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Are Republicans Getting Ready to Shoot Themselves in the Foot?

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:34:58 +0000

Greg Sargent has been arguing for a while that Republicans run the risk of turning off voters if they go overboard on scandalmania. A new Washington Post poll bolsters his argument:

The Post poll finds a majority believes the Obama administration is trying to “cover up” facts about the IRS scandal and that a plurality thinks it is trying to cover up Benghazi facts. These numbers are at odds with yesterday’s CNN poll, which found more Americans think Obama is being truthful. But that aside, in spite of these negative findings about the scandals, the Post poll also finds that Obama’s approval rating is holding steady, at 51 percent, and the economy may be the reason why: Majorities believe the economy is beginning to recover and are optimistic about where the economy will go in the next year.

I'll play devil's advocate here. First, I think 1998 was probably unique: The nature of the scandal was clear to everyone and a majority of Americans simply didn't think it was very serious. The nature of our current set of contretemps isn't yet clear, and the Post poll makes it plain that most Americans do take them seriously. As we learn more, there's every chance that the public could view them as even more serious. In fact, they probably will. After all, big pile of scandals in the sixth year of a presidency usually spells trouble. 1998 is the sole exception, and I wouldn't hang too much on it.

Second, there's overreach and then there's overreach. In 1998, Republicans didn't just go a little overboard, they actually impeached Bill Clinton. As long as Republicans steer clear of impeachment this time around, they should be OK.

Third, I'd like to see the crosstabs for the Post poll. How partisan are the results? Where do independents stand? If this already a pure partisan battle, it won't go anywhere. But if Democrats are wavering, or if independents are mostly agreeing with Republicans, that could spell trouble.

Finally, approval ratings have a certain amount of inertia. It's possible that there just hasn't been time yet for all of this stuff to affect Obama's approval rating. It may well start to suffer in the coming months, even if the economy does keep improving.

Do I actually believe all this? Sort of. But Republicans still have several problems. First, they're having a hard time tying anything serious to President Obama, and I don't expect that to change. Second, even if they avoid going down the impeachment rabbit hole, they show all the signs of a party just itching to shoot itself in the foot. The bogus email leaks are a case in point: you lose the press when you pull stunts like that. Finally, this is all happening too early. Maybe Republicans can keep up the outrage for a few months, but a year and a half? I really have a hard time seeing that.

Right now, Republicans are benefiting from a press corps that's offended by the AP subpoenas and Jay Carney's evasions over the Benghazi talking points. But their pique won't last forever. In the end, Sargent is probably right: these "scandals" are going to fade, and Republicans are going to get more and more desperate to keep them in the spotlight. That's pretty likely to lead them down a road to disaster.

Conviction of Genocidal Dictator Efrain Rios Montt Overturned by Guatemala's Highest Court

Asawin Suebsaeng — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:43:53 +0000

On Monday, Guatemala's Constitutional Court overturned the conviction of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general who ruled as de facto president from 1982 to 1983. On May 10, Ríos Montt, 86, was found guilty by a three-panel tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 80 years in the slammer; he is the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. But less than two weeks later, Guatemala's highest court threw out all proceedings in the case dating back to April 19, in part thanks to an aggressive lobbying effort by the nation's most influential business federation. Due to the court's 3-2 decision, the way forward—for Ríos Montt's opponents, for his supporters—has been thrown into question. After Monday's ruling, Ríos Montt was sent back to house arrest, where he had been since the case started in January 2012.

Here's a quick reminder of who Efraín Ríos Montt is, and what he did.

1. During his 17-month stint as military dictator, he oversaw the genocide by his armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the indigenous Maya Ixil population. Roughly 100 survivors testified during the course of his trial.

This Guatemala City newspaper reads, "Ríos Montt charged with 11 massacres." Via Granito: How to Nail a Dictator/Facebook

2. Along with the mass murder, his military regime carried out a policy of forced displacement, forced assimilation, torture, systematic rape and sexual assault, starvation, and arbitrary execution against those labeled as political opponents.

3. Due to his staunchly anti-communist attitudes during the Guatemalan Civil War, the general received plenty of financial, military, and political support from President Ronald Reagan's administration and friends in the United States. (Ríos Montt is an alumnus of the School of the Americas, a Department of Defense-owned institute and notorious tyrant-mill at Fort Benning, Georgia that taught torture, blackmail, death-squad tactics, and counter-insurgency to numerous Latin American strongmen and human rights abusers.)

Here's Reagan speaking to reporters following his meeting with Ríos Montt in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on December 4, 1982:

Well, ladies and gentlemen, President Ríos Montt and I have just had a useful exchange of ideas on the problems of the region and on our bilateral relations...I know that President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. His country is confronting a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala. I have assured the president that the United States is committed to support his efforts to restore democracy and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice. My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.

For all the accusations of obscene human rights violations, Reagan maintained that Ríos Montt was simply getting a "bum rap" from naïve activists.

Congress Can Make Apple Pay Any Taxes It Wants To

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:17:12 +0000

Sen. Rand Paul, obviously trying to follow up on the roaring success of his "Stand With Rand" filibuster, decided to go all #slatepitchy yesterday during hearings that revealed the stupendous extent of Apple's tax avoidance strategies:

I am offended by the tone and tenor of this hearing. I am offended by a $4 trillion government bullying, berating and badgering one of America's greatest success stories.

....I am offended by the spectacle of dragging in here executives from an American company that is not doing anything illegal. If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress.

I frankly think the Committee should apologize to Apple. I frankly think Congress should be on trial here for creating a bizarre and byzantine tax code that runs into the tens of thousands of pages, for creating a tax code that simply doesn't compete with the rest of the world.

I'm amused that a congressional investigation becomes "bullying, berating and badgering" when the topic happens to be taxes, but I'll allow Paul his histrionics. Because, roughly speaking, he's right. Congress sets the rules, and if they want to make sure Apple pays its taxes, all they have to do is write laws that require it.

That said, Paul's outrage is more than a little hard to take here since it's people like him that have been so successful at preventing Congress from writing a decent corporate tax code in the first place. His only concern is slashing taxes, not rationalizing them, and if someone introduced a bill to make Apple pay its fair share into the voracious federal maw, Paul would undoubtedly be grandstanding yet again with another filibuster. He doesn't really deserve to be taken very seriously on this subject.

Still, it's true that, in theory, Congress can address this anytime it wants. They set the rules, and they don't really have much standing to complain when companies exploit those rules to pay as little in taxes as possible. After all, what do you expect them to do?

The Fight For Our Precious Bodily Fluids

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:17:30 +0000

With Oregon in the healthcare news so much lately, it's only fitting that Portland is holding a vote today on water fluoridation. Sarah Kliff reports:

The fluoride vote will happen Tuesday and the most recent polls have the anti-fluoride camp up 50 percent to 43 percent. If Portland voters reject fluoridated water, it will follow in the path of many cities before it. Forty-four cities around the world — largely in the United States, Australia and Canada — have passed anti-fluoridation policies this year, according to the Fluoride Action Network.

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for fluoridation opponents. Not because I think fluoridation is harmful or ineffective. The evidence is overwhelming that it's neither, and Portland would be nuts to vote against it. And not because I have any sympathy for the John Birch Society loons who think fluoridation is some kind of global conspiracy theory.

No, it's just because I have a bit of sympathy for the slippery slope argument. This argument is simple: The goal of a water agency should be to provide clean water, period. So chlorine is fine because that's part of the core mission of making sure water is clean. But once you decide you can add other stuff because it provides some kind of societal benefit, where does it stop? If you can add fluoride, why not statins? Or anything else that a majority of the population thinks is a good idea?

Now, that said, I've never had more than a bit of sympathy for slippery slope arguments of any kind. The key question is whether or not we're actually likely to fall down the slope. We're human beings with intelligence and agency, after all, not rocks on a hillside. I believe, for example, that human beings are naturally cruel to outsiders, especially during war, so we need the strongest possible taboos against torture and ill treatment of prisoners. Even the smallest crack is likely to open the floodgates of rage and revenge. But fluoridation isn't like that. Are people really likely to start filling up their municipal water supplies with anything that sounds good once they've taken the fatal first step with fluoride? I don't think so, and history suggests I'm right not to worry too much about that. So fluoridation is fine.

Still, I sort of get the fear. And for those of you who think the fear is just some right-wing rube thing, take a look at the map on the right. The areas of the country with the highest fluoridation rates? The South and the Midwest. The areas with the lowest rates? The Northeast and the Pacific Coast.

White House Learned of IRS Tea Party Probe Early—But Didn't Tell Obama

Andy Kroll — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:23:51 +0000

President Obama's chief of staff and the White House's top lawyer got wind of an inspector general's investigation into the IRS' singling out of tea partiers and conservative groups several weeks before the report went public. But those officials, according to press secretary Jay Carney, did not tell Obama. The president says he learned about the IRS' screw-up only after an agency director apologized on Friday, May 10, for employees having targeted conservative groups—an apology that went viral.

Carney told reporters Monday it was "appropriate" that Obama wasn't told of the damning IG report beforehand. And the president, he said, wasn't angry to not have been given early notice. "He believes it's entirely appropriate that, you know, some matters are not appropriate to convey to him and this is one of them," Carney said.

As we've reported, a Treasury Department inspector general, at the behest of angry members of Congress, spent nine months probing whether IRS staffers targeted tea party groups and other right-leaning conservative outfits who had applied for tax-exempt status under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code. Although staffers did in fact zero in on conservative groups, the IG's report concluded that political bias did not play a role. Instead, staffers used "inappropriate criteria"—catchwords such as "tea party," "patriot," or "9/12 Project" (the latter a creation of conservative talk show host Glenn Beck)—to look for groups that might've been too involved in politics. (Groups that file their taxes under 501(c)(4) can dabble in politics, but it can't be their "primary activity.") IRS employees got away with this due to "insufficient oversight" by the higher-ups in Washington, the report found.

Testifying before Congress last week, Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who will soon resign as a result of the agency's tea party debacle, echoed the IG's findings. He said IRS employees made "foolish mistakes" and that the agency's behavior was "obnoxious." But those employees did not have a grudge against conservative groups. Their errors, Miller said, "were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection."

"What did they know" and "when did they know it" are two big questions looming over the IRS scandal. Here's what we know right now: Almost a month before IG's report came out last Tuesday, a staffer in the office of White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler learned of the report. Ruemmler herself was briefed on April 24. Soon after, she informed Denis McDonough, Obama's chief of staff. Carney said the president was not told of the investigation because there was nothing to be done about it. Also the White House did not want to appear to be interfering with an inspector general's report on such a sensitive issue. There is no evidence yet that Obama or his top aides knew about the investigation before this year.

Here is the IG's report:

Why the Government Surveillance of Fox's James Rosen Is Troubling

Julian Sanchez — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:05:10 +0000

On Friday, I wrote a piece for Mother Jones speculating that government spying on press communications may not be "unprecedented," as Associated Press head Gary Pruitt put it, but simply rarely disclosed. The rules requiring disclosure of such surveillance, after all, only appear to apply to "subpoenas" for "telephone toll records"; they do not cover other secret tools deployed by federal law enforcement, such as National Security Letters. Even outside the shadowy world of intelligence, as federal magistrate judge Stephen Smith has observed, court orders granting government access to electronic communication records routinely remain secret indefinitely. I suggested that there could be quite a few other cases like the AP story that we've never learned about, even if the Justice Department has been scrupulously following its own rules, because such cases might not involve grand jury subpoenas for phone logs.

It is rare for someone who writes about the intelligence community to have speculation of this sort confirmed almost instantly, but a report in the Washington Post Monday has shined a spotlight on another hitherto unreported leak investigation in which the Justice Department obtained a warrant to read the email of Fox News reporter James Rosen. The warrant in that case was sealed for over a year; it appears to have remained publicly unnoticed until today—nearly three years after the search of Rosen's email was authorized. Should anyone believe this is the only such instance of the government snooping into a reporter's email that hasn't yet come to light?

The Rosen case is especially unsettling because the warrant affidavit suggests that Rosen himself could be subject to prosecution under the Espionage Act, on the grounds that his alleged encouragement to a source to provide classified information amounted to "conspiracy." The attempt to redefine a routine and necessary part of national security reporting as crime is unprecedented.

Whether Rosen is prosecuted or not, the Justice Department targeting a reporter as a possible "co-conspirator" is troubling. The case against National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake—who revealed massive waste in the agency's deals with intelligence contractors—ultimately collapsed. The information he'd revealed was embarrassing to the government, not dangerous to national security. But Drake's life was shattered, and a clear message sent to others who might seek to embarrass the government. A similar dynamic is at play in this case. Reporters are already feeling the chilling effects of the AP leak investigation. The government may or may not succeed in jailing leakers (or, perhaps at some point, reporters), but the point is to ensure that government sources are too scared to talk to press without approval.

That might sound like a fine idea if at risk were only vital national security secrets whose publication would endanger the United States. But as even top intelligence officials have acknowledged, overclassification is rampant in government. Much basic information, without which effective national security reporting would be impossible, is reflexively classified, whether or not it poses any realistic security risks, and reporters routinely discuss such information with sources. In practice, that means the government can pick and choose which leakers to go after—and which ones to wink at, because they're serving the administration's interests. No doubt, the government does have an interest in—and an obligation—to protect legitimate secrets, but an aggressive campaign that targets reporters and subjects them to broad and secret intrusions (and maybe prosecutions as well) will undermine a necessary check on government power and prevent the public from learning crucial information about what is done in its name.

A version of this post was first published on Cato at Liberty.

4 Ways Apple CEO Tim Cook Spins Tax Avoidance

Josh Harkinson — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:56:49 +0000

"I've never seen anything like this and we don't know anybody who has ever seen anything like this," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said yesterday of Apple's baroque tax avoidance strategies. But Apple CEO Tim Cook, who will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations today, is aggressively spinning what Levin called "gimmickry" as patriotic, commonsensical, and no big deal. Here are the most remarkable talking points from his pre-released Senate testimony:

1. Apple's taxes are straightforward.
Spin: "Apple does not use tax gimmicks."
Reality: Yet somehow, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, Apple has paid almost no income taxes to any country on its $102 billion in offshore holdings. Between 2009 and 2012, Apple avoided paying US taxes on some $74 billion in income, an amount equal to the entire budget of Florida.

2. Paying American salaries through a subsidiary based in Ireland saves American jobs.
Spin: Apple and its Irish subsidiaries are engaged in a "cost sharing agreement" whereby the subsidiaries "partially fund R&D costs incurred by Apple Inc." The agreements "play an important role in encouraging companies like Apple to keep R&D efforts in the US."
Reality: This is how Apple brings back money from overseas without having to pay federal taxes on it.

3. Apple is awesome because it runs huge data centers right here in the United States.
Spin: "In 2010, Apple built one of the country's largest data centers in North Carolina, and it is in the process of constructing two additional data centers in Oregon and Nevada."
Reality: Apple only agreed to build the North Carolina data center after getting a $46 million state tax break, its local property taxes halved, and local taxes on its assets slashed by 85 percent—all for creating 50 jobs. To build its data center in deficit-plagued Nevada, it extracted an $88 million state tax break, the largest in state history. And Apple chose to build a data center in Prineville, Oregon, because Oregon has no sales tax and Prineville is in a "rural enterprise zone" that offers a 15-year property tax exemption.

4. "Apple supports comprehensive corporate tax reform."
Spin: "Apple recognizes that these and other improvements in the US corporate tax system may increase the company's taxes."
Reality: Cook wants to reduce the tax that corporations pay when they repatriate profits, which could save Apple a lot of money considering that 61 percent of its profits are earned overseas. But lowering the repatriation tax probably wouldn't benefit most Americans. After Congress enacted a one-time repatriation holiday in 2004, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used to pay for dividends, share buybacks, or executive bonuses.

How Hitler's U-Boats Are Still Attacking Us

Julia Whitty — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:09 +0000

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has some fresh news from World War II: 13 Merchant Marine ships sunk by the German navy in the Battle of the Atlantic threaten to release oil from their watery graves.

The finding comes in an assessment presented to the Coast Guard that analyzed 20,000 shipwrecks in US waters, and identified 36 as posing a significant threat of oil pollution. Seventeen of those are recommended for further assessment, which could lead to missions to remove their fuel oil and oil cargo. Besides the Merchant Marine vessels, the worrisome ships include a barge lost in bad weather in 1936, two ships sunk in separate collisions in 1947 and 1952, and a tanker that exploded in 1984.

The 17 wrecks NOAA recommends for further investigation. NOAA

"This report is the most comprehensive assessment to date of the potential oil pollution threats from shipwrecks in US waters," says Lisa Symons, resource protection coordinator for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. "Now that we have analyzed this data, the Coast Guard will be able to evaluate NOAA's recommendations and determine the most appropriate response to potential threats."

An initial screening of the 20,000 shipwrecks found 573 that could pose substantial pollution risks based on the vessel's age, type, and size. Ships built of steel, made to be a tanker or to carry over 1,000 gross tons got on the list. Further investigation narrowed the number to 107 wrecks. Some were deemed navigational hazards and demolished, and others were salvaged. But most of the 107 have not yet been directly surveyed for pollution potential. In some cases little is known about their current condition.

Locations of some of the 20,000 shipwrecks. NOAA

The report is part of NOAA's Remediation of Underwater Legacy Environmental Threats (RULET) project, which hunts down potential sources of oil pollution from sunken vessels. Knowing where these ships lie helps oil response planning efforts, and may assist in tracking down mystery spills—sightings of oil where a source is not immediately known or suspected.

The Gulfstate before it was torpedoed in 1943. NOAA/SSHSA Collection, University of Baltimore Library

The vessel ranked worst on the NOAA's risk assessment scale is the WWII tanker the Gulfstate, torpedoed and sunk off the Florida Keys in 1943. Here's a casualty narrative for the ship, as excerpted by NOAA, that tells the terrifying tale of how the vessel went down after an attack by a Kriegsmarine U-Boat:

At 09.03 hours on 3 Apr, 1943, the unescorted Gulfstate (Master James Frank Harrell, lost) was hit by two torpedoes from U-155 about 50 miles southeast of Marathon Key, Florida while steaming a nonevasive course at 10.5 knots. The first torpedo struck on the port side directly under the bridge and ripped a large hole in the hull at the waterline, causing immediate flooding and setting the cargo on fire. The second torpedo struck at the engine room. The fire leapt 100 feet in the air and spread from the bridge to the after part of the vessel. The master ordered the engines secured and the ship abandoned, but the vessel sank bow first within four minutes. None of the lifeboats could be launched and all rafts were lost in the fire. Only a single doughnut raft managed to break free of the tanker. The eight officers, 34 crewmen and 19 armed guards (the ship was armed with one 5in, four .50cal and two .30cal guns) had to jump in the water and swim through 600 feet of burning oil surrounding the tanker. The survivors clung to floats and the single raft for seven hours before being discovered by a U.S. Navy blimp, which dropped two rubber life rafts. An U.S. Coast Guard seaplane picked up three of the most seriously wounded two hours later and took them to Miami. One hour later the remaining 15 survivors (five of them wounded) were picked up by the American patrol craft USS YP-351. Three of the wounded were later transferred to USS Noa (DD 343) for medical treatment. All survivors were landed at Key West. Eight officers, 26 crewmen and nine armed guards were lost.

Gulfstate ranks as the No. 1 priority for the Coast Guard to assess and potentially to attempt to salvage or remove its oil, according to the NOAA rating system. That's in part because it might still be holding almost 84,000 barrels (about 3.5 million gallons) of oil, and in part because of its location near Florida's coral reefs. Unfortunately no one knows exactly where the Gulfstate went down, though it's thought to lie in more than 2,800 feet of water. So NOAA is recommending steps to find the vessel, including asking Florida's commercial and recreational fishermen to report oil spottings that could lead back to the ship.

Many of the 20,000 wrecks in US waters date to before 1891, when US shipping began switching to fuel oil. Most of these earlier wrecks from the age of coal and sail pose little or no environmental threat. You can find the full list of potentially polluting wrecks here.

"Mark Is Not Going To Die In Vain": New Yorkers Rally After Murder of Gay Man

James West — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:09 +0000

The site where Mark Carson was shot on West 8th Street, New York. Police say the killing was a hate crime. James West

Blinding afternoon sun lit the biggest gay rights demonstration in years in New York's West Village Monday. The LGBT community and its supporters, including a couple of mayoral candidates, marched in the wake of a murder that has capped a month-long spate of homophobic violence.

Demonstrators—police say 1,500, organizers say many hundreds more—marched through the leafy streets that gave birth to the gay rights movement to the corner where Mark Carson, 32, was shot in the face and killed Friday night as he walked with a friend. Police have charged Elliot Morales, 33, with second-degree murder and a hate crime, accusing him of hurling homophobic slurs at Carson.

Flourine Bompars, Carson's aunt, addressed the crowd, calling Carson "a loving and caring person" who will not be forgotten.

The audience applauded and cheered loudly after Bishop Zachary Jones of Unity Fellowship Church of Christ, East New York, shouted, "There is room for everyone at the table of love... and we will march and we will come closer together to make sure everyone has the right to be who they are."

Protestors march through New York's west village. Police and community groups say there has been an upwing in "bias" crimes. James West

The randomness of Carson's death has sent a jolt through the gay community. "It's clear that the victim here was killed only because and just because he was thought to be gay," the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, said on Sunday.

Community leaders say Carson's death is part of a worrying citywide trend: an uptick in violence against gay people, with five incidents this month alone. Police say "bias crimes" have risen this year compared to the same period last year, from 13 to 22, and advocates say that was on top of rising reports of violence from the previous year.

"The most pain is emotional," said Nick Porto, a 27-year-old fashion designer from Brooklyn, who was assaulted this month with his boyfriend Kevin Atkins, 22, as they walked near Madison Square after a Knicks game. (Police have released a video of the suspects).

"Mark is not going to die in vain. We are not going to get beat up in vain," Porto said after the rally. "Gay rights, we're still fighting for them, and the fight is not over. We need to protect each other."

Nick Porto (L) and Kevin Atkins, a couple, were assaulted after a Knicks game on May 5th. James West

But the source of the increase in violence is hard to pin down, say community leaders. Some who spoke at the rally blamed the increased visibility of gay rights: With a greater presence comes greater pushback, the reasoning goes. Sharon Stapel, executive director of the New York Anti-Violence Project, says victims are also feeling more comfortable reporting such crimes.

"But I also think we're still living in a country where it's lawful to discriminate against LGBT people, and that sends a message that it's OK to be hateful towards LGBT people," she said.

The protest also formed the backdrop to the race for New York City mayor. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, herself a lesbian, marched alongside relatives of Mark Carson at the head of the rally, but did not speak to the crowd. John Liu, the hyperactive city comptroller who is also a candidate, was at the rally shaking hands and introducing himself.

Nick Porto, the assault victim, admitted he was moved when he looked out across the crowd that filled 8th Street, "My knees got weak, I almost fell, I was just a mess," he said. "It's proof, it's absolute hope in our community, that we will survive this."

"Gay rights isn't just about gay marriage," he told the cheering crowd. "We need to live long enough to share in that opportunity."

John Liu (L), and Christine Quinn with members of the Carson family. Both are running for New York City mayor. James West

GOP: Obama Is Responsible for "A Culture of Intimidation"

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:02:36 +0000

Apparently this is the latest Republican thing. They can't show that Obama has been actually involved in the IRS scandal—or in any of the other squabbles currently roiling Washington DC, for that matter—so now they've gotten together and agreed on a new party line: Obama is responsible for all of this stuff anyway because he's relentlessly stoked a "culture of intimidation" against his adversaries. "The president demonizes his opponents," Mitch McConnell said with a straight face on Sunday, and this is at the root of all our problems.

Paul Mirengoff correctly suggests that this sounds whiny—"the kind of thing I'd expect from Democrats." But he agrees with the basic premise that Obama demonizes his opponents, and points us to an NRO piece by Eliana Johnson that provides the proof. I was curious, so I clicked the link. Just what has Obama done to strike fear into Republicans' hearts?

Well, only three things apparently. First, he dissed Fox News and then tried to exclude them from the network pool. Second, at an explicitly partisan DNC fundraiser following the Citizens United decision, he castigated "groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country." AFP, of course, is supported by the Koch brothers. And apparently Obama has also said some uncomplimentary things about Rush Limbaugh. This is the full bill of particulars.

I'll give them the Fox thing. Trying to keep Fox out of the press pool was bush league nonsense. But really. Kicking back at the rancid bile that spews out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth on a daily basis? Telling a bunch of rich Democratic donors that they're up against lots of rich Republican donors, so please open your wallets? This is a culture of intimidation?

Conservatives, of course, have fostered a culture not of intimidation, but of rank hatred so insane you can practically see the spittle flecks every time they talk about Obama. And yet, when Obama returns fire, even with his trademark restraint, it's time to bring out the smelling salts. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic

When is 2 About the Same as 70 Million?

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:31:16 +0000

A "twin prime" is a pair of prime numbers that differ by two. For example, 11 and 13, or 857 and 859. The "twin prime conjecture" states that there are an infinite number of twin primes. To this day, nobody has ever been able to prove this. It's one of the great open conjectures of number theory.

Recently, however, an unknown mathematician proved a theorem that, according to the experts, is almost the same thing. It turns out that there are an infinite number of prime pairs that differ by some number N. And what is N? We still don't know, but Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire has demonstrated that it's less than 70 million.

This is why I love number theory. I mean, what's a difference of 69,999,998 between friends? Also this:

Without communicating with the field’s experts, Zhang started thinking about the problem. After three years, however, he had made no progress. “I was so tired,” he said. To take a break, Zhang visited a friend in Colorado last summer. There, on July 3, during a half-hour lull in his friend’s backyard before leaving for a concert, the solution suddenly came to him. “I immediately realized that it would work,” he said.

Isn't that just perfect?

Virginia Republicans Have a Vagina Problem

Kate Sheppard — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:53:43 +0000

On Saturday, Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain clinched his party's nomination for attorney general in the November election. And much like the rest of the GOP ticket, he's got some baggage. ThinkProgress swiftly unearthed a bill he authored in 2009 that would subject women to legal penalties if they fail to report a miscarriage to the police.

Here's the relevant portion of his bill:

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf shall, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff's department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. No one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner. Any person violating the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

The penalty for a class 1 misdemeanor is up to 12 months in jail and $2,500 in fines. Obenshain's deputy campaign manager, Jared Walczak, told the Huffington Post that the bill (which never passed) was in response to a 2008 case in which a Virginia college student disposed of her reportedly stillborn baby in a dumpster:

"As sometimes happens, the legislation that emerged was far too broad, and would have had ramifications that neither he nor the Commonwealth's attorney's office ever intended," Walczak said. "Sen. Obenshain is strongly against imposing any added burden for women who suffer a miscarriage, and that was never the intent of the legislation."

Thinking through the legal ramifications of a proposed law seems like it should be standard procedure for someone who wants to be attorney general, but maybe I'm too optimistic.

Obenshain's nomination is only the latest outgrowth of Virginia's vagina obsession, though. In 2012, the state passed an invasive ultrasound law and set ultra-strict new building codes for abortion providers. Rev. E.W. Jackson, the party's nominee for lieutenant governor, has compared Planned Parenthood to the KKK. And then, not to be outdone, there's attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who thinks abortion is just like slavery.

After Girl Expelled From High School and Charged Over Lesbian Relationship, Anonymous Goes on the Offensive

Josh Harkinson — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:14:00 +0000

When Florida high school student Kaitlyn Hunt was 17, she began dating a 15-year-old teammate on her school's girls' basketball team. Kaitlyn's parents say the parents of the 15-year-old never complained to them about the (consensual) relationship. But a few months after Kaitlyn turned 18, the younger girl's parents had her arrested. She was charged with a felony—"lewd and lascivious battery of a child 12-16 years old." The girl's parents also succeeded in getting her expelled from school by appealing to the school board after the school and a judge refused to grant their request, according to Kaitlyn's mother, Kelly Hunt Smith.

"That is absolutely ludicrous," Smith wrote on Facebook last Friday in a widely shared plea for help. "We need justice in this situation, not to feed into these parents' hates and insanity."

Enter Anonymous, the global hacker collective, which recently has raised eyebrows by pursuing justice for rape victims. In this case, some of the same Anonymous members are rallying behind a girl they feel has been wrongly accused of sexual misconduct. On Saturday, they launched the twitter hashtag #OPJustice4Kaitlyn, and a press release that begins: "Greetings, Bigots."

"The truth is, Kaitlyn Hunt is a bright young girl who was involved in a consensual, same-sex relationship while both she and her partner were minors," reads the release. "She has a big future ahead of her and there are people, thousands of people in fact, that have no intention of allowing you to ruin it with your rotten selective enforcement."

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GOP Congressman: Calls for Impeachment "Will Likely Increase"

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:18:14 +0000

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R–Utah) talks to National Review about the I-word:

Behind the scenes, he says, House Republicans are frustrated by the White House’s evasiveness, and the calls for impeachment will likely increase. Chaffetz acknowledges that House speaker John Boehner is wary of moving too swiftly against the president....“Now, the speaker has more patience than I do,” Chaffetz says. “He has told me to be patient, that the truth will eventually surface. But I’m not a patient person, and if this administration makes us do this the hard way, that’s what we’ll do.”

....“This is an administration embroiled in a scandal that they created,” he says. “It’s a cover-up. I’m not saying impeachment is the end game, but it’s a possibility, especially if they keep doing little to help us learn more.”

See? All those calls from Republican elders to settle down and not get too crazy are working! According to Chaffetz, impeachment isn't a sure thing, it's only a possibility. That's totally non-crazy. All that's left now is to find some actual presidential wrongdoing. But I'm sure that's just a technicality.

Croatians (and Americans) Training Honeybees to Sniff Out Landmines

Asawin Suebsaeng — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:12:27 +0000

Bees are basically the most important insect ever. Honeybees make possible roughly a third of everything we eat, and the bugs pollinate about $14 billion worth of crops and seeds in the United States each year.

Here's yet another reason for mankind to feel forever indebted to the bees: They may one day be instrumental in detecting unexploded landmines. And Croatians are leading the charge in this field of research. Here's the rundown from Wired UK:

Nikola Kezic, a professor in the Department of Agriculture at Zagreb University, has been exploring using bees to find landmines since 2007. Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and other countries from former Yugoslavia still have around 250,000 buried mines which were left there during the wars of the early 90s. Since the end of the war more than 300 people have been killed in Croatia alone by the explosives, including 66 de-miners.

Tracking down the mines can be extremely costly and dangerous. However, by training bees — which are able to detect odours from 4.5 kilometres away — to associate the smell of TNT with sugar can create an affective way of identifying the locations of mines...The research is ongoing, but once the team is confident in the bees' landmine-seeking abilities, they will release the creatures in areas that have been de-mined to see whether the field has been successfully swept by humans. Kezic told AP "it has been scientifically proven that there are never zero mines on a de-mined field, and that's where bees could come in."

As wild as this idea sounds, it's hardly unprecedented. In fact, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have been working on this sort of research for years. The Defense Advanced Research Laboratory (DARPA) has been studying honeybees since 1999. Check out some of this Pentagon press material released in 2004:

Via the US Department of Defense

And here's a 2008 video from the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory on how American scientists train honeybees to detect other types of explosive devices:

An Inside Look at How DOJ Goes After Reporters, Not Just Leakers

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:01:25 +0000

The Washington Post writes today about the extraordinary treatment of a reporter in a recent leak investigation. But this one isn't about the AP or an al-Qaeda mole. It's about North Korea:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

....Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

Even more extraordinary, the Justice Department appeared to consider prosecution of not just the leaker in this case, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, but also the reporter, James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News. The charge? Acting as "either as an aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator of Mr. Kim." In other words, trying to get access to confidential government information, something that reporters do every single day. The key section of the warrant is below.

In the end, Rosen was never charged with anything, but it sure sounds as if DOJ might have thought about it. Read the entire Post piece for more.

Peggy Noonan's Broken Soul

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:29:51 +0000

I've read a slew of blog posts over the past few days suggesting that Peggy Noonan has finally and comprehensively gone crazy. The evidence is her latest column, which starts with "We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate" and goes downhill from there. But I don't get it. This isn't Noonan's worst column ever. It's not even her worst column in the month of May. That would be last week's column, in which she accused President Obama of refusing to send rescue teams to Benghazi because he thought it might hurt his reelection chances. I'm not making that up, and I'm not exaggerating. Here's what she wrote:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador. Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions.

....All of this is bad enough. Far worse is the implied question that hung over the House hearing, and that cries out for further investigation. That is the idea that if the administration was to play down the nature of the attack it would have to play down the response—that is, if you want something to be a nonstory you have to have a nonresponse. So you don't launch a military rescue operation, you don't scramble jets, and you have a rationalization—they're too far away, they'll never make it in time. This was probably true, but why not take the chance when American lives are at stake?

Noonan basically thinks that Barack Obama sat in the situation room on September 11th last year and was asked repeatedly, Do you want to send in a FAST team? How about the C-110 force in Croatia? Should we scramble F-16s? Can we send in a team from Tripoli? And each time, Obama stroked his chin, stared up at the ceiling, and decided that attempting to save American lives might hurt his reelection chances. So he said no.

There is, literally, not a single politician in the country that I would suspect of doing something like that. Not even the ones I loathe. Not Dick Cheney. Not Richard Nixon. Not Darrell Issa. Not Newt Gingrich. Not anyone. I think you'd have to go all the way up the ladder to Josef Stalin to find that degree of cynicism and callousness.

But that's apparently what Noonan thinks of Obama. This is the work of a broken soul who happens to have a bit of writing skill. But broken nonetheless.

Poverty Flees to the Suburbs

Josh Harkinson — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:38:59 +0000

Poor residents in cities and suburbs, 1970 - 2010 (millions)

Brookings Institution analysis and ACS data

Suburbs such as Highland Park (Detroit), Carol Stream (Chicago), and Forest Park (Atlanta) once stood for escape from the hard times of the inner city. Now their deceptively bucolic names conceal a national epidemic of suburban poverty. According to a report released today by the Brookings Institution, the suburban poor now far outnumber the rural and urban poor: Their ranks grew by 64 percent during the aughts to 16.4 million—a rate of increase more than twice that seen in America's cities.

What's going on here? Well, for one, Ward and June Cleaver's house wasn't exactly built to last. And as retiring baby boomers downsize and young millennials flock to hip inner cities, not that many people want to live in a half-century-old suburban tract home—except people with no other options.

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A Brief Reminder: Presidential Distance from DOJ and the IRS is a Good Thing

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:06:39 +0000

Dave Weigel notes that one particular conservative talking point has clearly caught on:

Score one for Republicans: The White House's insistence that Obama learned of every scandal "by reading the news" has become a punchline.

To the extent that this is just political attack-doggery, I don't really care about it. It's what you expect when the opposition party smells chum in the water. But we've been hearing this from mainstream reporters too, and it's a whole lot less defensible there. Chris Matthews, for example, was howling the other day about Obama's ignorance of the AP phone record subpoena, which he thought was indefensible. "You don't think Bobby would have called Jack?" he asked incredulously. And he's right: Bobby would have called Jack. And that would have been wrong, which is why the Justice Department is now kept at a much greater distance from the White House. This is universally considered a good thing, which explains Jay Carney's "Are you serious?" when he was asked about this by reporters a few day ago. Surely we haven't forgotten so soon after Watergate exactly why we prefer for the president to be kept very far away from criminal investigations?

Ditto for the IRS, which for similar reasons is an agency that we've deliberately set up to be independent of the president. We don't want the president to have any influence over the IRS, and we don't want him kept apprised of the details of ongoing inquiries. It would have been a scandal if Obama had known any details about the IG investigation of the IRS's tea party targeting.

By chance, two of our three current "scandals" happen to involve agencies that we really do want to retain their independence from the president. (Benghazi is different, but there's no scandal there in the first place.) As the feeding frenzy moves into high gear, I hope everyone remembers this. Ask all the tough questions you want, but let's not pretend, even jokingly, that Obama should have known more about investigations at DOJ or the IRS. That's exactly the opposite of what we want.

Obamacare Doesn't Make Employers Cover Spouses. Does That Matter?

Erika Eichelberger — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:07 +0000

Despite the 37 bills to repeal it and the scores of lawsuits filed against it, Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, is going to be in full swing soon. But the historic health insurance reform law is going to face many more bumps in the road as it is rolled out. One corner of Obamacare that hasn't gotten much attention is the fact that it will not require employers to cover spouses, which experts say could lead some employers to drop coverage for Americans' significant others.

The Affordable Care Act mandates that employers offer health insurance to workers and their dependents. But the law defines dependents as children, not spouses. And although some health care law experts say this is not going to result in any big changes in the way that employers provide insurance for husbands and wives, others contend that implementation of the law could end up leaving some spouses out of family plans, forcing them to buy insurance elsewhere.

"Right now there are virtually no employers that just offer coverage for the employee and their children," says Tim Jost, a health care law scholar at the Washington and Lee University School of Law who regularly consults with Obama administration officials on implementation of the Affordable Care Act. "Whether that will change or not, who knows. We will probably see at least some employers who will offer individual and child coverage, but not coverage for spouses."

If you live in a household that is in the upper-income range—one that takes in more than $94,000 a year (above 78 percent of households)—and you get dropped from your spouse's coverage, you won't be able to get a government subsidy to purchase insurance on the government-run insurance exchanges being set up by the health law. So, say there's a family in which each parent makes $47,000 a year, but only one has coverage. The spouse that is not covered would have to buy private insurance, which costs hundreds of dollars a month.

If you're middle income or poor, and your spouse's employer drops you from her health coverage, you'll be able to shop on the exchange with a subsidy. Even though your coverage would not be free, the idea is that at least it would be kind of affordable. Unless it's not. When people buy coverage on the exchange, their subsidy will be based on household income. As Jost points out, the problem is that household income for people using the exchanges will be measured before the household pays for the employer-provided health insurance. So the employee could be paying up to 9.5 percent of her income on health insurance for herself (the most that Obamacare will allow insurers to charge for employer-sponsored plans), or an even greater share of her income for individual and child coverage, and still her spouse's subsidy on the exchange would be based on that much higher pre-health-care-costs income level.

"It's a potential problem," says Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, a group that backs Obamacare. "There could be some folks that get lost in the shuffle. And that is not insignificant…If you're one of few people adversely affected by something, it doesn't matter that everyone else on the planet is getting the benefit." (The Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment for the story.)

But Rome adds that the situation "has to be put in context." He points out that this potential glitch doesn't change the fact that some 30 million people currently without insurance will get coverage under Obamacare. And Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped craft Obama's health care law, notes that "we're still a hell of a lot better off than we are today."

Judy Solomon, vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, adds that it's unlikely that too many employers will drop spouses anyway. "Family coverage is valued employee benefit," she says. "I don't see that this provision is going to change what employers do." Rome agrees: "If you are an employer and you provide good quality health care for your employees, including dependent coverage, it's because you understand that a good benefits package is the best way to recruit and retain top-notch employees."

Still, Rome says that Obamacare advocates would like to be able to address technical issues in the law, such as this potential spousal coverage problem, but that the Republican-controlled House makes that impossible. "It is an imperfection in the law and there are some things many of us want to fix," Rome says. "And we could if we did not have a GOP House of Representatives obsessed with repealing the law."

Review: Radiation City's "Animals in the Median"

Jon Young — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:05 +0000

Radiation City
Animals in the Median
Tender Loving Empire

Dreamy and wistful is the default mode for plenty of modern bands that haven't figured out who they want to be when they grow up, but the striking Portland, Oregon quintet Radiation City shows how to do it right. Their second album, Animals in the Median, shimmers like a unearthly mirage, weaving together misty melodies, analog electronics and the siren vocals of keyboardist Lizzy Ellison to create a poignant sense of faded optimism and missed opportunities. Hazy gems such as "Wash of Noise" and "Lark" echo the melancholy retro-futurism of Stereolab, albeit with a more delicate touch, while the gauzy "Wary Eyes" evokes the gently eerie sensation of hearing soft music from another room at 3 a.m. Ellison and company could create a great soundtrack for David Lynch.

The National's "Trouble Will Find Me"—Place on Repeat

Brett Brownell — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:30:06 +0000

Photo by Deirdre O'Callaghan

You know how when you get a song stuck in your head, you're not always sure how it burrowed its way in there? Well, people who attended The National's May 5 performance at New York's MoMA PS1 museum can be pretty damned sure. Over a six-hour period, the band played "Sorrow," off its 2010 release, High Violet, 105 times in a row.

The special performance, aptly dubbed "A Lot of Sorrow," was technically a work created by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson as part of his ongoing "explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound."

The following clip, supposedly starting around 2 hours and 40 minutes into the show, includes three of the repetitions.

During a Reddit AMA three days later, a band member reflected:

Actually as the hours went on I think we all realized that this experience was something special for us—there was a weird hypnotic resonance and spirituality to repeating the song over and over. We almost didn't want to stop and we learned something about our capacity for endurance and the song opened up in surprising ways...By the end it didn't feel like we were playing it anymore. We know the idea seemed pretentious in some way, but Ragnar has this mix of humor and sadness that feels quite similar to what our songs about...We're very glad to have done it.

This week, The National, follows up its hypnotic performance with the release of Trouble Will Find Me, their sixth studio album, on the 4AD label.

Trouble Will Find Me

Trouble... is replete with the usual mix of sorrow, longing, depression, and nearly infrasonic tone of singer Matt Berninger's voice that fans of The National have come to know and love. But some of the tracks still provide you with the opportunity to rock out, lest you need a break from your whimpering.

For example, there's "Sea of Love," the video of which the band premiered during its AMA. A fan had asked, "What is your guys' favourite music video?" Whereupon the band replied, craftily, "Actually there's one video that we all really love, so we made this homage." They revealed the link to the new video. And the sleuthing promptly began for the original.

A single-take shot in a sparse, nondescript room, with nothing but a dangling microphone, air-conditioning unit, and boy wandering in from off-screen: It didn't look familiar.

Nor should it. It mimics a video for a song first released in 1995—in Russia—by Soviet-era punk band Zvuki Mu. The song title, "Grubiy Zakat," means "Rough Sunset." Check it out:

Bryce Dessner, who plays guitar for The National, told PRI's The World that he "fell in love with it immediately" when he first saw the video on YouTube. "We have to do something like this," he told his bandmates.

They reached out to Zvuki Mu, but were unable to track down any of its members. Obviously, that didn't deter them from making their own version.

Next up for The National: a vinyl version of their six-hour MoMA performance for charity. Seriously.

If the new album, epic vinyl repetition party, and homage to a Soviet video aren't enough for you, you can get more of The National in movie form. Singer Matt Berninger's brother Tom was brought on tour as a roadie and ended up making a haphazard documentary about the band called Mistaken for Strangers. If you can make it to Australia by June, you can catch the next screening at the Sydney Film Festival. I'll leave you with the trailer.

Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:43:31 +0000

Here is the LA Times describing how the tea party targeting scandal at the IRS got its start:

In March 2010, a manager in a Cincinnati determinations unit asked a screener to get a handle on the issue, according to the report from the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. The agent started pulling applications with political-sounding names, such as "tea party" and "patriots."

And just who is this screener? Here's the New York Times:

For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not qualify for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general.

....It is not yet clear which manager in Cincinnati asked for an initial keyword search of Tea Party applications, Congressional aides said. One of the employees that the House committee is seeking to interview this week, Joseph Herr, had been a manager in charge of the group of specialists in Cincinnati from its inception through August 2010, according to the aides.

So we don't yet know who this poor schmoe is. But we're going to subpoena Joseph Herr and make him tell us! And when that happens, this mysterious lone specialist will officially become the most reviled person in America. I can hardly wait.

BY THE WAY: Both of these pieces are well worth reading. They are among the first in what is quickly becoming a whole new subgenre: the story about how the Cincinnati office of the IRS is completely and totally FUBARed. I expect this to culminate in a 20,000-word piece in the New Yorker.

Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

Tom Philpott — Sat, 18 May 2013 10:00:08 +0000

Nearly two decades after their mid-'90s debut in US farm fields, GMO seeds are looking less and less promising. Do the industry's products ramp up crop yields? The Union of Concerned Scientists looked at that question in detail for a 2009 study. Short answer: marginally, if at all. Do they lead to reduced pesticide use? No; in fact, the opposite.

And why would they, when the handful of companies that dominate GMO seeds—Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow—are also among the globe's largest pesticide makers? Monsanto's Roundup Ready seeds have given rise to an upsurge of herbicide-resistant superweeds and a torrent of herbicides, while insects are showing resistance to its pesticide-containing Bt crops and causing farmers to boost insecticide use. What about wonder crops that would be genetically engineered to withstand drought or require less nitrogen fertilizer? So far, they haven't panned out—and there's little evidence they ever will.

Yet despite all of these problems, the US State Department has been essentially acting as a de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel, a new Food & Water Watch analysis of internal documents finds.

The FWW report is based on an analysis of diplomatic cables, written between 2005 and 2009 and released in the big Wikileaks document dump of 2010. FWW sums it up: "a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods that they do not want, and lobby foreign governments—especially in the developing world—to adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops."

The report brims with examples of the US government promoting the biotech industry abroad. Here are a few:

The State Department encouraged embassies to bring visitors—especially reporters—to the United States, which has "proven to be effective ways of dispelling concerns about biotech [crops]." The State Department organized or sponsored 28 junkets from 17 countries between 2005 and 2009. In 2008, when the US embassy was trying to prevent Poland from adopting a ban on biotech livestock feed, the State Department brought a delegation of high-level Polish government agriculture officials to meet with the USDA in Washington, tour Michigan State University and visit the Chicago Board of Trade. The USDA sponsored a trip for El Salvador's Minister of Agriculture and Livestock to visit Pioneer Hi-Bred's Iowa facilities and to meet with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack that was expected to "pay rich dividends by helping [the Minister] clearly advocate policy positions in our mutual bilateral interests."

Another example: This 2009 cable, referenced in the FWW report, shows a State Department functionary casually requesting US taxpayer funds to combat a popular effort to require labeling of GMO foods in Hong Kong—and boasting about successfully having done so in the past. Why focus on the GMO policy of a quasi-independent city? Hong Kong's rejection of a mandatory labeling policy "could have influential spillover effects in the region, including Taiwan, mainland China and Southeast Asia," the functionary writes, adding that her consulate had "intentionally designed [anti-labeling] programs other embassies and consulates" could use.

The report also shows how the State Department hotly pushed GMOs in low-income African nations—in the face of popular opposition. In a 2009 cable, FWW shows, the US embassy in Nigeria bragged that "U.S. government support in drafting [pro-biotech] legislation as well as sensitizing key stakeholders through a public outreach program" helped pass an industry-friendly law. Working with USAID—an independent US government agency that operates under the State Department's authority—the State Department pushed similar efforts in Kenya and Ghana, FWW shows.

Yet, as FWW points out, in so aggressively pushing biotech solutions abroad, the State Department is bucking against the global consensus of ag development experts as expressed by the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project convened by the World Bank and the United Nations and completed in 2008 to assess what forms of agriculture would best meet the world's needs in a time of rapid climate change. The IAASTD took such a skeptical view of deregulated biotech as a panacea for the globe's food challenges that Croplife America, the industry's main industry lobbying group, saw fit to denounce it. The US government backed up the biotech lobby on this one—just 3 of the 61 governments that participated refused to sign the IAASTD: the Bush II-led United States, Canada, and Australia.

So why are our corps of diplomats behaving as if they answered to Monsanto's shareholders with regard to ag policy? My guess is GMO seed technology, dominated by Monsanto, as well as our towering corn and soy crops (which are at this point almost completely from GM seeds) are two of the few areas of global trade wherein the US still generates a trade surplus. The website of the State Department's Biotechnology and Textile Trade Policy Division puts it like this:

In 2013, the United States is forecasted to export $145 billion in agricultural products, which is $9.2 billion above fiscal 2012 exports, and have a trade surplus of $30 billion in our agricultural sector.

I guess US presidents, Democratic and Republican alike, are bent on preserving and expanding that surplus. President Obama altered much about US foreign policy when he took over for President Bush in 2009, but he doesn't seem to have changed a thing when it comes to pushing biotech on the global stage. And the impulse is not confined to the State Department. Back in 2009, when Obama needed to appoint someone to lead agriculture negotiations at the US Trade Office, he went straight to the ag-biotech industry, tapping the vice president for science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, Islam A. Siddiqui, who still holds that post today.

Meanwhile, the State Department operates an Office of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Textile Trade Affairs, which exists in part to "maintain open markets for US products derived from modern biotechnology" and "promote acceptance of this promising technology." The office's biotechnology page is larded with language that reads like boilerplate from Monsanto promo material: "Agricultural biotechnology helps farmers increase yields, enabling them to produce more food per acre while reducing the need for chemicals, pesticides, water, and tilling. This provides benefits to the environment as well as to the health and livelihood of farmers."

Elizabeth Warren Slams Wall Street Again

Erika Eichelberger — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:29:03 +0000

On Thursday, bank-basher Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed several bills headed for the House floor that would severely weaken Wall Street reform.

The Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law aimed at preventing another financial crisis, "put in place a variety of measures that work together as a system to protect consumers, hold big banks accountable, and reduce the risk of future crises," Warren said in a statement. "It is dangerous for Congress to amend the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act." (Derivatives are financial products that have values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates; some economists believe these products helped cause the 2007 financial collapse.)

Warren's condemnation of the bills, which just passed out of the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC), echoes a May 6th letter from Treasury secretary Jack Lew to House Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling attacking the bills. "The derivatives provisions in the Wall Street Reform Act constitute an important part of the reforms being put into place to strengthen our financial system by improving transparency and reducing risk for market participants," Lew wrote in the letter. "These reforms should not be weakened or repealed." Last year, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner denounced a series of nearly identical bills.

One of the bills now headed to the House floor would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. Another would allow certain derivatives that are traded within a corporation to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. Financial reform advocates say these kinds of trades can still pose a risk to the wider financial system. A third bill would allow big, multinational US-based banks to escape US regulations by operating through international arms.

"Wall Street's aggressive determination paid off last week" when the bills passed out of committee, Warren said. The bills also have bipartisan support, and have a good chance of being taken up in the Senate. If they do, Warren says she'll go to battle: "Now is no time to go backwards," she said. "I will do what I can in the United States Senate to stand up to those who would chip away at reform."