Wampum

Bush Watching in Maine

We are informed that George W. Bush will be visiting Maine next weekend. He'll be attending a wedding and it would be really surprising if he didn't manage to do some campaigning at the same time. If his handlers are idiots, he'll campaign where he's already lost, in the 1st CD, who's media market includes coastal New Hampshire, who's electoral votes he's also already lost. If his handlers aren't idiots, he'll go to Bangor and try to woo the 2nd CD's uncommitted voters.

This is a god-send for the Anti-Palesky movement. The Bushs are the epitomy of rich-people-from-away who's extravagant lifestyle has driven property values in South and Mid-Coast Maine up, and with them the property tax load. It is the Bush tax cuts that tossed the State budget revenue-side into a shredder, and is leaving gaps on the spending-side. Baldacci and the Legis could be Saints or Sinners and nothing they could do either way would have the slightest effect on these primary causes for the kiss from the crypt that Jarvis and Gann are visiting on Maine by way of Carol Palesky.

If he goes South, he is the problem. Mr. Fiscal Irresponsibility who summers as Mr. Richee Rich.

If he goes North, he is the non-solution. Palesky will benefit the average voter in the 2nd CD as little as the Bush tax cuts did. The Bush tax cut benefits went to the 2% of the super-rich that have summer homes along the coast, mostly around Acadia and in Southern Maine.

Empty hands and really lame excuses either way. Still, he gets an appreciative 2% of the vote, and that and 5 out of 9 SCOTUS votes should get him comfortably re-appointed.

The Kerry Campaign should make some hay on this as well, and Mike Michaud really should raise money out of a visit by the top-of-the-opposite-ticket. Here is a link to his site Michaud for Congress. Please use 42 cents to mark your contribution to Mike via Wampum.

Anyone learning details of the itinerary please drop them here. Good slogans suitable for signs would be nice too. I know some of you follow the RNC sound-bits-de-jour more closely than I do. My best effort is "What results???"

There you go again

In an op-ed piece picked up by the LA Times, Danielle Pletka [1] writes:

Iran, after all, is Terror Central: It has become an operational headquarters for parts of al-Qaida, continues to sponsor Hezbollah and Hamas, and senior officials remain under indictment in U.S. courts for masterminding the 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia of the Khobar Towers military housing complex, in which 19 Americans died.

According to U.S. and European officials, the regime also remains bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and is well down the road to doing so.

Are any of these assertions true?

The first one is obviously false. Or its as "true" as the assertion that Cuba, or rather the military prision at Gitmo, where one of my neighbors, a reservist, is currently stationed on active duty, has become an operational headquarters for parts of al Qaida. I'll have to tell his wife. She'll get a kick out of the idea that holding the bad guys behind bars operationalizes them and she can berate her husband for aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States. There are as many al Qaida cadres detained in Iran as in Pakistan, over a thousand all told. Iran came close to war with the Taliban/al Qaida before 9/11, holding a major mobilization on the Afgan border after several of its diplomats were assassinated. It funded and supplied the Northern Alliance during the November/December 2001 War, as did the US. Right up to this week Tehran was hoping to swap their al Qaida detainees for Washington's 3,800 Camp Ashraf Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization detainees.

Hezbollah and Hamas have many sponsors, in Lebanon, in Texas (if John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller are to be taken on face value, which doens't seem wise given their respective records), in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, and so on. They are but two of the 36 "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" (FTOs) designated by the US, along with, least we forget, the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK or MKO) campers.

The PBS and CNN coverages of the June 22, 2001 indictments for the Khobar Towers bombing lists 41 counts, 14 indictees (13 Saudi and 1 Lebonese), and the statements of Attorney General John Ashcroft and then-FBI Director Louis Freeh "that elements of the Iranian government inspired, supported and supervised members of Saudi Hizbollah". Oli North's basement office (and a surprising number of members of the 2nd Bush administration) were "elements of the American government", the American goverment was the government that passed, and enforced, the Boland Ammendment. I'll have to wait on a more timely example until it gets out of the Farsi press and into Europe, or I get Google-Graced.

Finally, there is the atoms-for-peace-or-war question. The P2-means-War meme.

To believe the current administration, it is necessary to believe that commercial uranium enrichment in Iran by centrifuge processing is definitive proof that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. However, the United States Enrichment Corporation (prior to the privatization of enriched uranium, a unit of the DoE) is going to shut down a gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant in Paducah Kentucky, after it builds a centrifuge processing enrichment plant in Piketon Ohio. Now there may be good reasons for Ohio to pursue a a weapons program, I'm simply unaware of what those reasons might be. To deter other states from holding primaries or caucuses before Ohio is a possibility.

I'm a businessman, and I do business in "the Middle East". I rate Danielle Pletka's four thesis as 1. profoundly false (Iran-al Qaida linkage), 2. superficially correct in part (Hezbollah targeting US forces in Saudi Arabia) and false in substance on the whole (34 other FTOs are ignored), 3. inconsistent with the actual indictment (no Iranians, public or private were indicted), and 4. contrary to the public statements of the US DoE and Bill Timbers, USEC's president and CEO.

Both Johns, Kerry and Edwards, will have to have NeoCon theology down cold to be able to reach into some superfically credible Bush or Cheney attack, like Carter's attack on Reagan's medicare record, and unravel it with panache in the face of Bush or Cheney, like Reagan did with the phrase "There you go again", and leap out into the surreal wasteland of the NeoCon NetherWorld and shred a tissue of lies.

In the mean time, isn't the OpEd page of the LA Times simply wonderful? Is there a single US media property that isn't running the P2-means-War story???

I wrote about this last January and February at Lisa English's blog Ruminate This. The articles are here and here.

[1] Vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Worthless Republican Flack.

Update: I simply can't see the monarchists I knew in the LA basin Iranian exile community any keener on a US-PMOI containment-tending-to-invasion-occupation-and-west-and-central-asian-general-war scenario than the marxists I knew in the SF Bay Area Iranian exile community would be. I suspect both would be happier living under the other, than either would be under Islamo-Marxos (emphasis on Harpo, Groucho, Zeppo and Karl) that are the MEK/MEO/PMOI/MOUSE, and not to put too fine a point on it, with mid-10^^6 Iranians living abroad, from the Pahlavi period to the 1st IRI period, to the Iran-Iraq War period, to the 2nd (current) IRI period, and a troop strength of only a brigade, the allure of the MEK outside the NeoCon circle of fanatics is distinctly limited.

Our Kerry/Edwards House Party

Around 5pm the WMTW News 8 crew -- Arthur Villator, Matt Chapman to scope the site -- microwave link to the station tower downtown, or the sat truck. At 630 Matt was back again with the microwave truck and raised the mast. Sam and Grace joined Matt in learning all about trucks with wicked tall masts and kool electronics gear parked in front of their house. MB's campaign staff came in -- Tom, Stephanie and Brian, then Tracie and Josh. At 7:30 Martie McClane showed up with Arthur, who spelled Matt. She was game and held our balloons while I tied them to the Kerry/Edwards signage that arrived this morning, which I attached to MB's primary signage (recycling is good).

The Edwards call went swimmingly, we joined the bridge as people started showing up. Then Al Frankin's SIL, Carla Bryson called. I thought I'd left the radio on and tuned to Portland's Air America affilliate. Then Rep. Tom Allen called and chatted. Several of our house party are Tom's acquaintances. All the while the WMTW crew moved around, creating content, then retreating out to their truck to edit the story framework before returning to do the audience response shots and wrap. At 9:30 Scott Episcopo from WGME TV13 came. He's shooting film, so he's doing response shots and Kerry's opening, before zipping off to the studio to make the 11pm show. The retirement order for the children was Sam, then Grace, then Jonah, which allowed Kaitlen to go home, and finally, towards 10, Kezzie..

Over 50 people "signed up" via the Kerry site. Half of that showed up, plus some friends, so we're a little long on the beer, wine and tapas, but time will heal that wound. The sign-up cards are good, though the cash contributions are effectively zero. The Kerry/Edwards campaign got local freemedia

John Kerry gave a good 50 minutes of good campaign speech. Our group was above happy many, many times during the speech. A few minutes before 11 Martie and Arthur came back to do the final reaction shoot live, which was rather cool. Tom said to me he learned at the Wellstone Camp that there is paid media and then there is free media, and John Kerry, John Edwards, and MB just got a boat load of free media. It's not something one sees often in school committee races.

Its all over, five friends, three of whom blog, and a rerun on the hour-delay.

Light Blogging while we prepare for a party

I'm not even going to try and make this look nice.

We're hosting an Acceptance Speech Party tomorrow evening. Prior to John Kerry's speech we'll be joining the John Edwards conference call bridge, and it appears that some Maine delegates will be calling us during the evening to share their experiences at the Convention. We've set up two videos for people that haven't yet seen one or the other (or both, but I don't see how a person could watch two videos in two different parts of the house at one time) to help warm us up for the main, er, Maine events. The video gifs should fall below this line. Now, back to the salt mines.

And this should be the last line of this entry.

White Man beats Indian Woman

MB tells me that I have to listen to Barack Obama's speach from Boston today, but deeds speak louder than words. Democratic primary contributors, movers, shakers, and voters in Oklahoma's 2nd CD chose a white man over an Indian woman to represent their party in the Fall general election. Emily's list supported Kalyn Free. Incumbent OK Dems, the NRA and the capitalist creeps (US Chamber of Commerce) supported Dan Boran.

Hurrah! Our party won an election!

Look for the 2nd OK CD to be represented by cronyism, the NRA, and Capital. The Fall election will simply be between two clothes horses. Tie colors, lapel widths, suit cuts, and above all, hair style will be that campaign's issues.

Return of the ... One True King (part IX)

Iran is on the block.

The Bush regime has just declared that the 3,800 or so surviving members of the Mujahedeen e Khalq (MEK or MKO) or National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) or People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) that it held at Camp Ashraf, after having bombed them during the invasion of Iraq, and having declared them status terrorists, and having declared a cease-fire with them (so there was firing to cease), and having found the MEK to be a terrorist organization (since 1997) that has previously carried out armed opperations against US targets is ... cordially welcomed to the status of protected persons (non-belligerents) under the Fourth Geneva Protocol, ending the risk of collective punishment or forced deportation.

Of course, the Camp Ashraf population are still status terrorists, and must continue to have US military escorts when traveling outside of Camp Ashraf, and if any can be proven to have committed acts of terrorism against the United States or Britian or ... then they may be punished.

This isn't good. The threat of nukes was the selling of the last war, and the enrichment story is running in all the "respectable" media outlets.

Reasonable Preparation

Before I examine a witness, either at a deposition or in a courtroom, I plan the examination by thinking about how the specific witness fits into the trial. What does this person know about the events in question? Is there anything that this person might know about the case that is not known by anyone else? What in this person’s background or experience will provide insight into the issues that are important to the trial? There are many, many other factors that are part of the preparation for examining a witness.

That sort of preparation is essential to an effective examination. To just wing it without preparation is unfair to the client. It also wastes the time of the witness, opposing counsel, the Court, and the jury. Failing to prepare is really just inexcusable except in certain, rare circumstances. Preparing to examine a witness is one of the minimum requirements of competency and professionalism for a lawyer.

Journalism is also a profession. I am not familiar with the professional standards of journalism. Is any preparation before conducting an interview part of the minimum standards of competency and professionalism for a TV journalist?

For example, let’s say that a TV journalist was going to interview Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash), Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich) and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.). How should the journalist prepare for such an interview?

It does not seem difficult to come up with questions that those three Senators are particularly suited to answer.

Stabenow and Cantwell are from battleground states. How the Kerry/Edwards ticket is doing in Michigan and Washington is of particular importance. Stabenow could be asked how John Kerry is doing among the socially conservative, blue collar voters of Michigan’s Macomb County.

George Bush is counting on a solid South. It would seem particularly appropriate to ask Mary Landrieu whether and how Kerry/Edwards can compete and win in the South. In addition, Landrieu won a run-off election in the South against the forces of the entire national Republican organization. Does she have any advice for Erskine Bowles or Inez Tenenbaum?

All three of the interviewees are members of the Senate. The workings of the Senate are a ripe area for inquiry. Do the three Senators support a lame duck or special session of the Senate to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission? Do the Senators think that the Senate is institutionally capable of swift action on those recommendations? If not, why not?

I would be interested in knowing how three rank and file Democratic Senators feel about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s unprecedented action of raising money and campaigning for Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle’s opponent.

Republicans are talking about using the “nuclear option” to change the Senate Rules by way of a procedural ploy (thereby avoiding the need for the usual 67 votes to change Senate Rules) to prohibit filibusters of Judicial nominees. What would be the repercussions of such a move?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist recently pulled a bill from consideration that would have extended the portion of the Bush tax cuts that benefit middle income Americans. Did the Senators support that extension? What was their reaction to Frist pulling the bill? What impact, if any, will Frist's action have on the presidential race?

Frist also pulled a GOP sponsored bill to reform class action litigation in order to consider the same sex marriage amendment. The class action bill had bipartisan support. Did the Senators support the bill? Did support for the bill cause them any trouble with trial lawyers? Did pulling the bill cause a rift between the GOP and the National Association of Manufacturers?

The areas of possible fruitful inquiry are virtually unlimited. A television interview, however, is quite limited in time. Very few questions get to be asked and/or answered.

Via
Avedon, I learned that Chris Matthews had the opportunity to interview the three Senators. According to Media Matters, he used time to ask seven questions about… wait for it… his Hillary obsession.

Here are his seven questions and the answers:

From MSNBC's convention coverage on July 26:

1) MATTHEWS: Do you think she [Senator Clinton] has the patience to try to help John Kerry and John Edwards win the offices they're running for?

LANDRIEU: Absolutely.

2) MATTHEWS: Even if it means she has to wait longer to get the job?

LANDRIEU: Absolutely. She's a team player, and I'd like to say this about Hillary, even though the press always wants to separate her out, she's a team player.

3) MATTHEWS: She's willing to wait her turn?

LANDRIEU: She's willing to do whatever it takes to win, this year.

4) MATTHEWS: This year?

LANDRIEU: This year.

5) MATTHEWS: You think she's really going to go all out for this ticket, even if it means she doesn't get the job?

LANDRIEU: We all are, we're totally united.

STABENOW: Chris, there's too much at stake.

6) MATTHEWS: Senator Cantwell, you've been quiet here. Do you think Hillary Clinton is willing to sacrifice her own immediate political ambitions for the Democrats' success?

CANTWELL: You can never be hurt in politics by being a team player, and she's going to demonstrate that she's one heck of a team player. And no matter what the consequences are, she'll benefit from that.

7) MATTHEWS: When it comes to election night, will she be rooting for Kerry and Edwards even though that means she's got to wait 12 years?

STABENOW: Of course, of course. There's too much at stake.

I have not seen a full transcript of the show and perhaps Matthews asked some or all of the question I suggest. Regardless, to waste seven precious questions asking three Senators about something on which that they can have no informed opinion while ignoring many subjects that might garner useful information is just ridiculous.

Why would Matthews ask such a silly question and then ask it again and again and again and again and again and again?

I think the reason is simple lack of preparation. I think he had not done his homework and was not prepared to ask questions tailored to those particular Senators. I think he would have asked the same questions of basically any Democratic Senator, Congressman, strategist, or other interviewee.

What exactly are the professional standards for TV journalists with regard to preparation for interviews? If journalism is to be treated as a profession, there ought to be some professional standards. Reasonable preparation for an interview should be one of those standards.

Reasons for Optimism

I noted in a previous post that I was cautiously optimistic about John Kerry’s chances to unseat George W. Bush in the fall. That optimism was based, in part, on the current national polls showing Kerry with a small lead. In addition, I noted that undecided voters are likely to break for the challenger. The fact that most of the undecideds are women made me more optimistic.

Jay Caruso thinks optimism for Kerry’s chances is misguided, arguing that Kerry should be up 8-10 points in the polls. Over at Real Clear Politics, J. McIntyre also thinks Kerry’s chances are overrated:

Now, maybe these people are looking at something different than what I'm looking at, but I just don't see all of this positive news for John Kerry. I see a President that has had a hostile, partisan press beating up on him relentlessly for months now hoping they can drive his job approval into Jimmy Carter territory still standing strong in the high 40's.

I see a Kerry/Edwards campaign that should be ahead today by at least 5 points nationally tied in the polls. I see a lack of appreciation among Democrats and the press for just how unappealing a candidate they are about to nominate.

I would be a lot more optimistic if Kerry had the 8-10 point bulge mentioned by Jay or even the five point spread McIntyre thinks is appropriate. Nonetheless, I prefer a small lead over a deficit any time.

There are a number of reasons for my optimism other than the national polls. For instance, the polling in battleground states seems to favor Kerry. Please consider:

* Larry Sabato’s Electoral Road Map has Kerry leading in every state Gore won in 2000, as well as in West Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

* The Electoral Vote Predictor has Kerry ahead in all of the Gore states as well as Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri. It also has Kerry even in Tennessee. Tennessee!

* The Election Projection also has Kerry holding all of the Gore states and has him leading in red states such as Florida, Ohio, Nevada, and New Hampshire.

* McIntyre’s own Real Clear Politics has an excellent compilation of polls from seventeen battleground states. That page links to more than ninety polls. George Bush cracks fifty percent in exactly four of the polls. An incumbent polling under 50% is in the danger zone.

* Professor Sam Wang of Princeton has a model to predict the current electoral chances of each candidate based on recent state polling. If the election had been held last Monday, Wang calculates that Kerry would have had an 85% chance of victory (Quick, hold the election tomorrow. The terrorists will not have time to disrupt it.).

Secondly, Kerry and the Democrats seem to have the political momentum. For instance:

* Bloomberg reports:

Kerry … leads 47 percent to 41 percent in states where the November election is likely to be closest, Pew said on its Web site. Bush led Kerry by as much as 11 percentage points last month.

* Betsy R. Vasquez, writing in the Moderate Independent, reports the following:

According to American Research Group's (ARG) Dick Bennett, things are moving in Kerry's direction, in particular in the all-important battleground states.

We asked Mr. Bennett if would it be accurate to say that there is no battleground state in which Kerry is trending negatively. Mr. Bennett agreed that is the case with regard to the states ARG has been tracking. He attributes Kerry's positive movement to three things.

Mr. Bennett told us, "Kerry has benefited by (1) a shift of independents to him from Bush, (2) becoming stronger among Democrats so that he runs about the same among Democrats as Bush runs among Republicans (and this give Kerry a slight advantage because there are slightly more Democrats), and (3) some softening among Republicans in Kerry's favor."

* As Kos notes, Democrats are three for three in Special Elections for the House since 2002.

* The Democrats seem to have offset some of the traditional GOP fundraising advantage.

Third, George W. Bush has failed to make inroads with Hispanics, despite a four year effort undertaken by Karl Rove. Perhaps the more important point is that Bush has lost ground with Florida’s Cuban-American voters. As Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture writes:

Cuban American voters in Florida continue to be a potential problem for President Bush in the upcoming election.

Not in the sense that incumbent won’t garner a majority of Cuban votes cast in Florida; He is presently polling somewhere between 60-65% of Floridian Cuban Americans. But compare those numbers with the 82% of this voting bloc Bush won in the 2000 election.

A near 20% drop in support in a demographic representing 400,000 voters in a crucial state represents a swing of potentially 80,000 votes. That’s quite significant in a state the President won last time around by a mere 537 votes.

Fourth, Bush has lost support since his post 9/11 surge. It is more difficult to regain a vote that one has lost than to persuade a voter who has never had an opinion.

Finally, there is the point made by Slate’s Chris Suellentrop:

Even a casual viewer of Hardball knows that the first rule of an election that involves a sitting president is that it's a referendum on the incumbent. This election, however, has turned out to be the opposite. It's a referendum on the challenger. Kerry probably isn't responsible for this turn of events, but he's benefiting from it: The referendum on the incumbent is over. President Bush already lost it. This presidential campaign isn't about whether the current president deserves a second term. It's about whether the challenger is a worthy replacement.

J. McIntyre’s argument is that Bush is in pretty good position because the voters are likely to find Kerry unacceptable. Maybe so, maybe not.

I am optimistic because George Bush has in fact lost the initial referendum. Lyndon Johnson lost the incumbent referendum and withdrew. Richard Nixon won the referendum and was reelected. Jimmy Carter lost the referendum but remained close until the voters decided that Reagan was acceptable. George H. W. Bush lost both the incumbent referendum and the election. Ronald Reagan won the incumbent referendum and had a second term. So did Bill Clinton.

Where is the example of an incumbent who lost the referendum but won reelection because of the failure the other candidate? Other than perhaps Harry Truman, it seems that incumbents who lose the referendum lose the election.

That makes me optimistic.

Oh Vunderbar, lets him and him fight (again)

Picking on that bastion of high-minded reportage ... el WaPo, we have in today's copy this

US-appointed interim Iraqi Defence Minister-Puppet Hazim al-Shaalan warned of invading Iran if it did not stop interfering in his country's internal politics. "I've seen clear interference in Iraqi issues by Iran," the Minister-Puppet said in an interview with The Washington Post in Baghdad on Monday.

So, what country offered to hold Muqtada al Sadr in safe keeping until a real Iraqi court could try him for the offenses charged (murder 1), effectively ending in mid-April the Seige of Fallujah, in the full light of day, and paid for it with the assassination of a senior member of its diplomatic staff in Baghdad? Even the Texas Daily Online carried that story, but not a mention from our heros at the incomperably upmarket WaPo. The answer is worth 50 US KIA, and 250 US wounded, and half the butcher's bill among the hostiles and the collateralized civilians.

What country has been targeted by several thousand irregular forces stationed in Iraq, and now temporarily held in Camp Ashraf? As recently as a week ago David Ignatz wrote about this in the WaPo. Again, no corrolation from our brave heros at the incomperably upmarket WaPo.

What country has been openly putting money and intelligence operatives in Iraq since the Fall of Baghdad, South, Central, and North? Hardly a state secret, and again, no corrolation from our brave heros at the incomperably upmarket WaPo.

Note: The hyphenation "-Puppet" did not actually appear in the original WaPo copy.

Note also: Any blogger who can prove that s/he has pied (or poured a drink on) any WaPo gliteratti in the next five days either in the Fleet or at a hospitality gig wins a year of hosting at Wampum's facility in Bangor, Maine. Cream is preferred, but key lime will also do just fine. We'll pick up the tab on the pie too.

You may have already won ...

True to form, the WaPo is taking this moment to attempt to transform bloggers blogging about real lives lived and politics participated in, or observed by, card-carrying non-members of the punditocracy, into a "spontanious" WaPo media event. Which blogs go better with a red tie, which go better with a blue tie, and which go better after you've tied one on. Wow! A contest!

Sack races for embeds, now that would be fun to watch.

in media res (redux)

The most effective press critique of the regime is the one you come back to daily. A Krugman editorial once a week at the Gray Lady simply doesn't cut it. A fawning whoever-is-in-power at the WaPo simply doesn't cut it. Wire service rewrites of administration press releases in all the second tier outlets -- your daily paper -- simply doesn't cut it. Getting lucky once each war in a monthly with Seymor Hersh is simply not enough.

There is one media outlet that has been onto the moronitude of the Bremer-phase of the Occupation of Iraq. If more Americans had access to this media outlet, MoveOn.Org's DVD distro last Fall on the Iraq War would not have been "news". Michael Moore's indy distro this Summer on the Iraq War would not be "news". People would not have to read Juan Cole for news that simply isn't available elsewhere, or to decode what passes for news that does make it everywhere.

Al Jazeera was thrown out of the NYSE for its "irresponsible" coverage of Bush's War on Iraq. Al Jazeera was rocketed in Baghdad for its coverage of Bush's War. During the fantastically stupid Seige of Fallujah, getting the AJ film crew tossed out of Fallujah managed to be high on Bremer's list of non-negotiables.

In a nutshell, if the American people have a "friend" anywhere in the media world, and we know it isn't CNN or MSNBC or ... or Eric Altman wouldn't have had a book to write and about a thousand blogs wouldn' t have Nidra Pickler and Bob Novak and ... to kick around, then it, this friend, is Al Jazeera. A flater mirror, or at least one that distorts differently, to hold up against the sea of sameness, mirrors that make small men seem large, and better men seem worse. Or, we could just open up or turn on the Daily Fruit Cake and read-or-watch-as-revealed-truth whatever the NeoCons in the Oval Office, Defense, Justice, and the Treasury (gack!) have to say about things going swimingly in Iraq.

Today Al Jazeera reports that its Fleet Center skybox banner had been replaced with "Strong for America".

I watched John Kerry's baby handling in Ohio yesterday. He'd a six month old boy, size large, and interested in the clip-on-tie mic to manage and he did so quite well for more than a nominal moment of time. John's technique on-camera meets this father's is-he-comfortable-with-children measure, but that's not the only point. The boy's father had told John Kerry how he, an American Muslim, felt about the marriage of theology and politics under the current Bush administration. John promissed that his administration would change this, that he would make that father less afraid for his sons' futures, replace Ashcroft, etc. The great chain of being that runs from "no lynchings of American Muslims" to "no lynchings of Arab satellite media outlets" has so few links any child who can count can count them.

Last Spring I wrote here, quoting defenselink.mil

Mark Kimmitt called Aljazeera, and other Arab media outlets the "anti-coalition media" and advised viewers to "change the channel". He was joined by John Abizaid, who said "It is always interesting to me how Al-Jazeera manages to be at the scene of the crime whenever a hostage shows up or some other problem happens to be there."

Pity he's not eager equal their competency on the ground.

It's now mid-July. What media outlet do you think equals their competency on the ground in Iraq? Its not a question you have to answer, at least not on the record, but it is one I suggest you think about. More Mainers are likely to get killed or wounded in Iraq, carrying out some absurd "looking for WMD" detail, or some horribly pathetic excuse for leaving children and life itself behind, like the last Mainers killed or wounded in Iraq, their lives and limbs wasted to maintain RNC media messages -- that WMDs exist, that the War wasn't the work of idiots, liars and madmen. The "responsible" media continues to hump the wooden leg that getting blown up while looking for weapons of mass distruction is a patriotic duty sane men and women should seek, at least through November, but discreetly off-camera.

Support our troops. Change the channel. Switch off Kimmett, Abizaid, Bremer, and above all, Bush.

Half Full - National Polls

Are you a political optimist or a political pessimist? I am by nature a political pessimist. Growing up and living in the South, I have been a first hand witness to the slow erosion of the Democratic Party. I suppose that may have colored my view of things.

As we approach the Democratic convention, how is the Presidential race going? Is the information now available to us sufficient to turn a natural pessimist into an optimist? To answer that question, a number of factors should be investigated. This post will focus on the national polls.

There is plenty for both the optimist and pessimist to see in the national polls. The optimist sees that John Kerry has retaken the lead in the Rasmussen tracking poll. The pessimist sees that only a few days ago, George Bush had the lead.

The optimists will note that Kerry leads in a number of national polls:

The USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll has Kerry with a one point lead in a three way race (47-46-4);

The LA Times poll has Kerry up 2 in both a three way and two way race (48-46 and 46-44-3);

Political Wire reports that an Investors Business Daily poll has Kerry up three or two (44-41 in a two way match-up and 42-40-4 in a three way);

The Pew poll (46-44-3) has Kerry up two;

The Marist poll has Kerry up one regardless of whether “leaners” are included (45-44-2 and 47-46-3 with “leaners” included); and

The CBS/NYTimes poll has Kerry up five (49-44).

The pessimist notes that President Bush has a small lead in both the Fox News poll (even without Nader) and the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

The pessimist will also be aware that despite months of bad news and years of poor performance by the President, John Kerry has been unable to open a lead outside the margin of error in any of the polls.

The optimist, however, looks at the internals of the polls and sees that much of the country thinks we are on the wrong track, that the President has a negative net approval rating and that the public is not enamored with Bush’s positions on the issues.

In the end, the national polls look half full to me. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that President Bush seems unlikely to win a majority of the remaining undecided voters.

That reason is best expressed by Charlie Cook:

The 45-45 percent tie, with each candidate fluctuating about three points up or down from that point, has been with us since April, though beneath the surface there have been some shifts. While some polls have shown Bush's approval rating on handling the economy to have improved a bit, those gains have been offset by a comparable decline in his approval ratings on handling foreign policy, the war in Iraq and even, to a lesser extent, terrorism.

Last week in this space, I discounted the widely held view that the knotted polling numbers between Bush and Kerry meant that the race itself was even. I argued that given the fact that well-known incumbents with a defined record rarely get many undecided voters -- a quarter to a third at an absolute maximum -- an incumbent in a very stable race essentially tied at 45 percent was actually anything but in an even-money situation. "What you see is what you get" is an old expression for an incumbent's trial heat figures, meaning very few undecided voters fall that way.

A recent survey by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio (Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates: July 6-7, 1,000 likely voters in 19 battleground states), underscores my point. Fabrizio's poll shows that undecided voters in those states have more pessimistic views than all voters in those states. Just 23 percent of the undecideds say the country is moving in the right direction, compared with 40 percent overall. And just 21 percent say the economy is in excellent or good shape, compared with 33 percent of all voters in those states. Those who are undecided are also slightly more apt to disapprove of the job Bush is doing as president, 46 percent to 40 percent.

This is certainly not to predict that Bush is going to lose, that this race is over or that other events and developments will not have an enormous impact on this race. The point is that this race has settled into a place that is not at all good for an incumbent, is remarkably stable, and one that is terrifying many Republican lawmakers, operatives and activists. But in a typically Republican fashion, they are too polite and disciplined to talk about it much publicly.

In a funny way, if this race were bouncing around, it would probably be a better sign for President Bush. It would suggest that there was some volatility to the race and that public attitudes had not yet hardened, and were thus still an eminently fixable situation. The dynamics of a presidential race usually do not change much between July and Election Day. This year, however, the race is much more stable than usual, which is ominous for an incumbent under these circumstances. The bottom line is that this presidential race is not over, but the outlook is not so great for the players in the red jerseys.

The argument that the undecided voters in battleground states are likely to break against Bush is underlined when we consider the gender of those voters. Most of those voters are women. As Common Dreams reports:

Women outnumbered men among undecided likely voters in a number of national polls released recently, including:

-- Women are 65 percent of undecided voters nationwide, according to the George Washington University's Battleground 2004 Poll conduced June 20-23 (n equals 1,000) by Lake, Snell, Perry || Associates and the Tarrance Group. See: (here).

-- Women make up 58 percent of swing voters, according to a June 3-13 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press (n equals 1,426). Swing voters in the survey are defined as registered voters who are either undecided or have said they may change their mind about who they will vote for in the presidential election. See (here).

The gender gap among undecided voters extends into key battleground states:

-- In Pennsylvania, women are 57 percent of the undecided voters, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll of registered voters (n equals 1,577) conducted July 6-11. See (here).

-- Similarly, women are 57 percent of undecided Florida voters, according to a July 13-15 American Research group poll (n equals 600 voters). The firm found a similar gender gap among undecided voters in other battleground states including Michigan (where 62 percent of undecided voters are women), New Mexico (69 percent undecideds are women), and West Virginia (70 percent are undecideds women). See (here).

Having the fate of the election in the hands of undecided women makes me optimistic. Even a pessimist like me is compelled to see the national polling data as half full.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at 05:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Maine's ISPs

Two weeks ago I attended what I suppose must be the founders meeting of the Maine ISP Association in Hallowell, just outside of Augusta. One of the issues that I mulled over during the drive up was cable. How do Maine ISPs get access to monopoly physical infrastructure, the basic CATV plant of the municipal video franchisee, whether TimeWarner or Adelphia? How do monopoly municipal franchise "cable broadband" ISPs, co-exist with ISPs offering "dsl broadband", both serving the Palesky-benefiting (southern, lakes, and midcoastal) Maine, or ISPs offering location-indifferent or independent telephone service area restricted dial-up access, and looking to enter those rich monopoly cable markets?

A simple rich-and-poor question, where wealth is created by walls and a history of walls, and the poor would like to raze, or at least lower, the walls, now and in the future. Nothing complex at all.

As it turned out, it really was just Maine ISPs, so the Atlanta and Philidelphia metro franchise and cable plant management companies were absent. It was just a DSL ISP, a big dial-up ISP, and a bunch of small dial-up ISPs, and me. Wampumpeag isn't an ISP. ISPs are our customers, as are hosting companies, bloggers, political campaigns, and anybody or anything that acquires a domain name.

Some hard questions: Should "virtual" ISPs be allowed to join? Should TimeWarer/AOL and Adelphia and Earthlink and Verizon and SBC and ... be allowed to join? Are they facilities based? Are they incorporated in or doing 50% of their business in Maine?

We didn't decide anything, and we comprised something less than most of the 40 or so ISPs that serve Maine, but we got closer to agreement on what the by-laws should be.

Now the reason for this self-serving post is this -- the DSL ISP put its key public policy goal on the table -- a word added to Maine's basic law.
Old

It shall be the policy of Maine to offer internet service everywhere, etc.

New

It shall be the policy of Maine to offer broadband internet service everywhere, etc.

Earlier in the primary cycle I wrote on Lawrence Lessig's blog on the problem Howard Dean's "technology policy" posed. In a nutshell, Dean's policy was broadband-everywhere, wireline and wireless. I won't repeat what I wrote on Lawrence's blog, other than the nutshell of both are suburban delivery systems (race and class), wicked expensive (worldcom bailout), and kept the spam-stupidity-and-cupidity model of the net unchanged. More turds via fatter pipes.

Now the importance of a comment on a blog, even one like Lessig's, is close to zero. It was interesting that one of my technical peers, who is to the far right of Ghengis Khan politically, was on the same page on the feasability of wireless as the rural half of the national broadband service plan and just as sanguine about the economics of the wireline broadband. Still, even two comments, one by (I'll omit my quals), and one by a co-inventor of the wireless technology, amounts to two dry beans when set against the charisma and hunger for change of Dean and the Deaniacs of last Fall.

Where this became more substantial was ironically via the Triballaw list. A sublist was set up, and I ended up spending hours pounding the keyboard on technology issues, starting from my critique of Dean's tech policy and reaching out as if I ran DARPA's ISTO and Commerce's NIST and could put in place the change from mutual assured de-industrialization with China and India to something mutually beneficial.

Other TLers wrote on this and related subjects. A TL contributor at Berkeley put our product in the hands of former Secretary Reiche, who teachs at Berkeley, and who also advises John Kerry on economic issues. Whatever became of our product I've no idea.

I don't expect much. A Maine ISP Association could allow TimeWarner et al, and Juno and the other New Jersy modem pool virtualized business models to join and vote just as if they were facilities-based with 50% of their business in Maine (or New Hampshire or Quebec and the Maritimes), in essense "local". It could also not, and leave TimeWarner and Verizon as "foreign" and above all, monopoly exploiting predatory corporations, and "free" or sub-cost virtual gambits like Juno, to form their own non-Maine ISP association.

Sometime the FCC may hold a locality public hearing in Portland. If they do so, I'll submit comment on the banality of TimeWarner's generic basic cable news-and-entertainment product, and the banality of AOL's generic internet (sort of) access product, relative to the vibrant culture of Maine's low-power radio and low-cap dial-up ISP access products.

Oh. This week I was recruited to participate in a bid to take .net away from Verisign Global Registry Services. This is, at its bottom, a very politicaly activity. The DoC regulates ICANN, sort of. On some issues. If Bush wins in November, in March the ICANN BoD might decide that the monopoly incumbant is the best choice for "competition", rather like the Powell FCC has selected the ILECs over the CLECs on key regulatory issues. If Kerry wins in November, in March the ICANN BoD might decide that the monopoly incumbant is the not the best "competitive" choice, and neither is the monopoly local number portability operator NeuStar, and offer 4.7 million domain name customers to one of the better competing technical and management teams.

Hope springs eternal. I bid .biz (won), .us (won), .org (lost), .cat (Catalonia, not "meow", pending) and some day I'll bid .naa, a pan-tribal sponsored top-level domain. Now I need to go fix a technical problem I caused that has freed the academics, tribal judges and practitioners, law students, and chiefs like my spouse for a brief holiday from Federal Indian and First Nations Law.

Flashback Friday

AT IRAN-CONTRA TRIAL, KERRY SAYS CIA SPYMASTER LIED TO CONGRESS
Steve Power, Boston Globe contributing reporter
July 25, 1992

WASHINGTON -- The US government fired the opening salvo in its case against Clair George yesterday with more than three hours of testimony from Sen. John F. Kerry, who accused the former CIA spymaster of lying to Congress about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. As the prosecution's lead-off witness, Kerry told a US District Court jury that George lied during an October 1986 appearance before Congress when he told the Foreign Relations Committee he did not recognize the name Max...

WHAT BUSH KNEW -- AND WHEN
Boston Globe Editorial
July 21, 1992

The release of previously classified intelligence documents on Saddam Hussein's procurement of weapons before his invasion of Kuwait validates the House Judiciary Committee's request for a special prosecutor to investigate possible lawbreaking by top officials of the Bush administration. Meanwhile, the administration's public relations campaign in defense of its actions does nothing to diminish the need for an impartial investigation...

RECOVERY MAY COME TOO LATE FOR BUSH
Hobart Rowen, The Washington Post
July 26, 1992

Sen. Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Mich.) pointed out during the [Alan Greenspan] hearing that real per capita income has declined over the entire three years of the [Bush] administration, the first time that has happened since the Hoover Depression days.

Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) said after the Senate Banking Committee hearing: "We've got a serious situation here, but Bush and Greenspan are singing from the ...

FACING PRESSURE, BUSH IS ADAMANT ON KEEPING QUAYLE; A FLURRY OF SPECULATION
R.W. APPLE Jr., Special to The New York Times
July 23, 1992

WASHINGTON, July 22 -- With pressures mounting within his own party for further measures to revitalize his re-election campaign, President Bush denied today that he was even considering the possibility of replacing Vice President Dan Quayle....

FOR BUSH, A HIGH-RISK RESPONSE
Mary Curtius, Boston Globe
July 25, 1992

WASHINGTON -- As he edges closer to another military confrontation with Saddam Hussein, George Bush is acutely aware that its outcome could either boost his sagging political fortunes or hand him a humiliating defeat. A president traditionally benefits from looking decisive on the world stage.

But senior administration officials insist that Bush fears the domestic political fallout if this confrontation results in anything less than Iraqi capitulation to the Security Council's...

U.S.-SAUDI LINKS REPORTED
Special to The New York Times
July 21, 1992

WASHINGTON, July 20 -- Government papers show that the United States and Saudi Arabia have cooperated extensively on oil marketing matters for many years, The Washington Post reports in its Tuesday issue. Such a relationship has been widely assumed to exist, although the countries have long denied it...

DOW TUMBLES IN ANOTHER SHARP LOSS
The Washington Post
July 21, 1992

It was the second straight session in which stocks fell sharply. When IBM came out with weaker-than-expected earnings Friday, the Dow fell 37.01 points. IBM continued to slip today, losing 2 1/8 to 92 7/8 and topping the Big Board actives list.

Wall Street's bearish mood was further soured by sharp losses in London, Tokyo and Frankfurt. Japanese stocks sank 4 percent, German issues lost ...

U.S. WAS AWARE THE IRAQIS WERE BUYING TECHNOLOGY
By Elaine Sciolino, The New York Times
Juyl 22, 1992

WASHINGTON, July 21 -- A year before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, American intelligence agencies had amassed evidence of President Saddam Hussein's vast network set up to buy Western military technology, including an Iraqi-owned front company based in Cleveland, according to documents disclosed today by Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat...

HOUSE, SENATE CANDIDATES FEAR EFFECT OF BUSH'S SLIDE

Helen Dewar, The Washington Post

July 24, 1992

A wave of consternation has spread through Republican ranks on Capitol Hill over prospects for critical House and Senate races this fall unless President [Bush] moves swiftly to regain the political offensive and reverse his slide in public opinion polls.

With Bush down, Democrat Bill Clinton up and Ross Perot out, Republican lawmakers who have been predicting big gains in the House and moderate gains ...

BUSH'S MUDDY MESSAGE; AND FIVE THINGS HE COULD DO.
George F. Will, The Washington Post
Juyl 23, 1992

Like the farmers who tilled fields at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, [Bush] campaigners are confident that natural forces favor them. Rich Bond, GOP chairman, interviewed on television with a beach behind him, yawned about Clinton's surge. Noting that four years ago Dukakis led Bush 51 to 34, Bond said: "You see behind me high tide. Time passes, gravity occurs, the tide goes out and ...

AN AMERICA IN THE GRIP OF `DEBT REVULSION'; CONSUMERS' RELUCTANCE TO SPEND SEEN HAMPERING ECONOMIC RECOVERY
John M. Berry, The Washington Post
July 26, 1992

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says he is not sure when things will get back to normal. "I don't know when that specific time is going to present itself," Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee last week. "We are looking at a phenomenon which we have not seen for half a century."

In two appearances on Capitol Hill last week, Greenspan said this painfully slow ...
BUSH ON THE ATTACK; BUT CHARGES AGAINST CLINTON AND GORE COULD RAISE HIS OWN NEGATIVE IMAGE
Andrew Rosenthal, The New York Times
July 23, 1992

WASHINGTON, July 22 -- President Bush has wasted no time attacking the Democratic nominee, accusing Gov. Bill Clinton this week of peddling birth control pills to teen-agers without their parents' consent and encouraging children to "haul their parents into court."...

BUSH PLAYS POLITICS WITH HEALTH RESEARCH
Joan Kuriansky, New York Times
July 21, 1992

How much does President Bush care about victims of breast cancer, osteoporosis and other diseases? Apparently not as much as he cares about placating opponents of the right to choose. He has vetoed the National Institutes of Health reauthorization bill the most important women's health legislation to emerge from this Congress...

GREENSPAN OPTIMISTIC BUT CAUTIOUS; NO EVIDENCE OF AN ECONOMIC SURGE BY ELECTION DAY.
Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times
July 22, 1992

WASHINGTON, July 21 -- Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave an only faintly upbeat forecast today, saying the economy would gain momentum soon. But he failed to say how soon and added that the jobless rate -- the most politically sensitive economic indicator in an election year -- would remain above 7 percent for the rest of 1992...

ON ROAD AS EQUAL PARTNERS IN NEW KIND OF POLITICAL ACT
Michael Kelly, The New York Times
July 22, 1992

VANDALIA, Ill., July 21 -- Bill Clinton and Al Gore have developed a political act unlike any seen on a Presidential ticket before, a political tag-team show that rests on presenting the two men as equal partners in a joint venture.

FROM PARTNER TO HELPMATE HILLARY CLINTON SPURS DEBATE ON PRESIDENTIAL WIVES
Elizabeth Neuffer, Boston Globe
July 20, 1992

WASHINGTON -- The Democrats hailed 1992 last week as the Year of the Woman in Politics. But to many who scrutinized the televised Democratic Convention in Madison Square Garden, it was clearly not the Year of the Political First Lady. There was presidential nominee Bill Clinton, surrounded by woman candidates for Congress, declaring, ''We need a new gender of leadership in America.'' Yet there was career woman Hillary Rodham Clinton, newly remade by the campaign's...

LONG-TERM JOBLESS IRATE OVER BENEFITS
Elizabeth Neuffer, Boston Globe
July 21, 1992

WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of unemployed workers, seeking to obtain the extended federal jobless benefits approved by Congress July 4, are discovering the emergency measure is not nearly as generous as it first seemed. The bill -- hastily approved by lawmakers as they tried to beat an end-of- session deadline -- does not help long-term unemployed workers who have exhausted their extended benefits. Unlike earlier emergency legislation, the bill does not extend the number of weeks that the..

(And who stepped up to fix the problem?)

KENNEDY, KERRY BILL WOULD LIFT LONG-TERM BENEFITS BY 13 WEEKS
Gady A. Epstein, Boston Globe
July 24, 1992

Sens. John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy introduced a bill last night to extend federal benefits for the long-term unemployed by 13 weeks, attempting to redress an unemployment package hastily passed early this month that some legislators mistakenly assumed would help the long-term unemployed. Rep. Chester G. Atkins will propose similar legislation today, but he and Senate aides admit that in the face of a certain presidential veto, it will be extremely difficult to pass any extension of...

GAY STAFFER TAKES ON THE GOP; FRANZ SAYS RELIGIOUS RIGHT PUSHED HIM OUT OF CAMPAIGN
Bruce D. Brown, The Washington Post
July 24, 1992

A month after [Franz] met with [Robert Mosbacher], he was called into the office of Tom Harvey, the campaign's personnel director. Here, Franz argues in his complaint, Harvey told him that due to "ideological differences with the religious right," some campaign officials wanted him off the [Bush-Quayle] team.

Bush-Quayle spokesman Tony Mitchell said Franz was offered the new position - at an extra $100 a ...

WHO LOST PROSPERITY?
The Washington Post Editorial
July 22, 1992

Mr. [Alan Greenspan] has been arguing for some time that the country is convalescing from the enormous boom of the 1980s, a time of much too much easy borrowing and easy spending not only by the government but by businesses and individuals. Who's to blame for the result? Just about everybody. In the past recession, people began to realize that their debts were too big. ...

CASH-HUNGRY STATES REVAMP WELFARE
Elizabeth Neuffer, Boston Globe
July 22, 1992

WASHINGTON -- Struggling with strained budgets and frustrated by surging numbers of dependent poor, growing numbers of states are asking Washington to waive federal regulations so they may implement sweeping changes in their welfare systems. On Monday, New Jersey became the fifth state this year to receive such a waiver, which allows the state to undertake experimental reforms for the next five years, including denying further benefits to mothers who have more children while on welfare...

ORDERS FOR DURABLES ROSE 2.3% IN JUNE
John D. McClain, Associated Press
July 25, 1992

WASHINGTON -- Orders to US factories for durable goods rose 2.3 percent in June, the government said yesterday, but analysts contended the advance revealed little manufacturing strength. ''The June increase is barely enough to compensate for the decline in May,'' said John M. Albertine, head of a Washington economic forecasting firm. ''The truth is the recovery is just treading water.''

"It's a one-step-forward, one-step-back kind of...

TWO DECISIONS FACING BUSH
Boston Globe Editorial
July 24, 1992

President Bush is facing two major decisions -- whether to dump Dan Quayle from the 1992 ticket, and whether to take military action against Saddam Hussein. The first question is obviously political, the other equally so, if not obviously so. Every drop in the polls heightens the pressure to dump Quayle, and there are reports that the Republican high command is polling on the question and is merely waiting for the results.

(Remember from where Jr. gets his testiness with critics..)

BUSH, HECKLERS CLASH AT POW-MIA MEETING
Michael Putzel and John W. Mashek, Boston Globe

July 25, 1992

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, heckled yesterday by the families of Vietnam POWs and MIAs, sharply rebuked his detractors in an angry exchange that seemed to reflect the frayed nerves of a star-crossed reelection effort. ''Would you please sit down and shut up!'' Bush snapped as he was repeatedly interrupted during a short speech to a group that has long been friendly toward him.

The president later insisted he was not upset. And Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat, came to...

(Darn, what did Kerry do? Guess I'll have to go buy the whole article...)

Webster Hubbell, Defensive Medicine, and Health Care Costs

I can think of no member of the Clinton administration more deserving of scorn than former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell. Hubbell ended up in jail but his conviction had nothing to do with his performance at the Justice Department or with anything related to Whitewater. Hubbell went to jail for the worst offense a lawyer can commit. He cheated his clients. You can find Hubbell’s plea agreement here.

Hubbell's technique for cheating his clients was not even particularly sophisticated. He ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses and then billed his clients for those expenses, falsely claiming them to be case related. While that may not be a particularly complex scheme, it is particularly despicable.

At the core of the relationship between a lawyer and a client is the idea that the lawyer will promote the interests of the client. When a lawyer puts his own financial gain ahead of his duty to a client, he disgraces not only himself, but also his firm, and the entire profession. I have no use for lawyers such as Hubbell. Disbarment, jail time, as well as personal and professional disgrace are completely appropriate in such cases.

In a round about way, that brings me to the subject of health care costs. The John Kerry web site, citing information from “2000 MEPS Data from the Agency for Healthcare Quality Research projected forward using KFF National Premium Increase” notes that the cost of health insurance for American families has risen from $6,772 to $9,549 over the last four years. Reducing the cost of health insurance has become a big issue.

The centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney proposal to reduce the costs of health insurance is to limit non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases to $250,000. It is obvious that the direct savings from such a proposal would do little to reduce health care costs.

According to the Congressional Budget Office the cost of the entire medical malpractice tort system is about $25 billion. Not even Dick Cheney wants to eliminate all of those costs. As the Vice President said recently:

Obviously, we want to preserve the right of people who have legitimate grievances to be able to go to court and address those grievances. That's as it should be. Nobody is suggesting that somebody who has been harmed by a serious breach of medical ethics, or somebody -- a doctor who has made a serious mistake, that an individual patient shouldn't be compensated for those errors.

According to the CBO, about the best we can hope for in direct savings from a damages cap is a reduction of about half of one percent in health care costs. That would save American families less than $4 per month.

The Bush/Cheney idea is not just to get savings from a direct reduction in costs of the tort system but also to change the way doctors practice medicine. The Republican idea is that limiting damages for pain and suffering will reduce the practice of defensive medicine.

Vice President Cheney defines the practice of defensive medicine as ordering tests or procedures that provide no health benefit to the patients in the hope of avoiding or defeating a malpractice suit. He says:

They'll do everything they can in terms of ordering up tests, whether you need them or not, because they're thinking not necessarily about treating the patient, they're thinking about the pending lawsuit.

The Bush/Cheney argument is that a cap on non-economic damages will reduce the incidence of defensive medicine and save $60+ billion per year in health care costs. That argument is predicated on two assumptions. The first assumption is that there is a lot of defensive medicine being practiced. The second is that a cap on damages will result in a reduction of such practices.

I do not think that a cap on damages is likely to result in significant reduction in defensive medicine. That belief results from my having a very different view of doctors than Bush/Cheney.

My experience with doctors in my family, the doctors who have treated me and my family, and the doctors that I know socially leads me to believe that doctors take the Hippocratic Oath seriously.

The Modern Version of the oath includes the following:

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

Defensive medicine is prima facie overtreatment and, therefore, a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. President Bush and Vice President Cheney may think that doctors routinely violate their oath, but I do not.

Secondly, I believe that doctors, other than a very small minority, abide by a far higher ethical standard than Webster Hubbell.

Defensive tests and procedures are ordered for the benefit of the doctor (to prevent his financial exposure in litigation) and not for the health benefit of the patient (which, by definition, is zero). They are, therefore, expenses of the doctor and not the patient.

It would be completely appropriate for a doctor to raise the price he or she charges for services that benefit the patient and then pay for tests and procedures ordered for the doctor’s benefit out of his or her own pocket (after obtaining informed consent from the patient, of course).

What is not appropriate is for a doctor to order a test for his own financial protection, fail to inform the patient that the test or procedure is of no health benefit, and then bill the patient (or the patient’s insurer) for the expense.

Webster Hubbell went to jail for incurring expenses that benefited him personally, falsely representing that they were expenses of the client, and then billing the client for such expenses. I see no important distinction between Hubbell’s cheating of his client and the practice of purely defensive medicine. A doctor billing the patient for the personal expenses of the doctor is cheating his patients just as surely as Hubbell cheated his clients.

George Bush and Dick Cheney may believe that most doctors operate at Webster Hubbell’s ethical level but I do not.

My belief that the vast majority of doctors abide by the Hippocratic Oath and operate at a higher ethical level than Webster Hubbell leads me to the conclusion that there is not a large pot of money to be saved from eliminating defensive medicine.

Of course, I might be wrong. Perhaps Bush and Cheney are correct in their assessment of doctors. Perhaps doctors do routinely violate the Hippocratic Oath and have no qualms about defrauding their patients. In that event, would the Bush/Cheney proposal eliminate a lot of defensive medicine?

I see no reason why it would. Under the Bush/Cheney proposal, doctors would still be liable for malpractice claims. They would still be called to account for unlimited damages for health care expenses and lost wages caused by negligence. They would still be liable for pain and suffering up to $250,000.

If doctors continued to order unnecessary tests and procedures, they would still be paid for those services. The Bush/Cheney view is that the doctors are quite willing to ignore their oath and commit massive fraud in order to gain financially. Why would a cap on non-economic damages in malpractice cases change their character?

Edit: Usage errors fixed. Spelling changed.

Prof. Hashem Aghajari

Overnight the retrial of Hashem Aghajari concluded. This time the offenses charged and the guilty verdict brought the penalty down from death to three years (with credit for two years time served) and post-release civil penalties. I wrote about his case in the context of the run-up to the elections in February:

I spent part of yesterday evening reading From ijtihad to wilayat-i faqih: The Evolving of the Shi’ite Legal Authority to Political Power by Abbas Amanat. The "why" is unimportant, though the proximal cause was looking up the press coverage on Professor Hashim Aghajari ...

That's from Part IV of my Iran series. See Al Jazeera for coverage of the re-trial. The AP and Reuters both have comperable copy that has been picked up by some media outlets.

I'm not the only one in East Blog-i-stan to be concerned that a US-Iran War is in the making. Juan Cole's blog, Informed Consent, has Iran in Bush's Sights, which I recommend highly. Wampum's readers are not monkeys who merely imitate, but following the links will expand one's education, so that our readers will not need the linking teacher. That is a redaction of the opening quote that twice cost Hashem Aghajari his life-in-law, and reading Abbas Amanat is highly recommended.

Changing The Tone Update

Number 8 on the Top Ten Ways To Change the Tone In Washington (For the Worse) is Try To Have Political Opponents Arrested.

Dan Froomkin at the Post’s White House Briefing points us to a piece in the Post Crescent for an example from Wisconsin:

Outagamie County Supv. Jayson Nelson might be new to politics, but he already can attest to the price of freedom of speech.

Nelson, who joined the County Board this year, said he got bounced from the VIP list for President Bush’s speech Wednesday at the Resch Center in Ashwaubenon because of inappropriate attire…

Nelson said he was ejected after being caught sporting a T-shirt endorsing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, though he said it was fully hidden beneath a heavy cotton button-down shirt…

[T]he female election worker who singled Nelson out snatched the VIP ticket from his hand and called for police, he said.

“Look at his shirt! Look at his shirt!” Nelson recalled the woman telling the Ashwaubenon Public Safety officer who answered the call.

Nelson said the officer told him, “You gotta go,” and sternly directed him to a Secret Service contingent that spent seven or eight minutes checking him over before ejecting him from the property.

Changing the tone for the worse, each and every day.

Say What?

The Post:

Sen. John W. Warner's office acknowledged yesterday that the Virginia Republican arranged for religious activists to use a Senate office building last March for a ceremony in which the Rev. Sun Myung Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be "reborn as new persons."

Did we really want them back?

A Denny Special

What makes House Speaker Dennis Hastert such a special politician?

The New York Times carries a story that may help answer that question.

Hastert met with 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas Keane and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton about the forthcoming report of the 9/11 Commission. What did they talk about? Not much, according to Hastert:

Mr. Hastert said that during the briefing on Tuesday the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic member of the House, did not offer a detailed summary of the report or its conclusions. "The report's not printed yet," Mr. Hastert said. "We didn't go into detail on content."

How does Hastert intend to use the report? Non-politically, of course:

"One of the things I've said all along is I would hope that this wouldn't become a political football," he said. "I think we ought to take the information in this report and move forward - and how best to reorganize intelligence, if we need to do that."

One might suspect that Hastert would have nothing further to say. But then, Denny would not be so special.

Hastert had to add one comment about a report that he hasn’t read after a meeting in which the report's contents were not discussed so as to make sure the report did not become a political football:

After their briefing, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and other House Republican leaders held a news conference at which they suggested that the report, which is scheduled to be made public on Thursday, would show that intelligence and law enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks were more the responsibility of the Clinton administration than of the Bush administration.

"The report covers eight years of the Clinton administration and eight months of the Bush administration," Mr. Hastert said...

That is what makes Denny such a special politician.

Big Savings

The Washington Post reports on a Dick Cheney speech in which he blames rising health care costs on medical malpractice suits:

Vice President Cheney, with a swipe at his Democratic trial-lawyer counterpart, yesterday blamed rising health care costs on "runaway litigation" and promoted a $250,000 cap on medical malpractice awards as the central tenet of the White House program to improve access, affordability and quality of care…

"This problem doesn't start in the waiting room," Cheney said in remarks released by the campaign. "It doesn't start in the operating room. The problem starts in the courtroom."

With lawsuits on the rise and multimillion-dollar awards making headlines, physicians and many Republicans say limiting damages is the solution to the broader challenges confronting the U.S. health system.

Would tort reform significantly lower health care costs?

The Congressional Budget Office does not think so. CBO approached the issue by looking at the experience of states that have enacted tort reform legislation. So far, the CBO has been unable to find any such savings:

CBO could find no statistically significant difference in per capita health care spending between states with and without malpractice tort limits.

Let’s assume, however, that tort reform would reduce malpractice premiums significantly, say in the range of 25-30%. If that reduction actually happened, would it lead to significantly lower health care costs? CBO says it would not.

Savings of that magnitude would not have a significant impact on total health care costs, however. Malpractice costs amounted to an estimated $24 billion in 2002, but that figure represents less than 2 percent of overall health care spending. Thus, even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower health care costs by only about 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small. (Footnotes omitted).

Let’s further assume that the health insurers would pass all of the savings along to the consumer (a fairly dubious assumption). Given those assumptions, how much would the centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney health care initiative save the average American family?

John Kerry’s web site says that the cost of health insurance for families has increased to $9,549 per year or $795.75 per month. If everything goes right and all of the above assumptions prove true, the centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney healthcare plan would reduce premiums by $3.98 per month. Instead of paying $795.75 per month, a family would be paying $791.77 per month. I know you are thrilled.

Wait a minute, what about the savings from the elimination of defensive medicine? The CBO suggests that you not hold your breach waiting for such savings to materialize:

Proponents of limiting malpractice liability have argued that much greater savings in health care costs would be possible through reductions in the practice of defensive medicine. However, some so-called defensive medicine may be motivated less by liability concerns than by the income it generates for physicians or by the positive (albeit small) benefits to patients. On the basis of existing studies and its own research, CBO believes that savings from reducing defensive medicine would be very small.

Even if we do not get direct savings from tort reform or from the elimination of defensive medicine, reduction in malpractice premiums might help keep health care more readily available. The CBO thinks not:

Some observers argue that high malpractice premiums are causing physicians to restrict their practices or retire, leading to a crisis in the availability of certain health care services in a growing number of areas. GAO investigated the situations in five states with reported access problems and found mixed evidence. On the one hand, GAO confirmed instances of reduced access to emergency surgery and newborn delivery, albeit "in scattered, often rural, areas where providers identified other long-standing factors that affect the availability of services." On the other hand, it found that many reported reductions in supply by health care providers could not be substantiated or "did not widely affect access to health care."

Paul Krugman recently wrote with regard to an actual policy debate on health care “I don't see how President Bush will win it.”

With tort reform as the centerpiece of the plan, I think Krugman may be right.

Avner the Eccentric

Avner the Eccentric was being interviewed on local radio a few days ago. I was listening with interest, not because I had a clue as to who Avner might be, or why he was Eccentric, or any particular interest in performance art, mime, juggling, or stand-up comedy. No, I was listening because he was talking about working in Europe, and working up to the politiclally intimate. That point when your friend takes a deep breath and puts his chin in his hand or tilts her head over slightly and asks about you and George Bush [or you and Ronald Reagen]. Avner's reply was this:

We're going to have an election in November, and when we do, I expect I'll vote for Ariel Sharon. [pause] The funny thing is, when you have your next election I expect you'll vote for Ariel Sharon too.

Avner makes his home in Maine, where Ariel Sharon's name never appears on the ballot, and his generic friend makes his or her home in Europe, where Ariel Sharon's also never appears on the ballot.

Both Tom Allen (1st CD) and Michael Michaud (2nd CD) voted in favor of H. Res. 713. Both are Democrats. Both endorse the legislative restatement of the outcome of the legal process at the International Court of Justice as misuse of that Court by a plurality of the United Nations General Assembly for a narrow political purpose. Neither presumably endorse a similar characterization of the Biodiversity Convention, or the Kyoto Convention, or for that matter, the Fourth Geneva Convention, or the Treaty Organization that each rely upon.

Earlier this month I wrote a piece on the actual physical threat to the life of Ariel Sharon. It upset a friend, which was not my intention. I was trying to point out, with so much less humor and clarity, what Avner the Eccentric got across on the radio in the space of two minutes.

Tanks to N in Seattle for the korrection.

The Top 10 Ways To Change The Tone in Washington (For the Worse)

In the run up to the 2000 election, American politics had become rabidly partisan and vituperative. That is perhaps not surprising as the election followed an era in which two of the most polarizing figures in American politics, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, led their respective parties. Some Americans (swing voters, for instance) became fed up with hyper-partisan politics and began looking for a candidate who could bring us together.

George W. Bush tapped into that discontent by promising to be a “uniter, not a divider,” and by promising to “change the tone” in Washington.

How has Mr. Bush done in fulfilling his campaign promise to change the tone in Washington?

After nearly four years of Mr. Bush’s Presidency and two years of Republican control of both houses of Congress, Mr. Bush can truthfully claim to have changed the tone in Washington. He and the GOP have made it far worse.

Miles Benson, in an op-ed, demonstrates the point:

The venomous conflict of the 2004 presidential election, which has pushed leaders to new levels of partisan hostility, has spread to ordinary Americans.

Intolerance of political differences is growing, experts say….

“We've become two warring nations," independent pollster John Zogby agreed. "The same incivility we have been experiencing within Washington in the last decade has spread out and we are seeing it nationally now…

Republican Bill McInturff of the polling firm Public Opinion Strategies uses an "intensity range" to show that attitudes are significantly stronger regarding President Bush than they were concerning Bill Clinton in 1996 or Bush's father in 1992.

When McInturff adds the percentage of Democrats who strongly disapprove of Bush (69 percent) to the percentage of Republicans who strongly approve of him (68 percent), the "intensity range" is 137 percent — almost double the 72 percent range for George H.W. Bush. The range for Clinton (in this case, Republican disapproval added to Democratic approval) was 92 percent.

"It's stunning. I have never in my life seen these kinds of numbers on the level of intensity on both sides," McInturff said. "We are seeing the largest gap in American history in approval and disapproval by party. The level at which people are locking in is without precedent."

Just in case David Letterman is interested, below are the Top Ten Ways The Tone in Washington Has Been Changed (For the Worse):

10) Play To The Base

Noam Scheiber, writing at The New Republic’s blog describes the reelection strategy of President Bush and Karl Rove:

Rove's grand plan was to spend the first three years of Bush's term stroking conservatives' erogenous zones--lots of tax cuts, conservative judges, regulatory rollbacks, and religiously hued social policy (the administration's marriage initiative, its efforts to restrict access to abortion, its retrograde stem cell research policies, etc.). The idea behind this stuff was that it would give Bush the political capital to tack leftward during his re-election campaign.

Spending the first 75% of the Presidential term pandering to the most extreme elements of the base is no way to be a “uniter not a divider” nor is it a way to “change the tone” for the better. The base is likely to accept the pandering and then clamor for more. The opposition party is likely to become less willing, not more, to accept an olive branch. That is particularly true if you also …

9) Spend the Last Year Campaigning to the Base Instead Of To Swing Voters

Rove’s plan to tack back to the center in the last year of the term has apparently been abandoned in favor of a plan to excite the base. The Washington Post reports:

As President Bush addressed a rally here Wednesday, he performed the political equivalent of preaching to the choir…

Although age-old campaign rules dictate that the general-election candidate must emphasize moderate "swing" voters and political independents, Bush strategists are predicting that this election, more than previous ones, will be determined by the turnout of each side's partisans…

8) Try To Have Political Opponents Arrested

There is no surer way to kill any chance for bipartisan cooperation than to try to have political opponents arrested over a political dispute. Three examples follow.

First, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas was in charge of a bill overhauling certain Medicare and other provisions. He offered a ninety page substitute bill one night then tried to ram it through the Committee the next morning.

Democrats on the Committee objected to voting on a measure they had not had time to read. Democrats insisted (as was their right under House Rules) that the bill be read in its entirety. While the clerk read the bill, the Democrats retired to a library near the committee room to caucus about how to proceed. They left one Democrat in the hearing room to object to any action requiring unanimous consent.

Thomas, upset that the Democrats had required the bill to be read, summoned the Capital Hill police to arrest the Democratic House members and evict them from the library.

Republican Congressman Ray LaHood commented that:

I've been here nine years and this is one of the saddest days we've had in the House. What has happened to the Democrats is shameful, it's embarrassing to our party. I'm sad for our party and I'm sad for the House.

Second, in 2000, the Texas legislature was unable to agree on a redistricting plan. The Federal Court then stepped in and imposed a plan. The Texas GOP was happy with the lines drawn by the Federal Courts until they did not win as many House seats as they hoped.

Tom DeLay then hatched a scheme to win more House seats for Republicans by discarding the tradition of having redistricting only once a decade.

Texas Governor Perry, following Delay’s plan, called for a special session of the Texas Legislature to redistrict in mid-decade. Texas Democrats fled the state to prevent a quorum thereby preventing the redistricting. DeLay then used his influence to have the Homeland Security Department turn away from tracking potential terrorists in order to track down the missing legislators. DeLay wished to locate the Democrats so that he could have them arrested and forcibly brought back to Austin to establish a quorum so that redistricting could proceed.

Finally, President Bush spent part of the Fourth of July at a rally in West Virginia. Nicole and Jeff Rank decided to attend the rally, acquired tickets, and showed up with the rest of the crowd. Nicole and Jeff Rank wore tee shirts to the rally that said “Love America, Hate Bush.”

Their reward for such insolence was being arrested for trespassing at the rally. They were removed in handcuffs. After the rally was over and the cameras gone, the charges against the Rank’s were dropped.

The irony of having people dragged away in handcuffs on the Fourth of July simply for expressing their political views seems lost on the GOP.

7) Have the Senate Majority Leader Campaign Against the Senate Minority Leader

Few political institutions require as much cooperation between opposing parties as the Senate. Much of the business of the Senate is conducted by unanimous consent and additional business requires a supermajority of 60 votes. Those procedural rules make cooperation necessary if the Senate is to attend to the People’s business.

The key to maintaining some bipartisan cooperation in the Senate is the relationship between the Senate Majority leader and the Senate Minority leader. To prevent that relationship from fracturing, it has long been a tradition for the Senate Majority Leader to avoid campaigning against the Senate Minority Leader and vice versa.

The Washington Post reports that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has broken that tradition:

Frist (R-Tenn.), who is heading a massive fundraising effort to deny Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) a fourth term, put his feet where his money is Saturday, traversing the state twice in 10 hours to stump for Republican John Thune. Historians say they know of no previous majority or minority leader who traveled to his counterpart's state to campaign for his ouster.

But Senate tradition and decorum are melting this year beneath the Senate's bitter partisanship, the GOP's zeal to keep its razor-thin majority, and the party's belief that it can knock off Daschle in a state that voted overwhelmingly for President Bush in 2000.

6) Accuse Democrats of Aiding Terrorists

The 9/11 attacks united America in a way that has not been seen since World War II. Al Gore gave a speech shortly after 9/11 in which he said:

There are no divisions in this country where our response to the war on terrorism is concerned. We are united. George W. Bush is my Commander-In-Chief. This country is more united that at any time I can remember in my whole lifetime…

I reaffirm again, that as Americans, all of us stand behind our President, our principles, and send a message to the world that we will win this war against terrorism.

That unity was difficult to maintain when Republicans began accusing Democrats of aiding the terrorists. After 9/11, Attorney General Ashcroft went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend administration policies.

When Democrats expressed concerns that some of those polices violated the Constitution, Ashcroft attacked. CNN reported:

Attorney General John Ashcroft lashed out Thursday at critics of the administration's response to terrorism, saying questions about whether its actions undermine the Constitution only serve to help terrorists.

Ashcroft was quoted as saying:

Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends.

If eroding our unity provides aid to terrorists, then Mr. Ashcroft, the current administration, and the GOP have much to answer for.

5) Accuse Your Opponents of Not Caring About the Security of the American People

After the 9/11 attacks, some people, including Democratic Senators such as Joe Lieberman and Bob Graham, proposed a new cabinet level agency that eventually became known as the Homeland Security Department. President Bush and the administration opposed the idea.

When political pressure became too intense, President Bush reversed course and embraced the formation of such a department. That put Democrats and Republicans in agreement on the fundamental issue but they still disagreed on the details.

In particular, President Bush wanted all 170,000 employees of the department to be political appointees while the Democrats wanted the employees to have Civil Service protections.

Mr. Bush used the dispute over civil service protection as cover to accuse Democrats of not caring about the security of the American people. The Washington Post reports:

Four times in the past two days, Bush has suggested that Democrats do not care about national security, saying on Monday that the Democratic-controlled Senate is "not interested in the security of the American people…”

Since Mr. Bush initially opposed the creation of a Homeland Security Department and argued that the failure to support such a department shows a lack of concern for “the security of the American people,” perhaps he should take a good look in the mirror.

4) Listen to Grover Norquist

By all accounts, Grover Norquist is one of the most influential GOP political operatives. A short bio is here. If you really want to change the tone (for the worse), perhaps the best way is to listen to Grover Norquist. Mr. Norquist’s position on being a “uniter not a divider” is expressed in two quotes:

"Bipartisanship is another name for date rape."

"We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals-and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship."

It appears that Mr. Norquist’s ideas have been adopted by the current administration and the current edition of the Republican Party.

3) Run a Relentlessly Negative (and False) Campaign

There is nothing like a false and negative campaign to increase partisan friction. Mr. Bush seems intent on setting records in that category. The Post reports:

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total.

2) Punish Democrats who Support Your Policies

In 2001, Michael Barone wrote an article about how George W. Bush could change the tone in Washington (for the better). He wrote:

In the run-up to the 1998 elections, I asked his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, whether Republicans would win the few seats they needed for a majority in the Texas House. We could, he said, but we probably won't, because we have a policy of not opposing Democrats who support us on one of our major issues.

With their control over the Republican Party and their ties to lobbyists, Mr Bush and Mr Rove could guarantee co-operative Democrats that they would not have serious opposition. Their goal was not to achieve narrow Republican majorities, but to create a situation where there would continue to be a reservoir of Democrats from whom they could win support.

Max Cleland fit the description of a Democrat who supported Bush on major issues. He supported Mr. Bush on his 2001 tax cut, the war in Afghanistan, and on authorizing the use of force in Iraq. Did Mr. Bush guarantee that Cleland would have no serious opposition so as to “create a situation where there would continue to be a reservoir of Democrats from whom they could win support?”

No way. The White House hand picked Cleland’s challenger who then ran a vicious campaign in which Cleland’s patriotism was questioned.

And the Number 1 way to change the tone for the worse is:

1) When Democrats Try To Be Nice, Just tell Them to F_ _ _ Off

Democratic Senator Pat Leahy and Vice President Dick Cheney disagree about many things. Recently, as President of the Senate, Cheney was on the Senate floor for a photograph of the members of the Senate. According to the AP:

Vice President Dick Cheney used an obscenity beginning with "F" in an exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on the Senate floor where members had gathered for a group photo.

Senate aides with knowledge of the encounter Tuesday said the vice president confronted Leahy about some of the Democrat's criticism about alleged improprieties in Iraq military contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. Cheney, who as vice president is president of the Senate, is a former CEO of Halliburton.

Leahy responded by criticizing the White House for standing by supporters who had accused Democrats of being anti-Catholic last year in opposing one of President Bush's judicial nominees, said one Senate aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Cheney then responded, "F-- off" or "F-- you," the aide said Thursday.

What set Cheney off was neither the criticism of Halliburton’s role in performing contracts in Iraq nor Leahy’s complaints with regard to the charge of anti-Catholic bigotry. What set Cheney off was that Leahy tried to be nice.

The Washington Times quotes Cheney explaining his behavior:

But what I really didn't like was after he had done so, then he came over — and he had done that in a public forum — and then he came over on the Senate and tried to put his arm around me and treat me as though I was his best long-lost friend. And I didn't appreciate it. And I spoke rather forcefully of what I thought about his action, and then walked off.

When Democrats try to be nice despite policy and political differences, it is time to tell them to F_ _ _ Off. Otherwise the tone of Washington might change for the better.

Policing the Borders

Medcine Lines

One of the major beefs in Indian Country since the budgetary reshuffling post-9/11 has been that this particular Republican Administration isn't putting increases in law enforcement and border control monies into the hands of tribal governments that abut the US-Canada and US-Mexcio borders. This is a special case of this particular Republican Administration not putting increases in State-targeted federal spending into the hands of tribal governments. The generic modern Republican approach to the Federal-State relationship (block grants, reserved powers, etc.) is present, but the average modern Republican approach to the Federal-Tribal relationship, since Nixon, has been much, much better than this.

The poster-child for the problem are the complaints by the Tohono O’odham Nation that it spends 60% of its law enforcement budget doing work along its 70 mile jurisdiction over the US-Mexico border the INS should either do, or pay for. About 1,500 undocumented immigrants, most from Mexico, cross the reservation every day. The Tohono O’odham Nation Tribal Police can't catch them all, and couldn't take care of them if they could catch them all, for lack of funding by, and cooperation with, the INS.

Now it is well-known that the government of Iran participated in the US Afgan War, providing support to the Northern Alliance against the Talibans, and after the fall of the Taliban Government interdicting large groups of Taliban and al Qaeda cadres crossing the Afgan-Iran border, and now holds over 500 al Qaeda cadres, some of them quite senior in that apparatus, in its prisions. As I mentioned in a recent post, one that caught the eye the spokesman of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (see comments), the US could effect the transfer of those senior al Qaeda cadres from Iranian to some other jurisdiction, say Cuban (or whatever Gitmo passes for) with ease. The US need simply shop the 4,000+ Mujahedin-e Khalq it holds at Camp Ashraf, all but about 70 of whom are already guaranteed amnesty by Iran, the rest are guaranteed that the death penalty will not be sought, regardless of the offenses charged (and there are offenses), off to the Iranian border. However, it choses not to, which sort of makes Iran's bothering to arrest and detain al Qaeda cadres of limited utility to the Iranian state.

There have been individuals and groups of individuals associated with al Qaeda which have committed criminal or quasi-military ("terrorist") acts against Iranian persons and institutions. Naturally, there are a lot more individuals and groups of individuals associated with al Qaeda which are innocent, at least of attacking Iranians an Iraninan institutions.

Finally, it is really, really, well-known that the Afgan-Iran border is about as hospitable as the Sonora Desert that the Tohono O’odham Nation Tribal Police attempt to control.

Except by the editors of Time magazine. The Tehran Times has the following from Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi, on the extent of Iran's borders and the problem of monitoring border crossings:

"It is reasonable that five or six people crossing the border illegally over a period of five or six months may evade our attention. The same happens on the border between Mexico and the United States." "It happened before Sept. 11 and who knew that Sept. 11 was going to happen?"

The good news is that the INS has illegal immigration down to a dozen people crossing from Mexico per year.

Above the fold...

Well, at least on the online version, that is.

Hourly Pay in U.S. Not Keeping Pace With Price Rises
By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: July 18, 2004

The amount of money workers receive in their paychecks is failing to keep up with inflation. Though wages should recover if businesses continue to hire, three years of job losses have left a large worker surplus.

...

Even though the economy has been adding hundreds of thousands of jobs almost every month this year, stagnant wages could put a dent in the prospects for economic growth, some economists say. If incomes continue to lag behind the increase in prices, it may hinder the ability of ordinary workers to spend money at a healthy clip, undermining one of the pillars of the expansion so far.

...

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that hourly earnings of production workers - nonmanagement workers ranging from nurses and teachers to hamburger flippers and assembly-line workers - fell 1.1 percent in June, after accounting for inflation. The June drop, the steepest decline since the depths of recession in mid-1991, came after a 0.8 percent fall in real hourly earnings in May.

Despite my keen interest in pocketbook economics, I'm not a professional. The closest I come is that my specialty in my field, archaeology, is wampum, used for a few decades in early American colonization as a monetary unit. And while my training may give me a bit of an edge over the average Joe in archival digging, there is no reason that mainstream journalists should have had any problem locating data released every month, in black and white, in the monthly jobs report (Addenda B-3 and B-4.) I first noticed the trend over six months ago, despite working 60 hours a week (at a pitiful wage, I might add):

Another issue I've been itching to talk about has been the stagnating non-exempt hourly rate, which once again, in November indicated that inflation is growing faster than worker bee earnings. From January to July 2003, non-exempt hourly earnings increased by 45 cents. Since July 2003, earnings have grown by a whopping 3 cents. Yet in the meantime, inflation, while not rampant, has still increased significantly more than wages.

The failure of the mainstream press to report such events irritates me to no end, as such laziness plays right into the hands of right-wing pundits who argue that all is well and good with our so-called recovery. While hundreds of thousands of jobs have been added in the past few months, we are still at an employment deficit not seen since the Great Depression, and the paychecks of newly re-employed worker bees are significantly lighter than before they joined the unemployment lines. Middle class Americans, who have seen their quarterly 401K reports make up much of the ground lost after the 2001 collapse of the markets and the equity in their homes (on the brink of a possible price bubble) skyrocket, are generally unaware of the pain felt by their peers on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Thus, when the SCLM fails to draw attention to the real costs of the Bush economic plan, consumer confidence rises. As consumer confidence heads up, so do Bush's poll numbers. When James Carville coined the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid," he wasn't bad-mouthing average Americans; the "stupids" were the media, who even back in 1992 often ignored the bread and butter issues voters ultimately depended on to determine how they pulled the lever, not the more sexy blather of "values" spoonfed to political journalists by agents of the Right.

I'm glad that the NYTimes has finally reassigned their economics desk from their previous stint on fashion or Kobe or the Bush twins. It's just too bad they didn't think to do it months ago.

Employees must wash hands after

This is an update to the Got CREMs? post. The Chron is reporting this now as a God damnit pay attention! No, repeat NO RUNNING WITH SCISSORS story. Here is the link. This seems vastly more credible as a story than the run-of-the-national-press coverage of only 24 hours earlier. Intern cooks eye. Tech squirts caustic goo in eye. Tech nearly fries tech. Accident, accident, accident. The Lab at Los Alamos a 35 acre playground chock full of sharps and SCIFs.

Looks like BC04 hasn't authorized the DHS or the FBI or the DoJ to run with this one. Pity. The idea of BC04 trying to do to the Regents of the University of California and the Lab management what the Clinton/Bush Administrations did to Dr. Wen Ho Lee, either to further the Cult of Fear, or the academic status ambitions of the University of Texas (remember the original midnight riders to the HSD authorization bill?) is kind of alluring.

with the Wehrmacht in Poll Land

I have to go to Geneva in September for a technical meeting and the working language is German. Over dishes this morning I was thinking about dropping in on VideoPort and picking up some episodes of Heimat I. That thougt and its similies settled on the 25 page CBS poll I was leafing through earlier this morning when I got early-riser oversight duty. In December 2001 the conduct of the "War on Terror" got 90% approval by the CBS sample population, and 6% disaproval.

September the 1st to October 26th 1939 are the dates of the Polish War, 55 total days.

October 7th to December 7th 2001 are the dates of the Afgan War, 60 total days.

Watching the Democratic left unfurl from that season of a collapse of sanity, when only one of its members could speak against the elected-by-coup Administration's choice of an Afgan War, to the present here in poll land, where now 62% think the Iraq War is not worth the casualties, it has been 34 total months. As I watched the macho text slinging at various blogs, I've wondered, where were these people when the question was real international police or fake multi-national military? At best only 12 in 100 of Democrats and "Lefties" opposed the Afgan War, and 80 in 100 celebrated the capture of Osama Bin Laden and the final distruction of the al Qaeda Group in December 2001.

Someday I'll have to post about the Nacht und Nebel-Erlass. Fortunately, there are no "Ghosts" in US-occupied Iraq, nor were there any in US-occupied Afganistan, nor anywhere else either.

---

Blitzkrieg Überraschungsangriffe mit koordinierten massiven Luftangriffen

Allawi selon Talib Shabib

Somewhere in my limited working set of blogtopia (skippy who?) I ran across this when Allawi replaced a decent physicist who didn't want to be the Occupation Authority's Chief Stuckee.

According to the memoirs of Talib Shabib, Iyad Allawi began his political life around 1963, as an assassin.

The original is here. It wasn't on Cole's site, so it must have been on an Iraqi site, or blind luck on my part. Anyway, its been google-capable for months.

Got CREMs?

Battelle, Lockhead-Martin, and the University of Texas, hope you do, or at least look to win the contract to manage and operate the Los Alamos weapons lab -- the LANL M&O Contract Competition, because you might. Two zip drives (Computer REmovable Media units) have gone missing. I recommend the coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle over the coverage in the NYT. More details of interest.

In the Cult of Fear as preached by its Evangelicals, two zip drives off-rez are a big deal. They could contain data on how to make nuclear weapons smaller, or lighter, or simply cheaper, all research goals of the Bush administration, and of course, fundamentally insane and contrary to the NPT, that the weapons inventories should monotonically decrease over time, and the cost of acquisition, as well as the life-time operating expenses, not drop to the point where the Portland Elks Club (conveniently adjacent to the Portland Jetport) could actually afford to acquire and maintain a weapon. On the other hand, they could be blank, or contain data that can't actually kill God or boil milk if given "to the enemies of the United States", which seems to mean the PRC and Israel, when the means to use new-generation weapons labs data is factored in to all the CoF rhetoric.

A few months ago it was the War on Waste that got the LANL M&O dance started. Some Lab employees actually used several thouseand dollars of public monies for private use, and that was the necessary and sufficient trigger for Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham to decid to open future Los Alamos contracts to outside bidders. The contract is valued slightly in excess of several thousand dollars.

There are always scandels at the Labs, those operated by the Regents of the University of California, or Battelle, or by the military. Some are reported, and some are eventually proven to be not quite what they were initially press-released as, and some are not reported. My favorite non-reported scandel was when a new Admiral arrived at the Naval Post-Graduate School and announced that the NPS would only allow MicroSoft's operating system product to be used by students, faculty and staff. In one act of management zeal four decades of institutional excellence was junked, the real-time weapons, ship and aircraft management, and generally complex systems education of fleet officers was replaced by the pink-collar skillset of MicroSoft Office ®, and as if that weren't enough fun for the day, a consumer electronics model for file sharing replaced the prior trusted computer system (TCS) model for machines and data security. Zip disks, flash cards, memory sticks, IR ports and SIM cards in cell phones, smart cards, ... all tending towards microdots in size, and a wintel dll. One hopes in all piety that data is only leaking out from all those Secure Compartmented Intelligence Facilities and their less secure host facilities. Heaven forfend if the data were leaking in.

From my bleary eyed point of view (POA where A has sleeping disorder), the real story is the who, why, and how of the Los Alamos Lab re-compete. For Congressional comment, see link. Anyway, look for the story to run in the national lantern show as a security scare story, and in the Chron and the contracts and security management specialty press as a re-bid story. Personally I think the second story is more interesting.

In the extended entry is something I found interesting at 5am. The document is at link. I've emboldened what I think is reading even before coffee.

NATIONAL NUCLEAR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION
The Department of Energy is responsible for enhancing U.S. national security through the military application of nuclear technology and reducing the global danger from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous agency within the Department, carries out these responsibilities. Established in March 2000 pursuant to Title 32 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 (Public Law 106-65), NNSA is responsible for the management and operation of the Nation's nuclear weapons complex, naval reactors, and nuclear nonproliferation activities. Three offices within the NNSA carry out the Department's national security mission: the Office of Defense Programs, the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, and the Office of Naval Reactors.

The Committee recommendation for the NNSA is $8,508,184,000, a decrease of $326,391,000 from the budget request of $8,834,575,000, but an increase of $330,617,000 over fiscal year 2003.

Nuclear weapons budget requirements- This Committee continues to believe that our nation's nuclear arsenal provides a vital deterrent to potential aggressors. In order to maintain a modern nuclear stockpile, the Nation needs to have a modern, efficient, and flexible nuclear weapons complex with the necessary design, production, testing, refurbishment, and dismantlement capabilities. Unfortunately, the country possesses neither a modern stockpile nor a modern nuclear weapons complex. Instead, both are largely carryovers from the Cold War era. After careful consideration, the Committee has concluded that much of the current situation results from a flawed budget process. Under the current process, the Department of Defense (DoD) establishes the military requirements for Nation's nuclear weapons stockpile (i.e., numbers and types of warheads), which in turn dictates the requirements that DOE must meet to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of those weapons. The size, capability and cost of DOE's weapons complex is a direct result of the specific requirements established by DoD for warhead refurbishments, design modifications, testing, and dismantlement. However, when DoD develops their requirements their decision process is not constrained by the normal types of budget trade-offs that an agency confronts in the process of formulating a budget request. In effect, DoD sets the requirements and leaves it up to DOE to come up with the budget to support the nuclear weapons complex each year. If these costs were funded directly by DoD, the nuclear weapons activities would be considered against other national defense priorities, such as developing improved conventional weapons, procuring more of existing weapon systems, paying ever-increasing operational and training costs, and providing a better quality of life for our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Similarly, if the costs of the nuclear weapons complex were solely determined by the DOE, they would be balanced against other DOE priorities, such as nonproliferation, science research, improving the Nation's energy supply, or accelerating the cleanup of contaminated sites. Instead, the weapons activities portion of the NNSA budget is effectively insulated from any such tradeoffs--DoD sets requirements that another agency has to fund, and DOE treats the weapons activities budget as untouchable because DoD set the requirements.

There needs to be a serious debate about whether the approximately $6 billion spent annually on DOE's nuclear weapons complex is a sound national security investment. Until that debate occurs and the DOE weapons budget request is subject to meaningful budget trade-offs, this Committee will not assume that all of the proposed nuclear weapons requests are legitimate requirements.

The Lizard Lounge is One

Its been a year since the Mozilla Foundation formalized the independence of the Lizard Lovers from AmericaOnline/Netscape.

For those who love beauty, point your browser here.

For those who love things other than beauty, point what's left of your browser on the smoldering wreakage of your wintel box here.

Quote Of the Day

The competition was fierce for today's Quote of the Day. One contender is Republican Senate candidate from Colorado, Peter Coors. The American Prospect reports:

In a debate taped Monday for broadcast on Friday, the two contenders for the GOP Senate nomination in Colorado, conservative Pete Coors and more conservative Rep. Bob Schaffer fell over each other to prove their fealty to the president's Iraq policies...

Coors took things a step further and indicated that even wondering whether or not the war was a good idea was unsound. "Hindsight's 50-50," he stated...

Despite that contender, the winner is Jeb Bush. Via Corrente, I located an Atlanta Journal Constitution article about a question posed to Jeb Bush. A high school student tested Bush' math knowledge:

Bush took the question from 18-year-old Luana Marques, who asked, "What are the angles on a three-four-five triangle?" The numbers refer to the proportions of the sides of such triangles.

Bush, hemming a bit, answered "125, 90, and whatever remains on 180."

Now, I could not have correctly answered the question but I am relatively sure that 125 + 90 is greater than 180.

Bush wins because his quote is part of a scenario I have long wished to witness. Imagine the scene at the Presidential debates this fall:

Jim Lehrer: Mr. President, the first question is for you. As both campaigns have agreed, you will have one minute to answer and then Senator Kerry will have 30 seconds for a rebuttal. Now Mr. President, a train leaves Chicago at 6:00 p.m. headed east at sixty miles per hour. At 6:30 p.m.another train leaves Chicago headed west at fifty m.p.h. At 7:30 how far apart are the trains?

Update: The fantasy question has been edited to make it easier. There is no prize for the correct answer of 140 miles. Your job is to decide what answer President Bush would actully give to such a question. Your choices are:

a) 140 miles

b) Anybody seen Dick? Well, how about Karen?

c) Jim, were those freight trains or passenger trains?

d) Why do trains always have to leave a blue state like Illinois?

e) an answer proposed in comments.

Chez Panisse et bombe a l'americaine

The Daily Californian reports that Alice Waters' group, Project Billboard, is suing to enforce its contract with Clear Channel for a $368,000 lease of a 69 foot by 44 foot advertizing space on the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. Clear Channel and/or the Marriott conglomerates claim the content of the media buy is sufficient to allow one or the other to break the lease.

If you want to see the image that can't be seen, at least isn't fit for Times Square, lick on the clink.
In the amazingly small world that is real life, well, there is a connection via East Bay French-American School. My daughter didn't like her daughter. Big deal.

Nell: Tanks for the spelling korrection.

More on gender under the Bush Administration, local edition

Nikki Kallio, columnist for the local paper of record, the Portland Press Herald, was none too impressed with Treasury Secretary Snow's take on women in the workplace:

SPEAKING OF DUMB THINGS TO SAY

When Treasury Secretary John Snow visited Portland last week and stopped at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram to talk with us, one of his responses gave me that nails-on-a-chalkboard cringe.

Our president and general manager, Rob Bickler, asked Snow whether he thought the nation's workplace productivity was reaching a breaking point and whether there was a social cost of having so many dual-income families.

Snow explained that it was impossible to go back to the 1950s, that women now sought fulfillment in the workplace. "Women are going to want to work . . . There's a couple of them right here," he said, indicating the women at the table.

Wow! There are women here! At a conference table! Imagine that. And how great to find out that we women choose to work because it makes us happy, not because we need to pay the rent. No, our big strong men can do that for us. We just want some pocketbook money to spend on bonbons.

You'd think the top economic official in the nation would be a little more savvy in his discussions concerning a sector of the population which makes up nearly half of the work force. Not too many chicks on the Business Roundtable, I guess.

I sat around that very table with Nikki Kallio six weeks ago, in my editorial board interview. Her criticism of Bush Administration policies are not just limited to Snow either; Bush's judicial nominees and advisory committee appointees also come under fire.

It is certainly time for Democrats to start banging the drum that W does not stand for Women (in case you're not clear on that, click here.)

Equally important, however, is for Democrats, men in particular, to take this issue seriously. I was thoroughly disheartened yesterday as I surfed through the blogosphere to see time and again posters hijacking threads on the leaked White House pay data for non-relevant commentary or links. Women and their issues deserve more than just lip service.

This Friday, on the 156th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, the Kerry-Edwards campaign plans to highlight women's issues and concerns. Now, granted, we should be doing that every day, but I urge the lefty blogosphere to follow suit and turn down the testosterone on this campaign. Showcase local Democratic women candidates, interview women activists, sign up to help NARAL, NOW or the White House Project.

Interdicting the Swiss Navy

My intellectual home is Berkeley, and I was pleased when Barbara Lee, who represents Berkeley, as well as Albany, Emeryville, Oakland, Piedmont and Castro Valley, voted against the War in Afghanistan.

When H.J. Resolution 64, (S.J. Res. 23), Authorization for Use of Military Force (Short title) was debated I remembered the hotel I stayed in once in Amsterdam. It was a small hotel and the "collectibles" that covered all the walls were the badges, patches, blazes, hats, and pins from police departments all over the world. Tracking Mohammad Atta and his group and their supporting groups required a criminal investigation, it was work for InterPol. I didn't want the investigation prevented by an elective war, and none of the other justifications offered for military conflict with the Taliban government seemed distinct from the rationals offered by Soviet authorities two decades earlier. The missions to "preserve Socialism" or "establish Democracy" are interchangable.

Authorization for Use of Military Force - Authorizes the President to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.

States that this Act is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of the War Powers Resolution.

Emphasis added. The vote in the Senate was 98-0, the vote in the House was 420-1. Dennis Kucinich voted for H.J. Res. 64.

In his post today Juan Cole "argues with" George W. Bush's Tuesday speach. To be fair, Cole shreds Bush on every point but this one. That I write this should not dissuad anyone from reading Cole on every other Bush claim.
Bush claims:

Bush: The world is changing for the better because of American leadership. America is safer today because we are leading the world. Afghanistan was once the home of al-Qaeda. Now terror camps are closed, democracy is rising, and the American people are safer.

Cole responds:

Cole: The Afghanistan war was the right war at the right time, and it did break up the network of al-Qaeda training camps from which terrorists would have gone on hitting the United States.

While Afganistan is larger than Switzerland, if one were to posit that all the Cantons of Switzerland were under the control of relentlessly anti-materialist Calvinists, all joined in a common purpose of articulating some military force structures against the United States, then after cutting the wires that feed the Gnomes-of-Zurich banking system, and negociating watch and intercept agreements with Italy, Austria, Germany, France, and a second tier of watch and intercept agreements with the bulk of European and Mediterranian states and transit infrastructure operators, and prudent watch and intercept agreements with domestic and adjacent foreign-landing transit infrastructure operators and the Coast Guard and Border Patrol, the liklihood of any Swiss military mission achiving its primary goal is hard to even imagine. There is even a shorthand for this degree of technical incapacity -- the Swiss Navy. Now there's something that curled Chester Nimitz's toes.

Cole ceedes the effective policy of containment and isolation to the Afgan War parties, Republican and Democratic, though he joins in the large minority who argue that containment and isolation were sufficient to vacate any "pre-emptive" necessity arguement by the Iraq War parties, Republican and Democratic. He goes on to point out that Afganistan is back in opium poppy agriculture and the heroin trafficing economy.

I listened to the debate the evening of October 11th, 2002, when even NPR's newsreaders and commentators openly ridiculed Senator Robert Byrd and his attempt to stop the rush to the Iraq War. It is a night now regreted by between 42% and 50% of the US electorate. The numbers are from Zogby, from last December to July. I can't imagine the Iraq War party getting as much support, and possibly even the votes of every Democratic primary candidate then in either the House or the Senate, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, had the Afgan War party failed the night of September 14th, 2001, and the response to September 11th a police investigation within the Treaty System, with containment and isolation ongoing in the Afgan-adjacent states, perhaps even up to the present, or even for years to come, rather than militarized invasion under the geographically displaced fiction of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I read Juan Cole's Informed Comment every day I read anything on the net, but I cannot agree with him that the Afgan War was the right war at the right time, and the selective abandonment of containment and isolation as a policy for managing asymetric warfare is incomprehensible.

I suppose in the interests of full-disclosure that while writing this I should mention that I was summoned to the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland) for the Autumn technical meeting of a secret organization I belogn to which may or may not be the Swiss Navy.

Americans close their pocketbooks

Retail sales took a major hit in June, dropping 1.1%.

Retail sales fall in June
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Retail sales slid a larger-than-expected 1.1% in June, the Commerce Department said Wednesday in a report showing the American consumer struggling to deal with the effects of high energy prices. The June decline was the largest since a matching 1.1% drop in February 2003. Stripping out a large decline in auto sales, retail purchases fell a smaller 0.2%.

Both measures were weaker than anticipated by economists, who had projected a smaller 0.6% fall overall and a 0.2% rise in sales excluding autos.

...

In June, auto sales plunged 4.3%, worst showing since February 2003's 4.6% decline, accounting for a large portion of the broad slump in sales.

But other categories also showed weakness. Department store sales fell 0.8%, while sales at clothing stores dropped 0.5%. Gas station sales reversed part of a big jump seen in May, falling 0.9%. Restaurants and bars saw business decline 0.8%.

One thing which is important to note is that these numbers are not adjusted for seasonal variations or inflation. So while May numbers jumped 1.4%, gas prices in May also skyrocketed more than 15%. Pump prices retreated a bit in June, but are still at near record high levels. So this big drop in total receipts occurred despite an increase in inflation.

It appears that the combination of high gas prices, increasing inflationary pressures and stagnant hourly wages may be causing consumers to tighten their pursesprings. This should set off major warning bells for economists monitoring the "recovery", as retail spending has essentially kept the US economy affloat for the past three years. And as mortgage rates threaten to creep up, few homeowners will be cashing out their equity, or buying, and thus furnishing, new homes.

Of course, the Bushies will have some positive spin on this. Please post in comments should you come across such before I do.

Flashback Wednesday, Medicare Fish Tales edition

Me, writing here at Wampum on the then proposed Medicare prescription benefit, July 7, 2003:

Seniors are concerned that once a Medicare drug plan is passed, the companies which provide their retirement packages will drop their own, more comprehensive, coverage.

Today, in the New York Times:

Medicare Law Is Seen Leading to Cuts in Drug Benefits for Retirees
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON, July 13 - New government estimates suggest that employers will reduce or eliminate prescription drug benefits for 3.8 million retirees when Medicare offers such coverage in 2006.

That represents one-third of all the retirees with employer-sponsored drug coverage, according to documents from the Department of Health and Human Services.

No aspect of the new Medicare law causes more concern among retirees than the possibility that they might lose benefits they already have.

The key issue that the Time article misses is that these findings, released by HHS, were the crux of chief HHS actuary Richard Foster's planned testimony to Congress. Of course, that testimony never occured, as Foster's boss, HHS top administrator Thomas Scully, threatened to fire him if was upfront with Congress. This is particularly surpising, as Robert Pear, author of today's piece, also wrote this just a week ago:

Inquiry Confirms Medicare Chief Threatened Actuary
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON, July 6 - An internal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services confirms that the top Medicare official threatened to fire the program's chief actuary if he told Congress that drug benefits would probably cost much more than the White House acknowledged.

A report on the investigation, issued Tuesday, says the administrator of Medicare, Thomas A. Scully, issued the threat to Richard S. Foster while lawmakers were considering huge changes in the program last year. As a result, Mr. Foster's cost estimate did not become known until after the legislation was enacted.

But neither the threat nor the withholding of information violated any criminal law, the report said. It accepted the Justice Department's view that Mr. Scully had "the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress.'' Moreover, it said, the actuary "had no authority to disclose information independently to Congress.''

Mr. Scully, who resigned in December, in part to become a lobbyist for health care companies, had denied threatening Mr. Foster but had acknowledged having told him to withhold the information from Congress.

Would it be too much to ask that Robert Pear remind his readers of the link to his previous writing on the subject, even if doing so underscores the fact that misdeeds by this Administration do have measurable consequences? Or perhaps Pear just has issues with short term memory loss.

Mardi a la Maison

Well, the fridge is clean and I've spent a pleasent 90 minutes listening to A la vôtre, which today played variations of La Marseillse, as one would hope for today. As the music and words rolled over the surfaces of the kitchen and out the open windows, and I labored in the fridge, washing and wiping and discarding and rewrapping and storing, what was running through my mind were stories. Stories of impossible beauty and love, of kindred spirits finding each other under the moon and parting by day, of love, of love, of love foreshadowed by unkind fate. The Bear Wife, The Woman who Married a Serpent, the Buffalo Woman, the Man who Married a Deer. They roll off the mind's tongue in an unweaving strand of connections to other stories and our place in the world, and each so transparently from the time of dogs, across the greatest of divides.

One of the PAC questionaires sent to MB was from the Maine Sportsman's Alliance, on a question on the November ballot -- should Maine continue to allow the taking of bears over baits?

Now the question itself is a diversion. Maine has serious environmental problems, its fish are dual-purpose -- useful either in vapor-lamps or as field thermometers, but hardly something a person should eat, unless they are shopping for a bad case of bottle sickness and the tremors, without the warmth the bottle brings. Asthma is endemic, there is smog over Acadia, and the Old Boys at the Department of Fish and Game operate under the assumption that the guide-to-taxidermist value-chain takes in more than kayaks, cycling, camping and eco-tourism. However, that institutional, political and gender critique wasn't the first mental doughnut that glazed my eyes, -- it was the sacrilege. It was one of those moments when the whole invisible edifice, comes crashing silently down into one's lap, and one has to look at things as they are. It is lying in wait to shoot men at the doors of bars.

The writing group at Akwesasne managed to make one face of this edifice visible in 1978 in A Basic Call to Consciousness. Those writers weren't afraid to put it in black and white -- domestication was a wrong turn, Indo-Europeans de-spiritualized the Indo-European world, spirituality is the highest form of politics.

When I followed the link from Dwight's post and found this

"It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife."

I was amazed by the scope of the speaker's vision, the depth of his mind, that he could see the possibility of The Man who Married A Box Turtle, the spirit person on who's back muskrat placed the spot of mud that grew to become this world, this Turtle Island.

I thought Ah ha! A spiritual Colonial! How excellent and rare!

Of course, author of the comment ment to hold up the real world as the devil's land, something not desired, and desire a mere thing to domesticate.

Christians working themselves into a tizzy over sex is pretty entertaining, but they should be talking to each other about sexism, the domestication of women. It won't fix everything, but its a start. And yes, Virginia, it is turtles all the way down.

The other "Two Americas".

I've often alluded to this election season as being "testosterone driven". Both Bush and most of the rivals for the Democratic nomination built their campaigns on appealing to men, and not just NASCAR-dads. The war in Iraq, terrorism and pissing off the UN occupied the headlines and the debates, these were the hot points of the stump speeches and disputes among the candidates.

I became an Edwards fan early on due to his rejection of the testosterone-laden campaign strategy. Despite being from a state with a significant military presence, Edwards emphasized bread-and-butter issues, drawing attention to the tens of thousands of texile workers whose jobs had been eliminated or moved off-shore under Bush's tenure. He also openly spoke of hot-button issues important to women; education, the economy, civil rights. And if you scanned any audience to which Edwards made his "Two Americas" appeal, you could see the nodding of heads, particularly those of women.

See, for many women in America, the "have vs. have not" allegory is not just one of economics, at least not economics in a vacuum. Despite assertions to the contrary (usually as justification for the dismantling of affirmative action programs), the gender imbalance in America is alive and well. And the fact that many have worked so hard, and with great success, to assert that gender bias no longer is a factor indicates that we may in fact be worse off than in the years where the struggle was accepted as valid.

Some have argued that there is really no such thing as sexism (or racism, for that matter), that it is all a matter of economics. Women are more vulnerable because of their tendency to inhabit the lower rungs of the economic ladder. However, this week’s settlement between Morgan Stanley and the EEOC over blatant discrimination against women even in senior positions undermines that argument.

The stories of rampant sexism filtering out of the case are disheartening; hostile comments, cakes depicting women’s anatomy, and trips to strip-clubs. Qualified women passed over for promotions and raises. Treatment one expected prior to women entering the workforce in equal numbers to their male counterparts, prior to diversity training and the politically correct workplace.

And then there were the denials and smokescreens: According to the Times version, the lead plaintiff, Allison Schieffelin, was not a victim of discrimination, but the perpetrator of an inter-office cat-fight. Schieffelin, a senior executive at Morgan Stanley, saw her position terminated in 2000 after she contacted the EEOC regarding discriminatory treatment in her workplace:

She contended that the firing was a retaliatory act, but Morgan Stanley officials countered that Ms. Schieffelin was fired for insubordination after turning hostile and disrespectful toward her supervisor, a woman who had recently received the promotion Ms. Schieffelin sought.

Ironically, this is not an unusual tactic in deflecting accusations of sexism; if the facts are against you, muddy the waters with overtones of a slap-fest between women competitors. Men in particular are reluctant to get involved with the “messiness” of personal disputes.

If you think that government is a safe haven from gender discrimination, think again. A separate story in the Washington Post describes the disparity in pay and status in the Bush White House. In this case, the discrepancy didn’t arise within similar job classes; men and women were paid the same for equal work. Instead, women failed to break the glass ceiling.

At the White House, the gap has nothing to do with wage discrimination: Women and men with similar titles receive similar pay. Rather, it comes from the dominance of men in high-end jobs; of the 17 White House staffers earning $157,000 -- the top of the pay scale this year -- 12 are men. That's roughly comparable to the 26 percent representation of women in the federal government's 7,000-person Senior Executive Service, according to the Partnership for Public Service.

[This figure is close to the current representation (22%) of women in the Maine Legislature. Sadly, however, that number has declined dramatically over the past 15 years, from a high of 35% in the late 1980s. This year, in light of the current dearth of women nominees in both major parties, that number is likely to drop into the teens for the incoming legislative class.]

Allison Schiffelin and the other 340 mid- and upper-level executive women at Morgan Stanley are heros; despite having achieved relative economic and professional success, they were willing to risk everything in order to bring attention to blatant misbehavior based upon the fact they were women. John Edwards, as well, was courageous enough to shrug off the mantle of machismo, willing to focus instead on issues of the head (and pocketbook), not just of the cohones.

Within Democratic “hackery” circles, John Kerry was criticized during the primary season as relying to heavily on the Old Boy Network, pulling much of his early staff from the ranks of the graying male dominated establishment. Fortunately, whether Teresa lobbed him upside the head, or he came to the realization himself, he began to change that image (warning, potential for accusations of “flip-flopping”), including the addition of Mary Beth Cahill as his campaign manager. And while a truly brave act would have been naming a woman such as Mary Landrieu as his running mate, his choice of Edwards and his “estrogen-laden”, multi-faceted Two Americas message shows Kerry may have finally gotten it.

Pass The FARM Amendment

Many proponents of amending the constitution to prohibit same sex marriage talk as if their true worry is not really same sex marriage. Instead, they worry that the slide down the slippery slope will end with people marrying animals.

John Smoltz, the Atlanta Braves pitcher was recently asked about same sex marriage. He replied "What's next? Marrying an animal?"

Via Charles Kuffner, I learned that Texas Senator John Cornyn spends his days in fear that if the Constitution is not amended, folks will be marrying box turtles.

Timothy Daily, a Senior fellow at the Family Research Council is worried that people may start to marry ponies.

Then there is Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum but you already know about his worries about relationships with canines.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal Constitution proposes action to end such concerns:

If the real, underlying issue in this debate is the fear that human beings will someday be allowed to marry animals -- if Smoltz, Dailey and others are honestly and truly worried by that prospect -- then let's address that issue head on. Let's pass a Federal Animals, Relationships and Marriage amendment to the U.S. Constitution that outlaws all interspecies marriages, period.

The FARM act would have two other important advantages over the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. First, this is a deeply divided nation, and the last thing we need is something to get us even angrier at one another. What we need instead is something that will unite us, a cause that all of us can rally behind. And surely all Americans … can get behind the FARM act and thus protect human-to-human marriage from this dire threat.

By championing the FARM act, President Bush could finally make good on his promise to be a uniter, not a divider. And John Kerry could use the amendment to demonstrate yet again that there are some issues too important to compromise on. As far as I know, he is now and has always been opposed to human-animal sex, even during the '60s.

Bookman has hit upon a good idea. If we pass the FARM Amendment, the slow slide down the slippery slope to marriage between humans and animals will be averted. Even more importantly, proponents of the Federal Marriage Amendment will have to create another straw man (no straw animals allowed) to fill up time on the cable news channels.

Manila cuts the cord

Juan Cole writes today that [i]t would be interesting to tally up the number of countries that left or are leaving Iraq May-September this summer. Al Jaz has the breaking news that President Arroyo has agreed to withdraw its 50-troop contingent from Iraq.

Update: Fester's Place is keeping track of the in/out flows of record.

Experience, Part I

Many folks are talking about whether or not John Edwards has the experience necessary to be on a national ticket. Edwards’s experience consists of one term in the Senate and his time as a trial lawyer.

Some people seem to think that six years in elective office is insufficient to appear on a national ticket. Howard Fineman, for instance, writes in Newsweek that:

Except for Ike, I can’t think of anyone in modern times that entered electoral politics and gained a place on a major-party ticket on such a hurried timetable.

As Josh Marshall points out, Fineman failed to think about a number of people.

1) Richard Nixon was Ike’s running mate in 1952 after only six years in the House;

2) Wendell Wilkie had never held elective office before becoming the Republican Presidential nominee in 1940;

3) George W. Bush had six years as Governor of Texas before his 2000 run;

4) Tom Dewey had a combined seven years as a District Attorney and Governor of New York before becoming the Republican Presidential nominee in 1948;

5) Adali Stevenson had served for four years as Governor of Illinois before his 1952 run for President;

6) Spiro Agnew first ran for office in 1962 and was the 1968 Vice Presidential nominee; and

7) Geraldine Ferraro served three terms in the House before her 1984 run for Vice President.

In addition, 8) George H. W. Bush’s only experience in elective office prior to his 1980 run for the Vice Presidency was four years in the House.

All told, there have been thirteen presidential elections since 1952. In nine of those elections at least one candidate had served six or fewer years in elective office when he or she first appeared on a national ticket. In six of those elections, a candidate appearing on the ballot for the first time had six or fewer years of experience in elective office.

In sum, Fineman is correct only because he is very, very good at not thinking.

Brad DeLong’s Investment Advice

Brad DeLong is asked for some basic investment advice and provides some sound answers:

I don't think I'm qualified to give investment advice, so I don't. But if I did think I were qualified to give advice, I would say:

1. Large house--a bit larger than you think normal--financed by a fixed-rate mortgage. (Unless you are in New York, DC, SF, or LA, where things are weird right now.)

2. 401Ks--as much money as you can put into them and other tax-shielded vehicles.

3. Additional savings--automatic, and a few steps more than you are comfortable with: the future if very uncertain, and there may well come a point where you will want to have more money than you thought you might possibly need.

4. Vanguard, I say. Put your money in one of the equity-heavy Vanguard index funds, one that places a large share of its assets overseas. Vanguard's fees are very low. You get all the risk-reducing benefits of diversification, and you get a high expected return. You can do better only if you are a professional investor--and only then if you are in the top fifth of professional investors.

5. For intellectual background... start with Burton Malkiel's _Random Walk Down Wall Street_ and Benjamin Graham's _The Intelligent Investor_. For something more amusing, try Adam Smith [George Goodman's] _The Money Game_. For something heavier, try Graham and Dodd's _Security Analysis_...

I am also not qualified to provide investment advice but if I were qualified, I would make two additional points.

First, Brad fails to recommend the best investment of which I am aware. It often earns 18% per year or more and carries no risk. The fist step of any investment strategy should be to pay off all credit card debt. It is insane to invest in the stock market, with its 11% average annual return, while paying 18%-22% on credit card debt.

Second, there are a number of reasons why Brad put investing in a home at the top of his list.

Among those reasons is the effect of leverage combined with the magic of tax free compounding. Let’s look at how the leverage works. Assume you purchase a house for $200,000 with a $40,000 down payment and a $160,000 mortgage.

If the house appreciates 4% in the first year, it would be worth $208,000. You will have gained $8,000 of equity on a $40,000 investment for a rate of return of 20%. Those gains compound each year without a taxable event.

You have to pay the interest on the loan, of course. Even there, investing in a house makes sense. Mortgage interest is deductible so, in effect, the government will pay roughly one-third of your interest expenses and you get to live in the house without paying rent. At least in this region, investing in a house is a no-brainer investment decision.

If you decide to purchase a home, please consider making half of your mortgage payment every two weeks instead of making the entire payment once a month. Assuming your mortgage has no prepayment penalty and that your payments will be immediately posted to your account, you can knock about eight years off of a thirty year loan.

On a $200,000 fixed-rate mortgage at 6.5%, making a half payment every two weeks instead of a full payment once a month will result in interest savings of more than $60,000 over the life of the loan.

The reason for those savings is two-fold. As a year has 26 two-week periods but only 12 months, you will be making one additional mortgage payment each year. Secondly, the fact that half of your monthly payment is posted two weeks early reduces interest costs.

As many people are paid every two weeks, the bi-weekly payments are also convenient for cash flow management.

Only after all credit card debt is paid and a house purchased is it sensible to begin looking for additional investment vehicles.

Unbreakable?

What baseball record is the least likely to be broken? I have long thought that Cy Young’s record of 511 wins is unapproachable. Second place on the all time wins list is Walter Johnson with 417 and no pitcher active in my fifty years has exceeded Warren Spahn’s 363. Twenty years averaging twenty five wins per year would leave a challenger short. Unless the nature of the way pitchers are used changes dramatically, Young’s record should be safe for a long, long time.

I recently ran across another record that may be difficult to surpass. Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves is 32 years old. He is in his eleventh major league season. Before that he played five seasons in the minors. Before that he played in high school and before that he played in Little League. No team on which Jones has played has ever finished below first place in the regular season.

I am not aware of anyone who even approaches that record of winning.

Wash dishes, clean fridge

From 10:30 to noon Tuesdays I'm resolutely in-kitchen, with the radio on, listening to A la Vôtre. Jacques Santucci and whoever else is down at Falmouth Street run through an interesting playlist (see link), somedays featuring l'afrique francophone, somedays l'amerique francophone, and of course, l'europe francophone. If there is one thing about A la Vôtre I would like to see changed, its that Jacques and his guests reduce the amount of air-time given over to spoken English.

The coming Tuesday will see the fridge cleaned from stem to stern.

Yesterday Jonah and I went to the local mall, looking for a wall clock, time having stopped since MB attempted to re-hang the mystically-synchronized-with-the-atomic-clock time piece from BJ's some days ago. Having everything happen at 8:30 every day is sort of a nuisance, and time an elegant way of demultiplexing experienced events. We were not successful in our quest, but we had a nice walk, POA and A, hand-in-hand, through Sensory-Overload-Country, daringly in underwear. One of the things that we broght home that is-not-a-clock is the July edition of Le Monde diplomatique, and I read bits of it while Jonah (later joined by Sam and Gracie and Kezzie but with that many targets to track, my eyes fail to focus on text and my dwell-time on any target is sufficient for station-keeping only, not reading) played that he was being driven, or was driving, to Honolulu.

So I read the closing page essay, Vivre avec les Arabes, jumping over the subtitle and reading with growing interest, even excitement, the text of the essay. It was great, and a gazillion mental miles above the tripe John Kerry wrote last February and was published by a Brown University student group. Mid-essay, the author posed the core problem:

Il faut donc vivre avec les Arabes, bon gré mal gré. Et avec les Arabes non résignés. Alors comment faire?

It was so good, it felt like an Indian wrote it. Someone who didn't start with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, or Stout Cortez silent on the Peak at Darien, or Cristobal Columbo either profoundly lost or amongst una gente en dios, as something other than value-free, or worse, value-positive starting points for narratives of two peoples. When I read the opening lines of the concluding paragraph,

Nous somes en 1967. Il serait temps de rechercher l'accord des Arabs à qui cette terre fut enlevée. Non pas d'Arabes mythiques, d'Arabes souhaités, d'Arabes tels qu'on les voudrait convertis miraculeusement aux thèses israéliennes par les exhortations de pro-sionistes du monde, les leçons des professeurs de morale, la lecture de l'Ancien Testament ou des classiques du marxism-léninisme. Mais des Arabes tels qu'ils sont, refusant d'accepter sans contrepartie une conquête réalisée à leur détriment.

It was fucking brilliant. Of course we're still in 1967, the UN Resolution 242, the boarders, the alignments of all the parties to the conflict, nothing's really changed since the Six Day War. I got to the final sentance, the hope that builders and planters could chose a path other than distruction, and sat back and let the words hum in my head. Then I glanced back to the opening and read the subtitle and involuntarily cried out "Holy Shit!!!", which got Jonah's attention in the car. The essay originally appeared in Le Monde on June 4th and 5th, 1967. The day the months and weeks of increassing skirmishes, waterway closures, shoot-downs, and rhetoric, spilled over into the general conflict called the Six Day War.

I can't tell time. Or time has stopped. Or its the same time as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

We Get Letters

As someone who has written reasonably extensively about autism, I often receive letters espousing theories of the causes of autism or promoting various cures. One such letter I received recently said, in part:

Autism is a congenital-disease, but not purely genetic; which is steered by the planetary effects, particularly the Moon is responsible for the said disease…

In a nut shell, this could be said that autism is purely a lunatic but a semi-genetic disease. I can help to combat autism, with the knowledge of astrology, provided being offered with a conducive environment of work. But, of course you should get my work tested.

I think I will pass on testing the writer’s work. Normally such letters provide a moment of amusement before the delete key is pushed.

Coming on the heels of the conviction of Ray Hemphill for killing an eight-year old autistic child while trying to exorcise the demons he believed caused the child’s autism (see the post immediately below), I am having a little difficulty in finding my sense of humor.

Hemphill Guilty

A Wisconsin jury has convicted Ray Hemphill of felony child abuse in the death of eight-year old Terrence Cottrell. Hemphill, a school janitor and lay minister, is subject to a sentence of up to five years in jail.

Terrence Cottrell’s mother, Pat Cooper, had turned to Hemphill and other members of the independent Faith Temple of the Apostolic Faith Church for help in dealing with her autistic son.

Church members, in their ignorance, thought that Terrence’s autism was caused by demons. Accordingly, they held a number of “exorcisms” in an effort to drive the demons from Terrence and cure his autism.

As CNN reports:

The boy's mother, Patricia Cooper, and two other female parishioners told investigators that they made the child lay on his back on the floor of the strip-mall based church. They then helped to restrain him while the defendant laid perpendicular across Terrance's chest for almost two hours, praying and whispering aspersions at the devil into the boy's ear.

With a full grown man lying on his chest for more than 2 hours in 80 degree heat, Terrence Cottrell was unable to draw breath and died of asphyxiation.

Hemphill’s brother, the “Bishop” of the church, still refuses to believe that the church members did anything wrong:

The brother of a minister on trial for suffocating an autistic child during an exorcism told jurors Thursday that it was God who "took" the child, not the defendant's intense ritual.

"I'm the pastor and God has ordained my brother to be an evangelist, he has the gift to cast out devils," David Hemphill testified…

David Hemphill, 63, was not in attendance that evening, but he told jurors he gave his brother permission to perform the exorcisms as an attempt to save the boy from what they believed was demonic possession.

"I've seen God heal some people, and then I've seen God didn't heal some. So all we're asked to do is to believe in the word of God," David Hemphill testified during direct examination by Hemphill's attorney, Thomas Harris.

Hemphill told jurors it was his church's belief that God sent Jesus to heal those who are sick, and in turn, several members of his church, have been given the "gift" of healing hands.

"Is there any sickness or disease that's too hard for God or believers [to heal]?" Harris asked.

"No, there's nothing too hard for God, and nothing too hard for his believers," Hemphill testified, adding that they only pray for sick people who ask to be healed.

If all the church members had done was "believe in the word of God," Terrence Cottrell would be alive today. Terrence Cottrell did not ask to be saved by exorcism. Indeed, the evidence at trial showed that he struggled against his restraints until he was no longer able to draw breath.

It is not for me to criticize the religion of others. It is not the role of the state to regulate religious belief. Nonetheless, when religion goes beyond mere belief and takes the life of an innocent child whose only crime was to have been born with a brain that functions differently, the state must step in.

I do not believe that Ray Hemphill or other members of the church intended to harm Terrence Cottrell. I think that they were honestly trying to cure him.

Neither their ignorance of the nature of autism nor their subjective good faith excuses the conduct of holding a child down while the weight of a full grown man compresses the child’s chest until all life is squeezed out. After all, the death happened in Milwaukee in the twenty-first century not Salem in the 17th century.

Hemphill was guilty of being ignorant about the nature of autism and reckless with regard to the safety of the child. Ignorance is not a crime. Recklessness that causes the death of a child is.

The jury returned a verdict that spoke the truth.

ICANN in, and not in, the news

MB came into my office and said "You should blog about this, ICANN finally getting some cojones, its in today's WaPo." To tell the truths, journal-of-record-coverage-of-ICANN doesn't mean there is anything news worthy happening, and the report by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee is four months post-hoc, and almost 90 pages long, and a problematic work itself, which I may get around to trying to write about for the non-specialist. The SACC document is on the main ICANN website, http://www.icann.org.

One thing the journals-of-record have been silent on that is both ICANN and news is the status of the .iq namespace, which vanished in the buildup to the US-Iraq war.

Here's a story I think is more important. It features John Ashcroft in person and Robert Mueller in person, the US AG and the Director of the FBI. Mueller even made an explicit connection between "9/11" and the arrests when they first happened in 2002. I'll have to dig up that bit of insane drunkenness.

After 26 months in federal custody, the Elashi brothers were convicted of selling computers to a Lebonese broker in Malta, who then sold the computers to Libya and Syria, without first obtaining an export license. This has the look and smell of a harassment case, but a conviction, no matter how absurd, lets Ashcroft and Mueller off the hook for yet-another-careless-political-prosecution.

The connection between the US-Iraq war and some commodity Wintel boxes going from Texas to Malta supporting 26 months of pre-trial detention and up to 10 years of sentencing, is that Bayan Elashi was entrusted by my friend the late Jon Postel to operate the Iraqi national domain name space, the .iq zone -- which winked out of existance and has remained "dark" ever since, because it pleased the United States, and ICANN, that it should.

More after I read the trial record. To be continued.

Return of the ... One True King (part 8)

David Ignatus writes in today's WaPo Lost Chances in Iran a piece that discloses yet another amazing NeoCon adventure in the making, this time in Iran.

Post invasion, the US and its partners in crime had bagged about 4,000 members of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, which I last mentioned with something less than admiration in part 4, which contains a link to an OpEd piece in the the NY TImes by Ali Safavi, who cheerfully mentions Maryam Rajavi (Mujahedin-e Khalq) as a bell weather for the popularity of Western-initiated regime change in Tehran. Interested readers should read this. Negociations, described in Ignatus' piece, resulted in a pledge by Tehran to

grant amnesty to most of the 4,000 Mujaheddin-e Khalq captives, to forgo the death penalty for about 65 leaders who would be tried in Iranian courts and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to supervise the transfer.

So far, so good, unless one has drunk the Mullahs-always-lie koolaide served at a surprisingly large number of wholesale and retail political koolaide outlets in the United States, one of the glow-in-the-dark subtexts of the waiting-like-coyote US-Iran War.

What would the US get in return for this largess to a civilized Iran?

Over 500 al Qaeda cadres, bagged by Iran in the Winter of 2001-2002, and another group of senior al Qaeda cadres, up to the General Staff equivalents in that organization, who were bagged by Iran in the Spring of 2002. Not thousands of indiscriminately arrested Iraqis, including children, but a significant fraction of the al Qaeda general combatant, field command, and head-quarters staff officer populations.

So why did our Idiot King prefer to keep 4,000 Mujahedin-e Khalq cadres in some jug or another in Iraq, rather than trade up for better quality cadres who actually want to blow up Washington, rather than Tehran? Because Cheney's gang of idiots think they're going to overthrow the Mullahs and the Majlis with the Mujahedin-e Khalq.

For those that don't follow Iranian politics, it is difficult to characterize just how unlikely it is that the
Mujahedin-e Khalq can affect "regime change" in Tehran. For those that do follow American politics, giving blanket amnesty to al Qaeda cadres who choose to be disarmed and taken into custody in Iran, and not invoking what amounts to an extradition agreement to interrogate senior members of the al Qaeda movement, should contribute to "regime change" in Washington.

Worker bees get squeezed, and it finally shows

A report on consumer spending released today indicates that the drop in average worker wages is now having an impact on consumer spending:

Consumer Spending Growth Slowed in May
Fri Jul 9, 2004 11:48 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Growth in U.S. consumer spending slowed in May as lower real wages and house prices, combined with fading benefits from tax cuts, squeezed middle-class Americans, a report showed on Friday.
Deloitte Research said its Leading Index of Consumer Spending fell to 5.30 percent in May from 5.84 in April, as a polarization in incomes -- with gains concentrated at the high end of the wage spectrum -- prompted consumers to curtail shopping.

"Reduced housing-related sales and the decline in real wages will produce a slowdown in spending by middle-class households," said Carl Steidmann, chief economist at Deloitte.

"However, luxury goods retailers should expect better sales from higher income households due to a rise in profit growth and interest income."

Let's not forget the impact of higher gas and energy prices as well, as more of the weekly paycheck goes into the gas tank.

Just how bad is the decline in real wages? Here's an update from a series I began late last fall.

Ironically, personal incomes have consistently increased over the past year, but that appears to mainly be related to the 40% increase in the value of the stock market. If you're a lowly worker bee with no investments, the economic "recovery" appears to have left you behind.

Of course, if you complain, Republicans will merely label you a pessimist. Besides, eventually, all that extra income at the top will trickle down, as tips to former-manufacturing-employee-turned-waiter.

Perfect Victims

I have been watching the trial of Ray Hemphill on Court TV. Hemphill is the school janitor and part time “minister” who presided over an alleged “exorcism” or "prayer session" of autistic eight-year-old Terrance Cottrell. That “prayer session” ended with the child’s death. I have previously written about the tragedy here and here. I will report the Hemphill verdict once the jury completes its task.

While watching the trial, I was reminded of exactly how vulnerable autistics are to accident, crime, abuse, and cruelty. It is in the nature of the disability that autistics are perfect victims.

For instance, any four-year old walking down the street with his grandfather and who spies his Dad walking on the other side of the street might dart towards his Dad and be hit by a car.

Christian Castillio, a four-year-old autistic boy died in such an incident recently. While any four-year-old might run into the street, such accidents are more likely to occur to an autistic child. Autistic kids are more self-focused, less aware of dangers, and lack judgment. My own son once left the house on his own and was found, half dressed, in the middle of the street walking in the direction of a busy intersection, completely oblivious to any danger. Our doors now have key operated dead bolts and remain locked at all times.

Not only does autism make accidents more likely, routine, everyday sorts of crimes may have a greater impact on autistics than on neurologically typical people. It is distressing for anyone to have a burglar break in and steal stuff. When that happens to an autistic child, the results may go far beyond the simple loss of property.

Elliot Walters is a 12-year-old autistic from Scotland. Burglars recently broke into his house and stole video games, jewelry and other items. Among the stolen items was a computer that allowed Elliot to communicate. His autism prevents him from speaking and the computer speech machine “enabled Elliot … for the first time in his life to put his thoughts into words and take part in school lessons.”

Elliot’s mother Suzanne said: “Everybody is absolutely devastated. It’s unbelievable.

“He was so successful in using it and we were so pleased with the outcome. With this he could actually say ’This is what I want’.

“He got to 12 years of age before we heard him make any vocal comments of his own choice. They have effectively taken away his voice.”

Fortunately, a local charity replaced the machine.

One characteristic of autism is a lack of social skills. Autistics act differently and their behavior may attract unwanted attention. Awkward and strange behavior can be a magnet for bullies.

Simon Taaffe, an eighteen-year-old autistic from Scotland, was unfortunate to encounter a group of such bullies. The judge in the subsequent criminal case described Simon as “a vulnerable, trusting and harmless person … academically about seven to 10 years in age, emotionally, too.”

Simon met three teenage bullies. They punched, hit and kicked him. He had a tooth knocked out. They then stripped him naked and threw him out onto the street. Why did they assault Simon? “Just for fun.”

It is more distressing when it is adults who abuse autistic kids “just for fun.”

In Australia, an Adult Training and Support Center is being investigated for abusing intellectually disabled adults.

An intellectually disabled man was taped to a chair and gagged while others in need were left for hours in their own urine, according to allegations by staff at one of Queensland's most prominent charity organisations…

The Australian has learnt the allegations include instances of leaving a woman who had urinated in her clothes unattended for several hours; yelling and verbally abusing disabled adults; deliberately shocking an autistic man with loud noise, causing him to go into a panic; and throwing the clothes of a woman who had undressed into a toilet cubicle while she screamed in confusion.

Another allegation involved a man being taped to a chair and gagged.

In Israel, the autism ward of a hospital has been closed after suspicions of patient abuse arose:

The Ministry of Health closed the autism ward of Jerusalem's Eitanim Mental Hospital following suspicions that the staff was abusing patients.

The ministry's inspection committee found, among other infractions, that members of the staff dressed one of the patients in women's underwear, forced other patients to eat their meals off the floor and forbade patients to speak or move as punishments.

Minister of Health Dan Naveh suspended all suspected staff members from their positions and forwarded the committee's findings to the police.

The patients will be moved to other facilities.

Autistics also suffer from the ignorance, lack of training and even cruelty of some people placed in positions of authority.

While at school in Perth, Australia, a 12-year-old autistic boy was locked in a cage sixty times in a six month period.

The autistic boy was properly separated from the class for hitting and pushing other students. Even putting aside the issue of whether it is ever appropriate to lock a boy up in a cage, he was often locked up for trivial behaviors. The boy was locked in the cage 23 times simply “for rocking, grunting and being edgy.”

Rocking, making noises, and being “edgy” are just part of the autistic terrain and warrant no punishment whatsoever, much less being locked in a cage like an animal.

Closer to home, a New Jersey couple responsible for caring for an autistic adult have been found guilty of starving their charge to death:

A couple from the mid-Hudson Valley has been convicted of starving an autistic man to death.

Phil Payne and his wife Darlene, both 46, of Unionville face up to 15 years in prison for second-degree manslaughter for the November 2001 death of John Ward, 56.

Ward … moved in with the Paynes in 1992… Ward weighed 80 pounds when his body was found in the Payne home, about 78 miles northwest of New York City.

In North Carolina, an autistic man died in police custody, suffocating in his own vomit:

An autistic man who died after he was arrested choked on his own vomit, said the pathologist who conducted an autopsy.

The cause of death for Sidney Templeton, 44, was "gastric aspiration due to severe agitation due to autism," said Dr. Patrick Lantz, who performed the autopsy.

Statesville police were called to Templeton's home Saturday by his mother, Mary Templeton, who said her son hit her after becoming upset with a new home health care aide.

Officers arrived around 5:20 p.m. and found the aide in her car and Sidney Templeton circling it, said Statesville Police Chief Stephen Hampton.

Templeton assaulted and spit on the officers, who restrained him with handcuffs, leg restraints and a special hood to protect them from potential blood-borne pathogens in his saliva, Hampton said.

Once at the Iredell County jail, Templeton struggled with officers as they attempted to get him out of the police car. When he choked, officers removed his restraints and began performing CPR before a rescue vehicle arrived to take him to a hospital, the sheriff said…

Lantz said autistic people can become severely agitated when their routines are disrupted. People who become so upset they choke on or inhale their vomit almost always have an underlying medical condition, such as psychiatric or neurological disorders, or are intoxicated, said Lantz, a forensic pathologist at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem.

A healthy person most likely would cough up the vomit, Lantz said.

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by problems with speech and language, interacting with others and controlling emotions. Mary Templeton said her son did not speak.

Mary Templeton said Sunday she had called police during previous outbursts by her son and that officers took him to the hospital. Hampton did not say why officers decided to take Templeton to jail instead of a hospital.

I very much doubt that the police intended to harm Templeton and they surely are entitled to be protected from the transmission of disease. Nonetheless, I can not help but think that better training in how to deal with an autistic having a meltdown could have avoided the death.

I wish I could say that it was difficult to find the above examples of how autistics are perfect victims. I can not. I simply put “autistic” into Google News and each of the above stories was in the first several pages of listings. Each of those stories ran in the last several days. I often run Google News searches for “autism” or “autistic” and I very rarely fail to see such stories.

As a society, we often make extra efforts to protect the perfect victims. Banks put money in vaults. Convenience store clerks work behind bullet-proof glass and put large bills in a safe. We lower the speed limit around road construction work. We need special efforts to protect autistics because they are perfect victims.

The answer usually lies in education and supervision. If you are a POA, visit your child’s school often and sometimes unannounced. Find out who is running that summer program. Do not leave your child with anyone unprepared for the responsibility. Make sure the police in your area are trained in dealing with autism. Perfect victims need extra supervision.

One of the most troubling aspects of the death of Terrence Cottrell is that his mother was present during the prayer services. She turned her autistic son over to ignorant and irresponsible people but she was present to supervise the activity. Even under constant, direct parental supervision an autistic child can end up a perfect victim. That is a disturbing thought.

GOP doubting Thomas-pollsters go public

I generally don't read National Review Online, but my curiousity was piqued by the teaser paragraph on Google.news for Bob Dole pollster Tony Fabrizio's column:

Am I the only person in America who noticed that the chief strategist of the Bush-Cheney campaign, Matt Dowd, inadvertently predicted Bush's loss to John Kerry...

Clicking through to the text of the article, I was rather surprised by Fabrizio's unabashed critique of his Bush Administration counterpart, Matthew Dowd, particularly Dowd's email to Bush/Cheney supporters warning of a rather significant Kerry bounce leading up to and immediately following the Democratic Convention.

I understand that Dowd and company want to set expectations low, but isn't a prediction of a 15-point shortfall in August a bit over the top? Won't even Bush's most ardent supporters see the race as lost if he is down by 15 percent at that point? Worse still, Dowd is predicting this a month before he thinks it will actually happen, and yet he doesn't offer a plan to combat it!

Fabrizio has good reason for concern: Bush Sr.'s favorable rating dropped 12 points after the 1992 Clinton-Gore Democratic Convention in NYC to 29%, it's lowest level in his presidency, and down from a high of 92% in February, 1991, at the peak of the first Gulf War. He got a 10 point bounce out of the GOP Convention two weeks later, but saw his poll numbers retreat from that blip, back down to the mid-30's throughout the summer and fall of '92.

As a pollster himself, one expects Fabrizio might know a thing or two about the subject. It's rather surprising that Matt Dowd seems so blaze' about the possibility of plummeting favorables for his boss. Perhaps he knows something the rest of us, including out-of-the-loop Republicans, don't.

"Seasonal adjustments" strike again

Jobless claims for last week were released a few minutes hours ago:

In the week ending July 3, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 310,000, a decrease of 39,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 349,000. The 4-week moving average was 336,000, a decrease of 10,250 from the previous week's revised average of 346,250.

Wow! That must mean the economy is still getting better, that the recent jump in claims in the past few weeks was just a "blip". But it's important to note that the official number is "seasonally adjusted".

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 351,137 in the week ending July 3, an increase of 32,751 from the previous week. There were 483,401 initial claims in the comparable week in 2003.

Now I'm not here to argue that there are statisticians at the Department of Labor plotting insidiously to defraud the American people by manipulating jobless data. However, the possibility for that scenario did increase substantially this year when the DOL and BLS moved to a seasonal adjustment which can be altered quarterly versus only once a year.

To give the DoL some credit, they did admit that the adjustments may have been a bit off mark, due to the fact that not all the companies they expected to shut down for their annual maintenance actually did so last week. Generally, the second week in July is the when most businesses shut down, which is why the seasonal adjustment is 127.0 (last week's adjustment was 113.2.)

So will we then see a huge jump next week? Hence the importance of the 4-week rolling average.

The good news is that although headlines generally touted the 4-year "low", the articles themselves were a bit less willing to cut the Administration any slack, speculating that the dip was just a blip on the screen.

Yes, Americans hate lawyers

Which is why all these movies, with legal eagle heros and heroines, were all such flops. Not an Oscar in the bunch, I bet.

The Verdict
A Civil Action
To Kill a Mockingbird
Inherit the Wind
Philadelphia
Runaway Jury
Erin Brockovich
Amistad
And Justice for All
My Cousin Vinny
Suspect
The Accused
The Client
A Time to Kill
Witness for the Prosecution

And of course, all those millions John Grisham made off of his ten or so novels on lawyers. Obviously, consumers were misled as to their content.

I really think GOPers are missing the boat here, just as they did when they attacked teacher's unions. The problem with setting up these evil stereotypical straw men is that the vast majority of average Americans have a friend or relative who went to law school. Besides my fair partner here at Wampum, I can count on both hands, and maybe both feet, the number of kind, honest, socially responsible attorneys I know. And they are the ones I want defending me should I need them, particularly against the cold, heartless corporate giants. Can't say I can count many multi-billionaire CEOs amongst my friends and family.

Spirited or Mean-Spirited

Having returned from a great beach trip, I wish to discuss the distinction between a spirited campaign and a mean-spirited negative attack. You may think that the difference is in the character or tone of the information being disseminated but that does not appear to always be the case. Take, for instance, the issue of attacking a candidate as a trial lawyer.

After John Kerry announced his decision to add John Edwards to the ticket, Republicans promised a spirited campaign. Dick Cheney called Edwards and, according to a Cheney spokesman:

the two men had a ``brief but very cordial conversation'' in which Cheney said he looked forward to ``a spirited competition'' that ``reflects credit on the process.''

President Bush concurred, promising “a good spirited contest”

Scott McClellan joined in the spirit of the day:

And as you heard earlier today, the President said he looks forward to a spirited and honest debate on the issues. And the Vice President, as well, looks forward to a spirited discussion of the issues, and he called Senator Edwards earlier this morning and welcomed him to the race, congratulated him on being selected. And the Vice President indicated that he looked forward to the debate and a spirited campaign.

The President and the Vice President both look forward to a spirited discussion of the issues. (Emphasis added).

While the President, Vice President and Press Secretary were looking forward to a spirited debate on the issues, other GOP operatives were attacking Edwards as an evil trial lawyer. GOP Senator Kit Bond remarked on Fox News that the selection of Edwards “"locks up the personal-injury-lawyer vote." The RNC called him a “friend to personal-injury trial lawyers."

The New York Times remembers that attacking trial lawyers is part of the Karl Rove playbook.

Yet Mr. Edwards's background as a trial lawyer before he entered the Senate is already drawing fire from another group with even deeper pockets: business leaders and manufacturers. Few things are capable of uniting industry groups as much as their opposition to trial lawyers. And few politicians have been as adept at exploiting that hostility as President Bush, who, at the urging of his political adviser Karl Rove, has made attacks on trial lawyers a central part of his political strategy ever since his first run for Texas governor a decade ago.

So, can we conclude that attacking trial lawyers is simply part of a “spirited campaign” “that reflects credit on the process” without going over the line to become a negative, mean-spirited attack? Perhaps it depends on the party of the person being attacked.

In addition to the Presidential race, there is also a Senate campaign going on in Florida for the seat being vacated by Bob Graham. Mel Martinez, the former head of HUD under President Bush, is running in the Republican primary as is Bill McCollum, a former House manager of the Clinton impeachment.

The Bush administration supports Martinez. The only problem is that Martinez is a former President of the Florida Academy of Trial Lawyers.

After Kerry announced the selection of Edwards, McCollum posted an ad on his web site attacking Martinez as an Edwards like trial lawyer.

Martinez quickly responded that the ad was a “mean-spirited, negative attack.''

So, is attacking your political opponent as a trial lawyer part of a spirited discussion of the issues that gives credit to the process or a mean-spirited negative attack? It would appear to depend on whether or not the person being attacked is a Democrat or a Republican. Imagine that.

Palesky, the Two Maines, and electing Kerry/Edwards

After leaving Cobscook State Park in Washington County, MB insisted that we stop in at Lamoine State Park in neighboring Hancock County. I knew we were in trouble when we emerged from the back roads were were taking to percolate down towards Acadia National Park from Route 1 and fetched up at the entry to Lamoine State Park. It looked like a gated community. Neat exhuberantly excessive masonary piers every rod or so supporting six foot high wrought iron fencing. Manicured lawns, divided by neat, level gravel roadways. Tidy brown painted ranger huts and sensible signs.

If Lamoine were magically transported, like the Land of Green Ginger, to eastern Washington County, the local people would live there, at least some would, driving out the desirable monied people on vacation from away.

Washington, Aroostook (the County), and the rest of Maine outside of York, Cumberland, Sagadahoc and Lincoln Counties are the other Maine, the part that keeps attempting to remind the policy elites of both parties that there are two Maines, two economies, two income levels, and two very different percentages of the population that lives near, at or below poverty levels. A Maine that is a safe seat for average Democrats, and a Maine that is a safe seat for no one in particular -- the 'have" and "have not" halves of Maine.

Now Palesky itself has problems translating from the icon of poor Mainers living in shacks overlooking Paradise Cove, where the rise in property values due to the influx of seasonal and retirement property buyers has caused property tax hikes, along with registered mail from the town tax office, followed by pay-or-quit noties, followed by sheriff's eviction-notices, to the rest of Maine were poor Mainers live in shacks and non-shacks untroubled by an influx of new monied neighbors and the problems they bring. The theory of property tax relief has no local properties, it is location independent, but the practice has local properties, it is location dependent, and irrelevant to the other Maine. The problem is, someone who can "sell" ideas to that second Maine has to sell the antidote to the dream of a simple, universal fix for what ails a known to be ill State of Maine. None of the current crop of Maine Dems fits the bill, which is why Palesky is on the ballot in the first place. The same "sale" has to be made to the Dems in the richer half of Maine, but not that Palesky is irrelevant, rather that it will profoundly transform local and state governments, eliminating most of the former and necessarily increassing the later, mostly to the benefit of those new monied neighbors and the corporations that will share the "taxpayer relief".

As I've mentioned before, the Maine Dems are horked. John Baldacci and majorities in both legislative bodies could not get a sales tax increase or any other reasonable pizza pie of bits of this and that tax policy or a local sales tax authorization to offset property tax. Like California before it, abandonded by its political class, Maine drifts as brainlessly as a pithed frog towards the hungry submerged pike driven by frustration, anger, greed, party, and like all fish in Maine, mercury. An "anything but Palesky" consensus has not emerged and the Maine Municipal Association and some progressive umbrella organizations are putting forward still-disjoint campaigns and beginning to interview for staff, unconnected to either the Kerry/Edwards campaign, necessarily run out-of-state, and the remnants of the prior Coordinated Campaigns for the Dems down-ticket. Since I've taken pains to avoid mentioning it in the past, the Party Chair has problems too.

Kerry/Edwards has already won the 1st Congressional District and its one electoral vote, York and Cumberland Counties, it is the 2nd CD and its one electoral vote, and the balance-of-state and its two electoral votes, three out of Maine's four, which Maine's Dems and Carol Palesky have taken away from both progressive, municipal and local rule Maine and the Kerry/Edwards campaign.

To win all of Maine, the two Maines, both for Kerry/Edwards and against Palesky, and necessarily for every Dem down-ticket, from Michael Michaud down, John Edwards needs to come to Maine and gandydance the tracks of the mill towns from Millinocket to Lewiston, doing the Two Americas speach.

Then again, if the two Johns can win without Maine, Maine's Dems can be left to stew in a pot of their own making. Changing my party affiliation from D to G has had an effect on my tolerance level for fake progressives and live-Dem-or-Die electoral strategists. It will be a while before I forget the Party Animal yelling at me across my own kitchen table because removing a visibly insane Portland Dem in this Fall's general would mean letting a hated local Republican (flat taxer, but otherwise sane) get to Augusta for two years.

Not a crime?

This morning's NYTimes reported a stunning follow-up on last Spring's jaw-dropper that Medicare's chief actuary's job was threatened if he told Congress the truth about the real cost of Bush's proposed drug-benefit plan. An investigation by HHS found that the analyst, Richard S. Foster, was threatened by his boss, Medicare chief, Thomas A. Scully, with the loss of his job if he reported accurately to Congress. The shocker is that HHS also determined that lying to Congress is not a crime!

But neither the threat nor the withholding of information violated any criminal law, the report said. It accepted the Justice Department's view that Mr. Scully had "the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress.'' Moreover, it said, the actuary "had no authority to disclose information independently to Congress.''

Hmmm...first the Justice Department asserts the Commander-in-Chief has absolute power any time US troops are involved in conflict around the globe. Now Ashcroft's minions declare lying to Congress, or "withholding information" under duress, is perfectly acceptable.

I'm curious as to whether the DOJ's lawyers spend any time actually investigating crimes (Enron, Halliburton, Plame) or if they now sit around all day justifying Bush's takeover of the government.

Juan Cole and Eric on Edwards as VP

Professor Juan Cole has a must read on John Edwards and Iraq.

North Korea and Iran are treated as a nuclear ensemble in the common-to-both-parties political lexicon. I'm going to try and seperate out the Iran part, and try and delineate that part of the JRE text that differs from the standard Axis-of-Evil text. New readers please keep in mind that I write about Iran from time to time, in a series called Return of the ... One True King. A link to the last part is here.

In his major primary piece on pre-emption and nukes, the only "justification" offered by the Bush/Cheney administration for its Iraq War with any theoretical legs, Edwards thoughtfully listed the Soviet-era warhead inventory management problem first.

60 percent of Russia's nuclear material remains unsecured. That country has 20,000 nuclear warheads and enough material to produce 60,000 more Hiroshima-size bombs.

This is a good begining, 20,000 weapons and a fissiles inventory capable of 60,000 additional weapons is catagorically different from North Korea's hypothetical half-dozen, or Iran's centrifuges.

Edwards' first "post-Soviet" talking point is establishment of a new Global Nuclear Compact (GNC) to reinforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The implementation language is overtly multi-national and repeats the explicit mechanism of assistance for peaceful use in exchage for strict controls over waste and reprocessing of the Clinton/Gore administration. While not explicitly a UN or an existing Treaty Organization, "leading nations" and nuclear technology overlaps with the Permanent Members of the Security Council, which means France, the Federation of Independent States, and China, as well as Japan and Germany. Broadly, an approach distinct from the Bush/Cheney record, and one Tehran appears to seek.

Edwards' second "post-Soviet" talking point is a UN Security Council vehicle to make economic sanctions easier to apply when the requisit condiditions arise. The "carrot and stick" approach of the GNC institutionalized by the primary Treaty Organization. Again, an approach distinct from the Bush/Cheney record, and one Tehran appears to seek.

Edwards' third "post-Soviet" talking point is to triple the spending on securing the "loose nukes in the former Soviet Union", and to end development of two new weapons technologies -- "bunker buster" nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic missiles. This is as anti-Bush/Cheney as one can imagine, and Tehran has no interest in "loose nukes in the former Soviet Union" finding any use in West Asia.

Edwards' fourth "post-Soviet" talking point is to strengthen our intelligence capability, and no sane person in Tehran or anywhere else wants to see another US military adventure based upon bad intelligence. This approach is inconsistent with the administrations punitive and criminal outing of working WMD covert intelligence officers.

Edwards' fifth "post-Soviet" talking point is creating a high-level NPT role in the administration. Again, a position Tehran is more likely to appreciate than the current incoherence and outing of working WMD covert intelligence officers.

Having less time than Professor Cole to write (I've a housefull of unruly post-vacation weasels to mind and lots of washing to attend to, not to mention paid work) my Edwards-and-Iran thinking is that he's wicked better than the BC04 war-rhetoriticans. Granted, the US-Iran war hasn't happened, yet, but the insane desire for war has been bubbling under the surface of both states since the fall of Reza Shah and Jimmy Carter, and it is only one accidental or one calculated act away. As Vice-President of the United State, John Edwards seems more unlikely than most to succumb to the lure of the ongoing phoney war with Iran, let alone let the fiction escape from its confines and consume whole armies and cities, as the phoney war with Iraq has. I will sleep better at night when he is Vice President.

Afternote: Since "breach of the NPT" gets so much attention in the Axis-of-Evil demonology, it is useful to read Article X of the NPT:

1. Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

Iran hasn't withdrawn from the NPT, but it seems that the current administrations in Washington and Tel Aviv would like it to do so.

Recovery checking into rehab?

Hope you all didn't blink as the rip-roaring recovery went speeding by.

U.S. ISM Services Index Falls to 59.9 in June From 65.2

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- A private gauge of the U.S. service economy fell more than expected in June to the lowest level this year.

The Institute for Supply Management's index of financial services, construction, retail and other non-manufacturing enterprises dropped to 59.9 last month from 65.2 in May. It reached a record 68.4 in April and has exceeded 50, indicating expansion, since April 2003.

The report, along with government figures Friday that showed job gains and auto sales were less than expected in June, suggests the economic expansion may be starting to cool. Economists said higher prices for energy and other needs such as food may be crimping consumer spending, an economic driver the past several quarters, prompting some to lower their forecasts last week.

I was out camping and invading Canada this past weekend, so missed the unemployment report. Others, of course, adeptly covered the lukewarm news. I did take a quick peek, however, at Addendum B-4, and noticed that, yet again, worker-bee constant wages, i.e., those adjusted for inflation, fell to $8.21, down 4 cents from April, and is 8 cents below last June's hourly rate. This indicates once again that while those average unemployed Joes and Janes may be finally finding jobs, those jobs are at Walmart and MikeyD's rather than good-paying union positions at Timken and International Paper.

Other than jobless claims, not much else is coming out this week. Next week, however, is another story, and may well offer a good indicator as to whether Bush's economic recovery should be checking itself into the Betty Ford clinic.

Yes!

Time to put my Edwards bumper sticker back on the minivan.

Update: I went googling through the Wampum archives, and found that it was last July when I first saw John Edwards speak in Portsmouth.

Running away...or research?

While Eric has been the most prolific poster on Wampum these days, I have been lurking around while trying to determine my political future. But this weekend, we both will be abandoning our readership, heading east, to Cobscook Bay, to camp with the kidlings for the holiday weekend. Cobscook State Park is one of the few places in Maine where one can clam without a permit, which in and of itself is a draw for me. See, I suspect few of the half-million so Wampum readers have ever questioned our website's name. Why Wampum?

Well, despite the fact I'm published on the subject of quahog and whelk beads, as well as the gender aspects of shellfishing in the pre-Contacta and Ethnohistoric periods, I've yet to dredge up a single mollusk. So one of the projects this weekend is to understand the mechanics of clam digging. Granted, the ten inch clam rake I just purchased from Hamilton Marine most likely has no relation to the tools of 16th Century Maine Indians, but I'm willing to bend the rules a bit.

Anyway, see you all on Monday. Tom, the wonderful field director, will be house and pet sitting, so drop on by and share a beer with him if you're in town.

Aljazeera's poll

Who's court?

The poll this week at Al Jazeera's english language web site is this: Is the tribunal set up to try Saddam Hussein legitimate?

Professor Cole notes that polling data in Iraq is split 40/40 on whether Convict Hussein should be executed or President Hussein allowed to live in peace. Of course, from our North American vantage points, we could be projecting our social division on what to do with Convict or President Bush. The bi-modal distribution of the Iraq opinion poll data is awfully familiar and comfortable, like an old flannel shirt for mornings clamming at the beach (on wampum's todo list this weekend).

It took me 1 second before I clicked on the "no way jose" button. Your milage may vary.

We get mail

A regular reader from ... um, some place other than Nunavut wrote in with a piece from American Buisness News on the settlement announced yesterday by Banc One Investment Advisors, part of Banc One, the sixth largest bank holding company, to settle a mutual funds fraud case brought by the SEC. Interested readers please see Accounting Web.Com.

We're happy to oblige.

Another reader writes asking something far different. Alexandra Samuel (alex@dearralph.com) wrote as follows:

I'm writing because I think readers of your blog would be interested in a
new way of helping to get George Bush out of the White House: by persuading
Ralph Nader to drop out of the Presidential race. I hoped you would consider
telling them all about it.

She then goes on to describe the mission of www.dearralph.com. All very fine and good. The trouble is, we're hacks. We don't care who voted for the Nader/LaDuke ticket in the last cycle, except for Florida and New Hampshire. In the current cycle we don't care if everyone slightly to the Left-of-Lenin in New England (outside of Maine and New Hampshire) votes Cobb/LaMarche (Green) or Nader/Camejo (Reform), John Kerry will still get all the electoral votes (outside of Maine and New Hampshire). There are plenty of non-hack sites where people can go non-linear about the generalized hypothetical effect of one or the other minor parties on the Great March to Victory over Crawford. Marcos' comes to mind. We only care about voter behavior in the swing states, where the electoral votes are in play.

In keeping with this, Patty LaMarche made the Maine papers this week by saying she'd vote for Kerry . She votes in Maine, and with Palesky on the November ballot (Jarvis-Gann zombies pursue Steven King, film at 11), three of our four electoral votes are the RNC's to loose. Kerry's 13 point lead in Maine has evaporated, see link. Of course, Maine is handled by the DNC and the national campaign as a vacation trip for deserving Massholes, so its not something we Mainiacs should bother our heads about.

Funny how no one thinks that Ralph could pick up the GoGos. Those poor people are stuck with religious orgies in-lieu of public policy, serried ranks of square-jawed whiteshirts who can now imprision for silence, and Enrons, tending towards Wallmarts locally, as pro-business policy.

A hiccup in the economic recovery?

While most economic news has been relatively bright these past few months, a small, dark cloud appeared on the horizon this past week. It may just bode a passing shower, but it's worth noting nonetheless. Three reports, which looked at separately might not merit a second glance, when viewed together are a tad disconcerting. First off was last week's durable goods report, which indicated a 1.6% drop in big ticket orders. This was the second month in a row orders took a slide, and the losses were generally across the board in private manufacturing. Had it not been for the whopping 14% increase in defense orders, the overall drop would have been even greater.

The next two reports of concern came out this week; the Chicago PMI and the ISM (Institute of Supply Management) Index, both of which saw decreases, particularly the Chicago survey, which dropped 11.6 points. These reports survey the businesses themselves, and are generally highly regarded by market analysts. Taken together with the Census Department's durable goods orders report, they indicate a pattern one hopes, for the economy's sake, does not continue.

AP reported this morning that the slight uptick in jobless claims was the impetus for a 100+ point drop on Wall Street. I tend to believe that those who watch the indicators for a living are a tad more saavy, and the manufacturing reports carry more weight than a small increase in unemployment.

(Note: also out this morning was May construction spending, which also failed to meet expectations with a mere 0.3% increase (down from April's 1.2% hike.)