Citizen Cain

Rahm Bombs

2006-04-22T08:03:00.000-05:00

Rep. Rahm Emmanuel was on Real Time with Bill Maher last night, promoting his new book, "The Plan." He said that there are five points that the Ds need to get across to the public, plus one other point. Already, this doesn't seem like great marketing. Five points plus one point? What the hell is that? How about six points? Anyway, here they are:

1. Balance the budget in five years.
2. Make college education as universal in the 21st century as high school education was in the 20th century.
3. Every who works gets health care.
4. Create a "hydrid-based economy" and cut America's dependence on oil in half in ten years.
5. Create an "institute for science and engineering" to do for new technology and new jobs what the NIH has done for healthcare.
Extra bonus point. Bring the country together for a common purpose and a common mission.

Are you feeling inspired? Me neither. Citizen Cain can do better. Here's my seven point plan:

1. Provide tax relief to average Americans, while making sure that corporations and wealthy people pay their fair share
2. Double federal support for education.
3. Everyone gets health care. Basic health care insurance is no longer tied to employment.
4. Cut America's dependence on oil in half in ten years and begin to address global warming through major incentives for energy efficiency and for alternative energy.
5. Make the country more secure through a serious commitment to homeland security, to rebuilding America's alliances, and through a focus on destroying al Qaeda.
6. Restore competence and integrity to government, with lobbying reform and a commitment to a government that works for all the citizens, not just the wealthy and politically connected.
7. Protect social security.

Assignment: discuss, in the comments section, the many reasons why Citizen Cain's plan is superior to Rep. Emmanuel's plan. No fair saying that seven points is better than five points plus one point-- I already said that.

In subsequent posts, Citizen Cain will grade your answers.

Iraq: Now the Bad News

2006-04-04T20:27:00.000-05:00

In the last post, we looked at some good news from Iraq-- the increasing capability of the Iraqi security forces. Today, we look at the bad news. And, as with all good new/bad news jokes, the bad news (almost) completely negates the good news.

There's a lot of bad news. Here's just some of it:

Those increasingly capable Iraqi security forces are, in most cases, just ethnic, religious or tribal militias in uniform, with little loyalty to the central government. Anthony Cordesman, who was the source of most of our good news in the last post, confirms that this is the case.

The prospects for the government of national unity that Condoleeza Rice and Jack Straw want the Iraqis to put together look increasingly dim. It now seems likely either that a government just can't be formed, or that the new government will leave significant groups unhappy and ready for war. In addition to the Shia-Sunni-Kurd conflict, the chances are rising of intra-community battles.

Baghdad and several other parts of the country are in the throes of ethnic (or religious) cleansing. While much of the country is relatively calm, that calm has been secured largely by ethnic, religious or tribal militias. As ethnic cleansing heats up, it is increasingly likely that these militias will mobilize nationally in an attempt to secure territory. Think Yugoslavia after Tito. Think Lebanon in the 1970s. If that's the case, the improved "quality" of these militias will be poor consolation.

If conditions continue to deteriorate, the United States will face some hard choices. No choice is good, but it is clear that as the civil war intensifies, and as Shiite militias become increasingly capable of taking on Sunni extremists, the case for U.S. withdrawal is strengthened. It's one thing to help a government fight against an insurgency, another to participate in or try to stop a civil war.

Citizen Cain has always been leery of just pulling out of Iraq, because as bad as conditions are, they will get worse if the civil war moves from assassinations in the night and battles involving platoon-sized groups, and takes on the scale of battalion-sized military units engaging in artillery duels in the middle of cities. But there’s a limit. We can’t go to war on the side of the Madhi army, and we there’s a limit to the casualties that we should accept in the name of keeping the violence in Iraq down to a low simmer.

Maybe there’s a way to pull out partially or gradually that will limit the risks to our soldiers while giving the Iraqis some chance of stabilizing the situation. I’m dubious. But we have to face the significant possibility that we can’t win in Iraq at an acceptable cost, and prepare for it.

Iraq: First the Good News

2006-03-29T16:22:00.000-06:00

The right wing talking point of the last fortnight seems to be that the MSM is failing to report all the good news from Iraq. Laura Ingraham, William Bennett, Michael Fumento, Howard Kaloogian, George Bush, and many others have all pushed this theme.

Stephen Kaus asks the right question. What, exactly, is the good news that the MSM is failing to report? For the most part, I agree with the Kaus's answer: there is no good news. In one area, however, I disagree. Unlike Kaus, I think that there is evidence that the Iraqi army is increasingly capable, and that one could make a case that this "good news" is underreported. However, I would argue that the good news about the improved ability of Iraq's military forces is overwhelmed by terrible news in the broader political situation, and that as a result, the overall picture in Iraq is terrible and getting worse.

Kaus is understandably skeptical of claims that the Iraqi military is improving:

Is it [the underreported good news] the Iraqis taking over the battle? We have heard that before and the statistics then went backwards. Laura Ingraham acknowledges that the previous iterations were false ("I think what we're doing now in Iraq is maybe finally the right thing. The Iraqi military is taking over more of the battle space."), but neither she nor the government seems to have anything specific. Saying that "more and more Iraqis are taking the fight," as President Bush did on Thursday is a little short in the evidence department.

Good point. Since Laura Ingraham and George Bush failed to tell us that the Iraqi military was in bad shape before, they're hardly credible when they tell us know that the situation has improved. However, we needn't rely on them. Anthony Cordesman of the Center on Strategic and International Studies is one of the leading American experts on Middle Eastern militaries and the author of Inexcusable Failure: Progress in Training the Iraqi Army and Security Forces as of Mid-July 2004. If the title doesn't convince you that Cordesman is willing to be critical of the administration, here are some details:

. . . failed dismally to execute their plans in the security sector . . .

and:

The CPA never standardized its public reporting on the status of Iraqi training, although the data always implied a much higher level of training than actually took place. The training data on the Iraqi security forces were also altered in ways that disguises the level of training in most services in the in CPA reporting issued from April 2004 onwards, by implying that training under the Ba’ath regime, or limited on the job training under the Transition Integration Program (TIP) was adequate.

and:

Most of the training was little more than at the token level . . .

and:

No single mission is more important than security, and no Iraqi popular desire is clearer than that this mission be done by Iraqis. The US has been guilty of a gross military, administrative, and moral failure. It seems to be finally taking steps to correct these mistakes, but its past history shows that detailed progress reporting is essential, and that the US military has been reluctant at best to come to grips with the need for an effective effort.

So if Cordesman thinks that the quality of the Iraqi military is improving, I think we should take notice. Here he is in a February 15 draft report:

In spite of the problems facing Iraqi forces, they have made major progress. Changes in the US led Coalition advisory effort have led to steadily higher selection and training standards and better equipment and facilities. Embedding US training teams in each new Iraqi unit, and pairing them with US combat units until they could operate on their own, has made a major qualitative difference in the field. More and more Iraqi units have come on-line.

and:

By early December, a total of 50 battalions were at Level 1-3 readiness and active in dealing with the insurgency. In March 2005, there were only three battalions manning their own areas—all in Baghdad. A total of 24 battalions were in charge of their own battle space in October and 33 in late December. In January 2006, the US army transferred an area of operation to an entire Iraqi army division for the first time in Qadissiya and Wassit provinces, an active combat area south of Baghdad. In early February 2006, 40 of the army’s 102 battalions had taken over security in the areas where they operated, and in contested areas, such as parts of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra.

and:

The Army was making real progress in developing effective personnel. NCO and specialist training improved, officers and NCOs now had considerable experience, and most training institutions were now functional. The Iraqi Military Academy at Al Rustamiyeh, modeled on the British academy at Sandhurst, graduated its first year-long course of 73 officer cadets on January 19, 2006.62 The NCO academy at Q-West Base Complex was also fully functional, and provided training to NCOs which had already demonstrated their capability by serving in Iraqi forces. A "master trainer program" to teach Iraqi NCOs how to train other Iraqi soldiers was underway and producing significant numbers of graduates by January 2006.

Is this enough progress? Does this progress excuse the administration's earlier failures? No. But it is progress nonetheless.

But how important are these changes? Does the fact that Iraqi security forces are improving mean that the overall situation in Iraq is improving? Are we making progress? Citizen Cain says no. Our next post will cover just a few of the reasons for pessimism.

(note: lightly edited for format and to add links on 4/2)

Citizen Cain: Prophet of the Israeli Election

2006-03-28T19:39:00.000-06:00

After Ariel Sharon was incapacitated by stroke, conventional wisdom was that his newly-formed Kadima party would be in trouble and that Likud would be resurgent. Citizen Cain resisted the conventional wisdom put forth by lesser minds and prophecied the victory of the center-left and the exclusion of Likud from the new government. From January 5:

Citizen Cain's bold prediction-- a coalition that excludes Likud will win. Some combination of Kadima, Labor and smaller parties, who will continue the policy of selective unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians.

Events prove: never bet against Citizen Cain.

Even Worse

2006-03-26T22:41:00.000-06:00

Zeyad reports that al-Iraqiya TV has been highly critical the U.S. attack on Madhi army militiamen, described by the U.S. as a terror cell. Al Iraqiya is referring to them as "martyrs."

How bad is that? Al-Iraqiya is the U.S.-funded network that is supposed to be the pro-American alternative to al Jazeera. Apparently, we can't even buy a friend in Iraq any more.

Untenable

2006-03-26T20:50:00.000-06:00

The situation in Iraq keeps getting more untenable. The Washington Post reports that U.S. and Iraqi forces killed at least 16 members of a "terrorist cell" tied to Moqtada al Sadr. This cell, according to the Post, was "responsible for attacks on soldiers and civilians."

Of course, while some of Sadr's followers are engaging in terror attacks, others are holding positions in Parliament and in goverment ministries.

An outspoken opponent of the U.S. presence in Iraq, Sadr has become a potent political force, fielding more than 30 loyal members in Iraq's new parliament. The incident Sunday was his deadliest encounter with U.S. and Iraqi forces since his Mahdi Army militia waged two violent uprisings in 2004.
"I think we are going to have a firm stance against the American forces because of this crime," Salam al-Maliki, the country's transportation minister and a close Sadr ally, said on al-Iraqiya television.

So we're dammed if we do and dammed if we don't. Either we allow the operation of terror cells, or we kill people closely affiliated with a member in good standing of Iraq's governing coalition. Maybe there was a time, back just after the fall of Baghdad, when we could have prevented some of this by crushing Sadr's movement. Maybe when they were looting the city would have been a good time. Or maybe after they murdered Abdel Majid al-Khoei, the moderate cleric under (ineffective) U.S. military protection. Or maybe after the 2004 uprisings.

Now, however, they're part of the government. Such a key part of the government, in fact, that prime mininister praises them in a March 20 Washington Post opinion piece:

Sidelining Moqtada al-Sadr's group from the Governing Council was a mistake. Had it been integrated into the political process back then, long before the formation of the Mahdi Army, events would have turned out differently in the south. I corrected this policy and brought Sadr's group into the democratic process. This inclusive approach resulted in the huge nationwide turnout for the December elections and a parliament that truly reflects Iraq.
During my term as elected prime minister, Sadr's group has not attacked any coalition troops. Furthermore, Sadr and several Sunni leaders are now catalysts for maintaining the peace in Iraq, calling on their followers not to retaliate against terrorist provocations, which aim to ignite civil war.

I'm not saying that al-Jafari's policy is wrong-- he may be making the best of a terrible situation. But how long with the U.S. be able to maintain its position in Iraq while at war with not only an insurgency but with a key member of the governing coalition?

Sorry, I'll stop now. I should probably be blogging about a good news story, like the opening of an Iraqi school or something.

A Sad Prose Poem from an Iraqi Blogger

2006-03-23T17:10:00.000-06:00

Citizen Cain's favorite Iraqi blog, Healing Iraq, resumed regular posting about a month ago after a long hiatus. Zeyad, Healing Iraq's maitre de blog, had been extremely optimistic about the prospects for his country in the aftermath of the invasion, and very positively-inclined towards the Coalition. It has been sad to see Zeyad's building frustration over the years with the circumstances in his country, and with the failures of the occupation.

His latest post, which describes the growing chaos in Baghdad, concludes with an intensity and passionate insistence on bearing witness that brings to mind Dylan's Hard Rain, albeit in realistic prose rather than Dylan's dream-like poetry.

Please don’t ask me whether I believe Iraq is on the verge of civil war yet or not. I have never experienced a civil war before, only regular ones. All I see is that both sides are engaged in tit-for-tat lynchings and summary executions. I see governmental forces openly taking sides or stepping aside. I see an occupation force that is clueless about what is going on in the country. I see politicians that distrust each other and continue to flame the situation for their own personal interests. I see Islamic clerics delivering fiery sermons against each other, then smile and hug each other at the end of the day in staged PR stunts. I see the country breaking into pieces. The frontlines between different districts of Baghdad are already clearly demarked and ready for the battle. I was stopped in my own neighbourhood yesterday by a watch team and questioned where I live and what I was doing in that area. I see other people curiously staring in each other’s faces on the street. I see hundreds of people disappearing in the middle of the night and their corpses surfacing next day with electric drill holes in them. I see people blown up to smithereens because a brainwashed virgin seeker targeted a crowded market or café. I see all that and more.

Don’t you dare chastise me for writing about what I see in my country.

I'm not sure who the last sentence is aimed at. Who is chastising Zeyad for writing about what he sees? Whoever it is, don't listen Zeyad! Keep on calling it like you see it.

Third Anniversary

2006-03-22T18:47:00.000-06:00

We should all pause to recognize the anniversary of this major event.

Kinsley: Don't Make Me Sick!

2006-03-20T14:28:00.000-06:00

I realize that I'm commenting on this late, but Michael Kinsley's Friday column on healthcare is a terrible disappointment. What atypically weak reasoning from one of Citizen Cain's faves.

Kinsley critiques the superior arguments of Krugman and Wells on a couple of points.

First, regarding the superior efficiency of single payer health care, Kinsley says, that Krugman and Wells :

don't do much more than simply assert that a single, government-run insurance program would be more efficient. Even the most competitive industry can seem wasteful and inefficient when described on paper. Dozens of computer companies making hundreds of different, incompatible models, millions spent on advertising: Wouldn't a single, government-run computer agency producing a few standard models be more efficient? No, it wouldn't.

Actually, Krugman and Wells don't merely assert that a government-run insurance program would be more efficient. They show that government-run insurance programs in other countries are more efficient than our patchwork public-private system. They also explain that, unlike computer software companies, with health care "the fragmentation of a system that relies largely on private insurance leads both to administrative complexity because of differences in coverage among individuals and to what is, in effect, a zero-sum struggle between different players in the system, each trying to stick others with the bill." Krugman and Wells note that an additional reason for superior efficiency of government-run insurance is its ability to bargain for lower-price pharmaceuticals (unless, of course, as with the Medicare drug benefit, pharmaceutical-company-written law prohibits such bargaining).

Second Kinsley states that:

Krugman and Wells note repeatedly that 20 percent of the population is responsible for 80 percent of health care costs. But that doesn't explain why health insurance should be different from other kinds. The small fraction of people involved in auto accidents in any year is responsible for almost all of the cost of auto insurance. You insure against the risk of being in that group.

But healthcare insurance isn't like auto insurance. It seems just and appropriate that people who get in a lot of accidents or who have DUIs and speeding tickets should have to pay more for their auto insurance. Does it seem right that sick people should have to pay more for health care insurance? Most people would say no. And while some might agree with making smokers or heavy drinkers pay more for health care, few would agree with denying such people insurance entirely. By contrast, if someone has a terrible driving record, denying them insurance (and a driver's license) might be the best thing for society.

This Kinsley argument is just depressing, coming from a liberal:

Krugman and Wells say that private insurance is flawed by "adverse selection": Insurance companies will avoid riskier customers. Only a single payer (that is, an insurance monopoly) can insure everybody, and spread the risk. But anyone is
insurable at some price -- a price that reflects the cost he or she is likely to impose on the insurer. Adverse selection is only a problem to the extent that insurance is not really insurance but rather a subsidy.

No no no! Adverse selection is a problem to the extent that it prevents sick people from getting insurance. Adverse selection is a problem to the extent that it makes employers want to avoid employing potentially unhealthy people because of the impact that it could have on employer-provided health insurance costs.

Kinsley concludes by recommending a pathetically small health care reform, based on a bogus issue.

Should people be allowed to opt out of rationing if they can afford it? That is, if the system (private or single-payer) won't pay for the $100,000 pill, should you be able to pay for it yourself? Fear that this would not be allowed helped to kill the Clinton health care reform 13 years ago.

Bizarrely, Kinsley fails to explain that this fear was unfounded. The Clinton plan would have allowed individuals to purchase additional insurance or health care as they chose. Moreover, no one is proposing national health insurance programs that would prevent people from buying additional health care.

Kinsley concludes by stating that "if a few smaller reforms like that don't work, maybe it will be time for single-payer." This makes no sense politically. Can he really be serious that progressive forces in this country should mobilize in favor of small reforms that are unlikely to do any good, and that after "a few" such failed reforms, then we'll be in position to convince the country that single-payer is the way to go?

Ignore Kinsley. His way would ensure that progressives lose the trust of the nation on health care issues for a generation. Now is the time to build a movement that can elect a government that will support the most just and efficient system-- single-payer government-provided healthcare.

Howard Fineman: A Tale of Two Politicians

2006-03-10T17:07:00.000-06:00

Howard Fineman has recent articles discussing the possible Presidential prospects of Rudy Guiliani and Hillary Clinton. He doesn't have any news to report in either case, but the articles make for an interesting contrast in how Fineman treats the two politicians. For one, it's the best of coverage; for the other, the worst of coverage. Can you guess which one is which?

First Guiliani. The article is called "Awaiting the Almighty: Rudy Giuliani may or may not run for president. But he's having a heavenly time thinking about it." While "lesser birds" will flock to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, "America's mayor" flies "alluringly alone." He has "near-total name ID, a 9/11 hero's aura—and, most valuable in these post-Katrina days, a reputation for administrative competence." He's "macho" and has "a hide of titanium." He dazzles audiences "with his energy and his revival-style witness to his faith in Jesus." He's got "charisma."

By the way, the Guiliani article also contains the gem that Newt Gingrich is "rapidly re-emerging and always provocative."

Now Clinton. This time it's called "Hillary's Money Politics: The Clintons take a page from the Bush playbook, but what about Bill and those ports?" Getting into a Clinton fundraiser "is no easy trick." She chooses "to keep her toughly worded anti-Bush rhetoric (the kind that excites Democratic hearts and opens their wallets) safely behind the closed, hand-rubbed doors." Her political strategy is to intimidate the rest of the possible Democratic field by raising so much money that they'll give up before the race starts. "It's an ironic but exact copy of what Bush did in 2000." She's "on the way to becoming the leading female empire-builder in the history of American elections." And "not only is she asking big donors to support her—she is, at least implicitly, asking them NOT to give to anyone else." Hillary isn't "completely secretive" because she "now has an interest in leaking—on her own terms, of course—the names of big shots . . ." Her "obsessive money focus" creates the "risk" that she will become "blind to the politics of an issue." Also it "can create conflicts—or at least the appearance of conflict—between candidate and spouse," for instance when Bill praised the "Dubai guys" and collected $600K in speaking fees from them while Hillary was denouncing the Dubai ports deal. Finally, it's lucky for Hillary that foreign citizens aren't allowed to give campaign contributions, because, says Fineman "the rules had allowed it, I'm sure they would have been asked—and Hillary would have had even more explaining to do."

Nowhere in his article does Fineman ever explain how Clinton is "implicitly" asking donor not to give to other candidates. Perhaps its just obvious that any politician would prefer that potential opponents not receive financial backing. Can Fineman explain how this is more true of Hillary than anyone else? Nor does Fineman explain how he's sure that Hillary would have gone begging to Dubai, or whether he thinks that other politicians, like say George Bush or John McCain might also have some explaining to do in this hypothetical situation. Most importantly, he doesn't explain why he chooses to end his articles about some politicians but not others with a zinger based on a hypothetical possibility. He doesn't explain whether Guiliani might occasionally have a meeting behind "closed, hand-rubbed doors," and if so, why he chooses to use this snarky language only in Clinton's case.

If this is a harbinger of the kind of coverage Clinton can expect during the 2008 election, the Democrats might as well run Al Gore.

Autism-Mercury News

2006-03-09T17:47:00.000-06:00

A couple of news items news to report on the autism-mercury front.

First, a couple of bloggers seem to have figured out independently that contrary to some assertions, California Department of Developmental Services (CDDS) data do not support the idea that new cases of autism are decreasing in response to the removal of thimerosal from most childhood vaccines. Interverbal has done a very thorough analysis, including some spiffy graphs, showing that while the total number of cases managed by CDDS is growing at a reduced pace, among children aged 3-5 (the supposed beneficiaries of reduced thimerosal) autism cases managed by CDDS is continuing to grow. Joseph at Autism-Natural Variation also has a crack at the California numbers, and shows why the “thimerosal theory” for explaining increased diagnosis of autism is much less likely to be correct than the theory that increased diagnosis is due to broadening criteria.

Nice job fellas! But while you may have done it better, don’t forget who did it first. I just want to be loved. Is that so wrong?

Second, proponents of the thimerosal theory can now point to a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPS) that says that autism rates are declining as a result of removal of thimerosal from vaccines. But what kind of peer review did this study really go through? How good is the evidence? Orac provides the answers. I highly recommend his respectful insolence. I won't rehash his arguments, but rather offer a few supplemental thoughts:

Citizen Cain can reveal, after an exclusive investigation, that “peer review” in JAPS means approval by a panel consisting of Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Jack D. Ripper, and a chipmunk. For you kids out there, Jack D. Ripper is a character in the classic movie Dr. Strangelove, who drinks nothing but rainwater and grain alcohol so that his “precious bodily fluids” won’t be contaminated by fluoridated water. Anti-chipmunk prejudice may explain why JAPS has no scientific standing, and why it isn’t listed in Medline.

This study, by a father-son team, David and Mark Geier evaluates two data sources to determine changes in autism incidence. One is the CDDS data. If only the Geiers read Citizen Cain, or even those Johnny-come-latelies Interverbal or Autism-Natural Variation, they could have spared themselves a lot of embarrassment.

The second data source is the Vaccine Adverse Event Report System (VAERS). As you might have guessed from its title, VAERS isn’t a system for tracking autism or other neurological conditions; it’s a system for tracking adverse reactions to vaccines. Therefore, not surprisingly, very few reports of autism incidence are made to this reporting system. According to Figure 1 in the Geiers' article, between 1993 and 2005 nationwide reports of autism to VAERS ranged from zero per quarter to about 78, with most quarters receiving fewer than 40 reports. Since about 1 million little Americans are born every quarter, and since an estimated 1 out of 166 people are thought to be on the autistic spectrum, something on the order of 6000 autistic Americans are coming into the world every quarter. Therefore, VAERS is finding about 2/3 of a percent of autistics. Can you, dear reader, see it might not be a good idea to try to track trends in autism incidence through a system that can't account for even one percent of autistic children? Trends in autism reported to VAERS clearly have far more to do with changes in the fraction of autistic children who are reported to VAERS than with actual changes in the number of autistic children.

What does real science on autism incidence look like? Nothing like what the Geiers have excreted. Real science looks like this. A team of researchers evaluated cohorts of four to six year old children in 1987 and 2002, using "diagnostic interviews, psychometric tests, and medical workups." They found that despite reported increases in pervasive developmental orders, the actual prevalence found in these evaluations had not changed, "suggesting a stable incidence."

Debunking the Sexual Repression Theory of Terrorism

2006-03-08T21:14:00.000-06:00

Andrew Sullivan approvingly links to an Ian Buruma article that attempts to resurrect one of the less persuasive theories about the origins of Islamist terrorism-- that sexual repression in Islamic countries leads to distorted, sexually-frustrated personalities that are prone to violence. Exposure to the permissive and sexualized West "provokes a mixture of rage and envy" that causes some to express their violent urges in terrorist acts against the West, or against Israel. Three weeks after 9/11, anthropologist Lionel Tiger put forward a similar argument in Slate, although in his case he emphasized the role that polygyny plays in limiting the sexual prospects of underprivileged men in parts of the Islamic world.

Citizen Cain would not deny that the differing sexual mores of Islam and Western countries could promote rage and envy among some Moslem men, nor that certain manifestations of terror-- such as the promise of sex in the afterlife for suicide bombers -- arise uniquely out of a particular social-sexual ideology. No doubt, sexual repression and segregation of men and women in some Islamic cultures has far-ranging cultural and psychological impacts.

But as an explanation of the motivations for terror, this theory just doesn't fit with the evidence. If sexual repression promoted terror, one would expect that it would also promote a variety of other violent expressions. If Islamic terrorism were caused by a generalized frustration among Islamic men, it would stand to reason that Islamic countries would be generally more violent than more sexually permissive countries. Is it so?

Bernard Lewis is a favorite among conservatives, and isn't usually accused of taking an excessively positive view of Islamic peoples. But here he is in his influential September 1990 Atlantic essay:

There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations.

Hmm. Dignity? Courtesy toward others rarely equaled in other civilizations? Doesn't sound to me like a culture riven by violence. Lewis continues:

And yet, in moments of upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient and civilized country -- even the spokesman of a great spiritual and ethical religion -- to espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in the life of their Prophet, approval and indeed precedent for such actions.

Okay, so that doesn't sound so good. But it doesn't seem, in Lewis's telling, that this "rage and hatred" is driven by sexual frustration. After all, it's hard to see why sexual frustration would be especially powerful during periods of "upheaval and disruption." Lewis, rather, attributes this rage and hatred to the challenge that the West poses to Islam as an alternative source of values and social organization, to the (correct) identification of the West as the source of "cataclysmic changes" that threaten traditional ways, and to the humiliation of a proud civilization bested economically, scientifically, and militarily by the West.

Is Lewis's assessment right? Beats me. But it provides no support for the theory that sexual repression is at the heart of Islamic rage.

If a generalized sexual frustration drives terrorism, surely it should also drive other forms of crime. And yet, here's Robert D. Kaplan, describing a 2002 trip to Yemen:

The Arab world, while afflicted by political violence, had little or no common crime. In this sense, Islam had risen to the challenge of urbanization and modern life, and was a full-fledged success.

Kaplan again:

For decades millions of Muslims have been pouring out of the villages and leaving behind, you know, a situation where religion was just a natural outgrowth of age-old practices. And rushing into these pseudo western cities where there was bad sewage, bad plumbing, you know, electricity and water systems were decaying and where family life was under attack. And in order to keep crime rates low, to keep family life stable-- which they did successfully-- they had to reinvent religion in starker, more ideological austere terms. This worked. So you have these cities in the Muslim world with millions of people, poor, downtrodden yet random crime is very low, almost nonexistent because the intensification of religiosity has worked but it's produced an ironic situation. There is now a fertile . . . [petri] dish to call it that for the emergence of disease germs like terrorists.

No generalized rage here, in Kaplan's version. Just an intense religiousity that reinforces traditional family life and social order, but that also incubates in its followers a willingness to commit terrorist acts to defend or promote or impose their religion. Is he right? Again, Citizen Cain doesn't know. But at least Kaplan's explanation, unlike the sexual repression hypothesis, accounts for both the low crime rates in many Islamic countries and the existence of terrorism.

Kaplan might be prone to over-generalization, or he might just be wrong about the low crime rate in Islamic countries? What do the statistics say? Let's turn to the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control for an Epidemiology of Violent Deaths in the World. This publication does not distinguish between Islamic countries non-Islamic countries, or between sexually repressive and sexually permissive countries. But it does break out homicide data by region, including the "Middle Eastern crescent." In 1990, this region had an age-adjusted homide rate overall and for males that were lower than the world averages, and lower than the United States. Overall rates of violent death were high, but as the result of the Iran-Iraq war, not as a result of homicides.

The proponents of the theory that Islamic sexual repression leads to terrorism lack an explanation of how this causation could work without also promoting high rates of non-terrorist violence. So can we please move on and think more sensibly about what the real sources of terror are, both in Islamic culture and in our own policies?

Classy Dick Cheney

2006-02-15T20:06:00.000-06:00

What a classy guy Dick Cheney is.  Completely takes responsibility for shooting his friend in the face.  Won’t hear of any suggestion that it was the victim’s fault.  So Brave and so Manly that John Podhoretz can’t but sing his praises.

Of course, a really brave and manly man, a man taking responsibility for his actions, might not have let Katherine Armstrong issue a statement blaming the victim, and might not have allowed that statement to stand for three days as the only official account of what happened.  He might not have, in his taking-blame interview, have recommended Armstrong’s perspective as the truest one.  He might not have allowed Scott McClellan to blame the victim, and might not have had Mary Matalin publicly declare that he, the Vice President, did nothing wrong and broke no rules.

But I quibble.  How can anyone possibly question the Veep’s character now.? How can anyone wonder if maybe he’s not telling the full truth after this brave and manly performance?  After all, what could he possibly be hiding?

Climate Change: Why Government Scientists are Speaking Out

2006-01-30T21:54:00.000-06:00

The New York Times today describes efforts by the Bush White House to silence NASA climate expert James Hansen and other government climate scientists, and the efforts of these scientists to fight back and get the word out about what they consider to be disturbing trends in the earth's climate. Why are climate scientists feeling so fiesty? Why is the White House so upset at what they have to say?

Excellent articles in the Washington Post and the Guardian provide some clues. The Washington Post describes how scientists are increasingly concerned that the climate is rapidly approaching a "tipping point," after which feedbacks in the climate system will encourage more rapid warming, which in turn trigger additional changes which trigger still more warming. The Guardian article provides details on a particularly disturbing recent piece of evidence of such a feedback mechanism: a recent study that found that a large area of permafrost in Siberia is melting, to reveal the peat bog beneath. This event could result in the release of substantial amounts of methane and, by exchanging white ice for dark peat bog, cause the earth to absorb more solar energy. Not a happy prospect.

The White House is committed to putting out the perspective that we have endless time to act on global warming. No urgency about it at all. Information that suggests the problem might be more urgent is clearly unwelcome.

Hamas: The Glass is Half Full

2006-01-29T14:20:00.000-06:00

Fafnir points out the little-noticed bright side of Hamas: a "sensible fiscal policy" and "intriguing plans for health savings accounts." Fafblog? Yes. Fafblog!

Bush-Made Catastrophe

2006-01-28T09:52:00.000-06:00

From Jenifer Moses's Washington Post op-ed today.

though Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf Coast region, it's being split between Mississippi and Louisiana, perhaps because, even though Mississippi has fewer than one-fifth the number of affected households Louisiana does, its governor, Haley Barbour, an ex-Republican National Committee chairman, is a pal of the president.

Maybe also because a lot of the displaced people in Louisiana are Democrats.

One long-term fix -- not just for residential planning but for flood control in general -- is restoring Louisiana's wetlands, which in the olden days acted as a natural buffer to storm surges, and without which none of South Louisiana would have been inhabited in the first place. But no one's talking much about the wetlands, perhaps because the subject is too, well, environmental. (And we know how the Bush administration regards the environment.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Bush rebuilding policy-- help out the Republicans and screw the rest, ignore the environmental roots of the problem, nickel and dime the rebuilding of the levees-- oh yes, and make promises you have no intention of keeping.

Promises Unfulfilled

2006-01-28T09:30:00.000-06:00

Citizen Cain recommends this morning's Washington Post article by Spencer Hsu about the Bush administration's failure to deliver on its promises about rebuilding after hurricane Katrina. Read it. Future historians will debate the relative importance of incompetence, indifference, venality, and retrogressive social experimentation in contributing to this debacle. Just who are these 43 percent who think this guy is doing a good job?

More dumping on Dowd

2006-01-26T09:39:00.000-06:00

Reed Hundt joins the noble alliance of Maureen Dowd bashers.

O'Reilly Tells Half the Story; Smears Vermont Judge

2006-01-24T20:11:00.000-06:00

Bill O'Reilly has clamped his jaws like a pit bull onto the case of the Vermont judge who gave out a 60-day sentence to a man convicted of sexual assault on a young girl. O'Reilly shows no signs of letting go until the judge, Edward Cashman, loses his job, and he seems to consider it a disgrace to the entire state that Vermont citizens haven't hung the judge from the highest tree.

I've got to admit-- the judge's sentence sounds pretty indefensible, if all you know about the case comes from O'Reilly. Here's what readers of O'Reilly’s most recent column and viewers of his January 13 “Talking Points Memo” know about the subject:

34-year old Mark Hulett "confessed to raping" a girl over a period of four years, while the girl was 6 to 10. Hulett lived in the girl's home, a friend of her parents.

Judge Cashman suspended all but 60 days of what could have been, should have been, a life sentence, or at least a 25-year sentence-- the mandatory minimum in the noble state of Florida.

Judge Cashman's "sympathies are with the rapist," not with the little girl or her family.

Vermonters who don't push for removal of Judge Cashman from the bench are complicit in evil.

Inexplicably, elements of the left-wing, secular press are defending Cashman.

As you may have suspected, there are a few things about this version of events that aren’t quite right, and a few that O'Reilly forgot to tell you.

Judge Cashman is a conservative Vietnam vet, appointed by a Republican governor, and is a former prosecutor with a reputation for being tough on defendants.

Hulett has an IQ of between 75 and 85, putting him in the category of "borderline intellectual functioning." Judge Cashman also determined that he had the emotional maturity of a 12-14 year old, and did not seem to understand why people were upset with him about what he did.

The girl’s parents seem to have emotional or mental problems of their own, and seem to have been quite lax about protecting their daughter. They allowed Hulett to sleep in the same bed with their child, and a second man has pled guilty to abusing the girl in separate incidents.

Hulett has no criminal record, and there is no evidence that Hulett ever abused any other children—that is he has not sought out children that he hasn’t been placed into bed with.

The sexual molestation involved fondling and oral sex, but not vaginal or anal intercourse.

Hulett's suspended sentence is for 10 years to life in prison. If he fails in treatment, refuses treatment, uses drugs or alcohol, lives in an apartment complex that has children, visits a bar, or looks at pornography, he can receive life in prison.

Cashman had intended to impose a three years of jail time, as recommended by the Vermont Department of Corrections, but if he had done so the Dept. of Corrections would not have provided sex offender treatment to Hulett until he finished his jail term. Cashman determined that the danger to the public upon Hulett’s release would be greater if he did not get treatment immediately, as he can with a 60-day sentence.

Cashman found that for Hulett is a good candidate for treatment, but that without treatment he poses a serious risk of reoffending. More on this below.

Did Judge Cashman make the right decision? Citizen Cain isn’t wise enough to say. But reading his statement on the reconsideration of the sentencing order, I was struck by the careful thought that Cashman put into the case, and I was glad that an independent judge was making a decision on the individual merits of the case. Much better that than a huge mandatory minimum imposed regardless of the circumstances. Consider the following from Judge Cashman’s statement:

Treatment experts in this area of human misbehavior believe they are able to group those who molest children based upon the of the offender's perception of the relationship. lf the offender views the encounters as "child to child," the perpetrator is reliving a prior abuse of his own. The age of the child molested often is the same age as that of the offender when he suffered a similar molestation. These offenders appear amenable to treatment and present low risks to re-offend, provided competent personnel properly treat and supervise them.

The other group of offenders perceives the relationships as "adult to adult." This group presents different treatment issues that make predictions of treatment compliance and success much more guarded.

The evidence on this point came into the record from the defense expert. He believes that the defendant falls into the latter group. He did not agree that the defendant would fail in treatment compliance. Yet, he did offer-guarded concern that Mr. Hulett would need lifetime treatment and supervision.

The court finds the balance of the evidence shows that Mr. Hulett presents a long-term risk to re-offend. How long could it go? The evidence of record was that it might be for the rest of his life. He needs treatment. He needs supervision. This presents the most pressing concern for public safety arising in this case.

The cognitive and emotional impairments described above do not impress the court as mitigating factors, as first impression might dictate. Rather, they present additional concern for long term risk control. Mr. Hulett's failure to empathize, as well as his emotional age, may create substantial supervision problems. His intellectual skills require specialized materials and treatment techniques.

The solution to these concerns requires quick and effective treatment. Delay in treatment, especially if connected with lengthy imprisonment, creates additional risks by hardening the defendant into a pattern of thinking that further alienates him from the fundamental social values we are trying to promote.

Again, I don’t know if Cashman came to the right decision, but he clearly was a man trying to do his job as best as he could. Could the same be said of a journalist who sensationalizes a difficult case, incites a public campaign and fails to give his readers and viewers key information to help the evaluate the situation? Bill O’Reilly has every right to disagree with Cashman’s decision, but he’s doing a public disservice by telling only half of the story.

Lewinsky, Barnes

2006-01-24T20:08:00.000-06:00

Why is it that President Bush and Fred Barnes can get away with doing the very same thing that got President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in such trouble?

I'm just asking.

Thinking About Wal-Mart

2006-01-22T11:51:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I attended this excellent conference, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. I won’t summarize it, but here are some thoughts that it provoked:

When I first started hearing about opposition to Wal-mart in the 1980s and early 1990s, the issues were primarily about protecting small businesses, preserving the character of small town business districts, and preventing sprawl. The critique of Walmart was fundamentally against the model of “big box” retail—small is beautiful; the big box is ugly. There are still important issues related to where retail development is sited, what it looks like, how well it fits with the neighborhood, its impact on transportation, and its use of public subsidies. However, the focus of the anti Wal-mart campaigners has shifted, and protecting small business is now a tertiary issue. The big box has won. It is unstoppable, because it increases the efficiency of the retail sector and translates these efficiencies into lower prices that benefit consumers, especially low-income consumers. So now what Wal-mart critics want is a better big box—one that pays better wages and health care benefits, that treats its employees better, that allows union organizing, and (for the more ambitious campaigners) that doesn’t create pressure on its suppliers to reduce wages and benefits to hold costs down. They want Wal-mart to be more like Costco.

Anti Wal-mart campaigners have focused on keeping Wal-mart out of particular communities. Campaigners usually do seek to connect local campaigns to the broader fight for workers by imposing conditions on Wal-mart’s entrance to a community through a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA). A CBA can include a requirement to pay a “living wage” significantly higher than the general minimum wage, to provide health care benefits, to contribute towards neighborhood beautification, etc. I have a lot of sympathy for these efforts, but this approach is a tough sell when, as in Chicago, Wal-mart wants to move into neighborhoods that have little existing retail and few job opportunities, and when Wal-mart can locate in suburban communities right on Chicago’s border without facing these obstacles. They naturally lead to questions about why big box retailers face requirements that don’t apply to smaller retailers and other types of employers. Moreover, the focus on Wal-mart expansion into new communities seems more suited to a campaign to protect local small business than to a campaign to improve working conditions for workers at the big boxes. The current critique of Wal-mart as a bad employer cries out for broader efforts: to raise the minimum wage, to enforce labor laws, to establish a national healthcare system. Given the current state of our national politics, I can’t blame anti Wal-mart campaigners from focusing on local fights, but it doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. Moreover, broader-scale efforts are possible even without immediate prospects for national legislation. Rather than fight expansion of Wal-mart into particular communities one at a time, it would seem more productive to organize a boycott of existing Wal-mart stores, until the company meets specific demands, perhaps related to allowing unionization. Boycotts have been attempted, but the primary focus of the anti Wal-mart effort is organizing communities against Wal-mart expansion.

Wal-mart pursues a “low-road” strategy of lousy wages and benefits, accepting the costs of high turnover, high costs for re-training, “shrinkage,” bad employee morale, and poor corporate image. To some extent, this strategy arises out of Wal-mart’s corporate history, management style and preferences, and are therefore changeable—Wal-mart might be equally profitable with a strategy that treated its employees better. However, to a large extent, Wal-mart’s approach is dictated by its role as a retailer of low-end goods for whom low-cost is everything. For Wal-mart, in comparison to higher-end retailers such as Costco, it is less important to have high quality staff who are highly knowledgeable and helpful. Therefore, boycotts and community organizing can accomplish only limited objectives. A low-end retailer can follow a high road labor strategy only so far and remain profitable, if its competitors are taking a lower road. Which is why a decent minimum wage, enforcement of labor law, and creation of a national right to basic health care are so essential.

Maureen Dowd: Stupid, Insincere, and Ugly

2006-01-18T19:08:00.000-06:00

Has there ever been a worse liberal pundit than Maureen Dowd? Any more shallow, smug, and harmful to liberal causes? Dowd condemns Gore and Kerry because "they allowed themselves to be painted as girlie men." Daily Howler has the goods, showing how Dowd herself tossed the paint on Gore 2000, doing great service to the RNC in the press corps' War Against Gore.

Don't worry Bob! Josh and Kevin (and even Atrios) may not link to you, but Citizen Cain will!

During the 2004 campaign, Citizen Cain fell out of his lazyboy when Dowd basically called Kerry a pussy on Real Time with Bill Maher. I don't remember Dowd's exact words, but I do vividly remember Aaron McGruder summarizing Dowd thus-- "So you're saying that Kerry is a bitch?" Dowd smirked and shrugged, as if to say, "if the shoe fits . . ."

Note also that Gore and Kerry's crime is they "allowed themselves" to be portrayed as weak. Not that they actually were. As if anything they could have done could have kept the likes of Dowd and the RNC from their nasty work. Dowd also manages in today's column to call Senator Clinton a "manly girl." Nice.

Did you know, by the way, that Dowd isn't as smart, sincere, or pretty as Naomi Wolf? It's true! Says so right here.

The South Side Gets Screwed! Citizen Chien Edition

2006-01-14T09:06:00.000-06:00

In the second of our our continuing series covering instances where Chicago's South Side doesn't get a fair shake, we turn to the issue of dog parks-- those little patches of the Chicago public park system where dogs can run around off leash. These places are essential for those of us who have young, athletic and sociable dogs for whom a leash walk just doesn't cut it. In fact, Citizen Chien is sitting next to me right now, whimpering softly as he pines for the society and stimulation of a dog park.

So, where in Chicago can you find this essential public service-- you guessed it, on the North Side. The Chicago Park District maintains 10 DFAs-- Dog Friendly Areas. All but one of these is on the North Side, and the single South Side location is Coliseum Park in the South Loop, a long distance from most South Side neighborhoods. Moreover, Cain and Chien have visited three North Side dog parks-- Wiggly Field, Montrose Beach and Margate Park-- and each is vastly bigger and nicer than Coliseum Park.

Don't our South Side dogs deserve the thrill of running free with other dogs every bit as much a North Side dog? Don't our South Side children deserve to use public parks without being terrified by dogs whose owners illegally let them off leash because that's the only way they have to exercise them properly (not that Citizen Cain excuses this behavior)? What do you say-- Chicago Park District?

One South Side neighborhood, Hyde Park, had a group organized to get a dog park. This group, whowever, has given up on getting a park, for reasons that its web site doesn't make entirely clear. Don't give up South Siders! Your pooches are getting screwed!

Reconstructing Iraq-- Oh Nevermind

2006-01-07T17:55:00.000-06:00

Remember back in 2003, right after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, how the political controversy of the moment was whether all of the fantastic reconstruction that would be occurring would be paid for with U.S. grants or with loans? “Why not loans?” asked foolish optimists on both Right and Left, “since the Iraqis are going to be swimming in all that oil money.” In the end, we decided to provide $18 billion for reconstruction, that the Iraqis wouldn’t have to pay back. When we weren’t debating that important topic, we were discussing what other countries we would cut in on all that lucrative Iraqi business action—the French and Germans were definitely out; the coalition of the willing was in. But what about those who didn’t join the coalition, but didn’t oppose our invasion too strongly? For instance, should we cut the Canadians in for a piece?

Those were the days! Hard to imagine that at one time reconstruction was supposed to be fun and fun and profitable and a means of rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies. After this optimistic beginning, we started realizing that anything that got reconstructed would be blown up unless we provided security so roughly half of the reconstruction money was reprogrammed towards security. And, of course, the Coalition Provisional Authority just lost $8.8 billion—let it disappear down a dark hole.

Nonetheless, just a month ago, President Bush cited reconstruction of Iraq as a key element of strategy for victory in Iraq:

BUSH: And all three aspects of our strategy—security, democracy, and reconstruction—we have learned from our experiences and fixed what has not worked. We will continue to listen to honest criticism and make every change that will help us complete the mission.

On Thursday, Keith Olberman pointed out when discussing President Bush’s meeting with former Secretaries of State and Defense to discuss Iraq (for five minutes) that Bush seems to have kicked away one leg of this tripod:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We take to heart the advice, we appreciate your experience, and we appreciate your taking time out of your day. We have a dual-track strategy for victory. On the one hand, we will work to have a political process that says to all Iraqis, The future belongs to you. And on the other hand, we‘ll continue to work on the security situation there.

The main thrust of our success will be when the Iraqis are able to take the fight to the enemy that wants to stop their democracy. And we‘re making darn good progress along those lines.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
OLBERMANN:
Contained therein, perhaps the only reason news to have come out of today‘s photo opportunity at the White House, the president‘s strategy for victory in Iraq mysteriously shrinking to only two elements, having been threefold just last month.

Back in 2004 pundits loved to our President call a man of constancy, principle, and follow-through. But when it comes to reconstruction of Iraq, as with so many issues, the closer we look the more it seems that this Presidency is best described as a short attention span Presidency—one that devotes constant attention to securing electoral advantage and to pleasing the Republican donor class, but when it comes to following through on policies and programs, it just can't be bothered.

Pat Robertson-- Nothing if Not Reliable

2006-01-05T21:16:00.000-06:00

Pat Robertson can always be relied upon to be crazy and offensive:

Conservative Christian evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson on Thursday linked Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke to God's "enmity against those who 'divide my land.'"
"He was dividing God's land and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America," Robertson said on his television program, "The 700 Club," broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach. "God says 'this land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.'"

Apparently, the 77-year old morbidly obese Sharon would have lived in perfect health forever were it not for his decision to cede control of Gaza to its inhabitants.

What's Next for Israeli Politics

2006-01-05T19:38:00.000-06:00

Shmuel Rosner and Christopher Hitchens at Slate both predict that Arial Sharon's incapacitation will work to the benefit of the Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party in the upcoming Israeli elections. Slate also has a roundup of U.S. bloggers that are predicting Likud victory, the withering away of Sharon's new Kadima Party, and the end to Sharon's policy of strategic unilateral withdrawals from some of the occupied territories.

But in Israel, Rosner's paper Ha'aretz has published opinion polls that indicate that Sharon's new Kadima Party will likely do roughly as well in the elections without Sharon as they were expected to do with him. In other words, they'll get the most Knesset seats-- about 40 to 42 out of 120 with either Ehud Olmert or Shimon Peres as their leader. Moreover, Ha'aretz has also published a variety of assessments that show that if Kadima starts to decline, a variety of possibilities other than a Likud resurgence present themselves. Likud's prospects are limited by Netanyahu's ascendency and and the desire for many former Likud voters for a more moderate path. Labor could make gains, particularly if Shimon Peres and other defectors return. Another possibility is that if Kadima falters, Shinui could pick up support as a moderate alternative.

Citizen Cain's bold prediction-- a coalition that excludes Likud will win. Some combination of Kadima, Labor and smaller parties, who will continue the policy of selective unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians.

Citizen Cain Gets Results: Christmas Tree Edition

2006-01-03T22:02:00.000-06:00

Southsiders can in fact get their Christmas trees recycled. My previous post, relying on the Chicago Park District web site, reported that the Park District was offering Christmas tree recycling at only six locations, all on the North Side. But La Citoyenne contacted the Park District and found out that in fact they are offering Christmas tree recycling at 23 locations, including ten on the South Side (defined as anything South of Madison). The correct information is here. The incorrect information was here, but was updated just this afternoon. I didn’t get a screen capture, so you’ll just have to trust me that until this afternoon there were only 6 locations listed, all North Side. Could it be that Citizen Cain’s bold reportage prompted the Park District to correct its site?

While not commensurate with the South Side’s area, this level of service is acceptable and isn’t the outrage that my previous post had described.

The South Side Gets Screwed! Holiday Edition

2006-01-01T14:45:00.000-06:00

To mark the New Year, Citizen Cain is launching the first of an occasional exclusive series—the South Side Gets Screwed!  This series will be of special interest to our Chicago readers, and will document instances in which Chicago’s glorious South Side doesn’t get a fair deal, whether from City government, the media, national retail chains, Cubs fans, or anyone else.

For our first installment, we will consider Christmas Tree Recycling.  The Chicago Park District web site offers six locations where Chicago residents can recycle their Christmas trees on January 7.  And where are all six?  You guessed it—the North Side.  In fact, the recycling location that is furthest south is on Fullerton Ave, which is 2400 North, a good 15 miles from much of the South Side.  If the Park District can afford only six tree recycling sites, wouldn’t you think that they might have thought to put at least a couple on the South Side?  Afraid not.  The South Side Gets Screwed!

Please feel welcome to e-mail me with additional examples.  Remember to use as your subject line—The South Side Gets Screwed!

UPDATE POSTED HERE—ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL FOR THE SOUTH SIDE.

Stop the Presses: Meacham is Dull

2005-12-29T14:52:00.000-06:00

Subbing over at the Daily Dish, Ross Douthat is disappointed that Newsweek's Jon Meacham is "wearying and banal" in his review of religious books in the Times book review. Well knock me over with a feather.

At Citizen Cain, our response to Parson Meacham's work is similar to Bob Somerby's. We'll let Somerby paraphrase: "Blah blah blah blah harrumph zzzzzzz." Also: "Blah blah blah blah blah plop fizz."

Victor Davis Hanson Must Be Stopped!

2005-12-29T11:52:00.000-06:00

VDH's latest column at NRO is up to his usual vile standard. Try to match this sentence for laziness of thought, foolishness, and just plain crappy writing:

Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances.

Sheesh. You hear that, John Burns? Quit running around Baghad looking for scoops and weld something, for chrissakes.

Or this:

there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West at large. Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem — murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not.

Is he really this dumb? Can he not tell the difference between a crime problem in a stable, functioning society and an insurgency that threatens to erupt into civil war, or anarchy?

President Bush: Burning the Midnight Oil

2005-12-29T10:39:00.000-06:00

Today's Washington Post article by Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei, about the White House political strategy for 2006, contains this gem:

Bush, who had plenty to be morose about through the fall, responded with vigor
as well. Instead of heading immediately to bed after the Oval Office address, as
he usually does, he stuck around to chew through themes for his upcoming State
of the Union address, another high-ranking administration official said.

Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Hitchens Promises, and Fails to Deliver

2005-12-28T09:59:00.000-06:00

The headline of Christopher Hitchen's latest at Slate is intriguing: Neighborhood Watch: Yes, Iran is meddling in Iraqi affairs, but maybe the influence works both ways.

Wow! Now maybe here's some good news that the Mainstream Media hasn't reported. Even while Iranian agents are having great success in their efforts to turn Iraq into a Shiite theocracy, maybe the influence of Iraqi democracy is influencing Iran, creating some sort of movement from below for greater freedom. In the first sentence of the article, we learn that Hitchens was actually in Iran this year, so no doubt his article will be filled with inside details on how what's going on in Iraq is influencing Iran.

But read the article. What a disappointment. Nothing. Hitchens seems to have done some reporting on the Iran's meddling in Iraq, but when it comes to showing that "the influence works both ways, he can only ask rhetorical questions:

everything I can glean from friends and contacts in Iraq makes it ever-clearer that the Iranian state and its clerical proxies made a huge intervention in the Iraqi voting earlier this month, most especially in the southern provinces and in the capital city of Baghdad. It was probable that the Shiite parties would have won anyway, but they made assurance doubly sure by extensive fraud and by using both militias and uniformed policemen to exclude, coerce, or intimidate voters. So, the regional dilemma is now as follows: Will the Iraqi model be one day followed in Iran, or will Iran succeed in imposing its own "model" on Iraq?

Hitchens does tell us that the Ayatollah Sistani is an opponent of Khomeniism and that he has some influence in Iran. Thanks for that-- Hitchens could have saved himself a trip to Iran and reported this hot news back in 2003.

Compassionate Conservatism in Action

2005-12-28T08:45:00.000-06:00

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published an evaluation of the spending reconciliation bill back on December 19. They found that the reconciliation bill includes a change to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program that will increase childhood poverty in the United States and lead to financial penalties on states that cannot meet the unreasonable requirements of the new provision.

Read the report. I won't go into detail, but yet again the Republicans are violating their professed federalist principles, not to mention that whole compassion thing.

Military Service and Socioeconomic Status.

2005-12-27T18:33:00.000-06:00

Citizen Cain is a big fan of both Jane Hamsher and Digby. Both bloggers are irritated with Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell for her criticisms of a November 4 Ann Scott Tyson front pager about the socioeconomic profile of Army recruiting. Tyson's article was based on an analysis of military recruiting data by the National Priorities Project (NPP).

I agree with Hamsher and Digby that Howell's critique is weak, and that it seems to be based on not much more than noting that some people disagree with the NPP analysis, without providing much context for judging who is right. But the dispute caused me to look more closely at the Washington Post article, the NPP analysis and a critique of it by the Heritage Foundation. Based on my review of these sources, I would say that the Tyson article was misleading.

Tyson's article states:

Many of today's recruits are financially strapped, with nearly half coming from lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data based on Zip codes and census estimates of mean household income. Nearly two-thirds of Army recruits in 2004 came from counties in which median household income is below the U.S. median.

Such patterns are pronounced in such counties as Martinsville, Va., that supply the greatest number of enlistees in proportion to their youth populations. All of the Army's top 20 counties for recruiting had lower-than-national median incomes, 12 had higher poverty rates, and 16 were non-metropolitan, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group that analyzed 2004 recruiting data by Zip code.

I have several problems with this. First, despite Tyson's assertion that nearly half of recruits come from "lower-middle-class to poor households," the available data don't actually tell us the socioeconomic status of the households recruits come from. The data tell us what zip codes recruits come from, so at most we can say that nearly half of recruits come from lower-middle-class to poor geographic areas. Tyson alludes to this, but in a way that isn't at all clear. While common sense and experience tells us that many recruits are "financially strapped," the article doesn't add a lot to our knowledge of this topic.

Second problem is that "lower-middle-class to poor," depending on how you define, could be most of the country. But it seems obvious that Tyson is trying to say that recruits come disproportionately from lower-middle-class to poor" regions. It isn't clear that this assertion is true. You would never know from Tyson's article that the NPP data show that the poorest regions of the country (those with median incomes below $20,000 per year) are actually underrepresented among recruits. The very wealthiest regions are the least reprented among military recruits. Zip codes with median incomes between $25,000 and $55,000 are overrepresented. The Heritage Foundation, drawing on the same Department of Defense data, reports the data by income quintile, and show that in 2003 the poorest quintile areas are the least represented among recruits, the second richest quintile is the most represented, and the richest quintile is the second most represented. Taking the NPP and the Heritage data together produces a picture where the poorest regions and the very wealthiest regions are underrepresented among recruits, but middle class regions, including at least middle-middle (and upper-middle-middle?) classes are well represented. A somewhat different picture than what Tyson reported.

Third problem is that while Tyson doesn't directly say it, she implies that the military is relying increasingly on poor areas. Here's her lead:

As sustained combat in Iraq makes it harder than ever to fill the ranks of the all-volunteer force, newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed, rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war.

But in fact Heritage shows that the poorest and second quintile zip codes become less well represented among recruits between 1999 and 2003.

Finally, Tyson is mislead by NPP's analysis of the "top 20 counties for recruiting." In fact these are the 20 counties with the highest recruitment rate, not the highest number of recruits. All of these counties are counties with very small populations, where the addition of one or two recruits raises the recruitment rate significantly. Therefore, the recruitment rates for these counties isn't statistically meaningful, any more than it is statistically meaningful that there were many poor rural counties with zero recruits. Digby says that Heritage reports "a bunch of arcane gobblodygook that I defy Howell or anyone else to interpret." Actually, it isn't that complicated. A high recruitment rate from a county that had only a few recruits doesn't mean much.

Note: this post has been modified slightly since original posting.

The Paranoid Style of William Kristol

2005-12-27T09:48:00.000-06:00

William Kristol opines, in the Weekly Standard, that liberals don't care about the war on terror, so transfixed are they by the imaginary threat that George Bush will turn the repressive powers of the state against innocent American citizens. The political opposition and the mainstream media, he declares, are infected by The Parnoid Style in American Liberalism.

Was the president to ignore the evident fact that FISA's procedures and strictures were simply incompatible with dealing with the al Qaeda threat in an expeditious manner? Was the president to ignore the obvious incapacity of any court, operating under any intelligible legal standard, to judge surveillance decisions involving the sweeping of massive numbers of cell phones and emails by high-speed computers in order even to know where to focus resources? Was the president, in the wake of 9/11, and with the threat of imminent new attacks, really supposed to sit on his hands and gamble that Congress might figure out a way to fix FISA, if it could even be fixed? The questions answer themselves.

So Kristol thinks that the law was "broken" and that it is too hard to conduct necessary surveillance under the law. Is he right? Citizen Cain hasn't formed an opinion, and the reason that he hasn't is that we haven't had a proper national debate on this topic, because the President decided that he was above the law and didn't need to change it.

Citizen Cain might well support an expansion of surveillance powers, if it could be shown, for instance, that data mining approaches that could be useful against terrorists could not be conducted under current law, and if a revised law could provide for adequate judicial oversight of how the data mining was conducted, and how the results were used. Citizen Cain could even forgive President Bush if he had, for a brief time after 9/11, violated the law while at the same time asking Congress to change it.

But Kristol says that Bush was right to violate the law indefinitely without Congressional or judicial safeguards, because of the possibility that Congress might not "figure out a way to fix FISA." Because liberals have dared to criticize the Preident and to suggest that he is improperly assuming powers that the law and the Constitution don't give him, liberalism is on the verge of descending into a "fever swamp."

Kristol's lack of respect for the constitution is appalling. At the risk of descending into the fever swamp, Citizen Cain declares that we might as well be a banana republic if we allow the President to ignore the law because of the possibility that Congress won't do what the President wants.

One More on Measuring Bias

2005-12-26T16:05:00.000-06:00

A final thought about Groseclose Milyo study. The Language Log critique of an earlier version this study states:

Let's begin with the assumption that underlies Groseclose and Milyo's assignment of ratings to the various groups they looked at: if a group is cited by a liberal legislator, it's liberal; if it's cited by a conservative legislator, it's conservative.
On February 24, 2004, for example, in a debate on the medical liability bill, the liberal Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut cited "a study conducted by the Rand Corporation and published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year [which concluded] that individuals received the recommended treatment for their condition in only 55 percent of the cases... " For Groseclose and Milyo, Dodd's citation of the study counts as one piece of evidence that the Rand Corporation is a liberal think tank. In fact, their method assumes that there can be no such thing as objective or disinterested scholarship -- every study or piece of research, even if published in so august a scientific authority as the New England Journal, can be assumed to have a hidden agenda, depending on which side finds its results congenial to its political purposes.

In their response, Groseclose and Milyo state:

Although we did not state it in the paper, our own view is nearly the exact opposite of this assumption. Namely, by and large, we believe that all studies and quotes by the think tanks in our sample are true and objective. However, it just happens that some, but not necessarily all, of these true and objective studies appeal differently to conservatives than liberals. To see why, imagine that a researcher publishes a study in a very prestigious scientific journal such as the New England Journal of Medicine. Suppose this study gives evidence that a fetus in the early stages of its mother’s pregnancy can feel pain (or cannot feel pain). We are willing to bet that this true and objective study will appeal more to conservatives (liberals) than liberals (conservatives). We are also willing to bet that conservatives (liberals) would tend to cite it more.
This is all that our study assumes—that these studies can appeal differently to different sides of the political spectrum. We do not assume that the authors of the studies necessarily have a political agenda. Not only that, we do not even assume that each study will appeal differently to different sides
of the political spectrum. We only assume that it is possible that such studies will appeal differently.

This is an excellent response, as far as it goes, but it fails to address part of the concern about the study's methodology. Suppose that a think tank, call it the NEJM Association, had published a study giving evidence that a fetus in the early stages cannot feel pain. Suppose further that liberal legislators cited this study frequently and that neither conservative nor liberal legislators cited anything else published by the NEJM Association, making the NEJM Association seem to be a liberal think tank. Therefore, under the Grosecose-Milyo methodology, a newspaper that cited the NEJM Association frequently would be tagged a liberal newspaper. That would make sense, perhaps, if it could be shown that the newspaper was citing the NEJM study about fetal inability to feel pain. But what if the newspaper was citing other work by the NEJM Association -- for instance, studies on the connection between diet and cancer incidence, or on outcomes of obesity treatment. I would contend that it would be unfair to give this newspaper a "liberal" tag.

In think that something like this might be going on with the Grosesclose-Milyo study. Think tanks produce work that is political charged and work that isn't. I would contend that on average, liberal groups produce more non-policically charged work, work that is important for it's expertise and informational content. Conservative groups, I would argue, are on average more political, and more consistently partisan. I don't think that Groseclose and Milyo have adequately controlled for this effect.

More on Measuring Media Bias

2005-12-24T22:48:00.000-06:00

A couple of additional points to make regarding the recent report evaluating “media bias” that I blogged about a couple of days ago:

In addition to the Media Matters evaluation of the report, earlier versions of the report received critiques from the Left Coaster and from Geoffrey Nunberg. The report’s authors, Groseclose and Milyo, responded to Nunberg. I agree with some of points made in these critiques of the Groseclose/Milyo report, particularly the idea that authors overreached by labeling their report a study of media “bias.” The report looks only at journalists’ use of think tanks and policy advocacy groups, and bias can creep into journalism in a lot of ways other than through selection of groups to cite. Moreover, the report takes any deviation from the political center (as defined by which groups are cited by members of Congress in floor speeches), as evidence of “bias.” I would like to see evidence of unfairness or inaccuracy on the part of journalists before the word “bias” is thrown around.

However, I don’t think that the report’s methodology is worthless, as some of the critics do. I think the report is actually pretty interesting, if it is taken not as a full accounting of “media bias,” but rather as an attempt to quantitatively determine what types of think tanks and policy groups the media give voice to most often, and how those groups stand in relation to the national polical center of gravity. The fact that the methodology produces some anomalous results doesn’t mean that the whole approach is without merit.

But I do think that the methodology needs some refinement. In particular, I think that several factors biased the report towards the result that media organizations favor liberal groups. I would like to expand on one of those factors that I cited in my previous post. I opined that liberal organizations are likely, as a group, more scholarly and and better sources of unbiased information than conservative organizations. Therefore, if journalists are more concerned than members of Congress with the scholarly reputation of an organization, they might be inclined to cite liberal organizations, not because they are liberal but because they are scholarly.

I was unfair, in my previous post, not to acknowledge that Groseclose and Milyo do attempt to control for the “scholarliness” of groups in their study. However, I do not believe that their controls fully address this issue, and I still believe that this factor biases their study towards the conclusion that the media favor liberal groups.

The authors constructed three binary variables to control for “scholarliness:” whether the organization’s website has closed membership (like a think tank and unlike most advocacy groups), whether the organization has staff with the title “fellow,” “researcher,” “economist,” or “analyst,” and whether the organization is located off K Street in Washington D.C. (unlike organizations devoted to lobbying, which tend to be located on K Street). I don’t think that these variables get very far towards a true measure of scholarliness—the Heritage Foundation comes out as scholarly as Brookings. I’d like to see the authors try to use a measure such as number of staff who have published research in peer reviewed journals in the last two years, or something similar.

Nonetheless, use of these variables made media organizations come out somewhat more conservative than the version of the model that did not control for “scholarliness,” though they still came out conservative on average and the change was not statistically significant. I’m inclined to believe that if the model used more sophisticated measures of scholarliness, news organizations would come out still more conservative.

But more importantly, scholarliness is only part of the issue. Think tanks and policy organizations produce a lot of different information. Some of this information is useful in arguments that fit on a liberal-conservative spectrum, and some is not. Sometimes policy organizations package this information into arguments, but sometimes they put information out in an unbiased way without spinning it at all-- a good example would being the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index. I would contend that liberal organizations are more likely to also be organizations that are good sources for this sort of non-ideological, non-partisan information. For instance, Amnesty International can fairly be classified as a liberal organization. But if a reporter is looking for a source of information about, say, the human rights situation in Sri Lanka, he or she will likely turn to Amnesty. Does that create a “liberal” slant to the story? Not if there’s no liberal-conservative split on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka. What if a journalist is writing a story about a politically-loaded question like welfare policy, and she gets data about trends in the number of poor people from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, because they provide the government data in an unbiased, easily accessible format. She then quotes the Economic Policy Institute saying that the Bush administration’s welfare policies are too conservative, and quotes the Heritage Foundation saying that the administration’s policies are too liberal. Is she tilting her story to the left because she has quoted two liberal organizations and one conservative one? I would say no, since one of the liberal organizations was used to provide data that was not in dispute, not to provide politically-salient arguments.

If I’m right that liberal organziations are better sources of unbiased information, and if members of Congress are more likely to quote organizations to score points in a political debate, while journalists are more likely use organizations to provide information that doesn’t necessarily have political/ideological salience, then the fact that journalists are more likely to quote liberal organization is not evidence that journalists slant left.

Santorum. Intelligent Design.

2005-12-23T23:18:00.000-06:00

A rat flees a sinking ship.

Measuring Media Bias

2005-12-22T22:45:00.000-06:00

As I was starting to write a critique of the recent report on “media bias” by Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and Jeffrey Milyo, a University of Missouri economist, I saw that Media Matters beat me to it. They do a bang-up job too, although I have some differences with the Media Matters evaluation.

The report found—guess what?—“liberal bias” in the mainstream media. Gasp! As Media Matters lays out, the researchers employ an unusual methodology to assess bias. First, they use Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) ratings for members of Congress to determine how liberal each member is. Floor speeches by each member were analyzed to see which think tanks and policy organizations each cited most, omitting the citations made in the course of refuting or denouncing the organization. The organizations most cited by liberal members were deemed to be liberal organizations, and those most cited by conservative members were deemed to be conservative organizations, with each organization receiving a score from 1 to 100 corresponding to the ADA ranking. Then the researchers analyzed media outlets for the think tanks they cited in their news stories, and compared these patterns with the patterns observed in Congress. Media outlets with similar citation patterns to liberal members were deemed to be liberal, etc.

The results were that 18 of the 20 media outlets evaluated came out as liberal. The exceptions were the Washington Times and Fox News.

Media Matters points out the authors’ apparent ignorance of previous scholarly work about media bias. They also describe some flaws in their methodology, and some of the peculiar results it generates: the ACLU turns out to be a conservative group; the National Rifle Association comes out as a moderate organization; the RAND Corporation and the Council on Foreign relations come out as being to the left of the ACLU.

Despite these anomalies, I think somewhat more highly of the report’s methodology than Media Matters does. It is a cleverly constructed attempt to generate an objective standard for defining how liberal or conservative an organization is, at least in comparison with the national political center of gravity. In most cases the relative results (in terms of how think tanks and media outlets are ranked in comparison with each other) seem approximately accurate. While the methodology doesn’t really get at “bias” as I understand it, it does provide some clues as to which groups are most often publicized by the mainstream media, and, on a relative basis, whether these groups are liberal or conservative. Moreover, the report’s authors have explanations for how some of the anomalies occurred and, in some cases, for why the anomalies aren’t important. Besides, no methodology is perfect.

However, I believe that there are at factors that bias the entire study towards labeling media outlets as “liberal.” One is described by Media Matters:

. . . stories about race relations that include a quote from an NAACP representative are unlikely to be "balanced" with quotes from another group on their list. Their quotes will often be balanced by quotes from an individual, depending on the nature of the story; however, because there are no pro-racism groups of any legitimacy (or on Groseclose and Milyo's list), such stories will be coded as having a "liberal bias."

Since the NAACP is the third most-cited group in the study, this factor could have a significant impact.

I believe that two additional factors bias the report towards the conclusion that the media tilt left:

1. The Government: A Conservative Group. The period of observation of media outlets varied, depending on the organization, but most organizations were tracked from the late 1990s through 2003. Moreover, of the 20 news organizations tracked, nine were followed only during 2001 and beyond. Therefore, during most of the time the news organizations were evaluated, the Republicans held the presidency and had the initiative in putting forward policies and programs that would receive press coverage. When reporting on a Republican White House initiative, a reporter seeking “balance” and reaction from political opposition might choose to quote Democratic congressional leaders, but they might also choose to quote liberal think tanks and advocacy groups. I would be interested in seeing the authors do an analysis of whether trends in citing liberal versus conservative groups change as the political party in power changes, both in the White House and in Congress.

2. Liberals: the reality-based community. The organizations most often cited by members of Congress were the National Taxpayers Union (conservative), AARP (liberal), Amnesty International (liberal), Sierra Club (liberal), Heritage Foundation (conservative), Citizens Against Government Waste (conservative), RAND (liberal), Brookings (liberal), National Federation of Independent Businesses (conservative), and ACLU (anomalously slightly conservative in this ranking). Note that the liberal organizations include two that are highly scholarly sources of relatively unbiased information, and not political advocacy groups. Amnesty International, while considered a liberal advocacy group on domestic controversies such as the death penalty and abusive treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, is also an outstanding source of unbiased information about human rights conditions in regimes such as Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, etc. Of the conservative organizations, the Heritage Foundation comes closest to being a scholarly organization, but it is much closer to being an arm of the conservative movement than either RAND or Brookings is to being an arm of the liberals. So when news outlets cite Brookings or RAND or Amnesty, the actual content of the information that is being cited is likely to be less loaded in ideological or partisan terms and less affected by “spin” than is the case when the National Taxpayers Union or Citizens Against Government Waste or the Heritage Foundation are cited. I would be interested in seeing an analysis that attempted to control for such differences.

So while I think that the methodology that Groseclose and Milyo have developed has some merits and is worth trying to improve, I think that their bottom-line result is unreliable. The finding that the media tilts left is unproven.

Lying Liars

2005-12-21T20:18:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post:

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan was asked to explain why Bush last year said, "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." McClellan said the quote referred only to the USA Patriot Act.

How low can they go? Clinton was torn a new one for parsing the word “is.” But Bush is allowed to invent new meanings for "any time."

Surveillance and the Law

2005-12-20T18:05:00.000-06:00

Many thanks to Kevin Drum for his lucid explication of the best thinking on legal status of the National Security Agency’s domestic electronic spying program. The New York Times sat on the story for more than a year, and yet when the finally published, their reporting of the legal issues involved was a confused jumble.

Drum explains that 1. the program probably doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment, given current interpretation of the law; 2. the program definitely does violate the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, and 3. the President has no constitutional powers allowing him to override FISA.

George Will asks the right question—if he really believed it was necessary to conduct this program, then why didn’t he ask Congress to give him the legal authority. I could accept it if he had started the program after 9/11, while simultaneously asking Congress for authorization. I can’t accept, however, that he unilaterally implemented the program and never bothered to ask Congress to change the law. This is criminal behavior.

Intelligent Design Defeated!

2005-12-20T17:54:00.000-06:00

When I opined yesterday that the Intelligent Design movement was in trouble, I had no idea how quickly events would prove me right. Of course, this is only one courtroom, and just one case, but Judge Jones would have seemed a pretty good choice from the ID perspective—someone who ran for Congress as a Republican and who was appointed to the District Court by W. This is a happy day.

Is 72 Hours Enough?

2005-12-19T20:48:00.000-06:00

I see now that Byron York has written an NRO article that addresses the question of why the Bush administration thought it necessary to do without warrants. The argument is that even with the ability to conduct surveillance for 72 hours, the Justice Department/ FBI bureaucracy can’t handle the paperwork required to process all of the applications for all of the surveillance that they want to conduct. Apparently the warrant applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are a bear. The court apparently isn’t the problem; getting the applications together is the problem. So even with a 72 hour window, there were concerns about the ability to get the applications in on time.

Hmm. If this story holds up, I’ll have to revise my opinion that the concern about timeliness is a red herring. My next question would then be, if the existing law was too cumbersome, then why didn’t the administration seek to change the law? It’s been four years!

Don't Worry about Your Civil Liberties

2005-12-19T20:12:00.000-06:00

The Bush administration is saying that while they dispensed with the requirement to get warrants to spy on U.S. citizens, they still had plenty of procedures in place to prevent abuses. First Draft has the transcript of a press briefing with Michael Hayden, Principal Deputy Director for National Intelligence (hat tip Atrios):

Q And who determined that these targets were al Qaeda? Did you wiretap them?
GENERAL HAYDEN: The judgment is made by the operational work force at the National Security Agency using the information available to them at the time, and the standard that they apply -- and it's a two-person standard that must be signed off by a shift supervisor, and carefully recorded as to what created the operational imperative to cover any target, but particularly with regard to those inside the United States.

I feel so much better now. Who needs courts when you’ve got an operational work force, including a shift supervisor?

Illegal Surveillance: Why?

2005-12-19T17:31:00.000-06:00

The Bush administration is floundering painfully as it attempts to defend of its program of warrantless domestic electronic searches. The Washington Post quotes Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

Gonzales said that while FISA prohibits eavesdropping without court approval, it takes an exception where Congress "otherwise authorizes." That authorization, he said, was implicit in the authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks.

This is preposterous; Congress authorized the use of military force against al Qaeda and the Taliban, not warrantless searches in the United States.

Moreover, the argument that warrantless searches were burdensome because of the time that it takes to get a warrant has been shown to be baseless. Since the administration could already conduct surveillance for 72 hours without a warrant under the law, the real reason must be not that they couldn’t get warrants quickly enough, but rather that they feared that courts might reject some of their requests for warrants. And why did they fear such rejection? Judges are generally very willing to grant warrants.

The most generous interpretation is that the administration feared that there might be instances where they were suspicious of an individual, but would not be able to show probable cause. There are less generous interpretations, involving possible eavesdropping against journalists or political enemies.

What’s the real reason? Citizen Cain doesn’t know. But the Bush administration sure hasn’t put forward the real reason yet.

Intelligent Designers Retreat!

2005-12-19T17:06:00.000-06:00

Intelligent design as a political program for sneaking the teaching of religion into science classrooms is in big trouble, and is on the verge of having to retrench. My evidence? Today’s Chicago Tribune column by the conservative Dennis Byrne. Byrne is clearly sympathetic to intelligent design, and spends much of his column defending it and criticizing the arrogance of secularists and scientists regarding “the Big Question: How did we get here, and why?”

But here’s what Bryne has to say when he comes to the big political question of the day – should intelligent design be taught alongside evolution in science classrooms?

The reality today is that when theology, philosophy or religion dares to examine the Big Question, its practitioners find themselves increasingly bumping heads with scientific claims of exclusive competence. This is wrong. Neither science nor theology has the right to tell the other to butt out of this quest. In this, no one has the right to demand that the study of intelligent design be kept out of schools. Out of the science class, perhaps, but not out of all classrooms.

So Byrne seems to be conceding that scientists should decide what gets taught in science class, and scientists overwhelmingly reject intelligent design as an unscientific theory.

Where then, according to Byrne, should intelligent design be taught? He doesn’t directly say, but since he refers to the contributions that philosophy, theology, and religion can make towards answering “the Big Question.” So I assume he supports the teaching of intelligent design in philosophy, theology and religion classes. Since all high school students take biology, but relatively few take philosophy, theology, or religion, I would consider this a major scaling back of the education agenda for intelligent design.

The next question to ask, now that it has been conceded that intelligent design doesn’t belong in the science classroom, is whether intelligent design is good philosophy, theology, or religion. Byrne says:

Philosophers and theologians may--must, actually--rigorously examine the scientific theory that random chance explains everything. A denial of that right and responsibility rises from the same spirit of arrogant certitude that haunted
Galileo.

It isn’t clear to me who Byrne thinks is denying philosophers and theologians the right to examine any question, so the comparison to the inquisition seems hysterical. By all means, examine away. But as philosophers and theologians examine this question, they should start by trying to understand the most rigorous work by scientists on this subject—and it isn’t by intelligent design proponents.

More Administration Dishonesty: This Time on Surveillance

2005-12-18T22:29:00.000-06:00

Bush administration sources have stated that the reason why the president needed to conduct warrantless surveillance of domestic intelligence targets is that it can take too long to get a warrant. According to the Washington Post:

The aim of the program was to rapidly monitor the phone calls and other communications of people in the United States believed to have contact with suspected associates of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups overseas, according to two former senior administration officials. Authorities, including a former NSA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, were worried that vital information could be lost in the time it took to secure a warrant from a special surveillance court, sources said.

But on Face the Nation today, Sen. Joe Biden explained that existing law allows the President to conduct electronic surveillance of anyone for up to 75 hours. Biden:

I'm the guy that drafted the FISA Act 25 years ago on the Judiciary Committee, one of the three people, and we set it up-- it's a secret court allowing the president to wiretap anybody, intercept anything for up to 75 hours. They can in the meantime go into that court and say, `I needed to do this.' If there's a reason the court thinks is under the Constitution permissible, they're allowed to do it. If it turns out they're not allowed to do it, they have to destroy the evidence.

So I just don't get it. He already has the authority under the FISA court to go in and intercept anything he wants up to 72 hours. This is neither, I think, legal, nor is it necessary what he's been doing. It is a little bit frightening how broadly he asserts his authority as commander in chief, where the guy hasn't shown very good judgment on torture or a lot of other things.

So once again this administration is being dishonest—making it seem as if they need to violate the law in order to protect the public. I hope that Congress has the guts to face down Bush on this one. I also hope that the Washington Post publishes a correction and stops trusting the sources that fed them a line about losing information during the time that it takes to get a warrant.

David Brooks Misses the Point. Again

2005-12-18T12:18:00.000-06:00

Does David Brooks even believe the stuff he writes? Start, in today's column, with the assertion that

American policy makers and think-tank Johnnies have not really looked at Iraq in
the broader context of . . . [other civil wars]. That's in part because when Americans think of civil war, we tend to think of our own Civil War, which was utterly atypical. It's also because American experts were almost all trained to think about wars between nations . . .

Please. First of all, it's silly to say that think tank analysts haven't looked at Iraq in the broader context of other conflicts. Second, it's ludicrous to assert that the American civil war has somehow prevented U.S. experts from an understanding of other civil wars. And third, it's preposterous to say that our lack of preparation for the civil war in Iraq occurred because of some kind of general failing in the training of American "experts."

Whatever the failings of experts, our lack of preparation for the civil war in Iraq is attributable predominantly to factors that David Brooks won't discuss: the abject failure of the Bush administration to plan for the occupation, and to commit sufficient resources to it. James Fallows has reported that even now, no one in the administration really gives much attention to Iraq, hard thought that may be to believe. Rumsfeld is apparently bored with the whole subject, perferring to focus on military "transformation."

But in Brooks's fantasy world, it isn't the Bush administration's fault. The problem, you see, is that American experts all have their heads up their butts thinking about the U.S. civil war.

Confusion About Surveillance

2005-12-17T15:58:00.000-06:00

Here at Citizen Cain, we’re confused by the whole issue of the Bush Administration’s authorization of domestic electronic surveillance.

First off, it appears that it is illegal to conduct electronic surveillance except as authorized by statute. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a government official who conducts electronic surveillance must be able to show that he was “engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction.”

President Bush overrode this law in 2002, using a secret executive order. The order authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance against U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, despite, as the Washington Post puts it, “previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.”

Question #1: How is it possible for a law can to be overridden by executive order. This seems astonishing.

According to the New York Times, the Bush administration’s justification for ignoring the law includes the following:

President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

But here is the relevant text of the Authorization for Military Force that Congress passed on September 18, 2001:
Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled . . .
a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized 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.
(b) War Powers Resolution Requirements-
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

Question #2: How could this authorization for use of force against al Qaeda be interpreted to allow for warrantless electronic surveillance.

The New York Times says that administration lawyers developed a theory that:

the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority.

Support for this theory, the Times said, came from a decision in an unrelated matter by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. The court referred in this decision to "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance." The Court decision, moreover, appears to say the authority to conduct such warrantless surveillance is well accepted law, and that this applies under some circumstances to domestic intelligence surveillance.

Question #3: If the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s requirement for warrants contradicts “the president’s inherent constitutional authority,” why hasn’t it been challenged on constitutional grounds? Can the president simply ignore a law because he thinks it’s unconstitutional?

Can a lawyer help me out, or point to something that explains this? The newspaper accounts just aren’t sorting it out sufficiently.

Sexuality and Genes

2005-12-16T23:07:00.000-06:00

Conrad, a commenter on a recent post about Brokeback Mountain and whether aversion to witnessing homosexual affection is genetic, opines that:

if one accepts that sexual orientation is genetic, that homosexuality is in the genes, it makes tremendous sense to assert that hetero aversion to gay sex is also in the genes. The point being that it's very hard to imagine a genetic reason why homosexuality would pass on homosexual genes to the next generation, since gay sex doesn't produce children. Whereas it makes excellent sense to suggest that hetero men with an aversion to gay sex are more likely to pass on their genes than hetero men without an aversion to gay sex.

Conrad makes some reasonable points, but I don’t necessarily agree. First, let me address the point that “it’s very hard to imagine a genetic reason why homosexuality would pass on homosexual genes to the next generation.” Then I will address whether hetero aversion to gay sex is likely to be genetic, because it enhances genetic fitness.

It is far from certain that homosexuality has a genetic component, but if it does, there are several theories of how genes that promote homosexuality could be maintained in a population. An early theory, by sociobiology founding father E.O. Wilson held that homosexuality is a form of genetic altruism—that homosexuals through human pre-history refrained from parenthood and instead devoted themselves to being good aunts and uncles—to helping raise the children of the tribe with whom they shared some genes. This theory hasn’t held up very well, because it’s hard to imagine aunt/uncle effort contributing sufficiently to genetic success to explain the persistence of genes that discouraged parenthood itself.

Another theory, first explained by Richard Dawkins and more recently by Robert Wright, holds that there may be genes that in modern society predispose some individuals to homosexuality, but that these genes did not predispose people to homosexuality in environments during which humans did most of their evolving. The expression of any gene is dependent on its environment, and maybe hunter-gatherer societies were not conducive to development of homosexuality even in people who, if alive today, would be homosexual. Keep in mind that in hunter gatherer societies there were no bars, personals ads, clubs, literature, movies or television and that people lived in very small groups and knew only a small number of people. Even for people who had some tendency towards homosexuality in a hunter-gatherer society, it might be difficult to find or identify other homosexuals as sexual partners or role models. Unable to express their homosexual tendencies, according to this theory, they “became” heterosexual and passed on their genes.

Conrad draws an analogy between sibling incest aversion and aversion to homosexuality. But incest aversion is a different case, because a very high percentage of people throughout human evolution have opposite sex siblings that are theoretically available as sexual partners, and because incest has hugely negative fitness implications, especially for women but for men too. So genes that predispose a person to finding sex with a sibling to be disgusting have high fitness benefits.

Another theory is that there may be genes that promote homosexuality but that have other fitness benefits. Perhaps a number of genes, each of which individually has fitness benefits and do not promote homosexuality, when combined together predispose a person to be homosexual. Still another theory, applicable only to male homosexuality, is that there may be genes that promote male homosexuality on the X chromosome, and that these genes have a fitness benefit to women. Since women have two X chromosomes and men only one, an X chromosome gene as it is passed through the generations will spend 2/3 of its time in women’s bodies, and only 1/3 in men’s. Therefore, if there were an X chromosome gene that, say, decreased a woman’s odds of dying in childbirth while predisposing a man to homosexuality, such a gene might survive in a population.

I personally think that some combination of the Dawkins theory of different environments and the gene combination/X chromosome theory is plausible, but no one really knows.

Turning now to the question of whether aversion to gay sex is genetic, I find it highly plausible that most men are genetically predisposed to prefer women as sexual partners, and vice versa. It’s less clear to me, however, that Conrad is right to assert that “hetero men with an aversion to gay sex are more likely to pass on their genes than hetero men without an aversion to gay sex,” if by this he means aversion to other people having gay sex. An aversion to the type of sex that other people are having doesn’t obviously seem to be fitness-enhancing. Maybe the point is that an aversion to gay sex makes a man more hetero on a continuum from homosexuality to heterosexuality, more exclusively devoted to sex with females and therefore less likely to expend effort on genetically unproductive couplings. Perhaps. Or perhaps aversion to other people having gay sex is a byproduct of genes that make a person prefer not to have gay sex themselves.

Though such theories have some plausibility, I’m reluctant to accept them because it is so easy to spin out equally plausible theories of what ought to be in our genes. Why not theorize that men should be genetically predisposed to encourage other men to be homosexual in order to keep the women for themselves, or that people ought to be averse to masturbation and oral sex because they’re wasted effort genetically.

Moreover, human beings have all sorts of genetic predispositions that may or may not be expressed depending on the circumstances. Perhaps a predisposition to disgust at homosexual affection between others is expressed only in when an individual rarely witnesses homosexual expressions of affection. So to say that heterosexual men may have a genetic predisposition to find expressions of homosexuality in others to be disgusting, seems to me to be a way to say, “it will ever be so.” I’m skeptical. If you said that genetic programming is likely to ensure that even 1000 years from now, most people will prefer opposite sex sexual partners and that most people will continue to feel protective towards their children and to prefer comfort over misery, I would agree. The genetic benefits of these tendencies, across an enormous varieties of possible environments, are just so obvious.

But if you say, “heterosexual men will always find the sight of other men kissing to be disgusting, because it’s in the genes” it seems to me that you’re trying to justify preferences that are highly malleable, to limit the scope of our culture to make change. I won’t go there.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish on New Orleans Levees

2005-12-15T22:35:00.000-06:00

The New York Times reports that the White House has agreed to double funding for flood protection levees in New Orleans, adding $1.5 billion to an already promised $1.6 billion.  With the added funding, it will be possible, the White House says, to protect New Orleans against catastrophic flooding from another hurricane the size of Katrina.  That is against a category 3 hurricane.  The funding would not be sufficient, however, to allow the levees to be strengthened sufficiently to prevent levee breaches in response to a category 5 hurricane.

Isn’t this a ridiculous place to be pinching pennies?  Not only does it invite another catastrophe, it threatens the success of the whole reconstruction effort.  How much sense does it make to spend tens of billions on reconstruction by nickel and dime the effort to make New Orleans safe from another catastrophe.  The best thing that the federal government could do to attract private investment back to New Orleans isn’t to offer tax breaks or to expand flood insurance protection, but to spend what it takes to protect the city.  In November, the Washington Post reported that ”rebuilding the levees in New Orleans to the level state and local leaders want is expected to cost $20 billion or more.”

It’s ridiculous that we aren’t budgeting money for this vital effort right now.  If we don’t, we risk wasting a lot more than $20 billion.

The Liberal Bias Boogeyman

2005-12-15T22:08:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post, particularly national politics editor John Harris, has covered itself in disgrace by undermining Dan Froomkin, the paper’s online White House Briefing columnist. Media Matters and Brad DeLong have the goods.

What is truly extraordinary about this episode is how little the White House, and/or conservative activists, need do to make the mainstream media crap itself for fear of being charged with liberal bias. All that it takes to get the Post to impugn their own man’s credibility Froomkin is for some conservatives to assert that he “writes from a liberal world view.”

More Brokeback

2005-12-15T20:38:00.000-06:00

It's overwhelming the impact that a link from Andrew Sullivan will have on traffic at a humble site like Citizen Cain. Thanks Daily Dish! Thanks also posters for the great discussion on the Brokeback Mountain post.

I see that Mickey Kaus has had a conversation with Robert Wright, in which Kaus no longer explains his lack of enthusiasm for seeing Brokeback Mountain on his need to see an attractive female lead. He now, much more plausibly, states that it's because he finds witnessing homosexual sex and romance to be repellent. Glad we cleared that up. Less plausibly, Kaus speculates that his aversion is genetically based; Wright makes mincemeat out of that argument.

And no, I don't think that Kaus should be driven out of polite society for his views, or that he hates gay people, or that he is psychologically diseased. The Malcontent should calm down. I'm just trying to sort through some very confused-seeming posts by Mickey Kaus to try and see what really is bugging him about Brokeback Mountain. And yes, I made fun of him a bit-- something that someone who can dish it out like he does should be able to take.

Now that Kaus has come clean, I'll leave him alone.

Mickey Kaus Loves the Ladies. Really!

2005-12-14T21:06:00.000-06:00

Welcome Andrew Sullivan readers! After you've read this post, please stay for a while, and check out what else we've got on offer here at Citizen Cain.

12/15/05, 8:40 pm

Regarding the new gay cowboy romance, Brokeback Mountain, Mickey Kaus has this to say:

I'm highly skeptical that a movie about gay cowhands, however good, will find a large mainstream audience. I'll go see it, but I don't want to go see it. (Why? Sexual
orientation really is in the genes. Sorry.)

Kaus doesn't want to see it because he's straight straight straight. When a correspondent questions why straight men should be uninterested in a gay romance when gay people manage to find pleasure in hetero romances, Kaus responds:

If a gay man, say, goes to see "Wuthering Heights," there is at least one romantic lead of the sex he's interested in! In "Brokeback Mountain," neither of the two romantic leads is of a sex I'm interested in. ... My wild hypothesis is that more people will go see a movie if it features an actor or actress they find attractive! If heterosexual men in heartland America don't flock to see "Brokeback Mountain" it's not because
they're bigoted. It's because they're heterosexual.

Got that? Kaus isn't interested in Brokeback Mountain only because he wants to see women when he goes to the movies. But it's not, NOT, because he's homophobic.

Interesting. First Kaus doubted that mainstream audiences would be interested in Brokeback Mountain. Apparently though, it's only heterosexual men who won't be interested. Straight women (if I follow Kaus's logic) should be doubly interested because of its two attractive male romantic leads. And hetero men won't be interested not because they find gay romance aversive, but rather because of the lack of female romantic leads. Gay women, I assume, will have no interest in it at all.

But does a movie have to have attractive female romantic leads to interest straight men, as Kaus says? Surely men straight men like lots of movies that have no romantic leads, and no romance, whatsoever. Like, for instance, Rope, or Terminator.

Or does a movie just need to "feature an actor or actress [that heterosexual men] find attactive?" as Kaus says in the same paragraph. Well Citizen Cain is no expert on attractiveness, but he knows what he likes. And he likes Brokeback Mountain co-stars (caution-- racy image) Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams. But perhaps these beautiful women don't get enough screen time in Brokeback Mountain to satisfy Kaus. Does Kaus also find himself uninterested, I wonder, in the many Hollywood films that feature a dozen or so male leads and one female lead, who gets minimal screen time (say, Ocean's Eleven or any of the classic Smurf pictures)? Does he stay away from movies that have no featured females at all (say Reservoir Dogs, or 12 Angry Men, or Master and Commander)?

Citizen Cain hasn't seen Brokeback Mountain. So he can't recommend for or against it. Nor would he assume that anyone who doesn't care to see it or who doesn't enjoy it must be homophobic. Moreover, Citizen Cain shares Kaus's pleasure in seeing beautiful women in movies. However, Citizen Cain also can sometimes identify with movie characters who experience powerful longing, even if the object of desire isn't to Citizen Cain's own taste.

Finally, I see that Andrew Sullivan has noticed that Kaus's posts on this topic:

The great thing about blogging is that, if it's done right and honestly, it can sometimes reveal things about yourself even you didn't know.

Well said.

Thimerosal and Autism: Where are the Goal Posts?

2005-12-09T22:53:00.000-06:00

Kevin Leitch is a parent of an autistic child, and an outstanding blogger, who is highly skeptical of claims that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. Leitch has commented here, and in greater detail here, on my previous post about a recent admission by David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm, a book highly sympathetic to claims that thimerosal causes autism. Kirby now admits that if autism cases among 3-5 year olds don't start declining by 2007 (in response to the removal of most thimerosal from vaccines), "that would deal a severe blow to the autism-thimerosal hypothesis."

Leitch points out that Kirby has moved the goal posts. Earlier this year, the New York Times summarized Kirby's position as follows:

Because autism is usually diagnosed sometime between a child’s third and fourth
birthdays and thimerosal was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001,
the incidence of autism should fall this year.

That's this year-- 2005. Leitch rightly asks, "what are the extra two years for." This is how Kirby explained his current position to me (without explaining why it has changed) in an e-mail back in August:

It is a myth that "most" mercury came out [of vaccines] in 1999. It wasn't even until July of 1999 that the government suggested that manufacturers begin to remove the
mercury "as soon as possible." Factories did not get approval for, and begin making thimerosal-free vaccines until 2000 at the earliest (Except for Merck, which got approval in Sept. 1999 to make Hg-free Hep-B vaccine, though it is not clear when this new formula actually appeared on the shelves of doctors offices).
On Meet the Press, Dr. Fineberg said that some mercury containing pediatric vaccines expired in 2003. I have reason to believe it was later than that, as many vaccines without thimerosal were not even produced until 2001 or 2002, and most vaccines have a shelf life of about three years from manufacture, it is my understanding. (Again, correct me if I am wrong). Plus, it takes quite some time for new lots to work their way through the distribution system, and new stocks are not ordered until old stocks begin to run low, as far as I can discern.
By this account, there were still mercury-containing vaccines on the shelf, potentially at least, until very recently. This matter is being investigated right now by the United States Senate, and we should have an answer soon, even if the Senators must subpoena the information (which they will, their staffs have indicated).
But let's take Dr. Fineberg at his word for now. He said at least some mercury containing vaccines (we don't know how many because the FDA won't say) expired in 2003. Meanwhile, 3-5 year old children entering the system now were born no later than June, 2002. In fact, we don't have the breakdown of individual birth cohorts, but one would imagine that there were more five year olds (born in 2000, when many kids were still getting the full amount of mercury in their shots) entering the system last quarter than three year olds, born in 2002. However, early intervention programs are lowering the age of diagnosis, and perhaps this ratio is changing as well.
. . .
My guess, and it is admittedly a guess, is that MOST 3-5 year olds entering the system today, on average received relatively high levels of mercury in their vaccines. If the FDA would release the pertinent information, we would know exactly how much that was.

So Kirby says that maybe thimerosal wasn't removed from vaccines in 2001 after all. Maybe it wasn't mostly removed until 2002 or 2003.

I don't find this persuasive. Proponents of the thimerosal-autism hypothesis hold that increased exposure to thimerosal resulting from changes in infant vaccine schedules in the early 1980s caused a massive subsequent increase in autism incidence. It isn't that there was no thimerosal exposure prior to 1980 (there was), it's that the increased exposure supposedly caused more autism. So significant decreases in exposure, even if some exposure remains, ought to decrease autism incidence if the hypothesis is correct.

Moreover, as an informed correspondent has told me, there was a shortage of DTP vaccine in 2001 and 2002, so it's unlikely that there was old vaccine sitting around by 2003. But Citizen Cain is a patient man. I can wait until 2007. I'm just afraid that by then the new hypothesis will be that miniscule amounts of thimerosal, still present in some vaccines because of use during the production process, are sufficient to cause continued high incidence of autism.

Evolutionary Psychology Debate Rages

2005-12-09T22:16:00.000-06:00

Citizen Cain did a lot of reading in Evolutionary Psychology a few years back, and found some of it intriguing, some of it persuasive, and some of it dubious. Evolutionary psychology seemed all the more persuasive because many of the critiques of it were shoddy and seemed to deliberately miss the point. I'm thinking specifically of Stephen Jay Gould, Hilary Rose, and Stephen Rose. It seemed to me that if that's the best the critics could do, then Ev Psych must have been on pretty solid ground.

But earlier this year, a new criticism of evolutionary psychology was published that was a cut above previous efforts. Adapting Minds : Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, by David Buller, a philosopher of science, seemed fair, informed, and reasonable. And it seemed to undermine most of the more provocative claims of the Ev Psych researchers.

But now Ev Psych has come back swinging, with defenses by leading researchers against Buller's criticisms of EP findings related to social contract reasoning, jealosy, and the psychology of parental care. Citizen Cain hasn't had time to study the arguments and decide who's right. A synopsis of Buller's attack is here. Ev Psych godfathers Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have organized the counterattack here. A counter-counterattack from Buller is here. Comments would be appreciated from anyone who has taken the time to wade through these papers, or, for that matter, from anyone who has a strong, uninformed opinion.

POSTSCRIPT (12/11): La Citoyenne told me that on reading the last phrase of this post, requesting comments from those with strong uninformed opinions, that I had made a typo. Wrong. I made a joke. But only sort of, because I like comments, even if they're uninformed. At Citizen Cain the posts are always informed; the comments may or may not be.

Memo to Nancy Pelosi: Assume that Anything This Adminstration Says is BS

2005-12-08T21:19:00.000-06:00

Condoleezza Rice got herself some nice press coverage by stating on her trip to Europe that the United States does not torture prisoners, here or abroad. This is how the Washington Post reported it:

U.S. obligations under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which prohibits cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, extend as "a matter of policy" to "U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States," Rice said here at a news conference with Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko.

If you've been paying close attention to this mendacious administration, however, it won't come as a surprise that this statement is carefully crafted to mislead, and doesn't say what it seems to say on first impression. As Eric Umansky has explained, the Bush Justice Department has opined that the Convention Against Torture prohibits cruel treatment only of U.S. prisoners at home or abroad. Foreigners, held in prisons not on U.S. soil, such as the secret CIA prisons in Europe. They're fair game.

Moreover, as Media Matters has pointed out, press coverage of Rice's statement failed to point out that the Bush administration uses a extremely narrow definition of torture, that allows it to engage in extremely abusive treatment of prisoners.

So Rice's statement, far from being some kind of breakthrough, was just a continuation of the Bush administration's sickening double-talk on torture: We don't torture, because we're the good guys, but don't make us stop torturing because we're the good guys. We're the good guys because we don't torture, but anything we don't short of causing major organ failure isn't torture. And we abide by our treaty obligations, but we interpret these treaties as allowing us to do whatever the hell we want to foreigners in foreign places.

So it's unfortunate that Nancy Pelosi waded into this story with the following comment, as reported by the Associated Press:

"It's about time," House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said of Rice's remarks. "Shame on us that it took so long for the administration" to make such a determination.

Yes, Pelosi was being critical of the administration. But she also gave them undue credit for making a determination against committing torture abroad. Sadly, no such determination has been made. Here's what Pelosi should have said:

Secretary Rice seems to be continuing this administration's pattern of double-talk. She says that the United States acts consistent with our treaty obligations, without saying that the administration's interpretation of our treaty obligations allows the use of treatment that any reasonable person would consider cruel and degrading, and allows torture of non-citizens when conducted outside of U.S. territory. I call on Secretary Rice to issue a clear statement that the United States prohibits its personnel and agents from abusing any prisoner, anywhere, and to support legislation that would codify this policy. Until then, we will have to assume that Rice's statements are a smokescreen for a policy that promotes torture and abuse.

Sully Sticks to the Hillary Script

2005-12-04T19:50:00.000-06:00

If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, the Republican line of attack against her will be that she's a left-wing freak and/or that she's unprincipled and will say anything to gain political advantage. Mainstream pundits will be happy to advance the latter line of attack, especially if their darling McCain is the Republican nominee, and they can contrast principled Senator Straight-Talk against devious Senator Forked-Tongue.

Here at Citizen Cain, we don't endorse political candidates. But we do believe that pundits shouldn't slam politicians for moral failings without providing some evidence. But sometimes the pundit herd all advances the same script about a politician without ever seeing a need to evaluate whether it makes sense. Whether it's the script that W is a man of great honesty and moral character who is in touch with the concerns of the common man, or the script that Hillary's burning ambition to be president has caused her to distance herself from her past as a socialist and a dove, these scripts don't need to be true if pundits and the RNC all read faithfully from them.

So when Clinton expressed respect for the feelings of pro-lifers, while re-affirming her commitment to pro-choice policies, this was widely taken as a shift to the right. There was no need to show that she was contradicting previous positions, and pundits were free to ignore previous expressions of similar sentiments because to have acknowledged them would deviate from the script.

Andrew Sullivan has produced a variation of the meme that Hillary Clinton is unprincipled. Now that the political winds are shifting, he detects Hillary re-positioning herself to the left on Iraq. Marvel at what counts as evidence for Sully, in a Sunday Times piece titled "Hillary, straw in the wind of an Iraq deal:"

A good indicator of the way the wind is blowing in Washington is often the position of Senator Hillary Clinton. A human weather-vane, Clinton has been a long-time supporter of the Iraq war, has visited Iraq, kept close contact with the military, served on the relevant Senate committees, and made hawkish noises that helped her with her rural New York state voters, but slowly alienated her anti-war liberal base.
Now, as with the rest of Washington, she’s shifting a little with the breeze. Yes, she recently voted against both Senate resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal or a fixed timetable for withdrawal. But last week she sent out an e-mail to constituents, finessing things. “We are at a critical point with the December 15 elections that should, if successful, allow us to start bringing home our troops in the coming year,” she wrote.

She still opposes a rigid timetable. But she has made it clear that the Iraqi elections next week will be a critical milestone in the American effort. After that the Iraqis had better step up or the US will start stepping down.

Does Sully provide any evidence at all to justify calling Clinton a human weather vane? After supporting the war in Iraq, she now says that "if successful," the December elections "should . . . allow us to start bringing home our troops in the coming year." That's it. Check the article. This is the closest Sully comes to providing an example of a shift in Hillary's position. I leave it to the reader to decide whether suggesting that we might next year be able to reduce troop levels in Iraq counts as a unprincipled shift from Hillary's war support.

Sully even notes that Clinton's position is very similar to George W. Bush's:

How different is this from the position of the president? On the face of it George W Bush is still insistent on fighting until “victory”, but Washington’s little secret is that the difference between Clinton and Bush is not much more than rhetorical.

So if both Clinton and Bush supported the war, and Hillary has now shifted in the wind, and Clinton and Bush still have the same position, then surely that means that Bush has shifted in the wind too? Simple logic would say yes. But Sully is operating on a level far beyond simple logic. In fact, Sully is able to surmise, without any evidence, that Bush is ignoring short-term political gain and focusing nobly on the big picture:

Are next year’s congressional elections a factor? Much of Washington believes so. I don’t. This president doesn’t need to get re-elected; and he’s smart enough to know that his legacy will be determined far more by resilience and flexibility in Iraq than a few lost seats at home.

Ugh. If Sullivan wants to say that Hillary is unprincipled and Bush is the opposite, that's certainly his right as a pundit. But shouldn't he be required to provide some evidence?

Slouching Toward Truth-- Autism and Mercury

2005-11-30T22:45:00.000-06:00

David Kirby has partially responded to my long list of questions to him about his use of California Department of Developmental Services data to try to show that reductions in the thimerosal content of vaccines may be responsible for decreasing autism incidence in California.  I have shown that the number of California DDS autism cases is growing in California, particularly among young children who are the supposed beneficiaries of reduced thimerosal exposure.  Claims that autism incidence is declining are based on a faulty approach to the data—looking at changes in caseload and confusing the change in total caseload with “new cases.

Understandably, Kirby doesn’t seem interested in mucking around in the data with me too extensively, or in answering my detailed questions.  But in an e-mail, he did address the key point, and concede that “if the total number of 3-5 year olds in the California DDS system has not declined by 2007, that would deal a severe blow to the autism-thimerosal hypothesis.”  He also conceded that total cases among 3-5 year olds, not changes in the rate of increase is the right measure.

Now we’re getting somewhere!  Somewhere that’s something like science!  We now have agreement from someone highly sympathetic to the hypothesis that thimerosal exposure contributes to autism on a means of falsifying that hypothesis.  And we only have to wait two years for the data to come in.  I hope the rest of the believers in the theory that thimerosal causes autism will also accept this test of their theory.

Blowing Smoke: Did "Everyone" Know that Valerie Plame Worked for the CIA?

2005-11-29T19:28:00.000-06:00

Never underestimate the right-wing's ability to manufacture a favorable story, even when the evidence is against them. Consider the case of whether Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operatiave was widely known before Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and the mysterious Mr. X started blabbing it to reporters.

The Minuteman has taken NBC's Andrea Mitchell to task for changing her story about whether Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative "was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community." Mitchell made this claim back in October of 2003, but more recently she has given difficult-to-understand explanations of why she didn't mean what she said. She now claims that she did not learn of Plame's identity until Robert Novak published it in his column.

The Minuteman seems to think that Mitchell's original story is the truth, and that Plame's identity really was broadly known. He has cited statements by other reporters in support of this contention. Matthew Yglesias, on the other hand, is inclined to believe that Mitchell's current story is true, since her original story has not been supported by other journalists who cover the intelligence community.

I agree with Yglesias, for the following additional reasons. The Minuteman's examples of other people that supposedly back the claim that Plame's identity was widely know are unimpressive. The late Hugh Sidey doesn't actually claim that he knew Plame's identity, just that her identity was known: "That name was knocking around in the sub rosa world we live in for a long time." Martin Peretz is similarly vague: "everybody in Georgetown" knew. But did he know? He doesn't say.

It's easy to say "everybody knew." Another thing to find someone who credibly claims, "I knew." And who will say so under oath.

But why would these journalists blow smoke like this? One possibility is that they want to appear in the know. In Peretz's case, animus towards Plame's husband Joseph Wilson seems also to be a factor. And clearly in Sidey's case, and possibly Mitchell's, another factor could be a desire to minimize the significance of the whole case, the better to portray prosector Patrick Fitzgerald's subpoenas of journalists (and subsequent jailing of Judith Miller) as overreaching harrassment of journalists-just-trying-to-do-their-jobs.

The Minuteman also mentions Republican National Committee communications director Cliff May and Fox analyst and retired General Pete Vallely as supporting the idea that Plame's identity was known. Media Matters has shown that the claims of these two men are highly dubious. Vallely's stories have been contradictory, were raised only after Scotter Libby was indicted, and have been partially withdrawn. May, after asserting his story in 2003, has not reasserted it despite numerous opportunities to do so. May continues to assert that Plame's identity was not a well-kept secret, but without actually saying that he had personal knowledge of her identity.

So was Valerie Plame's CIA identity a carefully-guarded secret, or something that lots of people knew about? Citizen Cain doesn't know. But so far the evidence presented that everyone knew seems like a lot of smoke. If there's someone out there who lacked a security clearance but knew Plame's identity, he or she has failed to come forward clearly and consistently, despite assertions to the contrary.

I'm Back!

2005-11-29T19:22:00.000-06:00

Did you know that I was gone?

In any case, semi-regular blogging resumes. But from now on, I don't promise to stick to press criticism, though I will continue to do some of that.

So what is the topic of this blog? Politics. Policy. Press criticism. Dogs. Anything that strikes Citizen Cain's fancy. I, and the rest of the Citizen Cain staff, of course, will make it up as we go along.

The Frank Rich Clown Show

2005-10-03T20:42:00.000-05:00

Frank Rich is a pathetic excuse for a liberal, and it's sad that so many look to him for liberal opinion. Consider his Sunday column, a pretty typical Rich combination of smug self-satisfaction, non-sequitur, and sucking up to John McCain.

Rich starts with ridiculing the idea that Tom DeLay might return as majority leader. How Rich knows that this won't happen, he never says. Then the smug self-satisfaction:

Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they're watching the beginning of the end of something big. It's not just Mr. DeLay, a k a the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.

Rich has the same disease that afflicts his New York Times colleague Maureen Dowd. The more questionable his assertion, the more supercilious his language. You see, if you aren't hip to the impending political death of Tom Delay and the whole Washington establishment, then you're not living in the reality based community, you poor fool.

And how do we know that the Washington establishment is coming to an end? Well, Rich tells us, Andrew Ferguson declared the "end of the Republican Revolution" in a Weekly Standard piece back in December. That's the non-sequitur. Ferguson's piece, which is recommended reading, didn't declare the end of the Republican establishment. Rather, it detailed how the Gingrichite "revolutionaries" like Jack Abramoff and his cronies had become corrupted by power and money. Citizen Cain thinks that this overstates moral decline theme, since these people seemed pretty corrupt from the get-go. But Ferguson nicely shows how the supposed revolutionaries stopped even pretending to care about issues that they had previously used to good effect, such as the nefarious power of money and lobbyists and special interests.

The conservative Ferguson expresses a hope that the Republican grass-roots will wise up to the corruption of their Congressional leaders, but predicts no collapse of the Washington establishment. Rather, he sadly notes that things are the same as they ever were:

That closed, parasitic culture of convenience--with its revolving doors, front groups, pay-offs, expense-account comfort, and ideological cover stories--is as essential to the way Republican Washington works, ten years after the Revolution, as ever it was to Democratic Washington.

Don't get me wrong. I hope that Rich is right and that the whole "Washington establishment" will be turned out of office and that "infatuation with power and money" will cease to contaminate "nearly every limb of government." Would that it were so. But the arrest and conviction of one or two lobbyists or procurement officials doesn't constitute an overthrow of the establishment.

Rich never really says how this revolution will come to pass, until his last paragraph, when he suggests a deus ex machina of-- are you ready?-- John McCain.

The one notable anomaly is John McCain, who retains a genuine hunger for reform, a rage at the corruption around . . .

You get the idea. This is what passes for liberal utopianism these days. Sad.

Sully Explains

2005-10-01T10:27:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, Citizen Cain asked Andrew Sullivan to clarify his sourcing is for the accusation that Donald Rumsfeld has demanded that underlings "break" or "destroy" Capt. Ian Fisback. Fishback has accused the Army of abusing Iraqi detainees.

Now, Sullivan blogs:

Obviously, I don't reveal sources, especially in a sensitive matter like this. But in this case, it behooves me to say that a very reliable source who has consistently provided very accurate information in the past gave me the information that a third party used the words attributed to him about Rumsfeld. I did not speak directly to the third party. Yesterday, I contacted the source again. The source does not retract the quote, which is attributed to a third party. But others I have since been in contact with, who are just as familiar with the situation, and one who is more so, differ and have said that the quote is unfair to Rumsfeld and that while Rumsfeld is following the case very closely, his view is not as extreme as that quote suggested; that he is merely paying very close attention to the case; and concerned about the accuracy of the accusations.

Strange how the prose style of this normally fine writer breaks down when he discusses this topic. But if I'm reading this correctly, Sullivan talked to a reliable source that heard someone else say that Rumsfeld said "break or destroy." But others "who are just as familiar with the situation" think that actually Rumsfeld is just interested in finding the truth. Hmm. Not exactly rock solid.

Those Vicious Democrats

2005-09-30T22:29:00.000-05:00

Chris Matthews had Molly Ivins and Susan Molinari on last night to play Hardball. Topic-- the indictment of Tom DeLay. Here are Matthews' first five questions to Ivins.

MATTHEWS: . . .
Molly, why do Democrats hate Tom DeLay?
. . .
MATTHEWS: Well, you do. I mean, you're not—you're only one of them that hate him. What's this visceral contempt and anger against this guy?
. . .
MATTHEWS: Well, why do you—why do you—why do you really, deep down, really are thrilled at this defeat by the guy, the fact that he's lost his leadership, the fact that he's facing—he is indicted, facing trial? And, apparently, he's going to get mug-shotted. He is going to, God knows, go through the humiliation of arraignment and everything else. Why does that give you a giggle?
. . .
MATTHEWS: So, the guy has no moral compass whatsoever, but you have no problem with him personally?
(LAUGHTER)

Not stupid enough for you? Try his first question to Molinari:

MATTHEWS: . . . Am I wrong that Democratic liberals hate Tom DeLay?

Whether it's DeLay or Bush, it seems that "Democratic liberals" can't oppose anyone except for reasons of personal animus, visceral contempt, and anger. For reasons why people who aren't crazy with hatred might dislike Delay, click here. Also here. And here. Also, read the Hardball transcript. Ivins did great. Kicked Matthews's butt, and Molinari's too.

More on Global Warming and Hurricanes

2005-09-29T21:39:00.000-05:00

Previous posts have attempted to explain the connection between global warming and hurricanes. While it is impossible to attribute the strength of any one hurricane to global warming, the evidence is very strong that global warming will increase the future frequency of intense hurricanes. Skeptico points to a fine post by the climate scientists at RealClimate that explains the relationship between warming and hurricanes in a very accessible way.

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.
Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.
The key connection is that between sea surface temperatures (we abbreviate this as SST) and the power of hurricanes. Without going into technical details about the dynamics and thermodynamics involved in tropical storms and hurricanes (an excellent discussion of this can be found here), the basic connection between the two is actually fairly simple: warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes. This is why they only arise in the tropics and during the season when SSTs are highest (June to November in the tropical North Atlantic).

. . .

But ultimately the answer to what caused Katrina is of little practical value. Katrina is in the past. Far more important is learning something for the future, as this could help reduce the risk of further tragedies. Better protection against hurricanes will be an obvious discussion point over the coming months, to which as climatologists we are not particularly qualified to contribute. But climate science can help us understand how human actions influence climate. The current evidence strongly suggests that:(a) hurricanes tend to become more destructive as ocean temperatures rise, and(b) an unchecked rise in greenhouse gas concentrations will very likely increase ocean
temperatures further, ultimately overwhelming any natural oscillations.
Scenarios for future global warming show tropical SST rising by a few degrees, not just tenths of a degree (see e.g. results from the Hadley Centre model and the implications for hurricanes shown in Fig. 1 above). That is the important message from science. What we need to discuss is not what caused Katrina, but the likelyhood that global warming will make hurricanes even worse in future.

Sully Accuses Rumsfeld

2005-09-29T19:56:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan reported a shocking accusation against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The accusation concerns Captain Ian Fishback, who has described cases of abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees by the 82nd Airborne Division. The New York Times quotes Fishback's complaints that Army investigators have been uninterested in the substance of his accusations. The investigators, Fishback says, have been more interested in learning the identities of other Army personnel who have made accusations of prisoner abuse to Human Rights Watch, implying that the investigators are trying to intimidate accusors rather than investigate abuses. Sullivan goes beyond this accusation, and says that his sources tell him that investigators are telling Fishback that "his career in the Army is over. Meanwhile the peer pressure on him is enormous. I'm reliably told that he has been subjected to an unending stream of threats and acts of intimidation from fellow officers. "

Behind the scenes, according to Sullivan, Rumsfeld is pulling the strings.

Another source informs that the word is around that Rumsfeld has taken a strong interest in this. He is quoted by some as saying "Either break him or destroy him, and do it quickly." And no doubt about it, that may be just what they are doing. Expect some trumped up charges against Fishback soon, similar to what they did to Muslim Chaplain Captain James Yee, whom they accused of treason with no solid evidence and then, when those charges evaporated, went on to accuse him of adultery. The bottom line, as the NYT reports today, is that the military and the Bush administration are determined to stop any real investigation about how torture
and abuse came to be so widespread in the U.S. military. The scapegoating of retarded underlings like Lynndie England is an attempt to deflect real
responsibility for the new pro-torture policies that go all the way to the White House. It's a disgusting cover-up and it rests on breaking the will and resolve of decent servicemen and women brave enough to expose wrong-doing.

Citizen Cain endorses Sullivan's view that responsibility for pro-torture policies goes to the White House. But just how solid is the information that Rumsfeld has ordered that Fishback be "broken" or "destroyed?" Sullivan's writing is normally pellucid, but his exposition here is murky. He refers to a singular source who informs him that "the word is around that Rumsfeld has taken a strong interest in this." Sounds like maybe this source hasn't heard directly from Rumsfeld, but has heard from others of Rumsfeld's interest.

Sullivan continues, "He (Rumsfeld) is quoted by some as saying "Either break him or destroy him, and do it quickly." Does Sullivan have multiple sources who quote Rumsfeld saying this, or is this the same one source telling Sullivan that "some" others have told him of hearing this? It sounds like the latter. Sullivan gives no clue as to the placement of his source, or whether the source has heard about Rumsfeld's interest second, third, or fourth hand.

Given the seriousness of the charge, Sullivan should clarify how good his source's information is. Is he just reporting rumors, or is he in a position to know what Rumsfeld has said about Fishback?

If there's substance to this story, there should be a special prosecutor. Citizen Cain isn't a lawyer, but surely it cannot be legal for the Defense Secretary to tell underlings to "break" or "destroy" a military whistleblower. Perhaps the lawyers out there can leave comments about what statutes might be at issue in this instance. Would it make a difference if Rumsfeld said not "destroy him," but rather, "who will rid me of this meddlesome captain?"

Hail Delong!

2005-09-28T22:44:00.000-05:00

Did the Daily Howler analysts stand up and cheer? We did here at Citizen Cain, when we read J. Bradford Delong’s recent angry post about the press corps’ contempt for public policy. The immediate cause of Delong’s ire was Michael Crowley’s execrable New Republic article about Bill Clinton, in which Crowley ridicules Clinton for his interest in the details of foreign and domestic policy, and his concern with the welfare of people in remote parts of the world. Crowley regales us with tales of how Clinton has bored celebrities, regular folk, and journalists by discussing policy issues with them at length.

Delong then continues with additional examples of Clinton getting similar treatment—in reviews of My Life by Weston Kosova and Michael Isikoff in Newsweek and by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. His conclusion:

I have not yet figured out why so much of our elite press--the Crowleys, the Kakutanis, the Isikoffs, and the Kosovas--is so... what should I call it? Feckless. Corrupt (in the sense of well-rotted). Decadent. Why does Michael Crowley react with contempt to Clinton's interest in Lesotho, or New Orleans? Why do Weston Kosova and Michael Isikoff cover the government--rather than, say, cover something like advances in bartending--if they find debates over policy the equivalent of crossing the Gedrosian Desert? Why does Michiko Kakutani think it pointless and boring to wake up early to watch the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president in sixteen years in a country of 130 million people?

It is a mystery to me.

It is, however, one reason that we are saddled with an incompetent president like George W. Bush. As David Frum writes, it has long been clear to insiders that Bush is not a "diligent manager of the office of the presidency, [or] a close student of public policy, [or] a careful balancer of risks and benefits"--that, in short, George W. Bush is totally unqualified to be president, totally unprepared to make the decisions a
president has to make. But by and large the elite press has simply not cared about the necessary qualifications to be a good president, and fears a president who is qualified to be president. For, after all, strikes them as bizarre and weird for somebody to actually know where Lesotho is.

Citizen Cain has explored this theme in relation to the Nora O’Donnell’s lack of interest in discussing U.S. policy towards Iraq, and her preference for talking about strategies for managing U.S. public opinion about the war in Iraq. Bob Somerby has also developed this theme. See his posts on how Al Gore put Maureen Dowd to sleep by talking about the environment, energy, and health care, and on how Gail Collins found it so tedious to listen to Gore and Bill Bradley debate their health care plans.

Not everyone has to be interested in policy issues. It takes all kinds. Perhaps when choosing a date for Friday night, most people would prefer someone who is good at making small talk, and steering away from heavy topics. But it’s sad when our press corps evaluates our politicians using Dating Game criteria.

Liberal Loser

2005-09-24T08:33:00.000-05:00

The Bush administration is on the run! Bush's approval ratings are at an all time low, and even members of his own party are disappointed in him. His mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the Katrina cleanup are now admitted by anyone who isn't completely servile. The press is become less servile, emboldened by Bush’s declining popularity.

So clearly, now is a time for liberals to vigorously oppose administration policies they disagree with, and even to start to advance a bold agenda of their own. Surely this should be the attitude of liberal pundits.

But not at Slate, where they are made of weaker stuff. Unbelievably, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg counsels Democrats and liberals to roll over for Bush, at least when it comes to the conservative agenda for rebuilding New Orleans. Weisberg says:

Liberals, who have failed to muster any kind of social consensus for a major federal assault on poverty since LBJ's day, should welcome conservatives as converts to the cause. They should hold back on their specific objections—some of which are valid, some of which are not—and let Bush have his way with the reconstruction. Making New Orleans a test site for conservative social policy ideas could shake out any number of ways politically. But all of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.

How foolish is this? Let’s consider Weisberg’s arguments.

Liberals have failed to muster consensus for a major assault on poverty, so let's give up and let conservatives have a turn. What better time than now, when the Republicans are unpopular and Katrina has focused the country's attention on the problem of poverty, to try to advance an anti-poverty agenda that liberals think will work. Why should liberals, at this particular moment, abandon their objections to bad conservative ideas and give up on advancing their own agenda?

Liberals should roll over for Bush, even when we think he's wrong, for the sake of providing an experiment in right-wing anti-poverty ideas. Great-- and send the message that liberals are willing to sacrifice the quality of life for poor people for the sake of an experiment conducted by politicians who manifestly do not have poor people’s best interests at heart. For instance, liberals want to provide Section 8 housing vouchers to homeless victims of Katrina, giving them maximum flexibility to find housing where it most suits them. The Bush administration, by contrast, wants to put homeless victims of Katrina into massive new temporary trailer home parks that would be concentrations of poverty, isolated from opportunity. Obviously a terrible idea. But what the heck—let’s do it, as an experiment. Pathetic.

If Republicans are allowed to try out their pet ideas and they fail, then we will “have learned something important about how not to fight poverty” and by implication, we won’t repeat the same mistake. Weisberg seems to have forgotten that the Republicans are the faith-based party, and won’t likely accept real world failure as proof that they were wrong. Weisberg also assumes that we all agree on what success means—for Weisberg, as for Citizen Cain, success means less poverty, and a better life for those who remain poor. But is that really the objective of, for instance, Bush’s suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act in Katrina-ravaged areas? As a result of Bush’s action, federal contractors will be able to pay workers less than the prevailing wage. Do we really need to conduct an experiment to tell us whether lower wages reduce poverty? But terminating Davis-Bacon is a dream of the right-wing. Suspending it for post-Katrina rebuilding will just whet their appetite for eliminating it all together, regardless of its impact on poverty.

If some anti-poverty program “works” in New Orleans, then it will work everywhere. But giving lots of tax breaks for businesses that operate in hurricane-ravaged areas will no doubt increase business activity in those areas, at the expense of business activity in other areas. That doesn’t mean that reducing business taxes nationwide will be good for the national economy, for our finances, or for the poor. Conservatives will say, “look, giving big tax breaks to business works! Let’s do the same for the whole country.”

Josh Marshall provides a bracing contrast to Weisberg’s sad, pathetic approach. Instead of writing off the poor in the Gulf Coast, Marshall has been keeping track of who in Congress supports, doesn’t support, or doesn’t take a position on legislation to overturn the Gulf Coast wage cut. This is the same approach the Marshall followed, to great effect, in the Social Security debate.

Let’s hope Marshall’s approach prevails among liberal pundits. Weisberg’s way is the way of defeat.

Krauthammer's Rationalization

2005-09-23T17:37:00.000-05:00

Clinton-hating, W-loving conservatives are having a tough time swallowing the "joint statement" in which North Korea agrees to give up its nuclear program and the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia agree to provide energy assistance and not to attack North Korea. After all, the right-wing has been contemptuous of Clinton for making a bilateral deal with similar terms back in 1994.

But Charles Krauthammer has figured out a way to have his cake and eat it too. In today's Washington Post, he puts forward this rationalization:

Why is the Beijing agreement different from the worthless "Agreed Framework" Bill Clinton signed in 1994 and North Korea violated (we now know) from the very first day? That agreement was bilateral. This one is six-party, but the major player is China.

No doubt that's a difference, but it isn't exactly clear why it is so important. Krauthammer rightly notes that China has leverage with North Korea that the United States lacks because of trade ties. But Krauthammer provides no reason to believe that China will utilize this leverage to make the agreement work, nor that such leverage will be effective. He just speculates that maybe China will do so, and maybe it will work.

The more important difference between the Clinton and Bush agreements is that, as Fred Kaplan has pointed out, the Agreed Framework was an actual agreement with a specific timeline of obligations. The new agreement, according to Kaplan, is merely a "preliminary step before the real negotiations—where, if history holds, North Korea will frustrate us with tricks and backtracking, and we just have to hang on tight." Moreover, this is an agreement that we could have had, Kaplan says, two years ago, before the North Koreans before the North Koreans "dropped out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kicked the international inspectors out of their nuclear reactor, unlocked 8,000 fuel rods, and reprocessed them into enough plutonium to build several atomic bombs."

In addition to making the "joint statement" seem better than it is, Krauthammer ignores the real accomplishments of Clinton's so-called "worthless" Agreed Framework. In the absence of this deal, North Korea could have built dozens of nuclear weapons by now, instead of the handful they are thought to have. But Krauthammer, desperate for a way to make sainted Bush look better than wicked Clinton, ignores all that and focuses instead on the fact that China's on board this time.

Blogging Is Hard

2005-09-20T21:57:00.000-05:00

Blogging is hard. It's hard work!

So I'm taking some time off. Next post will be Friday at the earliest.

Sucking up to Bush

2005-09-19T19:09:00.000-05:00

Michael Barone's latest syndicated column is a big wet kiss to Bush. Consider, if you can stand it, the following:

In Jackson Square, Bush found his voice for the first time since the levees broke. He described the people he had seen on the ground and the recovery work that had already been done. He promised to rebuild the Gulf Coast and re-engineer New Orleans, and added -- wisely, in view of Louisiana's heritage of corruption -- that inspectors general would oversee the spending.

The whole world is wondering whether we can trust the idiots who can't account for nearly $9 billion meant for reconstruction of Iraq. Don't worry, Barone assures us. Our brilliant Preznit is going to make inspectors general keep an eye on those bad boys in Louisiana.

Bush's liberal critics have been hoping that the Katrina disaster would increase support for big government, and they have a point when they say that there are some things only government must do and that it -- or they: local, state, federal -- must do them well. Bush's proposals use government differently. Like the GI Bill of Rights and the no-down-payment VA home mortgages of Franklin Roosevelt, Bush's Worker Recovery Accounts and Urban Homesteading would help people out, but only those who in turn do something to lift themselves up.

So let's get this straight. Liberals are salivating at the prospect of a return to big government. But Bush has a better way. Unlike those feckless liberals, he's going to be like Franklin Roosevelt. Is there any other way to read this? Yes, it really is that stupid. Barone continues directly:

And his Opportunity Zone turns on its head the liberal notion that the most effective way to help the poor and helpless is to tax everyone else heavily and hand out money to those in need.

Instead, Bush will borrow money heavily and hand it out to his contractor friends and give it away in tax breaks. The policy innovations from this White House have completely confounded liberalism.

Lower taxes and less bureaucracy, Bush is saying, will enable people in the private sector to build the kind of self-propelling economy that offers everyone a chance out of poverty.

Apparently Barone is letting Karl Rove write his columns for him.

Trent Lott -- Villian, Bully

2005-09-18T10:23:00.000-05:00

As we're all trying to figure out who is most to blame for the damage caused by Katrina, let's not forget Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. Two recent stories describe remarkably similar incidents in which this bully used his power to thwart implementation of laws that would have protected his state and limited the damage caused by Katrina.

On September 7, the Washington Post informed us that:

In Mississippi, 20 glittering casinos sprouted at the water's edge. An Army official tried to impose a moratorium on casino projects along the coast in 1998 but was outmuscled by developers and Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). All those casinos, which employed 16,000 people, now lie wrecked and broken.

The article explains:

In 1998, Deputy Assistant Army Secretary Michael L. Davis tried to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from rubber-stamping casino applications without studying the impact dredging would have on marshes that shelter wildlife, purify drinking water and help prevent flooding. This angered Lott, then Senate majority leader, who had recently flown to Las Vegas in a casino executive's jet and had raised $100,000 for Republicans at a casino-industry fundraiser.

Lott got the moratorium lifted, then he got the Army to launch an investigation of Davis. No wrongdoing was found, but Davis was removed from Gulf Coast permitting issues.

It turns out that Lott didn't bully only Davis. The September 19 New Yorker has an brief article by Jane Mayer based on an interview with Clinton's EPA Administrator, Carol Browner.

Last week, speaking from her office at the Washington consulting firm where she now works, she recalled the difficulties that her department experienced years ago when they tried to persuade legislators, including Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, that building on wetlands was environmentally risky. Developers, and the politicians who supported them, argued that gambling would attract commerce to the state.
The proposed casinos, Browner said, “were supposed to be in the water because the state didn’t want them on the solid land.” (To accommodate the moral qualms of conservative locals, the legislature relegated gambling to “navigable waters.”) She went on, “But they were huge, and they were right up against the shore. If you put structures this big into an estuary, you’re disrupting the aquatic life and changing the habitat and eradicating the wetlands, which has a huge effect on drainage. The wetlands act like a sponge in a storm. They’re an incredibly smart and helpful part of nature. But they have to be kept moist, like a sponge on your kitchen counter. If they’re dried out, and developed, they don’t work. The shoreline’s a very important buffer in a storm.”

Browner said that Lott was not alone among politicians in his disregard for the environment. “For fifty years,” she pointed out, “there’s been significant inattention to the environmental consequences of developing the wetlands.” But Lott was particularly single-minded in his support of casino development.

Mayer quotes Browner describing how when she first became Administrator Lott put a "hold" on an EPA nominee as a "warning" to her.

Then, in 1997 another EPA nominee needed Senate confirmation and Lott put a hold on that nominee too. According to Browner, Lott said, "It’s not about the nominee. . . . It’s because I want you to fire another employee, because he’s standing in the way of wetlands permits needed for casinos." Browner continues:

“He wanted me to fire this guy who was handling the wetlands permits down in our regional office in Atlanta,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it if I’d wanted to. I told him I wasn’t going to. It’s the job of the E.P.A. to enforce Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, which covers all wetlands permits, and this guy was doing his job.” Browner said that she did not tell the employee in Atlanta, because she didn’t want him to feel pressured. “Lott thought the guy was working with the Army Corps of Engineers to hold up the casino permits, and he was determined to get rid of him.”
Browner said that Lott kept the hold on the nominee for several months. “We couldn’t get the confirmation through,” she said.

Then Browner hears that the wetlands permit officer had changed duties within EPA.

“I called Lott,” Browner said, “and I told him that I didn’t fire the guy but
that he was gone. That very night, the E.P.A. nominee was confirmed.”

Mayer's article never explains how it was that the permits got approved, nor why the wetlands permit officer changed duties. In any case, according to these articles, Trent Lott sought to get federal government employees fired in two separate incidents because they were implementing laws to protect the environment and to limit flooding. Lott therefore played a key role in damaging wetlands that could have limited flooding, and in promoting the construction of casinos that were doomed from the moment they were built.

No doubt Lott will lead an effort to generously compensate his casino owner friends for their losses, and to allow them to destroy additional wetlands when they rebuild. Don't be surprised if he tries to squash civil servants who may get in his way.

More on Moral Hazard

2005-09-17T08:29:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, before Katrina hit, Malcolm Gladwell had a great article in the New Yorker about the concept of moral hazard in health care. He shows how the Bush administration's health care policy is built around the idea that we can reduce costs by creating economic incentives for people to limit their consumption of health care. Thus, the Bush administration opposes the goal of universal insurance, and instead promotes tax-free Health Savings Accounts, out of which people can pay for routine health care costs. When people have to pay for their own health care, they'll consume more wisely, and get only the health care they need.

Gladwell shows how wrong-headed this approach is when it comes to health care. Health care costs are driven not by over-consumption of routine care, but rather by underconsumption of preventative care, leading to the transformation of minor medical conditions into expensive, major health problems. Nonetheless, the Bush administration's policies are designed not to promote essential preventative care, but to make sure that generous insurance doesn't encourage people to frivolously overconsume health care.

Somehow, though, an administration that is acutely sensitive to the minimal dangers of moral hazard in health care, completely forgets about the concept when it comes to rebuilding after Katrina. Strange, given that the moral hazard created by insuring against the risks of living in a hurricane zone is undoubtedly much greater than the risk of insuring people's health.

Moral Hazard and Rebuilding

2005-09-16T22:46:00.000-05:00

Even before Katrina hit, the amount of economic damage caused by hurricanes every year was growing. But hurricanes have been more damaging not primarily because hurricanes are becoming more powerful, but because more and more building takes place in the zone affected by hurricanes.

Which brings up the concept of "moral hazard." In insurance, moral hazard signifies the incentive that the insured can have to behave in a risky way, or to commit fraud. Moral hazard is the reason that an insurance company won’t sell a $200,000 policy on a house that’s worth $100,000. The temptation to commit arson would be too strong. Similarly, in setting disability insurance or unemployment insurance levels, we have to balance the moral imperative to supply a decent standard of living to the unfortunate with the moral hazard generated by making it appealing to be unemployed or disabled.

People are encouraged to live in hurricane-plagued areas by a variety of government policies. The federal government subsidizes flood insurance. State insurance commissions prohibit higher premiums for property in coastal areas. And governments pay to help rebuild hurricane-ravaged areas.

President Bush has outlined an approach to rebuilding after Katrina that seems to be based on encouraging continued renewed population growth along the Gulf Coast by providing tax relief for businesses in hurricane-affected areas, and by using federal money to rebuild infrastructure. The President’s speech also mentions, sensibly, improved building codes. Press coverage has focused on whether the President can regain political strength by a show of generosity, whether conservatives in Congress will support the big spending that the President’s plan requires, and whether or not it is responsible to embark on a huge new program along with a war, while preserving tax cuts for the rich.

Sensible questions all. But what about whether it’s a good policy to encourage building in places that are so vulnerable? No one seems to be asking that question of the President’s plan.

So what’s the alternative? Citizen Cain certainly doesn’t want to be heartless toward the victims of hurricanes. But he also doesn't want to encourage people to build homes that will be destroyed by hurricanes. So here is the Citizen Cain plan:

assistance with paying for housing and finding work for people displaced by the hurricane. Receiving assistance should not be contingent on staying in the hurricane-affected areas, but should be equally available to those who choose to move out of the hurricane zone;
revision of state and federal insurance policies on the principle that people who choose to live in dangerous areas should bear more of the financial risk of doing so. New Orleans, however, would be an exception to this rule;
massive federal assistance for rebuilding infrastructure in New Orleans, and for strengthening levees, wetlands, and sea barriers that protect the city, but much more limited federal assistance for rebuilding other hurricane-damaged areas.

And why does the Citizen Cain plan favor New Orleans at the expense of other areas? Several reasons:

a port at the mouth of the Mississippi River is vital to American commerce;
New Orleans has been made more vulnerable by federal policies that have raised the level of the Mississippi, lowered the level of the land (through oil drilling) destroyed wetlands and barrier islands, and created navigation channels that funnel storm surges right to the city;
we can’t protect everything. New Orleans is the most valuable piece of property in the hurricane-ravaged area, economically, culturally and gastronomically. So let’s protect it with all the levels and dikes that are required, spend what it takes to make it a vital place once again, and adopt a policy for the rest of the Gulf Coast that respects the concept of moral hazard.

Cooper Blazes New Ground

2005-09-14T16:59:00.000-05:00

How dumb can our public discourse get? Let Anderson Cooper show you. Last night on Newsnight with Aaron Brown, Cooper was discussing the grim task of recovering the dead from New Orleans. Here's what he had to say to the EMS worker he was interviewing

And do you -- you know, people refer to them a lot as "bodies" and "corpses." I
mean, they're not. They are people. They're our neighbors. They're our fellow
countrymen.

Cooper's profound insight: dead people are "people," not "corpses." Does it get any dumber than that? Yes, sadly, it does. They're not corpses, Cooper explained, because they're "our neighbors . . . our fellow countrymen." And if a German tourist was killed, would his body be a corpse, one wonders. Perhaps in death it would become a neighbor.

The discussion over whether it was offensive to refer to "refugees" of Katrina was ridiculous. But this sinks to a whole new level.

Media Matters versus the Washington Post

2005-09-12T20:13:00.000-05:00

On Friday I discussed a story in Thursday’s Washington Post that provided some history on funding for the Army Corps of Engineers. The piece included the claim that “overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years.”

Media Matters has evaluated this claim, and found that:

In fact, the Clinton administration's budgets for 1996-2000 requested many times more money for the Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Protection program that the Post referenced than the Bush administration did for fiscal years 2002-2006, and Clinton also proposed significantly more federal money for other key flood-control projects in New Orleans and budgeted more money for the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Who’s right? Washington Post, or Media Matters? Or are they both right? Or both wrong? We’ll check it out, and get back to you.

Beware the Coming Era of Flood Control

2005-09-10T08:31:00.000-05:00

John Tierney makes an important point in his column in today's Times. Set aside the way he focuses blame for the inadequate condition of New Orleans levees on Congress. Congress deserves blame, though Tierney should blame Bush too; he isn't exactly powerless.

In any case, the important point in Tierney's column concerns what will happen if Congress investigates the poor preparation for a hurricane in New Orleans.

My daring prediction is they would make two discoveries. First, that mistakes were made by many people outside Congress. Second, that more money must be spent on flood protection throughout America.

Amen. The Army Corps of Engineers is a big piggy bank as far as Congress is concerned. After Katrina, every Congressman is going to want a big "flood control" project.

Before we set off down that road we should remember several points:

Flood control projects can make floods worse. The Mississippi River wants to overflow it's banks. Building levees the length of the river not only destroys wetlands, it also insures that the river will be higher, and flooding worse, downstream, i.e. in New Orleans.
It isn't possible or economically productive to protect every piece of property against floods. We need a policy of flood control for vulnerable cities, especially New Orleans, and of preventing flood plain development elsewhere. Instead, I fear that we'll adopt a post-Katrina policy of mastering nature by trying to prevent floods everywhere.
New Orleans is a special situation, uniquely vulnerable among American cities to flooding. What makes sense for New Orleans doesn't make sense for the rest of the country.

I highly recommend Rising Tide, John Barry's superb history of the 1927 Mississippi River flood. This huge man-made disaster was caused by the Army Corps's "levees only" policy for controlling flooding. After the disaster, the Corps alleviated flooding problems along the length of the Mississippi by building channels at the mouth of the Mississippi to speed the river's flow and to push sediment beyond the mouth of the river and into the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, this approach led to the erosion of the barrier islands that used to give New Orleans some protection from ocean storm surges.

After 1927, flood control policy started to incorporate floodways, in addition to levees and "channel improvements." Future flood control policy has got to make even more use of floodways-- areas designated for flooding when rivers run high. But this isn't the sort of policy that involves big spending projects like levees and navigation channels. It also requires excluding or discouraging development from substantial portions of land. So it's not the sort of thing the Congress is likely to be enthusiastic about.

So beware projects in the post-Katrina world that are sold as "flood control." They may be the opposite.

To Hume It May Concern

2005-09-09T22:12:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's Washington Post contains a good article by Michael Grunwald about recent history and funding of Army Corps projects in Louisiana. Some of the information in this article reinforces the case that the Bush administration did a poor job in preparing for the impact of a hurricane on New Orleans, a city uniquely vulnerable to a natural disaster. Other pieces of information in the article provide context that puts the Bush administration in a better light. At least, the article does make Citizen Cain reconsider his previous position that the Bush administration did a lesser job of maintaining levees in New Orleans than its predecessor. Maybe it did; maybe it didn't. We need more information (more on this below). Nothing in the article, I should add, undermines the conclusion that the Bush administration was negligent in preparing for and conducting relief operations.

Start with the information that puts Bush in a bad light:

Louisiana's politicians have requested much more money for New Orleans hurricane protection than the Bush administration has proposed or Congress has provided. In the last budget bill, Louisiana's delegation requested $27.1 million for shoring up levees around Lake Pontchartrain, the full amount the Corps had declared as its "project capability." Bush suggested $3.9 million, and Congress agreed to spend $5.7 million.
Administration officials also dramatically scaled back a long-term project to restore Louisiana's disappearing coastal marshes, which once provided a measure of natural hurricane protection for New Orleans. They ordered the Corps to stop work on a $14 billion plan, and devise a $2 billion plan instead.

So the Bush administration slashed funding for projects that, while they may not have saved New Orleans from disaster, could have helped limit the damage. But Grunwald also points out that while the Louisiana congressional delegation asked for more money for flood control, they also asked for more money for all sorts of Army Corps projects, including highly questionable navigation projects. So Louisiana legislators deserve blame, along with the Bush administration, past administrations, and the Army Corps generally, for failing to prioritize projects that would protect New Orleans. Louisiana politicians seem to have treated the Corps as a piggy bank for public works projects, without a lot of careful thought about what was worth funding and what wasn't.

Tim Searchinger, an attorney with Environmental Defense, puts it well:

It has been explicit national policy not to set priorities, but instead to build any flood control or barge project if the Corps decides the benefits exceed the costs by 1 cent . . . [snip] Saving New Orleans gets no more emphasis than draining wetlands to grow corn and soybeans.

This approach, in fairness, seems to long pre-date the Bush administration, though it would be interesting to know if one administration or the other was better on this score.

Furthermore, the Post story reports that "overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years." Interesting, but more context is needed. Bush slashed the funding the Corps requested for levees around Ponchartrain. Did Clinton similarly slash Corps requests, or were these projects still in the planning stages and not yet ready for significant funding? Citizen Cain doesn't know. If the Clinton adminstration provided all the funding that the Corps could usefully spend on New Orleans flood control projects at the time, then surely it was acting more responsibly than the Bush administration. Moreover, we have heard recently about studies and reports beginning in 2001 that identified a New Orleans levee break caused by a hurricane as one of the most worrisome potential disasters to face the United States. Was this fully understood prior to 2001? If not, this would tend to put the Clinton administration in a better light in comparison with the Bush administration, who was warned that New Orleans levees ought to be a priority.

The Post story is a good start, but we need a fuller accounting of how different administrations have approached flood protection for New Orleans, given the different contexts of different times. Given his good work on yesterday's story, Citizen Cain gives this assignment to Grunwald. Citizen Cain, however, forbids Britt Hume from working on this story.

Yesterday, Hume continued his disgraceful attempts to defend the Bush administration against charges that it failed to adequately prepare for and respond to Katrina. In his Special Report, Hume said:

Democrats, and some former government engineers, blamed President Bush for cutting the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers, claiming the cuts left New Orleans unprepared for a major storm.
But The Washington Post reports the Bush administration has granted the corps more funding than the previous administration over a similar period and that Louisiana has received far more money for civil works projects than any other state. The paper says much of the funding has been spent not on flood control, but on lawmakers' pet construction projects, including a brand new $750 million canal lock in New Orleans unrelated to flood control.

Notice how Hume makes it appear as if the Post article fully exonerates the Bush administration. He leaves out mention of the slashes in Army Corps requests for flood control in New Orleans. Moreover, he uses a bizarre construction to imply that the President's role is to "grant" funding to government agencies, while Congress determines how the money is spent. "[T]he Bush administration has granted the corps more funding," but sadly "much of the funding has been spent not on flood control, but on lawmakers' pet construction projects, including a brand new $750 million canal lock in New Orleans unrelated to flood control."

See? Bush "granted" the money, but lawmakers spent it unwisely. Beyond this bizarre portrayal of how government budgets work, Hume manages to imply that Bush wanted to spend more on flood protection, but was thwarted by congress. As Grunwald makes clear, this implication is completely false.

Providing “Balance,” and Getting it Wrong

2005-09-07T22:23:00.000-05:00

Obviously, one of the biggest stories to come out of Katrina is the issue of federal government performance in disaster relief. This is a story, that when told straight, reflects very badly on the Bush administration. However, the mainstream press loves “balance.” In general, they are very uncomfortable saying “the Bush administration responded in a desultory and clueless way” unless they can also say that some Democrat somewhere was equally bad.

Therefore, the press is eager to buy stories about poor disaster relief performance by State and local Democratic officials. And this line of inquiry is, of course, entirely legitimate. However, press eagerness to supply balance has allowed right-wingers to circulate of some questionable stories—including stories that repeat false assertions about state or local government actions, and that falsely claim that poor federal performance in disaster relief was actually caused by poor state and local efforts.

Media Matters has been doing superb work documenting the spread of disinformation about responsibility for the inadequacy of relief efforts in the wake of Katrina. For instance, they show how Bob Williams, with the right-wing think tank Evergreen Foundation, has been falsely claiming that federal efforts were hampered because the governor of Louisiana had not requested assistance. This assertion is doubly false—the governor did request assistance three days prior to Katrina reaching land, and in any case the federal government has authority to act even in the absence of a request from the State. Despite Williams’s lack of identifiable expertise in disaster relief, he has received time on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, ABC's World News Tonight, Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, and MSNBC's Connected: Coast to Coast. Josh Marshall has documented how the false claim about Louisiana’s failure to request assistance made it into Newsweek and the Washington Post. In the latter case at least, the source for the story was a "senior Bush official."

Williams has also claimed that state and local officials urged a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans only after President Bush called to urge them to do so. The Power Line blog has repeated this tale, along with the interpretation that the President’s smart thinking saved many New Orleans residents. Britt Hume, who has been assiduously looking after Bush administration interests, has also repeated this tale. Media Matters shows that this story is unfounded, and that a press conference to announce the evacuation was about to occur when Bush made his call.

The Vast Power of Rationalization

2005-09-05T08:57:00.000-05:00

Dennis Byrne and Niall Ferguson stand in awe of the vast power of nature, and can’t imagine why anyone would blame government at any level for the destruction caused by Katrina. In the Chicago Tribune, Byrne writes:

The ease and earnestness with which people express the knee-jerk belief that one of the most destructive and powerful forces in nature could have been defeated "if only . . ." belies a troubling level of ignorance or naivete. An "average" hurricane packs the energy of hundreds of atomic bombs. Or the equivalent of a half-year's supply of energy for the U.S.

To suggest that all "they" have to do to beat such a force is to build a sea wall 10 feet higher is screwy. So is the idea that all the food, water and shelter that a million refugees need can be positioned, as if overnight, within a day's ride of the destruction. Just assembling hundreds of buses, flatboats, helicopters, ice bags, hot meals and other necessities is a logistical miracle.

Rational people don’t believe that humans can "defeat" hurricanes, avoid all damage, fix every problem over night, or build a perpetual motion machine. Once Byrne is through beating the crap out of this straw man, he might address the question of whether better preparation, including a higher levee, might have limited the damage. He might address how well disaster management services performed in this disaster in comparison with other disasters.

Byrne continues:

Maybe the finger-pointing comes from today's mindset that someone else always must be ready and in charge of ensuring our safety and comfort. Or from an arrogance that we can plan in advance for every imaginable catastrophe. Or maybe it is simply partisan and ideological bunk, opportunistically tossed Bush's way.

We can’t plan in advance for every imaginable catastrophe. But experts have repeatedly identified the Katrina scenario– a hurricane hitting New Orleans, leading to a breach of the levees– as one of the most worrisome potential natural disasters. In fact, in 2001 FEMA identified the three most serious threats to the nation as a terrorist attack in New York City, an earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane hitting New Orleans. Byrne pretending that he doesn’t know this is partisan bunk, opportunistically tossed at Bush’s critics.

Ferguson’s LA Times column is about the important philosophical questions raised by Katrina– why does God allow such horrors to occur? What would Leibniz say? But when he turns to the question of government responsibility for dealing with the hurricane, he turns dismissive.

The banal response was, of course, to blame the city, state or federal authorities for sins of omission — a charge that prompted one of the city's former planning officials to declare defensively: "We are all responsible." For a hurricane?

At the risk of being banal, I’ll point out that while no human is responsible for a hurricane, specific people are responsible for building and maintaining levees, managing government responses to emergencies, and funding these activities. Just because Man cannot tame Nature is no reason to avoid a discussion of who has done their job properly and who has not.

Broder Reports from Neptune

2005-09-04T10:30:00.000-05:00

Nearly everyone on planet earth can tell that the Bush administration did a poor job preparing for and responding to Katrina, and that the political consequences for Bush are potentially ominous. And it isn’t just Paul Krugman who is saying so, though he may have said it best. The likes of David Brooks, Howard Fineman, Mort Zuckerman, Gloria Borger, Jim Pinkerton and Jack Cafferty have noticed that Bush has some serious explaining to do. Some are even starting to notice the connection between the Bush administration's incompetence in New Orleans and it's incompetence in dealing with Iraq.

But David Broder sees it differently. Today’s column finds that "it took almost no time for President Bush to put his stamp on the national response to the tragedy that has befallen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast."

And:

one thing seems certain: [Katrina] makes the previous signs of political weakness for Bush, measured in record-low job approval ratings, instantly irrelevant and opens new opportunities for him to regain his standing with the public.

We have seen this before. Bill Clinton was foundering in his third year in office when the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City shocked the nation and set the stage for his flawless performance of the symbolic rites of healing and comfort for the victims.

Broder doesn’t seem to notice that one element is missing– flawless performance, whether in performing "symbolic rites" or in paying attention to the basic requirements of governance, the Bush administration’s performance has been dismal. People are noticing, but not David Broder.

Broder makes some reasonable points in the last half of his column about the weakness and inadequacy of Congress in setting policy and performing its oversight functions. But in evaluating Bush’s preparation for and response to Katrina, he is bizarrely out of touch.

Hanson Delivers

2005-09-02T20:23:00.000-05:00

The always reliable Victor Davis Hanson produced another column of surpassing dumbness and moral bankruptcy today. He thinks that "The Western World Shows Too Much Softness in (a) Different Kind of War." His evidence:

The American military captured a suspected terrorist in Iraq, then turned him over to the Iraqis, who then released him. After getting his freedom, he shot an American officer.
A Palestinian suicide bomber, "apparently" having "interpreted recent Israeli magnanimity as a new sign of weakness," blew himself up at a bus station in Israel last week.
"Although no one has died at Guantanamo, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) compared Guantanamo to something out of the Third Reich or the Soviet gulag."
Some people are complaining about restrictions on immigration, and yet some immigrants have done bad things.
Blah blah blah harumph.

We can’t afford such softness, you see, because we’re fighting for "our very survival as we struggle to find the proper way of defeating a vicious enemy without losing our liberal soul."

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out how stupid this is, but someone’s got to do it.

If Hanson’s point is that suspected terrorists should be locked up forever, even in the absence of substantial evidence of guilt, then he’s already lost his liberal soul.
Hanson has absolutely no reason to believe that the suicide bombing was inspired by "recent Israeli magnanimity." Maybe it was inspired by the same things that inspired more than one hundred suicide bombings prior to the RIM– desire to drive Jews out of the West Bank, or out of the Middle East.
Let go of the whining about Dick Durbin! He didn’t say that Guantanamo was as bad as something out of the Third Reich or the Soviet gulag. He said that an FBI agent’s description of horrors occurring at Guantanamo sounded like something that would have occurred in the Third Reich or the Soviet gulag. Absolutely true.
Oy.
Good point.

My favorite parts of Hanson’s columns are the bogus historical arguments. This is a good one:
"This fight is quite different from past conflicts. None of the jihadists have uniforms." Okay, that isn’t quite fair. Here’s the full quote:

This fight is quite different from past conflicts. None of the jihadists have uniforms. Their first, not last, resort is terrorism.

Not much better. The distinguished Stanford historian seems to have forgotten the conflict in Northern Ireland. And what about the Roman struggle against the Zealots?

And how about this History lesson:

Our forbears believed that they did not have to be perfect to be good. To them, war, like poverty and depression, was another of the tragedies of the human experience where there were no good choices, the least ghastly being victory at all costs.

Really, Professor Hanson? Is this true of all of our forbears at all times? In Hanson-world History teaches that Americans never opposed brutal military tactics during Vietnam or the Spanish-American war. Thoreau never wrote "On Civil Disobedience." In Hanson’s past, we were a unified, martial, and brutal people. Those were the days.

More on Global Warming and Hurricanes

2005-09-01T22:11:00.000-05:00

The righty blogosphere is mobilizing to ridicule the idea that global warming might be making hurricanes stronger. While they are correct that global warming isn’t necessarily responsible for Katrina’s devastation, they incorrectly discount the relationship between global warming and a general upward trend in hurricane intensity.

Andrew Sullivan notes that the New York Times published an article that quotes several hurricane experts who doubt that recent trends in hurricane intensity are significantly related to global warming. Sullivan writes, "When the New York Times is debunking the idea, partisan liberals might want to reassess it." No no no no no!

First of all, there’s no rule that says that the New York Times defines the far left of acceptable opinion on every issue. Secondly, the New York Times doesn't get the last word on scientific questions, whether or not they're arguing against a position that liberals favor. And while the New York Times article is reasonable, and fairly calls into question the idea that Katrina (or any specific weather event) can be directly tied to global warming, Sullivan should note that this article also cites MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emmanuel, whose recent article in Nature shows that the power of Northern Hemisphere tropical cyclones has increased 70 to 80 percent in the last 30 years. Emmanuel believes that increases in hurricane intensity in the last two years are primarily the result of a natural cycle in ocean temperatures, but that the longer-term trend is influenced by global warming.

The Blazer Blog questions whether global warming even involves warmer ocean temperatures.

Ok, I'm no brainy scientist, but if hurricanes feed off of warm water, and they're saying that the water in the Gulf of Mexico is warmer because of global warming, how do you explain that if global warming is happening, the ice caps melt, and that COLDER water moves south, so wouldn't the average ocean temerature go down, not up?

Citizen Cain is no brainy scientist either. But it doesn’t take a brainy scientist to search the web and find authoritative statements contradicting Blazer Blog’s reasoning, such this one from the Environmental Protection Agency:

Global temperatures are rising. Observations collected over the last century suggest that the average land surface temperature has risen 0.8-1.0°F (0.45-0.6°C) in the last century. The surface of the ocean has also been warming at a similar rate.

James K. Glassman thinks that anyone who suggests global warming has anything to do with Katrina is a disgusting extremist who is only trying to “win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol. He states flatly that “Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing.” He cites the National Hurricane Center data that show that there were more category 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than in subsequent decades. This data refers to the strength of hurricanes when they hit land in North America.

No one disputes that there is a natural cycle of ocean temperature and surface pressure over the Atlantic Ocean that influences the intensity of hurricanes. Moreover, this natural cycle has a bigger impact than the half a degree or so increase in ocean temperature attributable to global warming. However, Glassman failsto point out that most scientists agree that global warming will eventual result in greater hurricane strength. There is some controversy over whether this is already occurring, but little doubt that we need to control global warming if we want to prevent storms from becoming still stronger in the future.

Hurricanes and Global Warming

2005-08-31T21:53:00.000-05:00

The horrible news coming out of New Orleans reminds us that the damage done by natural disasters depends in large part on the works of men. Kevin Drum raises important questions about whether the federal response to Katrina has been hampered because the Bush administration has put political hacks in charge of FEMA. Eric Holdeman argues that FEMA has been "systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security." Josh Marshall provides lengthy exerpts from a New Orleans Times-Picayune article describing federal budget cuts in funds for levee maintenance and improvement.

Another aspect of this story that should not be ignored is the possibility that hurricanes are becoming more intense because of global climate change. Time magazine has a piece on how hurricane intensity, as measured by wind speed, has gotten worse over the last 50 years, and how increased ocean temperatures could be the culprit. According to a Belfast Telegraph report, no less an authority than "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina."

According to King:

The increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming . . . We have known since 1987 the intensity of hurricanes is related to surface sea temperature and we know that, over the last 15 to 20 years, surface sea temperatures in these regions have increased by half a degree centigrade. So it is easy to conclude that the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming.

The same article notes that other scientific experts disagree with this assessment, including William Gray, a Colorado State University meteorologist "who is considered one of the fathers of modern tropical cyclone science." Gray believes that the increase in hurricane intensity is part of a natural cycle.

Citizen Cain doesn't know who is right about the causes of the current trend in increasing hurricane intensity. But it certainly is the case that global climate change models predict greater hurricane strength as a result of higher ocean temperatures. We would be foolish not to consider the possibility that storms will continue to worsen as we continue to pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and warm the oceans.

Pundit Innumeracy

2005-08-29T19:14:00.000-05:00

In today's LA Times, Rachel Shteir notices that there sure is a lot of theft going on. How bad is it? Why, "a tweedy dealer of antiquarian books and maps" was recently charged with stealing valuable maps from the Yale library. But Shteir doesn't depend on anectdote alone. She reports that "according to the latest FBI Uniform Crime Reports, a theft occurs every three seconds."

Having established that theft is common, Shteir glides into stating that "theft has exploded today . . ." because of a variety of social forces, including the workings of market capitalism, the real estate boom, habits derived from music "file sharing," and moral laxness (referring to habitual stealing as "theft addiction.") But how much evidence does she supply that theft is actually increasing? None, zilch, zero.

So Citizen Cain will help out by checking the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization survey. What does it show? Theft victimization rates of more than 400 per 1000 households in the mid-1970s, plummeting to just over 100 per 1000 by 2003. Gee, sure doesn't seem like theft is increasing.

Shteir is fond of the Uniform Crime Reports. Citizen Cain prefers the National Crime Victimization survey. But, let's look at the UCR too-- the UCR index of property crime (burglary, larceny-theft and auto theft). This measure shows a 23 percent decrease between 1994 and 2003.

Like many innumerate pundits, Shteir doesn't seem to know the difference between asserting that there's a lot of X, and stating that X is increasing. She's writing a book on kleptomania. Perhaps before she finishes it, she should learn this difference. While she's at it, she might want to think about the implications for her argument of the decrease in theft. If theft is decreasing, it's hard to see how the real estate boom and the overly forgiving term "theft addiction" are promoting theft.

Sympathy for Brooks; Defense of Krepinevich

2005-08-29T15:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, in an effort to be kind to David Brooks, I referred to his column on "Winning in Iraq" as "a very good column." I liked that his column was based on Andrew Krepinevich's article on "How to Win in Iraq," which I consider an honest effort to develop a strategy that, unlike the current approach, holds some prospect for succeeding.

Two estimable bloggers, Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias, disagree. Both focus on Brooks's statement that:

For fear of straining the armed forces, the military brass have conducted this campaign with one eye looking longingly at the exits.

DeLong asserts that:

David Brooks's attempt to shove responsibility from the Bushies to the military is indeed the most idiotic thing I've seen this month.

I don't see it that way. Prior to his statement about the military brass, Brooks sets the context by asserting that:

the U.S. didn't adopt this blindingly obvious strategy because it violates some of the key Rumsfeldian notions about how the U.S. military should operate in the 21st century.

Doesn't sound like giving a pass to the Bushies. I see the fact that our military brass has conducted the campaign with one eye on the exits as being forced by the Bush administration-- by the fact of Rumsfeldian doctrine and deliberate constraints on resources (remember, Rumsfeld spent the years before the Iraq War trying to cut back the Army), and by the Bush administration's assumption that we would just turn over Iraq to Chalabi and get out within months. Brooks could have stated this point more explicitly, but I think it's too much to accuse him of shifting all of the blame to the military.

Yglesias states further that Brooks's column "actually offers the definitive refutation" to Krepinevich.

It's nice to point out that if America's capacities were much larger than they actually are, that if we used those capacities cleverly we could do all kinds of stuff, but what does it really mean at the end of the day? Not much, as far as I can see.

This is unfair. While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of Krepinevich's article, it is not the case that his proposal is based on having larger military capacities. Krepinevich actually argues that his strategy would allow us to get by with a slightly smaller force immediately, and to draw down further over time. Is he right? Citizen Cain doesn't know. But Krepinevich's proposal does not assume larger forces, nor is part of a campaign to shift blame away from the Bush administration.

Oil Spot, or Partial Disengagement?

2005-08-28T16:05:00.000-05:00

Citizen Cain has been hard on David Brooks before, but today Brooks has produced a very good column. Brooks bases today’s column on an article by Andrew Krepinevich in Foreign Affairs on "How to Win in Iraq." As Brooks describes, Krepinevich proposes an "oil spot" strategy for Iraq. Krepinevich’s article is well worth reading.

As opposed to the current strategy of using search and destroy missions to kill insurgents, such a strategy would focus on protecting civilians in key areas. Once a safe haven is established, reconstruction assistance would target the secure area, which would gradually expand, like an oil spot spreading across pavement. Insurgents would have increased freedom to operate outside of the secure areas, because search and destroy missions would be reduced, but within the secure areas, life should be considerably improved. By providing security and economic renewal in these areas, we would hope to gain increased support from the civilian population. In addition to improving security in the 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces that are already relatively secure, Krepinevich suggests commencing a focused effort on creating additional safe havens in Baghdad and in Mosul.

Krepinevich also has some interesting suggestions on what we should be measuring in order to determine whether we are being successful. Insurgent numbers are difficult to ascertain, and number of incidents is a poor measure of insurgent strength. Krepinevich recommends instead focusing on numbers of assassinations of government officials and religious leaders, percentage of contacts with the enemy initiated by coalition forces, percentage of intelligence tips received through the civilian population as opposed to military reconnaissance, and the size of the bounty insurgents need to pay to induce Iraqis to plant improvised explosive devices and to commit assassinations. These metrics would help us better gauge the strength of the insurgents and the success of our strategy in creating security and earning cooperation from the Iraqi population.

The oil spot approach is based successful counter-insurgency efforts by the British in Malaya and by the Filipinos against the Huk insurgents, while the search and destroy approach follows the Vietnam model. Krepinevich also argues that the oil spot strategy could be implemented with no more than the 140,000 troops currently in Iraq, and perhaps slightly fewer– he suggests 120,000. The smaller troop requirement arises from the curtailment of search and destroy missions, and from the expectation that steps such as increasing the number of U.S. advisors embedded within Iraqi units and retaining the most effective U.S. generals for extended tours in Iraq would multiply the effectiveness of U.S. and Iraqi forces.

If the strategy is successful, U.S. force levels could gradually be drawn down. However, Krepinevich admits that it will take a long time– "at least a decade"– and will not be easy.

There will of course be great difficulties in carrying out such a plan. First, creating a coalition for a grand bargain will prove challenging, given the long-standing animosities between segments of the Iraqi population, the Iraqis' suspicions of Americans, and the cultural ignorance of U.S. forces and policymakers. Second, the U.S. military must walk a fine line between risking the increased casualties that extended embedding of American soldiers in Iraqi units will produce and risking a collapse of recruitment and retention efforts that could result from a continued reliance on large U.S. troop deployments. Third, setting up effective Iraqi security forces will be a fitful, long-term process, and oil-spot operations could prove frustrating to a U.S. military that prefers to take the fight to the enemy through traditional offensive operations. Finally, coordinating and integrating security, intelligence, and reconstruction operations will require a level of U.S.-Iraqi cooperation and an integrated U.S. effort far beyond what the interagency process in Washington has produced -- including strong central coordination and leadership from the senior political official on the scene, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad.

Even if successful, this strategy will require at least a decade of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars and will result in longer U.S. casualty rolls. But this is the price that the United States must pay if it is to achieve its worthy goals in Iraq. Are the American people and American soldiers willing to pay that price? Only by presenting them with a clear strategy for victory and a full understanding of the sacrifices required can the administration find out. And if Americans are not up to the task, Washington should accept that it must settle for a much more modest goal: leveraging its waning influence to outmaneuver the Iranians and the Syrians in creating an ally out of Iraq's next despot.

If the Bush administration were to propose such a strategy, perhaps some of us who think that the invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake could reluctantly support it. Some of us believe that we owe the Iraqi people a better effort to help them establish a decent society, and that to allow a return of Baathism, an imposition of a Taliban-style regime, or a descent into full-on civil war would be a catastrophe.

The Bush administration’s refusal to accept that the current strategy isn’t working, and to insist that staying the course is an adequate strategy, has pushed many toward the position that the best course of action is immediate withdrawal. This is the dynamic that is now playing out in the press– Bush versus Cindy Sheehan. Stay the course versus bring them home.

I would propose that the more interesting debate would be between the engagement strategy that Krepinevich has suggested and some variation of Juan Cole’s proposal for a partial disengagement. Cole has proposed that U.S. ground troops be withdrawn as soon as possible from urban areas, leaving Iraqi forces to police their own population. U.S. ground forces would be drawn down, though some might stay to train Iraqis, and we would continue to provide air support in order to prevent the formation of large insurgent forces. Cole’s strategy seems
consistent with pursuit of Krepinevich’s "more modest goal" of utilizing our "waning influence to outmaneuver the Iranians and the Syrians in creating an ally out of Iraq’s next despot."

Given the current state of affairs, in which there are no good options, either Krepinevich or Cole’s suggestions strike me as responsible and worth debating. I would suggest that the press should be making more efforts to help us understand the pros and cons of these different options– reengagement with a oil spot strategy, or partial disengagement. Brooks has performed a service by making a larger public aware of the oil spot strategy. Perhaps he could devote a future column to a fair presentation of the partial disengagement option?

Hitchens Slimes Wilson and Clarke

2005-08-27T13:25:00.000-05:00

In the Weekly Standard, Christopher Hitchens defends his view that the war in Iraq is "A War to Be Proud Of." Citizen Cain doesn't agree with this perspective, but will concede that Hitchens makes some valid points. However, Hitchens goes off the deep end with this attack on war opponents:

There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side.

Citizen Cain has no desire to defend George Galloway or Jacques Chiraq, and doesn't know well enough the views of Michael Moore or Tim Robbins to comment. But Richard Clarke? Joseph Wilson? These are both men who have proven rather better than Hitchens their commitment to defending the United States against terrorism. Could Hitchens bother to defend the charge that they are "plain frauds and charlatans?" Can he support the charge than they each "disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side?" Maybe Hitchens doesn't accuse them of that crime-- in his sleazy phrasing he might be accusing them of the rather less troublesome error of being "flippant" and making "heavy jokes about Halliburton."

This is cheap and slimy.

Hooray for Patrick Lang!

2005-08-26T07:40:00.001-05:00

On Wednesday night, Hardball led off with a substantive discussion of Iraq with former Defense Intelligence Agency official Patrick Lang. The discussion made clear that while the insurgency in Iraq is primarily homegrown, and is led by Baathists and former military officers. The Bush administration likes to emphasize the non-Iraqi, jihadi, elements of the insurgency, the better to tie the war in Iraq with the war on global terror.

Lang noted that the Iraqi military leadership understood from the beginning that they couldn't defeat the United States in a conventional military battle, and that they showed considerable savvy in planning a guerrilla resistance. Then Chris Matthews lowered the quality of the discussion with this question:

MATTHEWS: Why do you think they stood up to us and refused to participate in all the demands made by President Bush and the other allies if they couldn‘t beat us and they were that smart?
LANG: I‘m not sure they...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: And they may still be smart, but they weren‘t smart enough not to avoid this war.

The question constains the dubious assumption that "they," the leaders of the insurgency, had the ability to control Iraq's actions prior to the U.S. invasion. Citizen Cain thinks that the one guy who had this ability is now in a Baghdad prison. But the real howler in Matthews' question is the assertion that Iraq "refused to participate in all the demands made by President Bush and the other allies." Right up until just prior to the war, the demand made by President Bush and "the other allies" was that Iraq disarm, and that they cooperate with U.N. inspectors. Just prior to the war, President Bush added the requirement that Saddam Hussein must step down because:

Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power.

And since then, Bush and other conservative politicians have continued to state falsely, with the acquiescense of the liberal media, that Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with U.N. inspectors. See Citizen Cain's report on how Jean Schmidt got away with spreading this falsehood on Hardball. Now Matthews seems to be spreading it himself.

But hooray for Patrick Lang! Here's how he responded to Matthews bogus question.

LANG: Yes. Yes. I know that.
But I‘m not so sure that, in fact, that they saw it exactly that way, because if you look at the records of what the international inspectors were doing on the ground in there, they were—they encountered some delays and things of that kind. But, in general, if they asked to go someplace, they ended up going there.
As we know, in fact, the Iraqis didn‘t have anything to hide in the way of WMD things, because we looked all over the country for it and we couldn‘t find it. You know, it is really difficult to prove a negative, isn‘t it?
MATTHEWS: Yes.
LANG: If you‘re going to try to prove you don‘t have a nuclear weapons program and you don‘t have one, it is pretty hard to prove that.

So, contrary to Matthews' question, Iraq actually did what the international community demanded of it-- it ended its WMD programs, and it cooperated with U.N. inspectors. Well done Mr. Lang.

To Mickey: We Already Have Brent Bozell and Bernald Goldberg. We Don't Need Another One!

2005-08-26T07:03:00.000-05:00

During my brief blogging hiatus, things have gotten out of control. Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus suggests that the Democratic party doesn't need a strong spokesman. Why? Because:

After all, there already is an effective anti-Bush opposition party in America. It's called the media. We don't need two of them! (emphasis in original)

Blech. We already have a right-wing media and a mainstream media staffed by a combination of, on the one hand, liberals who don't seem to particularly care whether their side wins or loses, and on the other hand, conservatives who are willing to function as Republican operatives. So yes, it is rather important for the Democrats to have strong spokesmen.

Hiatus

2005-08-19T18:10:00.000-05:00

I am heading off on a vacation to clear brush on the ranch and get in some bike riding. Unfortunately, I am unlikely to have reliable internet access. Regular posting should resume on August 25.

Hanson: Invade Gaza!

2005-08-19T12:22:00.000-05:00

Is any major pundit worse that Victor Davis Hanson? For Citizen Cain’s money, no other regular contributor to a major newspaper matches Hanson’s special combination of crappy writing, pomposity, and loony world view. To read a smack down of Hanson for packing factual errors and plain hooey into his pretentious history lessons, click here.

Hanson, according to Harold Meyerson, is President Bush’s "favorite historian." Therefore, we have to pay attention to what he says.

In today’s Chicago Tribune, Hanson says that however bad the situation seems in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re better off there than in "Gaza, Iran and North Korea-- where the U.S. has let others handle the mess." Hanson writes so badly that it is frequently difficult to tell what he means or what he is proposing. This column, however, seems pretty clearly to be saying that the United States should eventually invade Gaza, Iran, and North Korea.

You see, bad things are happening in places that the United States hasn’t invaded, and we just can’t tolerate that.

For now, I doubt whether Palestinians, Iranians and North Koreans will be pacified by the deference of others. Sooner or later they may well have their own rendezvous with the quiet Americans now in the shadows.

U.S. foreign policy, under Condoleeza Rice’s stewardship, seems to be pulling back from the grand ambitions of the first Bush term, and adopting more modest goals and more multi-lateral, Kerry-esqe tactics. But Hanson is having none of it. Let’s keep invading until we’ve knocked off the entire axis of evil, he says, and the Palestinians too while we’re at it.

It isn’t clear yet whether Bush and Cheney are truly committed to a retrenched foreign policy. But surely they cannot be considering anything like what Hanson is proposing? Let’s hope that Bush has a new favorite historian.

Forget Policy; Let's Talk PR With Nora O'Donnell

2005-08-18T22:16:00.000-05:00

Cindy Sheehan’s protest against the Iraq war provides an opportunity for the press to ask substantive questions about the war in Iraq and about its impact on the home front. Do the Bush administration’s policies make sense? What are the alternatives? What went wrong? How do other military families feel about the burden that they are carrying?

But on MSNBC, they prefer to focus on different questions, questions relating to how the White House is or isn’t managing its public relations effort. On Hardball last night, the first segment was a taped interview of White House Communications Director Nicolle Devenish. Here are the first four questions that guest host Norah O’Donnell asked her.

[Is] the president . . . concerned that Cindy Sheehan‘s cause has grown into a national movement?
What would be the down side to the president meeting with her? He has met with her once before a year ago. Why not invite her in, pray with her or send First Lady Laura Bush to meet with her?
The president plans to stay in Crawford for another three weeks to finish his vacation. And Cindy Sheehan said she is not leaving until she meets with the president. What will happen to Crawford? And you are the president‘s communications director. How do you deal with something like this when there is now this growing group of people in Crawford, hundreds, and now across the country. The media following her so closely.
CNN, "USA Today" Gallup Poll shows 54 percent of Americans say the U.S. made a mistake by sending troops to Iraq. Is the White House, the president going to launch a new effort in the fall to help better explain to the American people why we’re at war in Iraq and when U.S. troops are coming home?
(I have removed the preambles to some of the questions; the punctuation is the responsibility of MSNBC.)

Note that O’Donnell didn’t ask Devenish to explain why we are at war in Iraq or when U.S. troops are coming home. She asked whether there would be a new fall effort at explanation.

O’Donnell’s next question seemed like it might be about something substantive. But at the last moment, O’Donnell saved it. She veered away from the substantive question she was starting to ask, and veered back into her favorite subject– management of public opinion.

August was one of the deadliest months on record for National Guard and reserve troops. Americans want to know what is the strategy in Iraq? There was an interesting story in the "Washington Post" on Sunday which said U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad say the Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations for us in Iraq. Why are we lowering expectations?

Of course, Devenish never had to explain the strategy in Iraq. But she did have to address the question of whether we are lowering expectations.

In her final question to Devenish on this topic, O’Donnell again started with the suggestion of substance, then again quickly veered away.

Because a senior administration official was quoted in the "Washington Post" as saying, what we expected to achieve in Iraq was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. This from an official who was involved in policy since the ‘03 invasion. Was that official off the reservation? Not speaking in tune with the rest of the White House?

Needless to say, this is turf that the White House communications director was happy to play on. Imagine her relief at getting such questions. Read the transcript. She did quite well. How well would she have done if O’Donnell had asked about whether the Bush administration is happy with the budding theocracy in Iraq, or about whether the Administration’s attempt to conduct the war with minimal resources has prolonged the conflict and increased the hardship for military personnel and their families? We’ll never know.

Having been such a gracious hostess to the White House Communications Director, O’Donnell introduced the next segment:

Is Cindy Sheehan‘s protest overplayed? And has she become a puppet of the left?
Coming up, we‘ll ask Pat Buchanan and former Senator John Breaux.

It got worse from there. Incomparably, Bob Somerby exposes O’Donnell’s "combative ridicule" of Sheehan and Iraq war protesters generally in her questioning of Buchanan and Breaux. We endorse Somerby’s words. But we draw your attention to another aspect of this horrific performance. First O'Donnell explores the White House’s communications strategy regarding the Iraq war generally and Sheehan’s protests specifically. Then she frames the following discussion as whether Sheehan "overplayed" her protest. Perhaps if Sheehan had focus-grouped it first she would have hit it just right. She might have distanced herself from the left, and avoided rhetoric shown to be unpalatable to five out of eight soccer moms.

O’Donnell, like most of her media star colleagues, shows little interest in policy or in foreign affairs, but she does show keen interest in the management of public opinion. She might have chosen to focus on how we might make the situation better in Iraq, or on whether U.S. presence is helping or harming the situation, or on the hardships of military families and how they might be alleviated. Instead, she preferred to explore ways that Presidents or protesters might market themselves better.

Is there a more serious issue than the war in Iraq facing us as a country? Is this really the best discussion we can have about it?

ABC Coverage of Afghanistan

2005-08-17T13:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I posted about weaknesses in newspaper coverage of accusations that the Pakistani military is training Taliban forces who then cross the border to fight in Afghanistan. Paul Watson’s excellent coverage of this issue in the Los Angeles Times stands out as an exception. Today, let’s consider how one of the networks has performed on this story.

A Nexis search of ABC News transcripts since June 1 reveals no mention of these accusations, and very little coverage of Afghanistan at all. The closest that ABC News came to discussing the Taliban training camps was in a June 8 report. In this report, Brian Ross reported on an al Qaeda training camp in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where terrorists are being trained "allegedly on the outskirts of the Pakistani army’s headquarters, apparently run by a major Pakistani politician." The politician is Maulana Fazlur Rehman. No mention was made of possible connections between this training camp and the war in Afghanistan.

The most extensive coverage of any story coming from Afghanistan related to the search for missing Navy SEALs. There were also occasional mentions of American war dead in Afghanistan, particularly after 16 Americans were killed in a helicopter crash. There were also numerous mentions Afghanistan in stories that focused on topics other than Afghanistan. For instance, Afghanistan was mentioned in retrospectives of Peter Jennings's career, in stories about how British Muslims feel about the presence of British troops in Afghanistan, and in stories about the demands of terrorist organizations that Western troops leave Afghanistan and Iraq and about the backgrounds of the London bombers.

The American press is failing to properly cover Afghanistan. Its near silence on the possible renewal of Pakistani support for the Taliban is a disturbing example of this failure.

(edited since original posting)

More Liberal Bias

2005-08-16T16:08:00.000-05:00

For all the talk of liberal bias in the media, is there any cable news show host, or regular guest host, who could keep his job after saying that the Republicans are pathetic losers, and that he hopes that they will never win another election? Is there any who would even want to say it?

The current state of cable news allows conservative talkers to say things that a liberal could never get away with. Last night Monica Crowley was guest hosting on The Situation with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC. She was responding to voicemails left about previous shows.

JEFF, ALTOONA, PENNSYLVANIA: This is Jeff calling from Altoona, Pennsylvania and just watching Friday‘s show with Chuck Rangel from New York State and he typifies the reason why Democrats will never win a major election in this country in the foreseeable future because they‘re living in a fantasy world. You know they can‘t see the truth or anything that makes sense even if it bites them on the ear like Mike Tyson.

CROWLEY: All right, Jeff, I have to say I‘m with you 100 percent. We like Charlie Rangel. We‘re so glad he came on the program but the Democratic Party is suffering from a girth of ideas [sic-- she probably meant dearth] on Iraq, on the war on terror, on tax policy, on Social Security, so maybe if they could get their acts together they might start winning presidential elections. I don‘t want to see that happening, I‘m just saying . . .

Failures in Covering Afghanistan and Pakistan

2005-08-16T15:25:00.000-05:00

Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times has been almost alone in covering accusations that Pakistan is providing support to Taliban fighters, helping them kill Afghan civilians and government forces, as well as U.S. soldiers. Citizen Cain has already praised a July 28 story by Watson about Pakistan’s connection to the Taliban. This story made some important assertions:

The Taliban is using numerous bases in Pakistan.
The Pakistani military is providing training to the Taliban at these bases, according to Afghan officials, including Sayed Anwar, acting head of Afghanistan’s counter-terrorism department.
As a result, the Taliban is infiltrating increasing numbers of guerrillas from Pakistan into Afghanistan and is conducting increasingly lethal attacks.

The story quoted the denials of Pakistani officials, and Anwar admitted that he did not have a "smoking gun" linking the Pakistani military to Taliban training. However, according to Anwar "reports from intelligence agents across the border and 50 captured prisoners describe an extensive network of militant training camps in areas of Pakistan’s federally administered North Waziristan tribal area where government forces are firmly in control." Moreover, Zulfiqar Ali, a freelancer for the Times, confirmed that once-closed Pakistani training camps for Taliban fighters have recently been reopened.

Clearly, this is an important story and, at a minimum, other newspapers should be reporting the same information. One might also hope that the story could be advanced through additional evidence about whether or not the Pakistani military is involved in training the Taliban, and through reactions from U.S. officials on theses accusations by one ally (Afghanistan) against another (Pakistan).

The Los Angeles Times followed up on August 11 with another story by Paul Watson which described continued battles between the Taliban and Afghan government forces backed by the U.S., and re-iterated that Afghan officials accuse Pakistan of responsibility for the Taliban resurgence. The story also reported accusations made by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of an alliance of six Islamic parties that are the primarily political opposition to the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Rehman accused the Musharraf administration of transporting Taliban fighters to training camps in the Northwest Frontier and "covertly aiding cross-border attacks on U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan." Rehman, who is described as "a longtime Taliban supporter and fierce critic of the West" stated that "we will have to openly tell the world whether we want to support jihadis or crack down on them. . . . We can’t afford to be hypocritical any more."

So, let’s see how our leading newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have performed on this story in the three weeks since the Los Angeles Times article.

The New York Times confirmed in an August 5 dispatch from David Rohde and Somini Sengupta that the Taliban is "resurgent" in Afghanistan, and provides some additional evidence that Taliban training camps are operating in Pakistan. It also describes how "violence on Pakistan’s side of the border has taken a vicious turn upward," and describes battles between the Pakistani government and militants, and the loss of government control in some areas. This story appeared on page 6. An editorial the same day mentions Pakistan’s "tolerance of Taliban activities" and "passive enabling of the Taliban." It goes so far as the say that:

once the snows began to melt this March, Taliban fighters started showing up in greater numbers and with suspiciously sophisticated gear in regions of Afghanistan that border Pakistan. Afghan military and intelligence officers are convinced that they are coming from Pakistani training camps.

However, the editorial does not say what it means by "Pakistani training camps." Readers might fairly draw the conclusion that this phrase means "training camps in Pakistan (that the government has no control over)." Neither the editorial nor the news story mentions the accusation that the Pakistani military is actually involved in training Taliban fighters at these camps. Nor has the New York Times published any reaction from a U.S. official.

The Washington Post, in an August 5 article by N.C. Aizenmann, described President Musharraf’s "contradictory record as one of the most important allies in President Bush’s war on terrorism." The article reports that Musharraf has made a show of cracking down on Islamic militants, but without significant impact and, according to some critics cited in the article, without much conviction. It also described how the Taliban’s Pakistani allies are becoming increasing powerful within Pakistan, and mentioned a training camp for Kasmiri militants. However, with respect to possible Pakistani military support for the Taliban, it mentions only that "although the Pakistani army killed more than 300 militants in a campaign against Al Qaeda bases near the Afghan border last year, it has since proved unable or unwilling to stop fighters from the ousted Taliban militia from slipping back into Afghanistan to launch bombings and attacks."

Is it really true that the Pakistani military is training Taliban fighters? Citizen Cain doesn’t know. Perhaps the Taliban training camps in Pakistan are being run outside of Pakistani military control. Perhaps the Pakistani government is powerless to control the situation. Perhaps Afghan officials and Pakistani opposition leaders have reasons to lie or stretch the truth when they make these accusations. But shouldn’t these accusations be covered, when they are made by an important Afghan official and a major Pakistani politician and ally of the Taliban? Isn’t it possible that they are true? Shouldn’t the press attempt to determine whether they are true? Shouldn’t U.S. officials be asked their opinion? Shouldn’t we find out what the United States plans to do about the situation?

The New York Times and the Washington Post have provided scant coverage to this situation. They have referred to training camps and to cross-border infiltration of Taliban, but without specifically describing the accusations against the Pakistani military.

How can this not be a major story? The attacks of 9/11 have their origins in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Afghan war against Soviet occupation radicalized Arab volunteers, including Osama bin Laden, who were supervised by Pakistani military intelligence and supported by the United States. The Taliban was created by Pakistani military intelligence amidst the chaos that followed the Soviet defeat, in order to provide security along trade routes. The close relationship between al Qaeda and the Pakistan-backed Taliban, allowed al Qaeda to grow and plan increasingly sophisticated attacks from their Afghan base.

Even after the Taliban were ejected from Kabul, Afghanistan and Pakistan remained crucial to the war on terror. Osama bin Laden is widely thought to be hiding in Pakistan. The London bombers had a connection to the radical Pakistani religious schools, or madrassas. The Taliban is growing stronger again, and is making use of bases in Pakistan. Surely it is a major story when the Pakistani military is credibly accused of renewing its support for the Taliban.

The Bush administration turned its attention away from Afghanistan very quickly, shifting intelligence assets to Iraq that could have been used to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his followers before they escaped to Pakistan. Just because the Bush administration prefers to minimize the importance of this region, however, doesn’t mean that the American press should follow suit.

While coverage of Afghanistan has become increasingly sparse in American newspapers, it is still disappointing that major newspapers have yet to inform their readers of accusations made more than three weeks ago by the head of Afghan counter-terrorism that the Pakistani military is training Taliban fighters. It is also disappointing that major newspapers have not seen fit to inform their readers that a Pakistani ally of the Taliban also asserts that the government of his country is aiding the Taliban. All praise and rosebuds to the Los Angeles Times and to Paul Watson for covering these important studies. Raspberries to the New York Times and Washington Post.

If readers are aware of any coverage that bears on these issues that I have missed, in these papers or elsewhere, please post a comment to let me know about it.

How Bozell Does Press Criticism

2005-08-12T15:53:00.000-05:00

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review section on July 31, Judge Richard A. Posner praises a number of books for documenting "the bias in some of the reporting in the liberal media." For a critique of Posner's article, see Media Matters. I want to focus on one of the books Posner singled out--Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Melt-Down of the Liberal Media , the 2004 tome by L. Brent Bozell III, head honcho at the Media Research Center. Imagine my humiliation, as a press critic, at never having read this masterwork.

Naturally, I headed straight to the library to correct this grievous error. This will be a short review, because one amusing anecdote pretty much says everything you need to know about this book. It comes at the beginning of chapter 5.

Bozell goes to a CNN studio to tape an interview for story on “a breaking Hollywood scandal.” But oops! A snafu at CNN puts Bozell into the wrong studio, to talk about the wrong subject. Before he realizes it, a live show has started, and he’s supposed to discuss Oscar contending films on Showbiz Today, along with other “film critics."

One small problem though: “Film critic” Bozell had not viewed a single one of the Best Picture nominees and had no idea what was going on with the other categories! But I was stuck, and so for the next half hour, I bluffed. I didn’t want to answer “I have no clue” to every question, so I winged it, proffering one uniformed opinion after another. I was especially proud of myself when I spoke of being impressed by the cinematography of one film, and won enthusiastic agreement from my fellow critics, causing me to wonder if any of them had watched these movies either.

Funny stuff! What a great story. My only complaint about it is that it shouldn’t come in chapter 5. It should be in the preface; if possible, I would like to see it printed on the cover. Should readers really have to wait until chapter 5 to learn that Bozell is willing to go on national TV and just make stuff up? Should they even have to open the book? What does it say about a man that he offered “uniformed opinions”—in fact that he lied-- for no better reason than that he “didn’t want to answer ‘I have no clue’ to every question?”

Bozell says that “this story comes to mind whenever I ponder how some in the news media cover economics.” For me, this story will come to mind whenever I ponder how L. Brent Bozell does press criticism.

Autism Epidemiology

2005-08-12T11:39:00.000-05:00

While we're all waiting to see whether David Kirby will concede that the data show continued increases in the California DDS caseload of autistic young children, let's clear up some issues about the use of California DDS data for assessing the impact of autism on vaccines.

Two formidable commenters, Autism Diva and Jim Laidler, have graced our pages with comments on these issues. The Autism Diva reminds us that:

The administration of the DDS is such that the numbers are too unreliable for epidemiology, which is why they have specifically asked that their numbers not be used for epidemiological purposes.

Jim Laidler points out that:

the prevalence within each birth year cohort continues to rise well into the late teens. This is not consistent with the natural history of autism, and so indicates that the California DDS data . . . is . . . not reliable for tracking autism prevalence.

Laidler also points out that we don't need to rely on flawed California DDS data because there are better ways, implemented in peer-reviewed studies, to assess autism incidence. I highly recommend more detailed statements on these issues from Autism Diva and Jim Laidler.

So, if the California DDS aren't useful for autism epidemiology, why is Citizen Cain engaging in a discussion with David Kirby over what the California DDS data mean? Let me explain.

One school of thought holds that autism didn't exist, or that it was comparatively rare, until babies began to be exposed to thimerosal in vaccines starting in the 1930s. Incidence increased further, the argument goes, in the 1990s, because changes in vaccination schedules increased the amount of exposure to thimerosal. According to this theory, autism incidence will decline as children's exposure to thimerosal declines. Since autism is often diagnosed among children aged 3-5, and since significant reductions in thimerosal exposure began in 2000, or maybe 2001, we ought to start seeing reductions in autism incidence about now if this theory were true.

People being naturally impatient, they want to know now whether autism incidence is decreasing among young children. They don't want to wait for an epidemiological study to be published in a peer reviewed journal. So they latch onto such data as exist now, like the California DDS data, which is published every quarter. As Laidler points out, this data is unreliable for assessing past changes in autism incidence, since increased caseload almost certainly reflects changes in diagnostic criteria (even, contra Kirby, within the category of "full-blown autism"), increased awareness, and changes in the level of services available to those who receive a diagnosis of autism.

But I would argue that it might not be so unreasonable to use the California DDS data to get a first read on whether or not autism incidence is now decreasing. Awareness of autism hasn't decreased over the last five years. Diagnostic criteria, as far as I know, aren't becoming more strict. Availability of services, to the best of my knowledge, isn't decreasing. So if, say, over the next year or two, we were to see a sharp drop in the California DDS caseload of young autistic children, we would have a fact that required explanation. It wouldn't prove that autism incidence had decreased, but it would sure make me want to look more closely to see what's going on. People who don't have their minds made up about possible connections between thimerosal and autism find it very persuasive to hear that caseload out in California is starting to decrease, just as the theory predicts! And despite my best efforts, that's what people are hearing.

So rather than just say that the data isn't suitable for epidemiological purposes, I prefer to engage in the discussion and try to establish some ground rules on how to interpret the California data. Reasonable people should be able to agree that what we're looking for is a significant drop in autism caseload among young children, corresponding to the period during which thimerosal exposures decreased. If we see such a drop, we have to look further to see what's going on, because one possibility would be that the drop is the result of reduced thimerosal exposure. Reasonable people ought to agree that the best way to see whether such a decrease has occurred is to track the number of new cases among young children over time. If such data is not available, the next best way is to track the number of total cases among young children (3-5 years old). Reasonable people should also be able to agree that the tracking changes in total caseload is a lousy way to look for such a decrease. Reasonable people should not insist, once the issue has been explained to them, that a decreasing rate of increase in the total caseload indicates a decrease in autism in young children.

Autism Diva and Jim Laidler seem to think that David Kirby is not a reasonable person. Let's see. Kirby promises to sort through the data and respond next week. Let's give him a chance!

I hope that we'll be able to agree that autism caseload is continuing to increase among young children in California, and therefore that the DDS data provide no suport for the idea that autism incidence is decreasing in response to reductions in thimerosal exposure.

Moreover, a knowledgeable correspondent informs me that California DDS recently published an evaluation that illustrates the impact of new cases and drop-outs on net changes in total caseload. See page 7. This evaluation makes it clear that significant number of cases drop out for one reason or another-- the number of drop outs was more than 20 percent of the number of new cases in 2004. Moreover, the number of drop-outs is highly variable, making use of changes in total caseload a poor measure of the trend in new cases. New cases increased from 2,355 in 1999 to 3,524 in 2002. New cases decreased slightly in 2003, before increasing again in 2004, to 3,554. Unfortunately, this analysis does not break out new cases and drop-outs by age.

To summarize-- the best data from California show a recent leveling off in the total number of new cases per year, and continued growth in total cases among young children. In no way can the data be interpreted to show a decrease in new cases among young children.

One final issue to address. After having claimed that new cases seem to be decreasing, Kirby now states that maybe it's too early to start seeing a decrease, because maybe thimerosal exposure didn't really start decreasing until as late as 2003. My knowledgeable correspondent point me towards an article in the December 17, 2003 JAMA which indicates that there were significant shortages in many vaccines, including DTaP, between late 2000 and spring of 2003. As a result, stockpiles of vaccine produced prior to 2000, or 2001, were likely used up pretty quickly. While some may have still been around in 2002, certainly the exposure levels were decreasing. And since the argument is that increased exposures in the 1990s caused increased autism incidence, decreased exposures in 2001 or 2002 should be leading to decreased incidence among 3-4 year olds, if the theory were correct.

Life of a Pundit

2005-08-11T15:52:00.000-05:00

The life of a pundit is an easy one. You can say just about any damn thing you want, and you don't have to back it with evidence. It doesn't even have to make the slightest bit of sense.

Which brings us to David Brooks. In today's New York Times, he encourages smart kids to study cultural geography. I have no problem with that. But then he proceeds to denigrate other ways of understanding the world. Where did this gem come from?

The economists and scientists tend to assume that material factors drive history - resources and brain chemistry - because that's what they can measure and count.

Let's leave aside the silly swipe at the economics profession and consider whether "scientists tend to assume" that "brain chemistry" "drives history." Is there any scientist who believes this? What does it even mean? The mind, and the brain chemistry, boggles. The decline of feudalism was caused by increased seratonin production, maybe? How do scientists "measure and count" historical brain chemistry anyway?

He warns budding cultural geographers of the danger of studying "why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them." What is that danger? You guessed it. Liberals.

This is the line of inquiry that is now impolite to pursue. The gospel of multiculturalism preaches that all groups and cultures are equally wonderful.

Some versions of multiculturalism may preach that "all groups and cultures are equally wonderful," but each in their own way. If Brooks is unhappy with such an attitude, he's free to make an argument against it. But that's not what he does. He instead claims, with no evidence, that multiculturalists insist that all cultures have the same attitudes towards technology or towards economic growth, and are therefore hostile to cultural geography. You'll probably find these multiculturalists hanging out with the scientists who believe that brain chemistry drives history.

Questions for David Kirby-- Dataphobes Beware

2005-08-11T00:52:00.000-05:00

David Kirby’s response regarding the California autism data is interesting and perplexing on a number of levels. He notes that we aren’t certain about the extent to which thimerosal remained in vaccines between 1999 and 2003, and that it may be too early to tell whether reduction in thimerosal has had an impact on autism caseload in California. I agree. I wouldn’t myself have trumpeted the California DDS numbers as proof of anything. It is Kirby, in his Huffington Post article, who holds up the California data as reflecting the "gold standard of autism epidemiology" and who claims that "if the numbers in California and elsewhere continue to drop – and that still is a big if -- the implication of thimerosal in the autism epidemic will be practically undeniable."

Even after reading Kirby’s response, I can’t tell whether he still thinks that the numbers in California show a "drop." Gratifyingly, Kirby says that Citizen Cain is "absolutely correct," though it isn’t clear what I am "absolutely correct" about. I contend that the California Department of Developmental Services data show a steadily increasing caseload of autistic children aged 3-5, from at least the third quarter of 2002 through the second quarter of 2005. Kirby responds with some unfamiliar numbers on "new entries" into the California DDS system since the third quarter of 2003, which show a decline for two quarters, then start climbing up. He also reiterates his original position that the "California numbers" are "dropping," but that he "will certainly point out this new, and perhaps confounding, development."

I admit to being confused about what this means. But let’s try to work through it. The truth is out there! We may never find it, but we should be able to get closer to it.

Kirby and I seem to have very different approaches to looking at the numbers. Mine is pretty straight-forward– look at the caseload of 3-5 year-olds with autism. Is it decreasing? No. Is it increasing? Yes. Every quarter, for a total of 38 percent since the third quarter of 2002.

Kirby’s approach is more complicated and, to my eyes, confused. He provides data on "new entries" to the California DDS autism caseload, and then says that these "entries" are more correctly called a "net gain" in cases. Then he continues to refer to "entries." The two things are very different: "new entries" would tell us how many new cases of autism among a given age cohort have been registered in a given quarter. To the best of my knowledge, California DDS does not report such data. The data that I’m aware of just shows caseload by age. If California DDS also reports new entries, I would appreciate being informed of where to find this information.

But I don’t think that new entries really are reported, because Kirby says that "entries" really means "net gain." A net gain would be an increase, quarter over quarter, in the number of persons within a given age cohort that are part of the California DDS autism case load. Therefore, a "net gain" within an age cohort is a very different thing than "new entries." Why? Consider 3-5 year olds. If there were a steady state (zero net gain) in the autism caseload, and no deaths or drop-outs from the system, there would be new 3-5 year old entries into the system every quarter, and these new entries would be matched by an equal number of children that would no longer be in the 3-5 year old category for the simple reason that they turned 6 years old. In a steady state, there would be no net gain, but continual new entries. If there were 5000 cases, and during the next quarter 1000 of them turned 6 years old, and there were 1000 new entries, there would be zero net gain.

Therefore, a positive net gain of any size means that autism incidence is growing among 3-5 year old Californians (if we assume, just for the purposes of this discussion, that the California DDS data really reflect autism incidence). For the numbers to be "dropping," we would need to see actual decreases in caseload and a negative net change. Kirby seems to think, if I understand him correctly (a big if) that if the rate of increase in caseload slows then autism incidence is decreasing. A steady state, for Kirby, seems to involve a steady rate of increase in the number of 3-5 year olds with autism. Wrong. Autism caseload among 3-5 year olds is increasing every quarter. The amount by which it increases varies slightly, but in no sense can a reduction in the increase be considered a decrease in incidence.

But what the heck are these numbers that Kirby provides as either "entries" or "net gain." Kirby says that he got them from Rick Rollens; could Rick Rollens or Kirby let us know where these data have been published? Because the numbers don’t make sense as either "new entries" or as "net gain." The caseload numbers that I compiled XXX show a net gain of 139 3-5 year old cases in the second quarter of 2005, compared with Rollens/Kirby’s 449. For every quarter, the Rollens/Kirby numbers are higher by far than the actual net gain in California DDS caseload. So the Rollens/Kirby numbers are too high to represent net gain.

Hmm. Could the Rollens/Kirby numbers actually represent "entries" rather than "net gain." No, because the Rollens/Kirby numbers are much too low to represent entries. There is no way, with new entries averaging 397 cases per quarter over the last 8 quarters (as the Rollens/Kirby data portray) that the number of cases among 3-5 year olds could be 5446 and growing (as the California DDS data indicate). Since children don’t enter the system until they are 3 years old, and since there are 12 quarters in the three year age spread, there would have to have been an average of at least 454 new 3-5 year old entries per quarter to sustain a caseload of 5446. In reality, the number of new cases would have to be substantially larger than 454 cases per quarter, given that some children do not enter the caseload until they are 5 years old (or older), and therefore the distribution of 3-5 year old cases will be skewed towards the older end of the range. As a result, more than 1/12 of the caseload would be turning 6 years old every quarter, and an equivalent number of new entries would be needed just to maintain a steady state.

So– some questions for Mr. Kirby– where do these numbers come from? What do they represent– new entries? Net gain? Something else? Do you concede that the numbers are not, in fact, "dropping?" Do you concede that the relevant numbers (caseload among 3-5 year olds) are increasing every quarter, with some fluctuations in the rate of increase?

Let me repeat my thanks to Mr. Kirby for responding so graciously. I hope the conversation will continue.