grave. This is the second wave of mass killings since the bombing of the Askariya Shiite shrine in Samarra several weeks ago. Sectarian violence continues to rage, and Shiites living in primarily Sunni areas are abandoning their homes in fear for their safety.

President Bush, unlike Donald Rumsfeld, is starting to acknowledge the threat of civil war. "I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," he said. "It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come." As civil unrest continues to take its toll on Iraqi civilians, the Iraqi government is still struggling to adapt to the new distribution of power, as the Sunnis (once powerful under Saddam Hussein), are now governed by the Shiites. And the Shiites, who have been shut out of power for the past 14 centuries, are not about to give that up just yet.

Meanwhile, the CNN/Gallup poll found today that the war in Iraq has driven Bush's approval rating to the lowest of his presidency—36 percent. With approval ratings so low, the pressure is on the administration to try to pull out some of the 130,000 troops in Iraq, before the midterm elections.

Canada has its warmest winter ever, and other global warming news

Looks like there might be something to this global warming stuff after all. Here's AP:

TORONTO — The winter of 2005-06 has been Canada's warmest on record and the federal agency Environment Canada said Monday that it was investigating whether it was a sign of global warming.

From December through February, which is considered meteorological winter, the country was 3.9 degrees above normal — the warmest winter season since temperatures were first recorded here in 1948.

Environment Canada climatologist Bob Whitewood said it smashed the previous record set in 1987 by 0.9 degrees.

....Whitewood said the last 10 winters had been warmer than normal and along with this winter reflect a trend that could be explained as global warming.

Hmm, yes, I can see how he might infer that.

Hockey-playing Canadians are said to be "disappointed" about thinner ice. No comment from the thousands of pregnant seals "forced to give birth on shore by unusually mild weather that has prevented the Gulf of St. Lawrence from freezing."

Apropos, it's been at least a day since we last drew attention to this Mother Jones story about the plight of adorable polar bears doomed to (probable) extinction thanks to pollution and global warming. (Their Arctic home is literally melting beneath their feet.)

In other climate change news, NASA has roused itself long enough to tout a survey it says confirms “climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in Earth’s largest storehouses of ice and snow.” The story has an agency researcher noting an "internal NASA change...to allow scientists greater freedom." Which, if true--and don't count on it--will be quite the cultural shift.

New national security guidelines reflect significant semantic changes

At the end of last year, National Security Advisor Stehpen Hadley did some word tinkering with the "Adjunctive Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Access to Classified Information." The result is that the government now has broader, vaguer power to deny information to those seeking it. The overall change puts emphasis on loyalty to the U.S. government, and allows those holding information to look at various "suspect" factors rather than singling out a specific violation as grounds for denying classified information. It also places particular burdens on gay citizens that did not exist before.

For example, in addition to the already existing requirements for U.S. loyalty--things such a voting in a foreign election or expressing a desire to divest oneself of American citizenship--the new version says that the vocalization of allegiance to another country disqualifies a person from receiving information.

Under the category of "personal conduct," Hadley has added:

Conditions that could raise a security concern and may be disqualifying include: credible adverse information that is not explicitly covered under any other guideline and may not be sufficient by itself for an adverse determination, but which, when combined with all available information supports a whole-person assessment of questionable judgment, untrustworthiness, unreliability, lack of candor, unwillingness to comply with rules and regulations, or other characteristics indicating that the person may not properly safeguard protected information.

Deliberately providing "false or misleading" information to an employer could also disqualify a person from receiving classified information under the revised guidelines.

And under "psychological conditions," there is a definition of "adverse behavior":

Behavior that casts doubt on an individual’s judgment… that is not covered under any other guideline” is now a condition that could render an individual unfit for approval.

However, a former sentence that would permit access to be denied because of "reliable, unfavorable information from neighbors or coworkers" has been removed.

In the area of leaks, the earlier version of the document listed one condition that could arouse a security concern; the current version lists nine, many of which are related to computer technology, and some of which are related to efforts to gain information "outside one's need to know."

The 1997 version stated that sexual orientation "may not be used" to disqualify applicants, but Hadley's new version states that clearances cannot be denied "solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the individual." Also, the 1997 version eliminated "adverse sexual behavior" from disqualifying an individual if the behavior was "not recent." However, the new version states that the behavior cannot be used for disqualification if it "happened so long ago, so infrequently, and under such unusual circumstances, that it is unlikely to recur."

In the "criminal conduct" section of the document, Hadley has removed the word "acquittal" from a list of factors to be considered in granting access to information. He has also added discharge from the military "under dishonorable conditions" as a reason to deny access. And though it was removed in the past, Hadley has re-instated the abuse of prescription drugs after a prolonged illness as a reason to deny access.

March 13, 2006

Contraceptive issue becomes hot in Connecticut

20% of hospitals in Connecticut do not routinely offer contraceptives to all rape victims, but there is now a pending proposal that would make it illegal to not offer them. Rape counseling activists argue that not only should all hos