MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: June 25, 2006

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June 30, 2006

Prison Guards Lock Down Schwarzenegger

In a political about-face as sudden as it is short-sighted, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared that the way to fix the state’s problem-wracked prisons is by building more of them and locking more convicts up inside them.

For the last two years, Big Arnold has pushed for a range of progressive reforms in the nation’s biggest prison system, from releasing low-level female drug offenders into halfway houses to bringing back education and treatment programs – even adding the word “Rehabilitation” to the Department of Corrections official name.

Why? Because the prison population has hit a record 170,000, and reducing it makes obvious sense in a cash-strapped state that spends over $7 billion a year on incarceration and still has one of the worst recidivism rates in the country. Schwarzenegger was the first governor in years whose campaign wasn’t bankrolled with the help of the prison guards’ union, one of the state’s most profligate political donors, which freed his hand on correctional policies. But now, suffering from sagging poll numbers and facing a fall election, Schwarzenegger has made an alliance with the powerful union; to prove it, this week he called for the construction of two brand new $500 million prisons, and for the defeat of a ballot initiative that would weaken California’s notorious “three strikes you’re out” law which has put thousands of minor offenders behind bars for life.

As a federal court investigator put it, Schwarzenegger is abandoning "one of the most productive periods of prison reform" in the state’s history and giving the guards’ union back a “disturbing” degree of say over incarceration policy. C'mon, Arnold - it wasn't that long ago that you were fighting for the freedom of all humans!

You can't leak something that's already overflowing

If anyone tells you that certain leftist newspapers like the Wall Street Journal (though they will probably say the New York Times, which is about as "leftist" as the WSJ) committed treason by leaking intelligence about the U.S.'s secret searches within a vast global database of confidential financial transactions--tell them to go to a "burning hot" place.

Really. Because that is where The Heretik is camped out, exposing the outrageousness of this claim. He explains that the Bush administration has been doing nothing but blabbing for years about its intention to spy on and monitor financial transactions as a way of fighting the so-called war on terror.

"George Bush should look in the mirror," The Heretik says, for "Nobody has done more to...tell terrorists we are on to them, on the financial trail which in some ways is going cold."

He then provides a chronological collection of statements by Bush, beginning September 24, 2001, in which he explains to the world over and over how the U.S. is tracking international financial transactions and freezing the assets of terrorists.

Except, of course, that didn't really happen. The Heretik points out that terrorists do not actually do business with Swift--what a surprise-- only with a few selected Swift banks, and that terrorist assets are easily and quickly converted to things like diamonds, gold and investments in front companies. However, as a result of the fishing expedition, millions of confidential Swift records have been released without authorization, violating privacy laws, and resulting in complaints lodged in thirty-two countries.

"The simple truth is terrorists need little money to do great harm." So says The Heretik. And he refers to Bryan Bender's Boston Globe story, in which Bender quotes former terror financing expert Victor D. Comras:

Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume their transactions were being monitored. We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing.

Is Prostitution Really Inevitable?

In the New Republic today, Michelle Cottle argues against Congress' brand new "pimp tax" idea, which aims to use the IRS to crack down on sex traffickers. This, I think, is a sharp point:

Obviously sex trafficking is a global atrocity. ... But the chairman's current proposal, which lumps together international sex traffickers with neighborhood pimps and down-on-their-luck working girls, comes with a built-in overreach that all but ensures that the agency's pursuit of sex criminals will wind up resembling its pursuit of tax cheats in general over the years: Overwhelmingly, the small fry are the ones netted since they are both the most abundant and the least able to defend themselves. [Here's a good example.]

Fair enough. A sincere effort to crack down on sex trafficking obviously wouldn't just give the IRS some token funding to hound "down-on-their-luck working girls." And there's certainly something to the criticism that many attempts to stop sex trafficking end up hurting women who become prostitutes "voluntarily" (yeah, those are scare quotes). The International Justice Mission, for instance, a Christian organization that helps the Thai police bust brothels, often "rescues" women who don't want to be freed. "We need to make money for our families," one woman said after a raid in 2001. "How can you do this to us?"

So that's all well and good. What I'm not so convinced about is when Cottle says that "some form of [prostitution] will always be with us," and so we should do what many sex-worker advocates in Nevada are calling for and decriminalize the business. Now these advocates are listening to actual prostitutes and know infinitely more than I, but there are studies looking into this subject that are worth noting. In 2003, the Scottish government, looking to revamp its own prostitution policies, did a massive report on policies in different countries around the world, and found that pure legalization plus regulation just isn't the best way to handle prostitution.

Among other things, the study found that legalization led to a dramatic expansion of the sex industry—in Australia, brothels expanded to the point where they overwhelmed the state's ability to regulate them, and became mired in organized crime and corruption. That was typical. In countries that went the legalization route, child prostitution and the trafficking of foreign women into the region also increased dramatically. Surveys, meanwhile, found that sex workers still felt coerced and unsafe even after legalization. In the Netherlands—often held up as a model in this regard—a survey done in 2000 found that 79 percent of prostitutes were in the sex business "due to some degree of force."

The best approach, as far as I can tell, turns out to be Sweden's. In Sweden, prostitution is considered "an aspect of male violence against women and children" and treated as such. Legislation, passed in 1999 as part of a broader "violence against women" bill, decriminalized the selling of sex while making the buying of sex illegal (pimping was already outlawed). So that was novel. But the bill also—and this bit was crucial—provided ample social service funds for helping any prostitute who wanted to get out of the business to do so, as well as funds for educating the public.

And after a few early hiccups, this strategy seems to have worked. Prosecutions of male buyers and johns went up dramatically. The sex trade doesn't seem to have been pushed underground, as many feared. Street prostitution in Stockholm has dropped by two-thirds since 1999. The Swedish government estimates that only around 200-500 women are trafficked annually into the country, as compared to some 17,000 trafficked into Finland each year. And most importantly, 60 percent of prostitutes took advantage of the social service funds and succeeded in exiting the sex industry.

At any rate, when it comes to views on prostitution I think I pretty much agree with this post by Emma of Gendergeek, who opposes fully legalizing prostitution in theory and isn't swayed by the argument that it just allows women to "choose" for themselves what to do with their body. And although I'd be interested in seeing evidence to the contrary, Sweden's approach appears to best finesse the line between legalization—which seems to work out horribly in practice—and outright criminalization, while offering those in the sex industry more of a choice than they quite obviously have at present.

UPDATE: Petra Östergren, a Swedish writer who has interviewed a number of Swedish sex workers, has some strong criticisms of the law here, which are very much worth reading.

Press intimidation: Red meat for the Republican soul

Is it just me, or is the notion that Congress "expects the cooperation of all media news organizations" in keeping classified programs--including, presumably, manifestly illegal ones--secret...a little chilling?

The House of Representatives yesterday voted to condemn the decision by several newspapers to publish details of the Bush administration's secret program to track terrorist financing, in a swipe at the media aimed primarily at The New York Times.
The nonbinding "Sense of the Congress" resolution states that media organizations "may have placed the lives of Americans in danger" by revealing details of the classified program. It goes on to say that Congress "expects the cooperation of all news media organizations" in keeping classified programs secret (Boston Globe).

Hmm, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal all published stories on this, but a special mention for the New York Times (presumably in its role as proxy for elitist Blue America). Could this have to do with...politics?

Never mind that the administration itself has publicly discussed its monitoring of terrorist finances since 9/11; or that by at least one account the program had become decreasingly effective as terrorists got wise to the surveillance; or that the legality of the program has not been established. Never mind any of that. Republican lawmakers feel perfectly entitled to say the New York Times will have "blood...on their hands" (Rep. Peter King), that "loose lips kill American people" (Dennis Hastert), and that the disclosure "jeopardizes the safety of the American people" (John Boehner). This is bullying and demagoguery, plain and simple.

"Let's be honest: We are here today because there hasn't been enough red meat thrown at the Republican base before the Fourth of July holiday," [said Rep. James P. McGovern, a Worcester Democrat]. "The administration and its allies have no problem with leaks to the press when those leaks advance their political agenda. But if a leak contradicts their agenda, suddenly they call it treason."

Coming soon: stem cell showdown

From the Washington Post:

Senate leaders from both parties agreed yesterday to schedule a vote on a package of bills that would loosen President Bush's five-year-old restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research.

With head counts suggesting there are enough votes to pass the legislation and with Bush having promised he would veto it, yesterday's action sets the stage for what could be the first full-blown showdown between the chamber and the president.

Bring it!

The package would allow federal funding of research on embryos slated for destruction at fertility clinics--embryos rich in the useful kind of stem cell. (Bush yesterday called them "society's vulnerable members." How's that for a frame?) As Mother Jones reports this month, there are lots and lots and lots of those embryos.

And so, far from going away, the accumulation of human embryos is likely to grow, and grow, and grow. And in growing, the embryo overstock is likely to change—or at least complicate—the way we collectively think about human life at its earliest stages, and morally what is the right thing to do with it. At some point, embryos may alter or even explode the reproductive landscape: It is ivf embryos, after all, that are at the center of the nation’s stem cell debate, which itself has prompted a new national conversation about life and reproductive liberty, creating new alliances as well as schisms. In 2001, as one of his first major domestic policy decisions, George W. Bush banned federal funding for labs developing new stem cell lines using leftover ivf embryos; then in May 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill approving funding for stem cell research using these same embryos, setting the stage for an eventual conservative showdown. In the course of this debate, embryos have emerged as another tool for truly hardline conservatives looking for new ways to beat back abortion rights. Like “fetal rights” laws that seemingly protect unborn children from acts of homicide, “embryo rights” are being waved about as a weapon in the assault on abortion rights, as anti-abortion lawmakers talk about seizing control over frozen embryo stores; limiting the creation of new embryos; or both.

But the impact of the embryo is also taking place on a more subtle and personal level. The glut’s very existence illuminates how the newest reproductive technologies are complicating questions about life; issues that many people thought they had resolved are being revived and reconsidered, in a different emotional context.

Read the full article, by Liza Mundy, here.

Clarence Thomas Wears Combat Boots?

This quote, from Aziz Huq's analysis of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, pretty much says it all:

Ironically, Justice Thomas refers to Justice Stevens' "unfamiliarity with the realities of warfare"; but Stevens served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945, during World War II. Thomas’s official bio, by contrast, contains no experience of military service.

Sort of like how, on the one hand, we have a bunch of retired military officers opposed to the administration's policies on torture, and on the other hand, we have notable non-veterans like Dick Cheney and David Addington insisting that their critics are unfamiliar with the "realities of warfare"…

The U.S. couldn't find Gitmo detainee trial witnesses; the Guardian found them in three days!

From the Guardian: so, so wrong...:

The U.S. government said it could not find the men that Guantánamo detainee Abdullah Mujahid believes could help set him free. The Guardian found them in three days.

Two years ago the U.S. military invited Mr Mujahid, a former Afghan police commander accused of plotting against the United States, to prove his innocence before a special military tribunal. As was his right, Mr Mujahid called four witnesses from Afghanistan.

But months later the tribunal president returned with bad news: the witnesses could not be found. Mr Mujahid's hopes sank and he was returned to the wire-mesh cell where he remains today.

The Guardian searched for Mr Mujahid's witnesses and found them within three days. One was working for President Hamid Karzai. Another was teaching at a leading American college. The third was living in Kabul. The fourth, it turned out, was dead. Each witness said he had never been approached by the Americans to testify in Mr Mujahid's hearing. [Italics mine]

The paper says Mujahid was one of 380 Guantánamo detainees whose cases were reviewed at "combatant-status review tribunals" in 2004 and 2005. "By the time the review tribunals ended last year the US government had located just a handful of the requested witnesses. None was brought from overseas to testify. The military lawyers simply said they were 'non-contactable. That was not entirely true." No kidding.

If it talks like George W. Bush and acts like George W. Bush...

Coming a bit late to this...but it's worth a look: Via Lamontblog, the campaign blog of Ned Lamont, who's trying to nab Joe Lieberman's spot on the November ballot, a feisty new Lamont campaign ad. It features video of George W. Bush but the voice and statements of Lieberman, and ends with the capper, "If it talks like George W. Bush and acts like George W. Bush, it’s certainly not a Connecticut Democrat." (The ad is the handiwork the legendary Bill Hillsman, interviewed here by MJ.com.)

Deep, cleansing breath

Bikram Choudhury, the "hot yoga" entrepreneur/franchiser/guru who is fighting a string of legal battles over his claim that he owns the copyright to various ancient yoga practices, is in a spat with the L.A. building department. After finding, the LA Times reports, 160 people in Bikram's warehouse packed into a space suitable for 49, plus not enough fire exits and other violations, the city has slapped Bikram with 10 criminal charges. Ever mellow, Bikram "said that he's the victim of a five-year campaign of harassment by employees of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. He also said that he had had it with Los Angeles and was moving the world headquarters of his Yoga College of India to Honolulu. 'Thanks a lot, L.A.,' he said. 'I've made up my mind.'"

June 29, 2006

Berkeley: As go styrofoam containers, so goes Bush...

Fresh off of declaring Tuesday "Cindy Sheehan Day," the City of Berkeley voted this week to put the impeachment of Bush and Cheney to a popular vote on the November ballot. On the red-blue political map of America, of course, Berkeley shows up as black. Mother Jones is too right-wing for Berkeley! But don't take my word for it; reading between the lines of this bland comment, you can just about glean where Berkeley's mayor is coming from politically: "It's not about Bush and Cheney, much as I despise them. It's about the Constitution and what they're doing to it."

Anticipating some eye-rolling, Bates also said, "Some people might say, 'Oh, only in Berkeley.' But things that start in Berkeley have a history of eventually being adopted by the rest of the country." To which my first reaction was, Name one! Well...

[F]irst city to desegregate its public schools, first to establish curbside recycling, first to divest itself of investments in South Africa, first to establish a citizens' police review commission, first to ban Styrofoam containers and first to mandate curb cuts for disabled access.

It's easy to make fun of Berkeley, of course--even if you love the place, as I do--but on this one I hope the city proves as ahead of the curve as it did on styrofoam.

Arnold v. Pombo: the Terminator meets the Driller Killer

California Rep. Richard Pombo will be familiar to Mother Jones readers for his near-pathological hostility toward the environment. (He particularly has it in for the ocean.)

Now he's tangling with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over his (Pombo's) tireless efforts to increase offshore oil and gas drilling, overturning a 25-year-old moratorium on same. Schwarzenegger, who's trying to "burnish his green credentials," as they say, before his day of reckoning with the voters in November, calls Pombo's drilling bill (the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act), which would give states authority over drilling for 100 miles offshore, and which was expected to clear the House today, "unacceptable."

Here, via Ocean Champions, is a snippet from a letter the Governator sent to Pombo.

My position on the need to protect California’s coast from the adverse impacts of oil and gas development is clear and unwavering. When I ran for Governor, I took a strong stance against any further oil and gas leasing in the Outer Continental Shelf off the coast of California and called on the federal government to buy out existing undeveloped federal leases. In a letter to the United States Congress on May 13, 2005, I stated this position in response to potential changes to California’s protections in the federal energy bill. In my November 3, 2005, letter to you, I restated my resolve on this issue. The impacts of new offshore oil and gas leasing and development off the California coast are unacceptable.

Full disclosure: Call us partisan if you want, but we at Mother Jones are unapologetically pro-ocean, and while we think Arnold's been a total dud when it comes to juvenile justice, we think he's got the right idea on this. Read the full letter here.

UPDATE: The House did indeed vote to end the drilling ban. On the upside, Pombo's bill will probably fail in the Senate.

Immigrants are bad for the West: discuss

Writing at Tech Central Station, Jerry Bowyer, an avowed conservative Republican, poses a question he says he recently put to Pat Buchanan:

If 200 years from now America will be filled with people who know and love the ideas of Jefferson and Madison -- but these people are overwhelmingly dark skinned -- will this be good or bad?

Buchanan's measured response: "a disaster and a tragedy"--identifying him obviously enough as as a "blood-and-soil conservative," as against the "we-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evident" kind, of which Bowyer is one. The problem for Buchanan and his ilk, says Bowyer, is that they're on the wrong side of history.

America is a highly dynamic country. In fact, dynamism is the point of it, especially racial dynamism. When the first Congress commissioned that Adams, Franklin and Jefferson create a 'great seal' which would represent the ideals of our country, the (eventual) results included the Latin words "E Pluribus Unum", From many, One. From many what? From many races. How could Jefferson and Franklin (who worked together on the Declaration of Independence) see it any other way? When they 'declared' to the world that rights were self-evident, they staked everything on the notion that the software of liberty runs on all varieties of human hardware.
History proved them right. ...

But, wait, if we don't send 'em all back to where they came from and erect electric fences from sea to shining sea won't we, you know, utterly destroy the West and everything Anglo-Americans hold dear?. Well, no.

Immigration doesn't represent the 'death of the West' it represents its renewal. People go from places that they don't like to places that they do like. This implies that they 'buy in' to what we're about to some degree. I would argue that immigrants tend to buy in to America more fervently than those of us who are born here. ...
Immigrants start businesses at significantly higher rates than the native born. Entrepreneurship is risky. It's difficult to imagine Silicon Valley occurring without immigrants from India. Immigrants have more children, which, of course, parents will recognize as the ultimate risk.
Do they change the culture? Of course, they do. Living cultures change, dead cultures don't.

All of which strikes me as sensible, obvious, true, reasonable, humane...etc. That it makes Bowyer something of an outlier among his Republican pals--and not just the paleoconservative Buchanan types--is as alarming as it is ludicrous.

E-voting fraud: Not a question of "if" but of "when"

Apropos the coming ballot meltdown, when it comes to electronic voting we already know to be afraid, very afraid. Now comes a report from NYU--by all accounts the most authoritative on e-voting to date--demonstrating that "it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome" of a national election. (WP)

The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.
With billions of dollars of support from the federal government, states have replaced outdated voting machines in recent years with optical scan ballot and touch-screen machines. Activists, including prominent computer scientists, have complained for years that these machines are not secure against tampering.

Indeed not. And, as Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, tells the Washington Post, "It's not a question of 'if' [somebody hacks an election, or at least tries to], it's a question of 'when.' "

Will the GOP Regret DeLay's Redistricting Scheme?

Just want to add an interesting twist to Monika's story. It's true that the Supreme Court ruled that Tom DeLay's naked power grab down in Texas was fine and dandy. What's significant is that this ruling sets a precedents for states to rewrite their district boundaries whenever they damn well please—rather than wait for the Census to come out every ten years, as used to be the tradition.

Now according to Richard Sammon, this could be a major boon for Democrats, if they want to get devious. This fall, Democrats will likely take both the governor's mansion and the state legislature in Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey and New York, and that means they can do what Texas did and redraw their districts, in effect shifting more and more seats in the House of Representatives into the Democratic column. They could potentially do the same in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, if they win state elections there. The only places where Republicans could potentially retaliate are Georgia, Indiana, and Missouri.

So the Democratic Party could, if they wanted to, take Kennedy's ruling and redraw enough electoral districts to take back the House in 2008. Personally, I don't like the idea of elections being decided by whichever party comes up with the cleverest—and most aggressive—redistricting plan, but that's the reality right now. An ideal alternative would be for states to turn into multimember districts and elect at-large representatives for the House—which would be perfectly constitutional—so that we could junk this gerrymandering nonsense altogether, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

All We Need to Know We Learned from Tom DeLay

Lesson for today: It pays to break the rules. In 2002, Tom DeLay conceived of and executed a scheme to raise money for Republican legislative candidates in Texas, who would take over the statehouse, then immediately turn around and redraw the state's Congressional districts to cement the GOP majority in Washington. It worked: Texas sent 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans to Congress the year before the redistricting; the year after, the delegation had 21 Republicans and 11 Democrats. And now we know that it was legal too: Yes, said Justice Kennedy in his opinion rejecting a challenge to the redistricting, the new Texas districts were drawn ”with the sole purpose of achieving a Republican congressional majority"--and that's just fine. So what if DeLay is still in trouble for the possibly illegal means by which this enterprise was originally financed (for a primer, see Lou Dubose's DeLay profile)? Win some, lose some; as long as you lose the battle and win the war...

Coalition of eleven insurgent groups tries to make a deal with the U.S.

The Associated Press has reported that eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered an immediate halt on all attacks in Iraq if the United States will agree to withdraw foreign forces from the country within two years. These groups, which operate north of Baghdad, are know not for attacking Iraqi civilians, but for attacking U.S.-led coalition forces.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has reiterated George W. Bush's conviction that a timeline for withdrawal "is not something that is useful."

There are believed to be about two dozen insurgent groups in Iraq, so a coaltion of eleven of them is a substantial number. Their other demands include:

-An end to U.S. and Iraqi military operations against insurgent forces.

- Compensation for Iraqis killed by U.S. and government forces and reimbursement for property damage.

- An end to the ban on army officers from Saddam's regime in the Iraqi military.

- An end to the government ban on former members of the Baath Party - which ruled the country under Saddam.

- The release of insurgent detainees.

Down with Air-Conditioning?

Over at Alternet, Stan Cox has an interesting two-part article about air conditioning, and how its rise has transformed the United States. Granted, his section on how A/C has helped make the country more conservative—by allowing more and more people to move to those sprawling, Bush-voting, water-guzzling Sun Belt regions—seems a bit overstated. He never really explains why hotter regions are so conservative (because they have more senior citizens living in retirement communities?). Anyway, I'm more interested in these assorted statistics:

The United States devotes 18 percent of its electricity consumption just to air-condition buildings. That's more than four times as much electricity per capita as India uses per capita for all purposes combined. ...

About 5.5 percent of the gasoline burned annually by America's cars and light trucks—7 billion gallons—goes to run air-conditioners. ...

Fifty-six percent of refrigerants worldwide are used for air-conditioning buildings and vehicles. North America, with 6 percent of the world's people, accounts for nearly 40 percent of its refrigerant market, as well as 43 percent of all refrigerants currently "banked" inside appliances and 38 percent of the resultant global-warming effects.

So air conditioning is destroying the planet. And the cherry on top:

Better insulation and 'green' energy can never be enough to satisfy the nation's summer demand for A/C. Just to air-condition buildings—and do nothing else—would require eight times as much electricity from renewable energy as is currently produced.

That doesn't mean it couldn't be done, of course. But might Americans just have to use less A/C and learn to suffer through the heat if we want to convert to renewable energy, lower our carbon emissions, and have any hope of staving off global warming? Cox believes so, unless, of course, someone invents some sort of ultra-efficient air conditioner (the EPA recently raised energy-efficiency standards for A/C units by 30 percent, but even if all current units were replaced overnight, which they won't be, that would only mean a scant 5 percent reduction in power used for A/C).

Now as strategies for reducing emissions go, I'd prefer to focus on making more fuel-efficient cars and bolstering public transportation before killing the A/C. But what if we had to use less air conditioning? Our economy currently depends quite heavily on it, especially in warmer parts of the country. No one's going to go to a sweltering movie theater in June, after all, or spend hours in a mall buying lots of stuff, unless there's air conditioning to keep people cool. And without air conditioning, worker productivity would plummet during the hotter months (long summer vacations, of course, are out of the question—that's crazy socialist talk). Fun little dilemma we have here...

The Coming Ballot Meltdown

Thought the Help America Vote Act (prompted by the realization that the U.S. electoral machinery was barely up to banana republic standards) solved our balloting problems? Oh, please. Andrew Gumbel--a veteran reporter not given to alarmism--raises the curtain on..."The Coming Ballot Meltdown" in The Nation. Read it and weep.

Celebrating 50 years of interstate driving (and crawling)

While we're making bulleted lists about America's cars, here's one to mark the 50th anniversary of the U.S. interstate highway system. From McLatchy (formerly the late, lamented Knight-Ridder):

Interstates make up just 1 percent of total U.S. road miles, but they carry a quarter of all traffic and 40 percent of all truck traffic.

About 60,000 people ride over the average mile of interstate highway daily

Pre-interstate, drivers could cover about 250 miles in a dawn-to-dark day on the road. Interstates doubled that

Why do interstates feel more congested these days? Because they are. In the past decade, their traffic volume increased 29 percent. Total interstate lane miles increased just 4 percent in the same period.

Interstates today have a fatality rate of about 1 per 100 million vehicle miles. That compares with 2 per 100 million vehicle miles on other roads. Curved exit ramps (versus right-angle turns) and minimum speeds get much of the credit

Freight distribution by truck has been growing 12 percent a year since 1956

What state has no interstates? Alaska. Hawaii has highways that are considered interstates because they're paid for out of the same federal fund and built to the same standards, but they're designated with an H instead of an I

Which cities have the worst interstate access? Buffalo, N.Y.; Dover, Del.; Fresno, Calif.; Jefferson City, Mo.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; and Tulsa, Okla., according to the Federal Highway Administration

The interstate system is a great thing, no question about it. But clearly it hasn't proved an unequivocal good, as notes the party-pooping Washington Post:

Unsightly stretches of asphalt sprawl now surround virtually every major U.S. city. The continent-wide delivery system that allows Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Gap, 7-Eleven, Blockbuster and Holiday Inn to offer identical products and services in identical stores from coast to coast has turned a richly diverse nation into a standardized single market -- changing the shape of towns across America. ...

With the number of drivers increasing much faster than highway mileage, a system designed to save travel time has become a chronic waste of time for millions of commuters. A study for the Federal Highway Administration found that drivers using interstates in and around large cities spent about 25 hours per year in traffic jams in 1982; by 2002, the annual waiting time was more than 60 hours.

Are "Vets for Freedom" a PR Ploy?

From the annals of propaganda news: Apparently a group called Vets for Freedom, which bills itself as "America's largest non-partisan organization," has been trying to convince newspapers to run stories by two of its combat veterans who are now embedded reporters in Iraq, on the theory that their reporting will offer "balanced and credible viewpoints." But it turns out the group has ties with the Bush-Cheney public relations team, as first reported by the Buffalo News. And a former Bush spokesperson, Taylor Gross, has been hyping the group to newspapers without mentioning that he's a former political operative.

But the Buffalo story hasn't received much broader attention. Meanwhile, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post have all run op-eds by Vets for Freedom "without any reporting on who they actually were."

SUV's emit as much CO2 as 55 coal-fired plants! And the U.S. is the worst offender...

Via the Guardian, the Environmental Defence watchdog group has a new report out showing that...

Americans represent 5 percent of the world's population but drive almost a third of its cars

Americans' cars account for nearly half the carbon dioxide pumped out of exhaust pipes into the atmosphere each year

U.S. cars play a disproportionate role in global warming because they're less fuel efficient than passenger vehicles used elsewhere in the world; they emit 15 percent more carbon dioxide because they're less fuel-efficient and are driven across America's wide open spaces (see "sprawl," "exurbs"...)

The average U.S. passenger vehicle has a fuel economy of less than 20mpg
Overall U.S. fuel consumption will continue to rise in the next few years

More SUVs are still sold in the U.S. than any other type of car. (This has been true since 2002.)

SUVs "soon will be the main source of automotive CO2 emissions", emitting the equivalent of 55 large coal-fired power plants.

Ethanol, anyone? Read the full report here.

Net Neutrality Bill Falters in Senate

Things don't look good for net neutrality:

In a dramatic tie vote Wednesday, a U.S. Senate committee rejected an amendment that would have preserved the status quo of equal pricing for all Internet traffic, an issue known as network neutrality.

Although the net neutrality amendment did not prevail in the committee, the issue could be revived. The amendment that failed was part of a larger telecommunications bill that passed the committee and now heads to the full Senate. A similar amendment could be reintroduced into the larger bill before that vote.

Tim Wu wrote an essay in Slate recently about why people should care about network neutrality—"The future of the Internet depends on it!"—so go read that for a good backgrounder.

Scientists want libraries? What next?

Here's a bright idea: Close he EPA scientific libraries so regulators can't get at the science that, under law, they are supposed to base their decisions on. No worries, a flack told the Washington Post--all that stuff is going to be digital anyway. Except that there's no money for that either. All but eliminating the agency's library network saves $2 million; according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the EPA estimates that "providing full library access saves an
estimated 214,000 hours in professional staff time worth some $7.5
million annually."

Hamdan to Rein Bush In?

Marty Lederman has commentary on the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision today, ruling that the military tribunals set up at Guantanamo are improper, over at SCOTUSblog. Among other things, the Supreme Court has apparently ruled that the Ge