3:15 PM
Censoring al-Jazeera
Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog group defending freedom of the press internationally, has criticized six countries -- the United States, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iran, Tunisia, and Canada -- for their persistent harassment and censorship of Arabic station al-Jazeera, expressing regret that "some governments have no hesitation in censoring al-Jazeera, the leading Arabic news channel, to protect their political and diplomatic interests. These methods demonstrate their intolerance of critics."
The group also called on Iraq's interim government to rescind its ban barring the channel from operating in Iraq and to allow it to reopen its Baghdad offices as soon as possible. No major American media outlets are even covering the censorship of al-Jazeera, let alone the banning of the station in Iraq; this despite Bush's grand inaugural speech extolling the virtues of freedom and democracy last week. For those interested, here's Reporters Without Borders rundown of each country's violations against al-Jazeera's right to freedom of the press:
The Saudi authorities have refused to allow the channel to cover the pilgrimage to Mecca since 2003, refusing all requests for accreditation. Contacted by telephone by Reporters Without Borders, presenter M'hamed Krichen explained that the authorities made no distinction between al-Jazeera and the Qatari government. A crisis in diplomatic relations between the two countries entails a freeze in the channel's work in Saudi Arabia. CNN and the BBC both operate in Saudi Arabia and are seen as less of a problem since their Arabic audience is smaller than that of al-Jazeera, which has daily viewing figures of between 35-40 million worldwide.The channel has been blocked in Algeria since June 2004. It is the first time in ten years that a foreign channel has been subjected to such a ban. The authorities used the pretext of a reorganization of the work of foreign correspondents and press in the country, but only the Qatar-based channel was affected by the changes. Various sources agreed that the step followed the broadcast of a debate about Algeria in the program "El-Itidjah el-Mouakass" in which opposition figures made trenchant criticisms of the Algerian generals and President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's national reconciliation policy. It also made public the results of its own poll in which 72% of viewers considered things had not improved in Algeria. Journalists from al-Jazeera currently obtain accreditation only for major international events. A renewed request for accreditation was unsuccessful.
Iran has threatened sanctions against the al-Jazeera bureau there on several occasions. In November 2004, Tehran told the channel to remove a cartoon it considered offensive from its website or face the consequences. The foreign media director at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Orientation, Mohammad Hossein Khoshvaght, said, "Unless this animation disappears and if such abuses continue, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Orientation will be forced to take the necessary steps to considered restricting the channel's work in Iran". The channel was threatened with expulsion a second time soon afterwards for referring to the "Arabic Gulf" and not the "Persian Gulf".
In Tunisia, the authorities refused the channel's application to open an office and to accredit its correspondents. Al-Jazeera sought accreditation to cover the October 2004 presidential elections but the authorities said they would only allow it if they could choose which correspondent the channel sent.
In January 2004, al-Jazeera was banned from covering government activities in Iraq for one month following a broadcast that was viewed as "provocative" in which one of the participants made accusations against some political leaders. Al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau has been closed since 7 August 2004 to "protect the Iraqi people", according to the official decision. The interim Iraqi government accused the channel of "incitement to racial hatred and tension". In November 2004, the Iraqi Defense Minister, Hazem Shaalan, fulminated against al-Jazeera calling it a "terrorist channel". "May God curse all those who terrorize Iraqi citizens and Iraq's children, whether they are journalists or others. The day will come when we deal with al-Jazeera in other ways than with words," he threatened.
In April 2004, the United States also accused the channel of stoking up anti-American feelings in its coverage of events in Iraq. Contacted by Reporters Without Borders, Jihad Ballout, spokesman for al-Jazeera, said that the channel's editorial line would not be influenced by the attacks. "We are simple observers, and not actors. We do not apply any political judgment and we try to present a balanced coverage of the conflict. We give equal airtime to the Iraqi people as to the insurgents and the US forces," he added.
Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj, a Sudanese national, has been held by US forces since the start of 2002 at Guantanamo military base in Cuba. His wife has had no news of him for 18 months and the reasons for his detention remain unknown.
In Canada, several conditions have been slapped on al-Jazeera's distribution. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruled that the distributors had to monitor its programs 24 hours a day. Moreover, the CRTC authorized the operators "to modify or cancel al-Jazeera programs ... to avoid distribution of offensive remarks."
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1:42 PM
Overreach in five simple steps
Trudy Rubin of Knight Ridder takes a good hard look at the Shiite leaders who will rule the new Iraq after Sunday's elections:
Back in the days of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni Arab minority ruled, and the majority Shiites suffered. Now the Shiites are about to come to power through the ballot, and Sunni Arabs are scared.They fear that politics is still a zero sum game and this time they will be the losers. They fear Shiites will pay them back for what they suffered under Saddam.They look at the posters of the United Iraqi Alliance - the bloc of Shiite parties and groupings that has been "blessed" by the top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Every poster bears the face of the ayatollah. Secular Iraqis (including many Shiites) fear that a win for the alliance will mean a Shiite Islamic state like that of Iran.The rest of Rubin's piece makes the argument that the Shiites don't really want civil war, so they'll be nice and moderate, and try to address all the fears of the Sunnis and Kurds. She quotes Adel Abdel Mahdi, a possible candidate for prime minister, as saying: "The real danger is that Shia will overvalue their power and go to extreme requests. But people are wiser than before." Call this the optimistic case for Iraq.
Alas, what Mahdi says may all be true now, but a simple desire for peace may not be entirely relevant. No one wanted World War I, for instance, but a bunch of otherwise smart leaders miscalculated, overstepped their bounds, retaliated when they should have backed down, and before anyone realized what was happening, millions were dead.
So it could go in Iraq. The Shiites, for instance, have promised the Sunnis and Kurds that, under the interim laws, any three provinces will be able to veto the final drafted constitution produced by the elected National Assembly. In a sense, they're saying that Sunnis and Kurds won't get screwed, even if they are the minority. But what happens if constitution after constitution gets vetoed and the Shiite leaders get frustrated with the lack of progress? They could easily repudiate the American-imposed Transitional Administrative Law—indeed, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has already said that Iraq should not be bound by the interim constitution, and the UN basically agreed with him. Heck, here in America, where we've had 200 years of democracy, we have a president who felt too constrained by the Constitution and decided to give the executive branch a bit more power. Overreach happens all the time, and in Iraq, it could turn gruesome.
1:29 PM
The magic of Iraqi elections
Spencer Ackerman sums up the post-election dilemma in Iraq pretty well. At this point, the U.S. military presence is probably fueling the Sunni insurgency—or at least keeping the odd mix of secular Baathists, Salafist jihadists, and tribal warlords united and focused on wreaking havoc. But if the U.S. leaves too quickly, the insurgency could easily overrun the new government. The latter fact explains why the leading Iraqi politicians are already damping down their calls for U.S. withdrawal. It's a real dilemma, and not one that will be magically fixed by an election.
10:07 AM
Social Security word games
Can we get a bit of terminology straight? Via Josh Marshall I came to Rep. Allen Boyd's statement on Social Security. Boyd is currently the only Democrat "loud and proud" in favor of phasing out the program: his statement claims, "In its current form, Social Security cannot last." He then notes that in 2042, Social Security will finally draw down its accumulated reserves and reach "insolvency."
Since reporters, at the president's request, are dutifully scratching out the word "private accounts" from their coverage of the issue, I'd like to propose my own little word change. Social Security can never become "insolvent", period. It's a system of transfer payments from workers to seniors: so long as there are workers, the checks will never stop coming. So even if the Trust Fund does run out in 2042 and we had to cut benefits accordingly, those benefits would still exist, they would still be financed by payroll taxes, and they would still be higher in real terms than they are today. Unless Boyd envisions a country in which the entire producing class has up and vanished thirty years from now, the system will be solvent for all eternity.
3:19 PM
Another problem in Darfur
Earlier today, this site noted the U.N.’s pending decision on what to do about Darfur. Over at The American Prospect, Mark Goldberg breaks down how George Bush’s longstanding opposition to the International Criminal Court could prove more than a little problematic for the justice process:
The Bush administration can't be seen as being "against" prosecuting those responsible for genocide, so it has fielded two seperate [sic] ideas for bringing the guilty to justice to counter the ICC referral. First they’ve recommended that an independent, ad hoc tribunal be set up somewhere in the region; second, they’ve toyed with the idea of referring the cases to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.Considering that the ICC is competent to try these kinds of crimes and is already open for business, setting up an ad hoc tribunal for Sudan would be unnecessarily costly and time consuming. Because the duplicative process would be entirely at the United States' urging, we would have to pick up most, if not all, of the tab. On the other hand, referring the Darfur war crimes charges to Rwanda would set the genocide trials up for failure. Unlike its sister court for the former Yugoslavia, the Rwanda tribunal hasn’t been much of a success. Referring certain cases to national courts and training local judges should remain the Rwandan tribunal’s top priority.
Instead, administration paranoia about international prosecutions of American troops (given the abuse scandals in Iraq and Guantanamo, at least a few would be warranted) and disdain for international agreements could potentially throw up another roadblock against bringing the killers to justice.
2:58 PM
Torture continues to 'migrate'
Here's reason number 87 (or whatever we're at) to oppose Alberto Gonzales' nomination for Attorney General:
In another case involving a group known as Task Force 20, a collection of Special Forces soldiers and CIA officers, a 73-year-old woman complained she was arrested, flown to an undisclosed location and questioned for several days. She said one male captor "rode" her and called her names. She added that two of her fingers were broken and that she was sexually abused with a stick.That's from a report headlined "Pentagon Files Reveal More Allegations of Abuse in Iraq." More on that story and others here.
People are finally getting it. Yesterday not one Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted for Gonzales' nomination to move to the Senate floor. Meanwhile, both the Washington Post and the New York Times ran anti-Gonzales editorials today. It's tough to say if this newfound liberal spine is the result of internet petitions, or the fact that Barbara Boxer decided to stand up to Condoleeza Rice, or hordes of constituents writing letters to their Senators, or what. But something's sure changed.
1:57 PM
Naomi Klein on the DemsOver at Alternet they have an interesting and provocative interview with Naomi Klein. Much of her commentary focuses on the anti-war movement, the Iraqi election, and the need for progressives to commit to what she calls "deep democracy" and genuine sovereignty in Iraq. I was particularly struck, though, by her post-election (U.S. election, that is) analysis, coming as it does as Democrats move to choose a new DNC chair. She discusses Karl Rove's exceptional "branding" of Republican ideology and how he, unlike Kerry, managed to fire up his the party faithful:
Karl Rove understood that if he wanted to galvanize his base, he should make sure they could vote for the things that stirred the strongest passions -- which in his analysis were abortion and gay marriage. The Kerry campaign took the exact opposite approach. They felt that the best strategy was to muzzle their base on the issue that they cared [about] most passionately: the war in Iraq. And the campaign so took for granted their loyalty that they ran a pro-war campaign."Later she continues:
First of all, I believe that an anti-war campaign could have won the election. But even if you think I'm crazy, I believe that an anti-war campaign would have done a better job at losing the election. Elections are also moments where issues get put on the national agenda. If there had been (an anti-war) candidate with courage, for instance, it would have been impossible for Bush to name Alberto Gonzales as his candidate for attorney general. It was Kerry's silence more than Bush's win that allowed Bush to make such a scandalous appointment."
That seems right to me. For all his talk of a "mandate" and "political capital," Bush can't steamroll the Democrats on his 2nd term agenda if they put up a strong fight (as they failed to do, time and again, during his first term.) One key to to effective Democratic resistance, Klein says, is to "answer the language of faith with the language of morality," which John Kerry signally failed to do. As Democrats appoint a new DNC chair, essentially the first signal of the party's direction after the 2004 defeat, they would be wise to tap into morality as the issue in a fight against an administration that is so morally bankrupt.
1:42 PM
Democracy and Islamists
Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post took a look yesterday at the Shi'ites of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, many of whom are thinking about voting for secular parties in the upcoming election. Surprising, no? Seems that Basra residents have grown a bit tired of the local religious parties and their inability to deliver the goods: water, electricity, security, etc. Voters certainly won't avoid the religious slate altogether—Ayatollah Ali Sistani's influence remains strong, and Iraq's rural areas are still "red states" through and through—but the drift is pretty pronounced.
No surprise there, maybe, but it's a good indication that it might not be the end of the world if democracy in the Middle East gave rise to Islamic governments, as many have feared. Eventually, these leaders have to keep the country running smoothly, and they need to answer to voters. An overly-zealous and incompetent government could well turn people away from religion altogether, or promote the development of a secular society, as we're seeing in Basra. In fact, this is the sort of argument touted by thinkers as diverse as Reuel Marc Gerecht and Michael Hirsh—namely, that the path to "modernization" in the Middle East runs not through a pro-Western, secular leader like Iyad Allawi or Kemal Attaturk, but through Islamic governments taking power and then moderating themselves.
Is the Bush administration catching on? Perhaps not: Lately we've heard that the U.S. has warned Iraqi leaders that the new government "should not install an Islamic state." But we can't keep imposing conditions like this forever. Sooner or later any Middle Eastern democracy is going to have a strong Islamic component—certainly stronger than we would feel comfortable with—and it's time to start asking whether that's necessarily a bad thing. Shadid's reporting, at least, suggests it might not be.
12:20 PM
How mandatory is this risk, anyway?
The New York Times continues to do us proud, with another great piece bringing up more questions raised by Bush's privatization plan. It asks what will happen to disability payments—which, remember, is already inadequate under the current system—along with gripes about annuities, and a keen point about how private accounts will be shared. Will spouses have access to the accounts? What happens in divorce?
By the way, I suspect that private accounts will induce many stay-at-home parents, who mostly tend to be mothers, to start entering the workforce in droves, so as not to lose out on retirement benefits. Not good news for social conservatives who want to keep the traditional child-rearing family intact. Gary Bauer, take note!
This question, though, is really quite interesting:
Would the accounts be voluntary or mandatory? If they are voluntary, when would a worker decide whether to participate? Would the decision be irrevocable?Now granted, President Bush hasn't actually proposed a plan yet, but presumably the plan will go something like this. Young people in my age cohort (18-35) will be allowed to divert some of their payroll taxes into private accounts. In exchange for the super-colossal returns we're all expecting to get on the stock market, Congress will cut our guaranteed benefits in the future. But what happens if I don't want to put my money in the stock market? Do my guaranteed benefits still get slashed? That means I'm heading for the poorhouse, and fast! Hm, not good.
Or how about this. What if I stay in the old system for a few years, and then all of the sudden stock prices sink. So I decide that I want to get in on the action and try to switch over to private accounts. Will I be able to do that? Doesn't that mean I'm gaming the system, choosing guaranteed benefits when stock prices are too expensive and then getting in when prices go down?
That brings up the flip-side. Usually when stock prices are high, that means the economy's booming and I have a job. So I can't buy quite as many stocks. But when the market's not doing so well, the economy's probably in recession, and I may not have a job anymore, and I can't get in on buying stocks at low prices. Meanwhile, when I don't have a job, my account's languishing. Under the current Social Security system, my benefits are calculated by averaging wages over the best 35 years of my life. So a bit of unemployment won't kill my retirement cushion. By contrast, if I'm unemployed, I'm not adding anything to my account, and I'm missing out big on the magic of compound interest. Not good at all!
So how good does this new scheme really look to young people? Keep in mind, I'm 22 right now. Under the present system I'll retire in 2050, when, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the system will still be paying full benefits. Sorry, I think I know which option I'll be choosing.
12:05 PM
Debating Gonzales
Legal Affairs is running an interesting debate between John Hutson and Heather MacDonald over whether Alberto Gonzales should be confirmed as Attorney General. Lots of good points all around. One thing I'm not overly keen on, though, is debating and rationalizing the nuances of torture after the fact. If President Bush wants to revise or ignore the Geneva Conventions, or develop new "stress interrogation tactics," then fine, bring it on down to Congress. We'll talk, we'll debate, we'll hold rallies—all that democratic stuff we heard so much about on Inauguration Day. But I honestly have no interest in first finding out that the White House has drawn up their own torture standards, and only then having a discussion about whether "some of it was okay," or "most of it was okay," or "maybe they went a bit too far, but they raise some interesting points here and there."
11:50 AM
What Chile can and can't teach us
At least we can always count on the New York Times! While other reporters have started shying away from using the term "privatization" to describe Bush's plan to, um, privatize Social Security, the Times gets loud and proud, with a front-pager noting all the problems in Chile's "PRIVATE" pension plan. The downside, I guess, is that conservatives will chalk up all this great reporting to liberal bias—or as Hugh Hewitt says, "MSM is acting as an arm of the Democratic Obstructionist Party." "MSM" means "mainstream media," and yes, Hewitt's too busy to debate the Times piece. Our loss, I guess.
So here we go. We've discussed Chile's privatization problems before, and the Times hits on all the right notes: fluctuations in the stock market have hurt retirees, administrative fees have chewed up pensions, and the government ends up dishing out billions to bail out unlucky seniors who invested wrong. One thing I'd caution against is playing up the "administrative fees" aspect; Chile's costs appear driven more by a lack of competition among pension funds than anything else, in part because of an overly strict regulatory regime. Still, it's worth noting that in times of great deficit, the U.S. government could always levy a tax on those mutual funds that manage private accounts, who could in turn jack up the fees on those private accounts.
Another thing to note is that timing is crucial. Most Chileans got into their private accounts right as the stock market started roaring, and that's good for them. But not everyone gets in at the right time. As John Quiggin notes, "Anyone who started investing in the US market in the late 1990s (and didn't manage to outperform it) is well behind where they would have been if they had put their money into government bonds." So yes, it's true that as in Chile, stocks outperform bonds in the long run. But some of us may try to retire before the long run, in which case we lose.
Oh, and finally, we've got the annuity problem. The Times looks at the case of Dagoberto Saez, who has kept his private account for 24 years. When he checks out at the age of 66, he'll have enough saved up to get a 20-year annuity paying $315 amonth (that's about a third of his pre-retirement salary). So what happens if he lives to be 87? Or better yet, what happens if he dies immediately after he retires? There's no way to bequest from annuity, so there's no way for Mr. Saez to pass his hard-earned savings on to, say, a widow or child. Bad luck all around.
11:45 AM
Sudan's suffering continues
On Tuesday, the United Nations received the results of its inquiry into Darfur, and is expected to release them in the coming days. At least in theory, the report will determine whether the U.N. will call the mass killings there a genocide, and supporters of an intervention hope a definitive ruling from the report will finally prompt international action.
That same day, the World Health Organization reported some progress, with a significant decline in the number of refugees dying from hunger and disease:
"The kinds of information that I am receiving on water supply, sanitation, food access and health services ... would mean that the death rates are likely to have reduced," WHO crisis chief David Nabarro said. "We have almost certainly gone down to within the threshold limit for a humanitarian crisis…We have not had the kind of dysentery, diarrhea and hepatitis outbreaks during October, November and December that we had in July, August and September."Unfortunately, the larger problem of continued attacks hasn’t seen a similar decrease. Last week, the village of Hamada -- a target of government-backed militias since December --- was reportedly destroyed, and the week’s violence claimed a reported 105 lives while displacing some 9,000 more refugees. Just yesterday, African Union observers reported bombing raids against Darfur villagers by the government air force.
As for the international response, American officials at the U.N. said Wednesday that the U.S. will introduce plans to bring the killers to justice. While watchdog groups back the idea of prosecuting the war criminals, and it’s a necessary move, the ongoing violence must be dealt with first. Fresh from a visit to the region, several House members of both parties called on the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions:
"This is not a problem for Africans alone to solve," said Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) "The whole world must be engaged."The U.N. now has its report. Soon the world will learn if its leadership will act on its findings or merely punt again as more people die.
11:09 AM
Trying to enforce the world's whaling ban
Back in July, the International Whaling Commission held its annual meeting, at which Japan, Norway and Iceland pushed the international community to lift the international ban on commercial whaling that’s been in place since 1986. As MotherJones.com noted at the time, however, those countries have consistently violated the ban anyway:
Norway has killed between 550-640 whales per year since 1992 for commercial purposes. Iceland declared last August that it would resume whaling for "scientific research" with a goal of 250 kills annually. And Japan kills more than 600 animals per year, citing research purposes, while illegally allowing the commercial sale of meat and other derivatives. In all, the three countries have already killed more than 25,000 whales since the ban went into place.On Thursday, the Humane Society International promised to continue pursuing a lawsuit against the Japanese government for violating commission rules (a Japanese whaling firm has killed some 400 whales in Australia’s Antarctic whale sanctuary, which violates both the whaling ban and international water rights).
While the U.S. has historically been a leader in support of the ban, its representative to the commission has quietly let this dispute between allies play out on its own.
5:39 PM
Troop shortages in the National Guard
For the first time since 1989, the National Guard (which, together with the reserves, makes roughly 40 percent of the nearly 150,000 troops in Iraq) failed to meet its authorized level of 350,000 troops. With a 15,000-troop shortfall, the guard is optimistic that with a massive recruitment campaign and cash rewards it can make up the personnel shortfall by September. But the deficit of troops is more significant than it first appears, due largely to the number of active soldiers who refuse to join the National Guard. As a report in today's Los Angeles Times explains:
"The National Guard, like the smaller Army Reserve, has faced difficulty filling its slots because of the extended and sometimes unpredictable deployments that have been required by the Iraq war, a conflict that has forced the guard to play a major role. Most acutely, the National Guard has suffered from a drop in the number of full-time soldiers who join after they are discharged from other branches of the military, Blum said. Before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, about 50% of troops joined the guard upon leaving the active-duty services. That number has dropped to about 35% today, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum said. Former soldiers have said discharged troops are reluctant to join the guard, fearing doing so could land them back in Iraq."With the U.S. military suffering regular losses in Iraq (with the highest ever one-day toll today), and the U.S. Army committed there for the near future, the Guard is unlikely to see its ranks replenished any time soon.
5:06 PM
Update on released Gitmo detainees
Two weeks ago, the U.S. announced plans to release four British nationals and one Australian previously held without charges at Guantanamo Bay. In a statement at the time, the Pentagon put the burden of charging the men on their home governments. And now, it turns out, neither Britain or Australia will be prosecuting them.
The four Brits returned to UK soil Tuesday and were promptly arrested by the police. But they’ve already been released after questioning. Each of them has alleged being subject to torture during their stays in Gitmo, and the lawyer for two of the detainees has "guaranteed" he will sue the United States over the treatment.
Meanwhile, Australian Mamdouh Habib is due home this week (because Australia’s anti-terror law went into effect after his arrest, the government couldn’t try him even if it wanted to). However, on Tuesday his lawyer provided more details of the abuse Habib reported. Habib said interrogators defaced photos of his family and told him they had killed them all. He also alleged that interrogators had a naked prostitute menstruate on him while he was chained down, and offered him the night with said prostitute if he "cooperated" with them (another detainee has made similar allegations) -- ironic, considering how the administration touts the "liberation" of Afghan and Iraqi women). Needless to say, Habib’s lawyer is also planning a lawsuit against the U.S.
The upshot of all this is after three years in captivity, all five men go home without ever being charged with a crime, without evidence of wrongdoing, and with some obvious scars from the experience. Nobody’s benefited from this, but the process of doling out punishments probably isn’t over.
4:45 PM
Figuring out what divides the country
I haven't seen anyone else tout the new and massive poll from Pew Center, so here's a link.
Looking through the tables yields some really interesting finds. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said that making the Social Security system financially stable should be a top priority for the coming year. Sounds like a number for the president to start flogging. But wait! By a pretty overwhelming margin, the public thinks that the health care system needs more urgent attention than either Social Security, the tax system, or the legal system. In fact, 47 percent of respondents say Social Security works pretty well and needs only minor changes, as compared to 36 percent who say the same about education, and 27 percent who say the same about health care.
Meanwhile, public attention is starting to focus once more on domestic policy—or more precisely, liberal domestic policy. While terrorism and the economy remain top issues, 59 percent now want the president and Congress to deal with problems of the poor, and 60 percent consider "providing insurance to the uninsured" a top priority. Both issues had fallen off the map after 9/11. Curiously, though, "crime", "the environment" and "morality" all dropped off the map as issues after 9/11, and haven't really returned to prominence. Meanwhile, no one really gives a fig for tax or tort reform: barely a quarter of the public thinks either should be a "top priority."
Most of us, then, are Democrats on domestic policy. (Quite critically, the number of Republicans who think "government is always wasteful and inefficient" has plummeted from 74 percent in 1994 to 49 percent today.) Meanwhile, there's a certain consensus that religion is "very important" to over three-fourths of Americans, while over half of Americans believe that corporations earn "too much" in the way of profits. While there are some sub-splits here—the country is evenly divided on whether or not God is necessary for reality—there's more common ground than the rancor of partisan politics would suggest.
So what truly divides us? National security. In the 2000 election, the most common "attitudes" that determined party identification were whether a person believed that government was efficient or inefficient, or whether government should regulate business or not. By contrast, in 2004 the attitudes were all security and "patriotism"-related. 76 percent of Democrats believe that "Good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace," whereas only 32 percent of Republicans believe such a thing. Only 33 percent of Democrats agree that "We should all be willing to fight for our country, whether it is right or wrong," while 66 percent of Republicans agree. Bush voters overwhelmingly thought that military force was the way to defeat terrorism, while Kerry voters tend to think that "too much force creates hatred that leads to more terrorism."
3:17 PM
Bush: Read my lips, no new payoffs
As noted below, there are now two confirmed cases of administration officials paying pundits to advocate policy. So earlier today, the White House press corps decided to ask the president what he thinks about the practice:
Q: Mr. President, do you think it's a proper use of government funds to pay commentators to promote your policies?BUSH: No.
Q: …Are you ordering that there be an end...
BUSH: I expect my -- yes, I am. I expect my Cabinet secretaries to make sure that that practice doesn't go forward. There needs to be independence. And Mr. Armstrong Williams admitted he made a mistake.
And we didn't know about this in the White House. And, you know, there needs to be a nice, independent relationship between the White House and the press and the administration and the press. And so, no, we shouldn't be going forward.
Q: Mr. Williams made a mistake. Did the Department of Education make a mistake?
BUSH: Yes, they did.
Q: And what will happen to the people that made this decision?
BUSH: And we've got new leadership going to the Department of Education. But all our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying, you know, commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.
It’s nice to see the president coming out against a practice tantamount to bribery. The next step should be to find out who at these Cabinet departments spent taxpayer money on these payoffs, and make sure they’re never in a position to do it again. Unfortunately, it'd be easier to just blame the pundits or scapegoat Rod Paige and Tommy Thompson now that they're out of government, and Bush has a history of letting dogs lie when it comes to policing figures within his administration.
12:23 PM
Another pundit on the payroll
When pundit Armstrong Williams admitted to taking a $240,000 payoff from the Department of Education to promote No Child Left Behind, he trotted out the "there are others" defense but declined to name names. On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported on one of them:
In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families."The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage," she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children."
But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.
The Post reports Gallagher got another $20,000 of administration money for writing a report on government efforts to "strengthen marriage" for a private organization (funded by a DOJ grant). When asked by the paper about the arrangement, Gallagher responded:
"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.Tribune Media Services will now stop distributing Gallagher’s column as a result of the disclosure (UPI, conversely, plans to still carry it). And if there are other pundits hiding their spots on the administration payroll, it’s high time they got exposed, too.
12:04 PM
Taking a stand
Say this for the Senate Democrats: they've grown a serious spine of late. Holding up Condoleeza Rice's confirmation for Secretary of State may or may not have been smart politics—and it didn't change the final outcome—but at least they're taking a stand. Most surprising, though, is the fact that it wasn't just perennial media hounds like Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy who were ripping into Rice—it was everyone:
[T]he depth of bitterness among some Democrats over Iraq was clearly on display. "She misled me," Senator [Mark] Dayton [D-MN] said, referring to Ms. Rice's prewar statements about Mr. Hussein's supposed arsenal. "She misled the people of Minnesota and the people of America."Mr. Dayton said Ms. Rice had helped to construct a foreign policy based on a false foundation "by hiding the truth, hiding the truth in matters of life and death, war and peace.""I really don't like being lied to, repeatedly, flagrantly," Mr. Dayton said.Now Dayton isn't just any random Senator. He's up for re-election in 2006, and may face the fight of his life. Early indications are that the National Republican Senatorial Committee will put up a strong challenge to Dayton—Rep. Mark Kennedy seems like a good bet. But Dayton's pretty clearly not planning on staying quiet and tending to his constituents—in addition to criticizing Rice, he also voted against Alberto Gonzales' confirmation. It seems that even so-called "swing" Democrats no longer believe that sharp criticism of Bush will hurt them at the polls. That sounds about right—ask Charlie Stenholm how far cooperation gets you. Dayton will be targeted in '06 whether he sides with Bush on every issue or calls Rice a flagrant liar.
Update: And let's not forget the Senator who started it all.
11:49 AM
How dare they teach kids to treat others with respect
Didn’t take Margaret Spellings to step into her first controversy, did it?
The freshly minted education secretary wrote a letter to PBS on Tuesday, protesting a children’s show that includes two lesbian couples (though their lifestyles are not the subject of the show). As the Associated Press reports, Spelling asked PBS to refund the federal money spent on a particular episode of "Postcards from Buster" refrain from airing the episode. Created by Mark Brown (best known for his "Arthur" books and cartoons), the show features a cartoon rabbit who travels around and teaches child about various parts of America. The episode in question involves a trip to Vermont and focuses mostly on "farm life and maple sugaring," but offended Spellings by including positive characters in a civil-union partnership:
"Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in the episode," Spellings wrote Tuesday to Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive of PBS."Congress' and the Department's purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television."
On Tuesday, PBS announced it will not distribute this episode to its stations (though a spokesperson claims Spellings’ objections were not the reason). Thankfully, Boston’s WGBH plans to not only air the episode, but make it available to all others.
First SpongeBob, now this. And content aside, the idea of Cabinet members putting censorship pressures on public television and demanding a refund undermines the institution’s independence, which was the whole reason for its creation in the first place.
10:48 AM
Social Security and African-Americans, once again
Since President Bush, apparently, is going full steam ahead with his plan to convince African-Americans that they should support Social Security privatization because they die young, the only thing left to do is to pull out this old post on the subject. And, well, pretty much pound away until it sinks in. Ahem:
- If you're really worried about black men dying off early, maybe the correct thing to do is to try to increase life expectancies for black men. On the whole, black men are less likely to have health insurance, more likely to spend time in prison, and have lower incomes than other racial groups. Showing that you "care" about all this by forcing African-Americans to start paying administrative fees to mutual fund managers is a wee bit perverse, no?
- The system is not "inherently unfair" to blacks. If you look at this chart, there's almost no difference in benefits (per dollar of taxes paid) among different races. It's true that African-Americans have shorter life expectancies than whites, but they are also more likely to receive disability, they tend to have lower average wages, and they have more surviving relatives. So it's about a wash. There's no reason to think privatization will be a better deal than the current system—indeed, it will be a worse deal if black life expectancies start rising.
- The claim that people could "pass the private accounts from one generation to the next" is a bit misleading. That's true if people die before retirement—they can pass on their accumulated savings. Once they retire, though, most people will likely convert their savings into annuity payouts, and there's no way to bequest from annuity.
That should do for the time being...
10:38 AM
The personal is no longer private
Josh Marshall is having a lot of fun with the fact that the White House has all but commanded reporters to use the phrase "personal accounts" instead of "private accounts" when talking about the great Social Security phase-out scheme. It's all the more bizarre—Orwellian, I suppose we'd say—when you realize that Republicans themselves used the phrase until they realized it didn't poll well.
Obviously reporters shouldn't ever take their marching orders from the White House, and I'll happily continue to call it "privatization," but there's an element of truth in the change of phrase. These accounts really aren't private in any meaningful sense. The government dictates how much money goes in, it dictates what stocks and bonds a person can invest in, and it will likely dictate how you'll be able to withdraw the money. As Max Sawicky explained a few days ago, it's entirely within the power of the government, from now until eternity, to tap into the funds in these accounts—either by taxing the financial brokers administering the system (who then pass on the costs by raising fees), or by mandating that accounts be invested in federal debt, or by taxing the eventual disbursement. Paradoxically, we're getting privatization subject to even more heavy-handed government intrusion.
3:31 PM
The cost of war
The Bush administration is set to put in new funding requests for Iraq and Afghanistan for this fiscal year. They are seeking roughly $80 billion for military operations and, combined with $25 billion in emergency spending already approved, the total for 2005 alone is close to $105 billion. To put it into perspective: every single citizen in the U.S. has chipped in more than $1200, so far, to fund the cost of the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that's just for starters -- the latest "unforeseen" funding request comes as the U.S. Army says it will keep at least 120,000 troops in Iraq over the next two years! Given the best case scenarios and figures provided by the Bush administration thus far, you could bet that those two years are sure to increase to at least five. A look inside the numbers and the funding request reveals not only an exorbitant sum, but also a seriously misguided allocation of taxpayer money. Here are a couple doozies:
While up to $650 million is reportedly earmarked for humanitarian, reconstruction and military operations in Asian nations devastated by last month's tsunami, the administration is set to assign $1 billion to $2 billion to construct a new U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad.At nearly $105 billion, total funding for military operations in 2005 would be more than 13 times larger than Bush's budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz assured Congress at the start of this war: "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." This quote, like so many incredulous statements by this administration surrounding Iraq, reveals how unprepared they were for the harsh realities of Iraq. Bush narrowly escaped removal from office in 2004 but, as the human and monetary costs for the war in Iraq mount, it will prove more difficult for him to hide from the failures in Iraq during his second term.
2:54 PM
Copenhagen vs. Kyoto, again
A brief introduction to Bjorn Lomborg. Several years ago, Lomborg gained notoriety by writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that attempted to refute scientific claims about global warming—and not surprisingly, came under heavy fire from most scientific corners. Not one to rest on his counterintuitive laurels, Lomborg next set up the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a bunch of economists (fairly skewed in their ideological leanings, as it turned out) did a bunch of cost-benefit analyses to figure out the most efficient way to spend money on foreign development. Again, not too surprisingly, the panel ended up ranking the fight against global warming as the least efficient and least worthy project.
At any rate, Lomborg wrapped the whole experience up in a new book, which was recently reviewed by economist John Quiggin. The review's well worth reading to get a sense of the whole issue, and Quiggin gets in some well-aimed shots at the Copehagen panel.
Right, then. One quick take on this admittedly well-trodden debate. Even setting the potential biases of the Copenhagen panel aside, it's all well and good to say that environmental measures like the Kyoto protocol are not cost-effective, and that we should do something else instead to help the world. But that's only good policy if we actually do something else instead.
Consider it this way: not signing the Kyoto protocol will benefit a lot of American industries, and by extension, a lot of Americans. Most of the costs, meanwhile, will all borne by those in the Third World—if global warming causes the sea level to rise, it's not Miami and San Francisco that will suffer unduly, it will be Bangladesh and India and Thailand and Indonesia. So if we really wanted to take Lomborg's advice to heart, we'd figure out how much American businesses and consumers gain from abstaining from Kyoto, tax that amount, and then spend it on whatever development projects we deem truly worthy. Though something tells me none of the Copenhagen Consensus fans are recommending that.
2:41 PM
The battle against sex trafficking
Over at National Review Online, Rich Lowry praises both the Bush administration and the evangelical movement—led in Congress by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS)—for undertaking bold initiatives against sex trafficking in the Third World. Indeed, this is something that people of all parties and persuasions can and should get behind, since, unlike AIDS prevention, the issue doesn't really traverse any deep ideological fault lines. I should add, though, that dealing with the broader issue of sex workers in general isn't always so simple, as Maggie Jones reported last year in Mother Jones.
1:44 PM
Early cooperation between Abbas, Israel
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, good news should always be taken with caution. But so far, the election of Mahmoud Abbas at least has both sides talking and taking steps toward a workable solution.
Starting Thursday, Palestinian Authority troops will deploy to southern Gaza with promises of cracking down on militants there. Already, PA troops have started policing the northern portion of Gaza, and Israeli officials say they are so far pleased with PA efforts to stop militants’ rocket attacks against Israeli targets. After a week of negotiation, Abbas has also gotten Hamas to promise a temporary ceasefire. His next challenge is to get Hamas to back down on some of its demands (such as the release of all Palestinian prisoners, a dangerous blanket proposition). Still, multiple sides appear willing to use Abbas’ election as a fresh chance:
"Since the election ... we see the positive steps that Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] is taking, especially the negotiations that took place between Abu Mazen and the Palestinian terror groups for a cease-fire," Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told Ha’aretz.Mofaz, speaking to reporters through a translator, said he hoped talks between Abbas and Sharon will take place "as soon as possible." He said Israel is ready to give the Palestinians control over their towns in Gaza and is looking for ways to help after the handover.
"We are ready to give them the responsibility in the Palestinian towns in Gaza," Mofaz said, adding that Israel wants to examine how the international community could help the Palestinian people "and improve the economic situation in the territories."
William Burns, the U.S. assistant secretary of state, on Tuesday called the current climate the best for progress in several years, and former Israeli PM Ehud Barak feels there is hope for peace if Abbas continues to follow the model of Anwar Sadat and King Hussein:
"The Israeli silent majority is ripe for it, but they don't want to be manipulated. There will be a peace agreement, and you would need a magnifying glass to identify the difference between the agreement that will be achieved and the work of Camp David."So there are finally signs for optimism, albeit of the cautious variety.
12:48 PM
Iraqis torturing Iraqis
Human Rights Watch has a new report chronicling numerous incidences of torture committed by the Iraqi security forces. Most disturbing is the fact that "[t]he Iraqi interim government, led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi … appears to be actively taking part, or is at least complicit, in these grave violations of fundamental human rights." And yes, this was torture: "In several cases, the detainees suffered what may be permanent physical disability." Just in case, you know, anyone wanted to compare it to mere fraternity hazing.
Meanwhile, Beth Potter of United Press International recently sat down with Iyad Allawi's campaign manager, Adnan Janabi, who told her that Allawi's government would bring back former Baathists from Saddam's army and dreaded Mukhabarat to crack down on terrorism. This partly explains, I think, why many of the Shi'ite leaders have been clashing so publicly with Allawi and other ex-Baathist members of the interim government. Most of them fear a Baathist revival of sorts—and with new allegations of torture surfacing, those fears aren't entirely misplaced. An associate of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the top Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, noted that once the religious Shi'ite list came to power, "If there are former Baathists as ministers, we will kick them out." For the record, that would include Prime Minister Allawi, Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib (sort of like our head of the FBI), and intelligence chief Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani. Not exactly lightweights.
So while everyone's jumping at those (admittedly quite heartening) signs that Sunnis may join in political process, the most ruthless battles might yet be waged by those already in government.
12:33 PM
"Democrats, go big!" reconsidered
Yesterday I got a bit exasperated that the Senate Democrats didn't really put out anything big, bold, and attention-grabbing in their "opposition agenda". Looking through the newspapers today, I'm not convinced that exasperation was so misplaced—rather than grabbing the headlines, the Democrats' "new look" was relegated to a few minor paragraphs in a story about how both parties are sort of doing stuff.
Anyways, on the brighter side, Ezra Klein notes that the opposition agenda will at least serve some purpose:
[T]he Senate Leadership has created a policy package on every issue so no Republican proposal ever lacks a progressive counterpoint, so no critic can ever charge that Democrats lack alternatives and so no Democratic flack will step on a Sunday show without an affirmative counterproposal backing his criticisms.Fair enough! Meanwhile, over at TAPPED, Sam Rosenfeld notes that whatever the Democrats lack in vision they've (partially) made up for in tactical efficiency:
It should be said that the Senate Dems under Harry Reid and Byron Dorgan have already been very impressive in using their leverage to make points and cause a little mischief when the opportunity arises. An article like this gives one the impression of a caucus that has blessedly resisted the myth that "obstructionism" is politically deadly and to be avoided.I'm not sure what all this mischief really accomplishes—grabbing a little media attention?—but so long as the minority party is locked out of all legislation-writing, there's not much point in simply standing idly by. Senate Democrats do represent a majority of Americans, after all, so they have a duty to obstruct some of the more egregious Republican acts.
Meanwhile, though, Sam makes another good point—that Democrats don't "shoot for the moon" on policy proposals because they still believe "that they'll be back in the majority soon enough anyway." Oy. Wrong, wrong, wrong. (The Democrats, that is, not Sam.) The 2006 midterms look bleak for the opposition, barring a truly ruthless offensive on Social Security, and they're simply not going to come back to power by incremental steps anytime soon. They could win, what, 3 Senate seats and 10 House seats over the next two elections, and that would be an impressive haul, but they'd still be completely locked out of power. Tom DeLay and Bill Frist have no interest whatsoever in working with Democrats, whether the minority party has 49 percent of the seats or 12 percent. Treating this like a close presidential race—where you just need to tweak a few proposals so you can inch ahead in the polls—seems like a futile endeavor to me.
10:28 AM
Make Social Security more progressive?
Okay, so the White House has finally broken out of its holding pattern on Social Security. The latest idea, as floated to the New York Times today, is to back away from any drastic cuts, and instead just try to get in a few modest "progressive" benefit cuts:
The White House has already floated one approach to the issue of future benefits, suggesting that the benefits be based on price increases rather than on the current formula, which is based on economy-wide growth in wages. Since wages tend to rise faster than prices, the effect would be to set benefits at lower levels than promised under current law.But that approach drew intense criticism from Democrats and some Republicans. Administration officials are now reviewing an idea called "progressive indexation." The idea is in effect a compromise that would allow initial benefits for low-income workers to rise in line with their wages but would peg benefits for affluent workers to the inflation rate. The effect would be to direct relatively more benefits to lower-income people than to higher-income people.In one sense, the distinction between benefit cuts and "progressive" benefit cuts doesn't really matter, since the savings far in the future from a reduction in benefits won't pay for today's private accounts—for those we have to borrow trillions of dollars. (More accurately, for those we have to hope the Asian Central Banks suddenly and magically develop a renewed appetite for U.S. Treasuries.) Privatization is still a bad idea that can't be paid for.
But notice also what Bush is trying to do. For 70 years, Social Security has remained a hugely popular program because it benefits everyone. Since benefits depend on a worker's lifetime average salary, the system rewards work—the more money you earn over the course of your life, the bigger your retirement checks. In one sense, this feature is wholly unnecessary—millionaires usually don't need their Social Security money to stay alive. But universality has helped maintain support for the program, especially among America's middle classes. There's a reason why Social Security, and not, say, Medicaid, is the "third rail" of politics.
Phasing-out Social Security by "means-testing" benefits will only erode that support. High-earners, once they start getting a raw deal out of the whole thing, will soon start ask Congress to let them put even more money in their private accounts, causing the solvency of the pay-as-you-go system to crumble even further. Eventually, Congress needs to start cutting benefits even further, which turns out to be pretty easy to do once only low-earners are really getting anything out of it—and as we've seen with housing vouchers, or Medicaid, or heating subsidies, it's pretty easy to slash stuff for low-income Americans. They hardly even vote, after all!
So no, I don't like the softer, gentler approach—because I don't trust that Bush or the Republican Party really intend to save Social Security or make it more progressive. Anyone can see that the privatizers want to phase the whole thing out, and using class warfare to tear apart the program's constituency is a perfect way to go about it.
10:17 AM
More trauma in the GOP family
Apparently, some gay-marriage opponents aren’t just getting mad about President Bush acknowledging he doesn’t have enough Senate support to write discrimination into the constitution. Now they’re threatening to get even.
As Tuesday’s New York Times reports, a coalition of religious conservatives calling themselves "The Arlington Group" -- and including the likes of Jerry Falwell and James Dobson -- have written to the president, threatening to withdraw support for Bush’s Social Security privatization plan if he doesn’t play hardball on gay marriage:
"We couldn't help but notice the contrast between how the president is approaching the difficult issue of Social Security privatization where the public is deeply divided and the marriage issue where public opinion is overwhelmingly on his side," the letter said. "Is he prepared to spend significant political capital on privatization but reluctant to devote the same energy to preserving traditional marriage? If so it would create outrage with countless voters who stood with him just a few weeks ago, including an unprecedented number of African-Americans, Latinos and Catholics who broke with tradition and supported the president solely because of this issue…"When the administration adopts a defeatist attitude on an issue that is at the top of our agenda, it becomes impossible for us to unite our movement on an issue such as Social Security privatization where there are already deep misgivings."
Some Senate conservatives said Monday they will again push an amendment though even Rick Santorum -- Rick Santorum! -- concedes the Senate would "come up short" on votes at this point. And once again, Republicans are already proving quite adept at party infighting as Bush’s second term gets underway.
3:09 PM
Will there be future Ken Blackwells?
Ken Blackwell became a household name during the presidential election, and a lightning rod for Democratic criticism based on his dual role as Ohio’s secretary of state and an honorary chair of George Bush’s campaign there.
On Monday, the Associated Press looks at the debate about partisan election officials working on campaigns ahead of next month’s meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State:
The issue has arisen in other states, including Arizona, California and Georgia. Georgia in 2001 banned secretaries of state from having any financial role in the campaign of a candidate whose election they would certify.In California, a GOP senator has proposed a constitutional amendment to make the office nonpartisan following allegations that Democratic Secretary of State Kevin Shelley misspent federal election money.
In Arizona, the state Democratic Party called on Republican Secretary of State Jan Brewer to resign, criticizing her for her role as a Bush campaign co-chairman.
On the national level, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) says he’ll introduce legislation that would ban all state election officials from overseeing elections in which they campaigned for a candidate. But such legislation would only mask the problem of partisan election officials, who would logically just give up overtly campaigning for a candidate. Even in Blackwell’s case, his supporters say that his role with the Bush campaign was a largely honorary one given to multiple elected officials. Even in that case, it doesn’t affect whether his partisanship came into play during his decision-making process.
New Mexico secretary of state Rebecca Vigil-Giron told the AP that the public must be assured "that we are not participating in any type of manipulation." If Blackwell’s example is to spur reform, secretaries should look at non- or at least bi-partisan approaches to handling elections separate from partisan elected officials. Otherwise, the appearance of impropriety will only linger.
2:16 PM
The U.S. -- now less sustainable than Botswana
Given that the current administration has arguably produced the worst environmental record of any in history, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that a new index ranks 44 nations ahead of the United States when it comes to environmental sustainability. As the New York Times reports:
Finland, Norway and Uruguay held the top three spots in the ranking, prepared by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities. The United States ranked 45th of the 146 countries studied, behind such countries as Japan, Botswana and the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and most of Western Europe…The index is the second produced in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, which meets in Davos, Switzerland, this week. The first complete index, in 2002, produced outrage and soul-searching in lower-ranking countries like Belgium and South Korea, said Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and an author of the report.
The report is based on 75 measures, including the rate at which children die from respiratory diseases, fertility rates, water quality, overfishing, emission of heat-trapping gases and the export of sodium dioxide, a crucial component of acid rain.
There are some flaws in the study, which researchers admit (such as Russia’s high ranking, based in part on its large unspoiled areas despite massive environmental damage in its population centers). But frankly, it’s a bit of a surprise that the U.S. is ranked as high as it is given the government’s recent anti-environmental policies.
In the last two years, South Korea used its low ranking to spur internal action on improving the environment. Unfortunately, the current U.S. administration probably won’t follow that example.
12:55 PM
Let's see a real opposition agenda!
Steve Soto has a good summary of the new "opposition agenda" put out by the Senate Democrats this morning. (For an even more in-depth look, Max Sawicky has the actual documents.) They've put out a lot of old, familiar goodies—increasing our troop strength, fixing No Child Left Behind, allowing re-importation of drugs from Canada—but I wonder why they didn't just shoot for the moon.
No, really! The Democrats, after all, have no hope of getting any of these things passed over the next four years. Especially since House Speaker Dennis Hastert has already declared that no bill will get by the lower chamber unless it has the support of a majority of Republicans. So the Democrats don't need to craft bills that hew closely to political reality. Like Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite, they can promise that "If you vote for me, all of your wildest dreams will come true." So on education, for instance, they could have proposed universal preschool. On voting reform, they could have promised to abolish the electoral college, or eliminate gerrymandering. On budget reform, they could have vowed to "end corporate pork as we know it". What? These things will never happen, you say? Who cares? The goal of an opposition agenda isn't to get stuff passed through Congress; the goal is to define what the opposition party stands for.
12:42 PM
Does Kofi need to go?
The American Prospect is running a debate between Michael Steinberger and The Nation's own Ian Williams over whether liberals should join the calls for Kofi Annan's resignation. After reading the first round, at least, I'll side with Williams' defense of Annan. Yes, yes, the UN has been egregious in failing to prevent genocide in Rwanda, Sudan, and now perhaps the Congo. But it's hard to see how ousting Annan would change any of that—it's not as if the great powers in the Security Council are all waiting around, ready to intervene in Darfur if only the Secretary General would say something.
More to the point, though, it's quite evident that conservatives calling for Annan's head have no interest in reforming the UN. If Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) and the dittoheads at Fox News were denouncing Annan because, say, they wanted to institute new standards against genocide and needed a fresh start, that would be one thing. But they don't. They want to rip the whole institution apart, and it's senseless for liberals to engage in any sort of rational discussion on these grounds. But I'll be interested to see how this debate unfolds.
11:46 AM
How To Enlist Bill Clinton
Now that the Republicans are in utter disarray over privatizing Social Security—even Gary Bauer is fretting about the political backlash—President Bush has decided on a truly novel approach: Trumpet over and over again Bill Clinton's old quotes about the program being in crisis.
Never mind that Clinton, in his points out, Clinton could put this nonsense to rest pretty quickly with a few short statements. But failing that, Clinton's actual speeches provide ample ammunition for defenders of Social Security. I like this quote, personally:
So what's the bottom line? You can see it. Today, we're actually taking in a lot more money from Social Security taxes enacted in 1983 than we're spending out. Because we've run deficits, none of that money has been saved for Social Security.Interesting. So federal deficits are the problem. Who would have thought? But this line sums it up well:
Social Security is also a life insurance policy, and a disability policy, as well as a rock-solid guarantee of support and old age. That is why we have to act with care as we make needed repairs to the program occasioned by the huge growth in retirees… I believe, first of all, we have to reform Social Security in a way that strengthens and protects a guarantee for the 21st century. We should not abandon a basic program that has been one of the greatest successes in our country's history.Clinton was wrong about the "crisis", but he was right about the importance of the program.
11:39 AM
The U.N. confronts genocide
Today marks 60 years since the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz and described for the whole world the horrors it discovered there. In New York today, the United Nations held its first-ever special session on the Holocaust, with Secretary General Kofi Annan reminding the delegation to heed its lessons:
"Two-thirds of all Europe's Jews, including one and a half million children, were murdered. An entire civilization, which had contributed far beyond its numbers to the cultural and intellectual riches of Europe and the world, was uprooted, destroyed, laid waste."Truly it has been said: 'all that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing'."
First, kudos to the U.N. for the special session condemning anti-Semitism, particularly at a time of rising bigotry in some European nations. But Annan’s remarks highlight just how little the international community has learned in the past six decades. As crises like Rwanda and the Sudan demonstrate, evil still triumphs today when good men do nothing.
Tomorrow, the U.N. will receive the findings of its investigation into the genocide in Darfur, and the Security Council will have to decide what it’s really learned.
10:41 AM
Stem cells, round two
Back in 2001, one of George Bush’s first political battles involved how to fund stem-cell research. Bush settled with a classic compromise that pleased nobody by limiting research to existing stem-cell lines. Christian conservatives complained about the existence of any research, while scientists argued the 78 existing lines were insufficient and many had been corrupted.
As the Los Angeles Times reports Monday, the success of stem-cell research now depends on opening up more lines:
All human embryonic stem cell lines approved for use in federally funded research are contaminated with a foreign molecule from mice that may make them risky for use in medical therapies, according to a study released Sunday.Researchers at UC San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla report that if the stem cells are transplanted into people, the cells could provoke an immune system attack that would wipe out their ability to deliver cures for diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes.
The study says it will take at least a year to clean the cells of the contamination, assuming that’s even possible. But in order to create new lines, scientists must destroy additional embryos, which would no doubt get certain elements of the Bush base up in arms (even though, as research advocates constantly stress, the embryos will eventually be tossed out anyway as in-vitro-fertilization leftovers). With the Reagan family and others still very active in support of the potentially life-saving research, it appears another round of stem-cell debate is on its way.