MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: April 2, 2006

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April 7, 2006

Gonzales Stonewalls on Eavesdropping

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales expressed further support for expanding presidential power yesterday, when he claimed that President Bush may have been within his legal limits when he circumvented Congress and ordered domestic wiretaps in the name of national security. Gonzales' responses to questions by the House Judiciary Committee have been vague, frustrating Republicans and Democrats alike.

Of course, you won’t catch Bush issuing an apology anytime soon. "You can come to whatever conclusion you want [about domestic surveillance]," the president said. "The conclusion is I'm not going to apologize for what I did on the terrorist surveillance program."

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-CA) pointed out that the extent of executive power is limitless so long as congressional oversight is no longer necessary. "No one in Congress would deny the need to tap certain calls under court order," he added. "But if the administration believes it can tap purely domestic phone calls between Americans without court approval, there is no limit to executive power. This is contrary to settled law and the most basic constitutional principles of the separation of powers."

Divesting from Sudan

Major unions are continuing to divest pensions from the Sudan in an effort to pressure the Sudanese government to halt the current campaign of slaughter, rape, starvation and displacement in Darfur.

Calpers, the nation's second-largest public pension fund, is the latest organization to begin unloading investments in the region. The board unanimously decided that none of the fund's $141 billion in assets will be distributed to stock holdings in foreign firms that profit from the oil rich Sudan. Their strategy for divestment will be modeled after that proposed by the University of California, which on March 16 unanimously approved a plan to get rid of both their direct and indirect holdings.

Several states and universities are withdrawing their investments in an effort to send a strong message to Sudan. Institutions vary widely on the type of companies they are targeting and the type of investments to be divested. The best way to distinguish between the various approaches is by reading the Sudan Divestment Taskforce’s, State of Divestment Report.

New Jersey, Illinois and Oregon have already approved divestment plans, and there is pending divestment legislation in Massachusetts, Ohio, New York, North Carolina, Indiana, Texas and Vermont. In addition to the UC system, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Amherst, Brown, Brandeis, Columbia and Emory are all currently shedding financial ties to the region. Currently, there isn’t a comprehensive list of foreign corporations operating in the Sudan. However, the “dirty dozen” are listed here.

Global Warming Debate Suppressed

The Bush Administration is making it increasingly difficult for scientists to disseminate their research on global warming. According to the Washington Post:

[Over the last year,] administration officials have chastised [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

As of summer 2004, all NOAA media releases had to have prior authorization from those higher up in the administration, a caveat that intimidates some researchers to modify what they publish. According to Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, his team "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change,' " in order to get a news release issued. James Hansen, head of NASA's top institute studying the climate, said:

In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public. Should we be simply doing our science and reporting it rigorously, or to what degree the administration in power has the right to assume that you should be a spokesman for the administration? … I've tried to be a straight scientist doing the science and reporting it as best I can.

Meanwhile, global warming is not only becoming taboo for scientists. TV weather reporters are increasingly urged to report only on the day’s weather, with no mention of its relationship to overall climate change or human influence. According to a recent Salon feature, networks, driven by ratings, want weather programming devoid of social responsibility and often program lengthier climate reports on weekend evenings, a timeslot known to have the lowest ratings. "The last thing any station wants is an activist weatherman," says Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington research group.

Ross Gelbspan reported something similar in Mother Jones last year, asking why discussion of climate change is absent from the media. The world is being inundated by extreme weather—mudslides, higher-than-average rainfall, tsunamis, hurricanes, and floods, yet the media never tries to look at the larger picture. For example, Gelbspan writes, "when one storm dumped five feet of water on southern Haiti in 48 hours last spring, no coverage mentioned that an early manifestation of a warming atmosphere is a significant rise in severe downpours."

Newsrooms deserve a portion of the blame for providing soft reports about the global climate, but the fault isn't solely the media's. The more pressing problem is the fact that scientists are unable to disclose their findings and research, preventing both the media—and consequently, the public—from fully understanding the ramifications of global warming.

April 6, 2006

Banning Junk Food from Schools

The war against junk food is as quixotic as ever:

The days when children consume two orders of French fries in the school cafeteria and call it lunch may be numbered. A bipartisan group in Congress plans to introduce legislation today that would prohibit the sale in school not only of French fries but also of other fatty or sugary foods, including soft drinks.

That's from the New York Times. Anyone who believes that Congress will actually manage to ban junk food from schools—including junk food from vending machines—should save their optimism for Powerball or some other reasonable venture. Back in May of 2004, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced a measure that would merely develop nutritional guidelines for school vending machines. Guidelines. That's all. But no. Four Democrats sided with eight Republicans to defeat the measure.

Is the junk food lobby really that powerful? Consider the evidence: In June of 2005, Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell vetoed a bill that would've rid Connecticut schools of junk food, despite widespread parental approval. Guess who opposed the measure? Two months earlier, Kentucky had just barely managed to squeak out a bill that banned soda from elementary schools—anything more stringent would never have passed. Arizona had to make the same compromise in April. Members of Congress who oppose federal regulations on junk food always say that these issues should be matters of "local control." But local legislatures are powerless in the face of our Frito-Lay overlords, evidently.

At any rate, the Times piece helpfully swats down some arguments against nutritional standards—namely, that they'll cost schools revenue or that kids won't eat healthy food. But it's less clear that nutritional regulations in schools will get anywhere close to the root of the junk-food problem—namely, that large agribusinesses have managed to hijack the entire system of food production in the United States and secure themselves $180 billion worth of government subsidies enabling them create utter crap on the cheap. Against that sort of tide, a few dams in the cafeteria won't do very much.

Pushing Prescriptions

What can you buy for over $100 million? Quite a bit, actually. The Center for Public Integrity has a new report out revealing that pharmaceutical companies spent $18 million on political contributions between 2001 and 2004, along with $44 million lobby state governments in 2003 and 2004, in order to thwart state attempts to reduce drug prices. And that all pales beside the $83 million the industry spent to defeat a California drug discount proposition in 2005.

33 states have passed at least 66 separate laws pushing down drug prices since 2003, although the Center doesn't quite say how many further laws were scuttled because of lobbying, besides, of course, the California initiative.

Massachusetts Gets Universal Health Coverage

Massachusetts looks set to pass legislation to guarantee universal health coverage—the first state to do so—and that should count as good news, even if the policy itself might have a few kinks in it. At first glance, the new law will require everyone to carry health insurance or face higher income taxes, provides subsidies for low-income workers (those making under $9,500 a year get free coverage), and levies a very small fine on businesses that don't provide health insurance.

As with most things, the devil's in the details. Matthew Holt has an incisive comment here—how this plan fares will depend on how the state regulates its insurers. If insurance companies are allowed to offer cheap policies to the healthy and unaffordable policies to the unhealthy, then the market will implode; those people forced to buy very expensive policies under the new mandate will simply end up underinsured, with all the risks that entails. Or perhaps insurance companies will be very heavily regulated (Massachusetts already requires community rating, which is good); we'll see. Leif Wellington Haase also notes that funding issues, which have torpedoed many a state universal health care plan, could become an issue.

Ezra Klein says he would've preferred legislation that severed the tie between employers and the insured. That might be ideal, although now we'll see once and for all whether individual mandates, which are often touted as a moderate alternative to single-payer or single-insurer systems, can actually work, and how well. There's something unsettling about watching states "experiment" with various approaches to universal coverage—there are, after all, actual lives at stake here—but seeing as how the U.S. health care system is going to need a radical overhaul once someone who actually cares comes to office, it will be good to have evidence on which systems work and which don't from as many states as possible.

Uranium for Everyone

I realize not everyone dashes to the mailbox to see if the latest issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has arrived yet, but there's a story in this month's magazine that's worth reading. Basically, back in the day, the United States used to export highly-enriched uranium (HEU) to other countries for various civilian purposes, until discovering that the stuff can very easily be used to make nuclear bombs, should some crafty terrorist get it into his or her head to do so. No good. So we switched to exporting low-enriched uranium (LEU) instead, which can be used for the same civilian purposes, but can't be used for nuclear weaponry.

Anyway, so it's pretty much LEU for everyone nowadays, except that four major international producers of medical isotopes, which are used for diagnostic procedures and chemical treatments, still buy about 85 kilograms of HEU a year from the United States to make their isotopes. That poses something of a proliferation threat, especially since medical facilities aren't exactly the most secure of sites. Congress, for its part, has tried to introduce laws to force these companies to switch to LEU, which is much safer, to produce their isotopes—something that is technically feasible.

But. These producers are lazy, and in 2003, they successfully lobbied to loosen that requirement in the energy bill, which Bush signed into law last year. So basically, thanks to business lobbying, the United States continues to send bomb-grade uranium around the world—indeed, as a result of the bill, it will probably increase exports of HEU—to unsecured locations. Sweet dreams, everyone.

Frist's Immigration Compromise

I'm not sure I understand the point of this "compromise" immigration bill floating through the Senate. In the latest version, all immigrants that have lived here illegally for more than five years could apply for citizenship; anyone that has lived here less than five but more than two years would have to leave and apply for "guest worker" status—or indentured servant status, if you prefer—and any illegal immigrant that has lived here for less than two years would have to leave, period.

Okay, so why would any of those undocumented immigrants who have lived here less than five years ever show their faces? They wouldn't, and this bill will only push those immigrants even further underground. Meanwhile, how will the Department of Homeland Security, which now handles immigration, know which immigrants have been here how long? After all, these immigrants are all undocumented—that's the point. Someone who has been living here ten years illegally might have a hard time proving it.

Then there's another concern. As Jean of Body and Soul observes, the last time the United States cracked down on immigration, in 1929, officials "made no distinction between people of Mexican ancestry who were in the USA legally and those who weren't." There was a lot of intimidation and harassment and shipping people off on trains. All this for a policy that almost certainly won't stop illegal immigration. Moreover, the latest Senate "compromise" will only get worse once it gets compromised further, in conference with the draconian House bill. It's probably time to scuttle immigration "reform" altogether and wait for a more sensible Congress to come to power.

April 5, 2006

Plenty of opportunities to impeach Bush

The United States of America has undergone three impeachment proceedings. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached because he removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from his position, which was a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. He was not convicted, and Kansas Senator Edmond G. Ross, who cast the vote that saved the president, is profiled in John F. Kennedy's Profiles In Courage. In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon was impeached because of the Watergate break-iin coverup, but he resigned from office before the proceedings could go forth. And in 1998-99, President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair he had with an intern. Clinton, of course, was not convicted.

In each case, impeachment proceedings were begun because of the perception that the president had violated a law. Patiot Daily points out that Congress may ratify Bush's illegal spying with new FISA legislation so that his actions will be deemed legal and he cannot be impeached for having committed them.

Patriot Daily goes on to say, however, that during the month of March alone, Bush violated enough other laws to make impeachment proceedings possible. The writer of the Patriot Daily piece says that, "to avoid writing a book," it was necessary to omit any violations of law committed before March 1, 2006, violations of humanitarian laws and negligence, and some of the prior laws to which there had not been additional information added.

With these restrictions in mind, here are just a few of the March violations:

Bush signed the spending bill, knowing that violated a Constitutional requirement that the bill must first pass in both chambers.

He violated the material witness law by using it as preventive detention authority who could commit terrorist acts some day but for whom there is no cause for criminal charges.

He violated the Clean Air Act by by loosening emission standards for aging coal-fired power plants. The Clean Air Act makes it clear that only Congress may make such a decision.

In a legal brief written for the U.S. Supreme Court, Bush cited evidence from a debate by two Republican senators. There was no such debate. The evidence was manufactured by the White House.

Bush defined "material support" for terrorists in such a distorted fashion that victims of terrorists wound up being defined as terrorists.

He approved the ports deal, knowing that Dubai's boycott of Israel was illegal under U.S. law.

He failed to hand over delinquent mining company safety violation fees to the Department of the Treasury, as required by law. (He also decreased major fines, and did not collect any in half of the caes.)

He violated the law when he secured the UAE ports deal without the required national security review.

Bush's nuclear deal with India violates U.S. and international nuclear nonproliferation laws.

Patriot Daily lists many more violations committed by the Bush adminiistration, as well as relevant links.

Iraq and Libya Revisited

This argument hasn't come up in awhile, but way back in the day, Iraq war-supporters used to argue that it was the invasion and ouster of Saddam Hussein that convinced Libya's Muammar Qaddafi to give up his own burgeoning nuclear program. Way back in 2004, I discussed some evidence that this wasn't the case: the relevant policy towards Libya had been put in motion long, long ago, and it took a lot of old-fashioned diplomacy by this administration—so much so that the people negotiating had to sideline John Bolton from the talks—to get Libya to give up the bomb.

Anyway, Arms and Influence links to a new analysis by Dafna Hochmann which says much the same thing: the invasion of Iraq had at most a marginal effect on Libya's decision. Robert Farley also has some good comments on the paper.

Texas' High Teen Pregnancy Rates

Jill at Feministe points out that Texas—which has, over the years, slashed funding for family planning and teaches abstinence—has the highest teen birthrate in the country, along with a very high rate of unintended pregnancies. According to the Houston Chronicle, 1.5 million women are "without help in avoiding unplanned pregnancies," and that was before the latest round of funding cuts and clinic closings.

Meanwhile, Bitch | Lab has a response very much worth reading, noting that a lack of family planning resources may lead to unintended pregnancies across the board, but it isn't the only factor leading to high teen pregnancy rates: "It’s not always lack of information. It’s lack of desire to want to avoid pregnancy. And it’s sometimes about a desire to want to get pregnant." Among other things, she notes that teen pregnancy is culture specific—Latina teen mothers in particular are much less likely to say that their pregnancy was "unintended" than white and African-American teen mothers, according to various studies. I don't really have a larger point here, I just thought both posts were interesting.

Amnesty Offers New Evidence on Rendition

Last week Diane noted that Amnesty International was set to release evidence proving the CIA used private aircraft operators and front companies to hide its rendition flights. The report is now public, and it gives numerous firsthand accounts from individuals who were flown on nearly 1,000 flights directly linked to the CIA and taken to "black sites" where they were extensively tortured and detained in "complete isolation, in cells measuring about 2m x 3m," and "permanently shackled to a ring fixed in the floor."

According to one account, prisoners were transported somewhere in Eastern Europe, where "all of the guards and officials were Americans" and "the men were never allowed outside, or even to look through a window," while "temperatures were colder than any they had ever known."

According to Condoleeza Rice, "The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured." But she says nothing about potential transport to "blacksites" or renditions conducted by other governments. To this she states, "where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured." But as Amnesty International points out, "if the practice of torture and ill-treatment in custody is so great that the USA must seek assurances that the receiving state will not behave as it normally does, then the risk is obviously too great to permit the transfer."

Swiss authorities have already confirmed Amnesty's report that six CIA flights landed in Switzerland. Dick Marty, the Swiss senator investigating allegations of secret CIA prisons on behalf of the Council of Europe, welcomed the report. "Interestingly the research was done by civil society and not by the government," he noted. Interesting indeed.

Privacy Issues Arise in HIV Case

The California Supreme Court is currently hearing an interesting case with potentially far-reaching implications: A woman identified only as "Bridget B." is suing her ex-husband for infecting her with HIV, claiming that she had the right to know that she was at risk of exposure to the disease. The case hinges on the fact that Bridget's ex-husband waited over a year into their marriage to tell her he had previously engaged in sexual relations with men—an action considered "high risk behavior."

The defense claims that the ex-husband in question, "John B.", should be absolved of any responsibility because, while he may have known about his own sexual past, he wasn’t aware that he was HIV-positive. A ruling on the case could set a precedent for what sexual partners do and don't have to disclose to each other—the defense argues that should it lose the case, all Californians could potentially be forced to "divulge all past sexual conduct that posed any remote possibility of a contagious disease." The court will hand down a decision within 90 days.

Shocking: Tax Cuts Go to the Wealthy

In the New York Times today, David Cay Johnston has some data to back up what many people have been saying all along—that Bush's 2003 tax cuts on dividends and other investment income mostly benefited the very wealthy:

Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each…

[By contrast, t]hose making less than $50,000 saved an average of $10 more because of the investment tax cuts, for a total of $435 in total income tax cuts, according to the computer model.

Meanwhile, Johnston reports that the usual administration line on these tax cuts—that lower taxes on investment will lead to more investment—may not even be true, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. (In fact, they may even lead to lower savings because "people need fewer investments to earn the same after-tax income.) So much for that rationale. But hey, at least the tax cuts were good for growth. No, wait, that's probably not true. Okay, well at least they were affordable and didn't blow a hole in the federal budget. No, that's not true either. Um...

April 4, 2006

Senate president's son sodomizes 18 boys, is not charged with sexual assault

Clifton Bennett, 18-year-old son of Arizona state Senate president Ken Bennett, and his friend, 19-year-old Kyle Wheeler, were charged in January of 18 counts of aggravated assault and 18 counts of kidnapping. The charges refer to incidents which occurred at a boys' student government leadership skills camp in June of 2005, at which Bennett confesed that he and Wheeler sodomized several 11- to 14-year-old boys with broomsticks and flashlights in 40 separate incidents.

Wheeler has an additional assault charge based on his choking three boys until they passed out.

Yesterday, the pair was offered a plea agreement that will include no record of sexual assault; they will likely receive 90-day jail sentences, though the judge could reduce the charges and give them no jail time at all.

According to the victims' parents, the boys are having some type of colonic difficulty, they are sleeping with their clothes on, are afraid at night, and have received sexual assault-related counseling. However, the prosecutor told the judge that the "broomsticking" was a "hazing ritual" and a punishment for breaking rules, not sexual assault. The assaults, he said, were not viewed as sexual in nature because the prosecution could not prove that the perpetrators had "sexual intent." One has to wonder how this prosecutor does with other rape cases.

Bennett is an honor student and an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. If convicted of a felony, he would not be allowed to go on a planned church mission in September.

Immigration, Penalties, Incentives

Mark Kleiman makes yet another good point about immigration here. Immigration reform bills that increase penalties for illegal immigrants themselves—like Jim Sensenbrenner's bill which would make residing in this country illegally a felony—will only make it harder to penalize the actual businesses who hire illegal immigrants, because the undocumented workers will be deterred from doing any whistle-blowing. And it's hard to catch companies breaking the law without whistleblowers.

Meanwhile, steep penalties that deter illegal immigrants from testifying or complaining about their work conditions only makes them more attractive to employers, more likely to be hired, and more likely to be exploited—which contributes heavily towards depressing wages for native workers. Finally, as Kleiman points out, steep penalties for makes them more likely to become the victims of crime—since they're less likely to report anything to the police, for fear of deportation.

If Congress really wanted to slow down illegal immigration, they'd give the immigrants themselves every incentive to blow the whistle on companies hiring illegal immigrants—perhaps by granting citizenship to any immigrant who can she that he or she was illegally hired by a company—and then levy very steep penalties on law-breaking firms. The problem is that the businesses themselves tend to have well-paid lobbyists who can stop these sorts of provisions and penalties, while undocumented voters don't have, for obvious reasons, much of a voice in Congress.

Toxic Soil in New Orleans

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, some 25,000 barrels of mixed crude oil spilled in St. Bernard Parish last year from a tank that floated off from its base at Murphy Oil Corp. Now residents are seeing residue in their groundwater, and tests show their soil iscontaminated with unusually high levels of diesel and arsenic. In the area around the spill, one-third of 53 soil samples showed diesel fuel content exceeding state regulations.

Up until now, little has been done to solve the problem. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a non-profit dedicated to monitoring oil refineries and chemical plants, says the EPA refuses to acknowledge the potential for these toxins to have a greater effect the community. According to LBB:

Seven months after Katrina, residents have received no information about the long term or immediate health impacts of contamination from the hurricane, including the Murphy Oil spill. Samples taken by the refinery and the government have been posted on a web site in an unintelligible format. The samples taken by St. Bernard residents in early March were a response to repeated citizen requests for information about contamination on their property.
According to St. Bernard residents, Murphy Oil is now refusing to clean the homes of some of the people with whom they have settled. They have also failed to give residents the results of soil samples taken on their property. The ongoing problems in dealing with the refinery necessitate a citizens’ organizing push.

The Bucket Brigade continues to give those residents that are near refineries EPA-approved buckets, which enable the community to test the levels of toxins in their air supply. But that doesn't do anything to actually reduce the toxins. "The question is why aren't the [EPA] and the [Louisiana] Department of Environmental Quality doing anything about it?" Bucket Brigade Director Anne Rolfes, said.

This latest discovery of soil toxicity adds to longstanding concerns about toxic exposure in New Orleans. According to the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, the sedimentary sludge that has settled in and around everyone’s homes is composed of "toxic heavy metals and the polynuclearomatic hydrocarbons both of which are cancer causing agents." When EPA administrator Stephen Johnson was asked about the threat of these toxins, he acknowledged that the sludge contains harmful bacteria:

We know that that sediment contains bacteria. We know that in certain parts it contains high levels of petroleum products. People shouldn't come into contact with that. So whether its 24 hours or 48 hours or two weeks still the message is: avoid contact with those kinds of materials…. And so EPA does not have any statutory responsibility for indoor air, for example. And issues such as mold are the responsibility of and advice and counsel from the Centers for Disease Control, Health and Human Services.

In other words, toxicity inside the home is not under the jurisdiction of the EPA, so the agency claims that it turns over its information to Mayor Nagin, who is then supposed to call the shots.

Shilling for HSAs

In the New York Times yesterday, Allan Hubbard, director of the National Economic Council, made the usual flimsy arguments for Health Savings Accounts—Bush's plan to "reform" health care. I thought this plan was mostly dead-on-arrival, but perhaps the administration's making a renewed push. Well, in that case, everyone should re-read Jon Cohn's article in The New Republic on why HSAs are a terrible idea—they shift risk from the healthy to the sick, perversely. But we can do the short version here. Hubbard:

Health care is expensive because the vast majority of Americans consume it as if it were free. Health insurance policies with low deductibles insulate people from the cost of the medical care they use — so much so that they often do not even ask for prices.

Well, even if this was true, HSAs wouldn't change a thing. The general and widely-quoted rule of thumb is that 20 percent of the population is responsible for 80 percent of the nation's health care costs. The people in this 20 percent, those who tend to go in for major surgery and emergency care and the like, will almost always rack up costs well over the $2,000 deductible they'd have with an HSA, after which their catastrophic coverage will kick in. And once that happens, they'll be consuming health care "as if it were free."

So HSAs won't have the slightest effect Hubbard's talking about on the vast majority of health care spending in the United States. At the margins, you might see some savings—that is, ignoring all the other problems with HSAs. But fundamentally? They won't address rising health care costs. (At any rate, rising health care costs in the future are likely inevitable—a natural consequence of the fact that health care keeps improving and people want to use it to live longer and healthier. The key question will be how to make sure that health care is more or less equitable, which is not remotely the case at the moment—and HSAs won't do a thing about that.)

MORE: Here's a good Wall Street Journal piece on how Hubbard has started a new push to sell HSAs to the public. The Times op-ed, apparently, is just the start.

Abramoff Offered His Services to Sudan

Adding to the laundry list of unethical behavior by lobbyist Jack Abramoff is the new discovery that he attempted to sell his "services" to the destitute and crooked Sudanese government. Abramoff and his camp are denying the story, but according to eyewitnesses the lobbyist wanted to help Sudan improve its image during a genocide that has left more than 400,000 dead.

That's no easy task, granted, which must explain the alleged $16-18 million price tag that Abramoff was charging. At the moment, Abramoff is headed to jail for fraud, tax evasion and conspiring to bribe public officials, which includes bilking an estimated $66 million out of Native American tribes.

According to Sudan's ambassador and a prior Abramoff aide, the idea for a grassroots image campaign dates back to 2002 when Abramoff wanted to retain the services of Christian Coalition front man Ralph Reed to help convince evangelicals—who have often put pressure on the administration over Sudan—to back off a little. The former aide said, "Abramoff waved two videotapes at me that were made by a Christian-rights organization and said that the tapes showed the need for Sudan to have Washington representation that could relieve this kind of pressure."

April 3, 2006

Amnesty International says CIA used private airlines for rendition

According to The Raw Story, Amnesty International is about to release evidence that the CIA utilized private aircraft operators and front companies to hide its rendition flights. The report presents locations throughout the world from which rendition flights landed and took off.

The countries that allowed the CIA to crross their airspace and use their airports cite the Chicago Convention, or Convention on International Civil Aviation, which allows private non-commercial flights to fly over a country without giving prior notification. Under this convention, states lack the authority to question why a private, non-commercial craft if flying over or making technical stops.

According to Amnesty International, the U.S. has transferred hundreds of individuals via rendition, and "rendition is part of an elaborate clandestine detention regime that includes the use of 'black sites' and 'disappearances,' as well as torture and inhuman treatment."

Obama Tells Bush to Wake Up

Today Barack Obama addressed the nation’s energy policy, condemning the Bush administration for stubbornly refusing to prioritize environmental issues.

Bush announced in his last State of the Union that the U.S. has a serious problem with oil dependency, yet has made little attempt to remedy the problem, which Obama equated to "admitting alcoholism and then skipping out on the 12-step program. It’s not enough to identify the challenge – we have to meet it. … I was among the hopeful. But then I saw the plan," he said. "[Bush’s] funding for renewable fuels is at the same level it was the day he took office. He refuses to call for even a modest increase in fuel-efficiency standards for cars. And his latest budget funds less then half of the energy bill he himself signed into law - leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in under-funded energy proposals."

Obama stated the importance of pressing environmental concerns.
Since 1980, we’ve experienced nineteen of the twenty hottest years on record – with 2005 being the hottest ever" he said. He also spoke to the predominance of natural disasters in relation to the importance of drastically cutting back our oil dependency:

For decades, we’ve been warned by legions of scientists and mountains of evidence that this was coming – that we couldn’t just keep burning fossil fuels and contribute to the changing atmosphere without consequence. And yet, for decades, far too many have ignored the warnings, either dismissing the science as a hoax or believing that it was the concern of enviros looking to save polar bears and rainforests.

But today, we’re seeing that climate change is about more than a few unseasonably mild winters or hot summers. It’s about the chain of natural catastrophes and devastating weather patterns that global warming is beginning to set off around the world – the frequency and intensity of which are breaking records thousands of years old.

Obama also called for Democrats stress reducing oil imports by more than 7.5 million barrels a day by 2025, a cutback two-thirds greater than Bush’s 4.5-million goal.

Rush Limbaugh's (Surprise) a Misogynist

Rush Limbaugh's loose banter is rarely worthy of acknowledgement. However, he crossed the line on his Friday show when he criticized the woman who was allegedly raped by several members of the Duke University Lacrosse team.

When asked by a caller why Rev. Al Sharpton has recently been quiet about the immigration debate, Limbaugh quipped that Sharpton is busy "trying to figure out how he can get involved in the deal down there at Duke where the lacrosse team ... supposedly, you know, raped some, uh, hos." When confronted by another caller, Rush acknowledged that his idiocy filter failed, saying “I knew somebody was gonna call and give me a little grief so I'm takin' the occasion of your call to apologize for it. That was, it was a terrible slip of the tongue. I'm sorry." Limbaugh then essentially nullified his apology by stating "I wish you didn’t hear me say it."

This is a good opportunity for people to see Mr. Limbaugh’s true uncensored feelings. It would be nice to believe this is a solitary incident, but something tells me Rush’s misogynistic feelings run much deeper.

Should Immigrants Be Able to Vote?

Paul Krugman is still uneasy about large-scale immigration, judging from his column on Friday. Unskilled immigration, he says, depresses the wages of low-skilled workers. Well, yes, but again, with properly-designed policies—living wages, full employment, labor laws that allow unions to flourish, earned-income tax credits, and the like—I think you can mitigate this, while preserving the very, very large benefits immigration brings for immigrants and the countries that send them. It's awfully odd to think that shutting the border is really the best possible thing we can do for low-skilled native workers.

But okay, we've been over that. This passage in Krugman's Friday piece, on the other hand, is new and deserves comment:

Imagine, for a moment, a future in which America becomes like Kuwait or Dubai, a country where a large fraction of the work force consists of illegal immigrants or foreigners on temporary visas -- and neither group has the right to vote. Surely this would be a betrayal of our democratic ideals, of government of the people, by the people. Moreover, a political system in which many workers don't count is likely to ignore workers' interests: it's likely to have a weak social safety net and to spend too little on services like health care and education.

This isn't idle speculation. Countries with high immigration tend, other things equal, to have less generous welfare states than those with low immigration. U.S. cities with ethnically diverse populations -- often the result of immigration -- tend to have worse public services than those with more homogeneous populations.

Well, I agree. Creating a Dubai-style underclass of disenfranchised immigrants who have few rights and even less voice in the country they help prop up is an awful idea. That's why everyone should oppose "guest worker" policies that allow companies to import a captive labor force that are here at the mercy of their employers, can't bargain for better wages, speak out against shoddy work conditions, or organize and strike. But I'd go even farther. Why should non-citizens have to be disenfranchised? Why not just let anyone living here legally vote?

It seems a bit crazy, but it's worth putting out there. Non-citizen immigrants seem to be constitutionally barred from voting at the federal level in any case, but nothing's stopping anyone from giving them the vote in state and local elections. And why not? Presumably immigrants should have a say in, for instance, what goes on in the schools they're sending their kids to. And it's perfectly possible: Takoma Park in Maryland allows non-citizens to vote, although I don't think it's affected voter participation or local politics very much there. (San Francisco has considered similar measures at various points, too—it's unsettling, by the way, that 4.6 million people in California, one-fifth of the state population, can't vote.)

Who knows, a bit of civic participation might even make immigrants more "patriotic" or "assimilated" or whatever it is nativists worry about. (Even though the evidence shows that even Hispanic immigrants are assimilating just fine.) At the very least, non-citizen voting would help prevent the United States from turning into another Dubai. It's just not very likely to happen, although maybe a well-placed and influential New York Times columnist could do his part to help this idea gain momentum...

How Britain Reduced Child Poverty

Jared Bernstein and Mark Greenberg have a good op-ed in the Washington Post today discussing Tony Blair's plan, introduced in 1999, to eliminate child poverty in Britain by 2020. How did it fare? Well, over the past five years child poverty in the country has dropped 17 percent—below the government's target, sure, but still pretty dramatic. Over the same time period, child poverty in the United States has risen 12 percent, to 13 million.

So why don't we have the same sort of national plan here? Well, the short answer is because we have a corrupt Republican administration in power that doesn't really care about poor children and the like. But this one bit from the op-ed, on the power of simply declaring a national goal, is good: "What if you don't end child poverty by the targeted date of 2020, we asked [British policymakers]. The question didn't really interest them. The target, they argued, focused the minds of the politicians, the agencies and the public. Without it, they would never have gotten as far as they have." I hear there's a minority party out there in search of a grand sweeping "vision," and like Bernstein and Greenberg say, what's wrong with this one?