So Much for Obama’s Sunshine Promise

A.I. and I have argued in the past about President Obama's honesty. I think our chief executive is no worse, but certainly no better, than your average politician. Telling us what we want to hear is what we pay these guys for, and Barack Obama is earning his keep. Consider this, from the New York Times.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that once a bill was passed by Congress, the White House would post it online for five days before he signed it.

"When there's a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it, so that you know what your government's doing," Mr. Obama said as a candidate, telling voters he would make government more transparent and accountable.

When he took office in January, his team added that in posting nonemergency bills, it would "allow the public to review and comment" before Mr. Obama signed them.

Five months into his administration, Mr. Obama has signed two dozen bills, but he has almost never waited five days. On the recent credit card legislation, which included a controversial measure to allow guns in national parks, he waited just two.

The NYT calls this a "change in the terms of a campaign promise." Good thing they cleared that up, because I sort thought it looked like breaking a promise. I resolve in the future to change the terms of my promises more often. Well, the Administration is about to mend its ways.

Now, in a tacit acknowledgment that the campaign pledge was easier to make than to fulfill, the White House is changing its terms. Instead of starting the five-day clock when Congress passes a bill, administration officials say they intend to start it earlier and post the bills sooner.

"In order to continue providing the American people more transparency in government, once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president's desk, the White House will post the bill online," said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman. "This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law."

Mr. Shapiro said the move would provide more transparency because the White House site drew so much traffic. It also stretches out the time in which a bill will be posted, making it easier for Mr. Obama to abide by the pledge.

But this is not another way of keeping his promise, it's an absurdity. While a bill is still pending in Congress it can be changed in any number of ways. The Volokh Conspiracy notes this:

The House is preparing to vote on an 1,000-plus-page bill that was subject to a 300-page amendment last night — an amendment that was not even available to many members of Congress until today. Most members of Congress have had no meaningful opportunity to read, let alone digest, the bill. The same is true for most legislative staff. Forget the public.

So posting a bill before it is passed by Congress doesn't give the public a chance to review what is actually legislated. Hundreds or thousands of pages may be added, changing everything. There are only two possible interpretations of the White House back peddling. Either they don't understand how bills become law, or they are covering up a broken promise a carpet of dishonesty. Take your pick.

TVC also notes that Obama's promise to make government more open is another one he has no intention of keeping. From Newsweek:

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications."

The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a "new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies."

Now I happen to think that the Administration was quite right to reject the FOIA request. If you want people to come in and talk openly, you might have to give some of them cover. But it bears noting that this is one more case where Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric was just telling us what we want to hear. Sorry Mac, but David Sobel is right. There is not an ounce of difference between Bush and Obama on this issue.

Civil Rights Commission vs. Teacher’s Union

I have thought for a long time that the single greatest obstacle to education reform is the teachers unions. It has seemed clear that given a choice between protecting their membership from any stress and doing what is right for their pupils, the NEA would always choose the former. Well, what do you expect me to say? I am a conservative.

But when the United States Civil Rights Commission endorses my view, that's a sign that the union's contempt for the basic mission of its members has become too grotesque even for its Leftist allies to stomach. Consider this language, from the Commissions recent report: National Teachers Unions and the Struggle Over School Reform.

No Child Left Behind requires that the states ensure that low-income and minority students are taught by qualified teachers at the same rate as other students…But the teacher unions have worked tirelessly against this requirement from the very beginning of the ESEA. Despite their insistence on educational inputs as the key to educational success, the unions repeatedly seek to block one of the most important of these inputs – equitable distribution of highly qualified teachers to high needs schools.

The teachers unions "tirelessly" oppose distributing more qualified teachers equally among low income and minority students. Let them eat cake. And consider this:

The NEA has also publicly opposed efforts to equalize school funding, fearing that comparability would interfere with local contracts. "A gut issue for our members is that they are opposed to something that weakens rights they have under their contract, and it is not the federal role to interfere with that," said Joel Packer, Director of Education Policy and Practice at the NEA.

So: given a choice between equal funding for schools with low income and minority students (compared with higher income, largely White student bodies), and protecting union contracts, the NEA's gut cares only about the latter. Its gut. Wow.

So has the Civil Rights Commission been taken over by conservatives? Not exactly. Among its members are Birch Baye, Bill Bradley, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Roger Wilkins, Father Theodore M. Hesburgh. That's the Left.

The teachers unions are all about teachers. They don't give a rotten apple core for their most needy students.

Greenpeace on Mount Rushmore

Greenpeace, an organization consisting of well fed and very well educated persons who are congenitally opposed to the generation of wealth that pays for food and college, staged a protest at Mount Rushmore. Here is a clip produced, I am supposing, by the insurgents who hung the banner next to Abe's face. Hat tip to my friend and Keloland coconspirator Cory Heidelberger.

Apparently our own Stephanie Herseth denounced the act as "outrageous." I say: well done. I am not a big fan of "civil disobedience" among persons who have every right to peacefully assemble and petition anyone they please for a redress of grievances. But I think that the appropriate response is to prosecute them to the full extent of the law, and then play the YouTube clip at parties.

The clip shows the difficult process of unfurling the banner. I found that engaging in its own right. When finally positioned, the effect was striking. Obama's face added to Mount Rushmore with the slogan: America Honors Leaders, Not Politicians: Stop Global Warming. There is a bit of self-imposed ignorance there. Every face on Mount Rushmore is the face of a politician. And since I live in South Dakota, I am in favor of global warming. But as an act of political theater, it was well staged and elegant, and harmless enough.  

Ps. Since Native Americans generally consider Mount Rushmore to be a violation of their sacred rights, doesn't this make Obama a coconspirator with all those White Presidents?

Healthy Skepticism on Healthcare 4

Kausfiles senses a perilous weakening in the Congressional momentum for health care reform. He refers us to these lines from Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic:

[T]here's reason for concern… On Thursday, as Politico details, the leadership got hit with a flurry of letters from several groups of extremely unhappy members. Some were objecting to the design of the public plan. Some were objecting to proposed tax hikes. Some thought the bill didn't do enough to control costs. Some thought it did too much (although, of course, they didn't quite put it that way).

But lurking behind all of these complaints, according to several sources I consulted Thursday evening, is a general wariness of taking a political plunge on health care. Like their counterparts in the Senate, House members don't like taking hard votes. Raising taxes, cutting spending, anything that takes money ouf of people's pockets--these are not things they want to do, even in the service of a greater, more popular cause.

And now they're getting nervous. They're seeing the president's popularity dipping, however incrementally. They're watching the Senate chase its tail over the same controversies. And having just taken what were--for many of them--similarly tough votes on an energy bill, they're not exactly thrilled about "walking the plank" again.

If Cohn is right, the Democrats are getting cold feet. One of the problems with having a nominal veto-proof majority in the Senate along with control of the House and the White House is that you are pretty much responsible for whatever the government does. If Health Care reform turns out to be deeply unpopular, the Democrats could easily find themselves trading places with Republicans on the is you is or is you ain't the people's baby scale.

There are two big worries here. One is that the Democrats will pass radical health care reform, and it will be very expensive but won't do any good. David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, thinks that's what all the pending plans amount to.

Over the past few decades, health care inflation has exceeded the general rise in prices by about 2.5 percent a year. These inexorably rising costs are bankrupting the nation, walloping businesses and squeezing middle-class salaries.

Fortunately, the country now has an excellent opportunity to change that. We have a president fervently committed to reducing health care inflation. We have a budget director who is perhaps the nation's leading expert on the issue. We have a fiscal crisis staring us in the face, just to focus the mind.

And what is the result so far? Failure. Overwhelming, amazing failure.

The health care bills now winding their way through Congress would cover many of the uninsured. They would pay for most of the costs associated with that expanded coverage. But they would do little to change the fundamental incentives that drive health care inflation.

If confidence in this reform agenda is fading, it's largely because the people at large are getting very worried about the expansive government/massive deficit dimensions of the whole Obama package.

But Brooks point is that, despite President Obama's focus on the health care cost issue, none of the plans addresses the real cause of health care inflation. Critics of the American system incessantly point out that American spends a lot more on medicine than any comparable nation. That is the problem to be solved. If it were solved, there would be plenty of money left over to cover the uninsured and get basic health care to everyone. So why do we spend so much more money than we apparently need to spend?

The answer is that Doctors recommend more tests and more treatments than make sense in any cost/benefit analysis. Why do they do that? Part of the reason is the tort law system. If a doctor doesn't order a test or treatment, and the patient loses an elbow or kicks the bucket, she risks a massive lawsuit. But that's only part of the reason. More tests and treatments equal more money for doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, lab rats, and so on. So any cost effective reform of the system will run against the interests of the tort lawyers (a major Democratic interest group) and pretty much the entire medical industry.

But those obstacles, potent though they are, aren't the real obstacle to reform. The real obstacle is Denzel Washington. I didn't see John Q, the film in which Washington plays a father who takes an emergency room hostage because his insurance company won't pay for a transplant for his ailing son. The movie's premise, as I understand it, was pure fantasy. What is pure reality is this: we Americans consistently demand the best health care possible for ourselves and our loved ones, beyond any rational cost/benefit calculations. Our system provides a lot more of that than any comparable system. We are the problem.

Ask yourself this: what if a treatment costs $250,000 and saves the life of one of four persons suffering from a specific disease? That's a million dollars per life saved, and a 25% success rate. Suppose 1,000 people suffer from that disease. That's two hundred and fifty million that can't be spent on education, highways, or homeland security, to save 250 people. Anyone who says we shouldn't spend it will be asked what a human life is worth.

European state-sponsored health care systems are a mixed bag. Some are pretty good; others, not. In terms of survival rates, the United States ranks very high on some measures (cancer survival rates are better than any European system), and in the middle on others. But the European systems are better at cutting people off. You just can't have this bypass operation because you're too old, sorry. We aren't very good at that, and that is why our system is so much more expensive.

Advocates of reform like to imagine that more treatment will be extended to people who now are denied it. This is fantasy. Any real reform of the system will mean denying treatment to people for whom that treatment is the only hope. Is the Democratic Congress courageous enough to do that? Not if current legislative proposals are any indication. The cause of healthcare reform looks hopeless.

Genomics 3: Endogenous Clocks & Marathon Mice

Okay there's this gene. Actually there are a number of genes that do the same thing, but the point here is that one seems to be enough. I'll just talk about mPer1, as if I knew what I was talking about. Per, by the way, is short for period. Look at mPer1 when a couple of yellow circles are sitting on top of the promoter segment of the gene labeled C and B. These are inhibitors, and they shut the gene down. When the gene is shut down, changes in the cell eventually result in the inhibitors being stripped off. The gene is activated and begins to change the cell chemistry again. Eventually C and B show up again and bind to the promoter, and the gene is shut down.

Get all that? The whole cycle takes a little more than twenty four hours. That's why it's called a circadian clock. In mammals, these Timex cells are the heart of the suprachiasmatic nuclei, a paired set of nuclei located at the base of the hypothalamus, a brain organ found in most mammals but not in Professor Schaff. The SCN is the central pacemaker for circadian rhythms. It allows mammals to keep a twenty four hour cycle. But it is sensitive to environmental inputs such as daylight cycles. The slightly longer than 24 hour period allows the system to adjust to changes in seasons or sudden changes in location. When a creature with one of these time pieces is kept in long term darkness, it keeps a more than 24 hour day.

This is a case where the gene mechanics can be connected well with the associated behavior. It is also a case where the common ancestry of the species is indicated. When the SNC is disabled in a lab rat, it loses the ability to keep a regular schedule. When the same mechanism is disrupted in fruit flies, you get a very irregular drosophila. But, and here is the punch line, they have transplanted genes from the mammalian SNC into the damaged fruit fly, and the fly is back on the clock.

That's what I got from Martha U. Gillette, a marvelous scientist who spends her time watching other critters keep theirs. Justin Rhodes, a biologist here explained how he and others bred a few lines of super buff mice. They kept several lines of control groups (just let them breed), and bred several lines of really strong wheel runners by selecting the strongest. Some of these mice could do many miles a day on those goofy wheels. By breeding several lines instead of just one, Rhodes and his colleagues could tell what changes in what morphological features and genes were constant across the enhanced lines. That clued them into the changes that were really important and not just random noise.

This is science, and I am entranced by it. This is what we are, at least in part. That, at least in part, is what I have always wanted to know.

DISCLAIMER: This is my very amateur take on all this.  Any mistakes are mine and not those of the expert presenters. 

California Screamin’

Many years ago my car broke down in the Middle of the San Joaquin desert, err, I mean Valley. I had to have the car towed to a really lonely town, Avenal, one of the bleakest places I have ever visited. I thought I had landed in some dreary film noir. But I ran into three sets of people from my hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas.

That was the story of California told in what amounted to the demographic version of an archeological artifact: California was once a Mecca for meek, a Beverley for Hillbillies from all other places. Now the meek are abandoning ship and returning whence they came as fast as possible. The state economy works about as well as my dreadful Dodge Omni, and the state government has seized up the way the Omni's transmission did on that highway to Hell. Governor Arnode is paying the state's bills with $3.3 billion in IOU's, and there seems to be no prospect of a break in the budget impasse. The state is $26 billion dollars in the red.

This hasn't happened over night. Manufacturing jobs have been leaving Hollywood land for real places like Arizona for years. Joel Kotkin, at Forbes, has a list of the parties responsible for California's disaster. In order: Governor Schwarzenegger, the public sector, the environmental lobby, the business community, and the people of California.

To flesh out a few of these, the Governor failed to lay out a program of reform when one was needed, and simply switched strategies and personalities with every defeat just like the actor he is. To be fair, he had little power to institute any real reform. But that doesn't let him off the hook. The enormously bloated public employee sector doesn't give a rat's ass what happens to the rest of the state as long as their benefits aren't cut. The environmental lobby has made doing business if California ridiculously expensive. The business sector has laid low, and the voters want all the benefits they can get without paying for any of them. The result has been that spending increased 31% from 2003 to 2007, while the population increased only 5%.

That public spending is the thing. Most of the blame has been laid at the feet of Prop. 13, which limited property tax increases back in the 1970s. Kotkin points out Prop. 13 kept a lot of people in their houses at a time when property taxes were soaring along with state revenues. I think it was a bad idea and greatly contributed to the dysfunction that afflicts the state. But it had no effect on California's current crisis. If Sacramento had had more revenue to spend, it would simply have spent more revenue. Having one of the highest tax rates in the country isn't helping now, it is driving out people and industries.

All of this would be merely curious to people west of Blythe, were it not for the fact that the President of the United States seems bent on turning America into a large scale model of California. As the economy stalls, and unemployment climbs like Kudzu in Arkansas, the President is spending trillions, and planning on spending tens of trillions more, that we don't have and have no prospect of producing. Meanwhile he wants to put a California-like environmental policy into effect, and wants a trillion dollar health care plan enacted. What no one seems to be asking (no Democrats, at least) is whether there is any realistic prospect that future economic growth can cover this kind of spending. California here we come.

Sociogenomics 2: Why You Can’t Clone a Calico Cat

There's a country music song in there somewhere. Calico cats are white with red and black patches. Apparently some couple with more money than sense paid to have their dear departed calico cloned. But several attempts failed to produce a cat that looked like Furball, or whatever they called the deceased. Instead they bought, for thousands, cats that were all one color or another. Someone might have bothered to tell them that what they were trying to do was destined to fail.

Calicos are all females, and their hair color is determined by a gene on the X chromosome. But here is the cool thing: the chromosome contains two complete sets of genes, one from each parent. In order for that to add up to a functioning cat, one set has to be turned off in each cell. This happens in patches, hence the tortoise shell color pattern. Now when they went to clone Furball, they took just one cell and used the nucleus to launch FB2. But in that one cell, only one set of genes was turned on, and that was fixed for the whole new cat.

I haven't had so much fun since grandma caught her x chromosome in the ringer. Here is the scoop: we understand how genes work. They are molecules, and we know how they code for RNA and how proteins are built form that. We have a pretty good idea about the factors that determine which genes are expressed, and it is clear that the environment can affect that process. I know a whole lot more about exons (sections of DNA that code for proteins), introns (sections of DNA that have to be edited out, but may play a role in expression), promoters (sections that call for a polymerase gene reader, than I did yesterday.

We also know that genes are responsible for all sorts of wonderful and terrible things that happen in development. But while mapping the genome has made it a lot easier to find a gene, it hasn't made it easier to determine how the gene actually produces an effect on the phenotype (the actual organism).

It is pretty certain that there is such a thing as general intelligence, or G. Sorry for all of you who think there are all sorts of Gs out there, and that everyone has at least one of them. A condition known as Fragile X syndrome produces a child (almost always a boy) with low IQ and low tolerance for stress. The gene has a long repeat of a three letter DNA sequence, and this shuts the gene down a lot before it can bond with RNA. The result is a bunch of fuzzy dendrites (part of the neurons that make the brain work). That doesn't mean we have "the gene" for general intelligence; it does mean we have a gene necessary for a well functioning brain and can tie it tight to a specific disorder.

Another genetic disorder was discovered that resulted in a pronounced tendency toward violence in one Dutch family.

Hans Brunner, a geneticist at the University Hospital in Nijmegen, has found that the violent male members of the Dutch family mentioned earlier in this paper, lacked a gene that produces monoamine oxidase-a (MAOA) (4). MAOA is an enzyme that breaks down significant transmitters in the brain. If the MAOA does not break down these transmitters - specifically, serotonin - then buildup of serotonin will occur and could cause a person to act violently (3).

So far, no studies have found such a link outside that one family. In this case, like the former, what made a determination of genetic causation possible was that a single gene was the culprit. But it seems very certain that more complicated arrays of genes and gene expression factors will turn out to play a significant role in a lot of good and bad behaviors. This doesn't mean genetic determinism. How genes are expressed is greatly affected by the environment, and the environment can be controlled, to some extent, by deliberate action. But to deliberate properly, we need to know more about the mechanics of DNA.

All human thoughts and actions happen because the brain works the way it does. It works that way in large part because of the extraordinarily complex structure of the human genome. We are getting a few peaks into that subterranean architecture right now.

Sociogenomics 1

I was one of a number of scholars lucky enough to be invited to the Illinois Politics and Biology Summer Institute, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The Directors include Ira Carmen, a political scientist who writes extensively on genetics and politics, and Gene Robinson, a biologist who spends his time working on links between the genes and social behaviors of honey bees. The Institute is meeting at the Institute for Genomic Biology on the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The pace is pretty brutal for this kind of thing: eight solid hours a day of presentation and discussion. Most of the NSF fellows are youngsters by my standard: working on their Ph.D.s, or just finished. I am learning to settle in as the designated old fart.

Today we covered the history of the American Political Science Association, founded in 1903 by, well, a bunch of Darwinists. But the APSA quickly ran away from biology following the historicist trend of the times. According to this latter perspective, human behavior and institutions were to be viewed as "socially constructed", that is, as if human beings constructed their institutions entirely apart from the natural world and its influences.

There were some good reasons for this. In 1903 there just wasn't enough known about biology, genetics, or evolution to usefully guide the social sciences. When such knowledge did begin to become available, there was enormous resistance on the part of most political scientists. For one thing, they didn't want to have to learn any real science. For another, there was fear that biological explanations would limit social progress and support regressive political ideas.

The coining of the phrase "Sociogenomics" (even the word genomics is rather new), indicates that the pendulum is finally swinging back toward nature as the foundation of a real political science.

The second topic we focused on today, and the one that was deeply fascinating to me, is the shift in the view of genes and how they operate. Many of those who fear genetic explanations of human behavior have the idea that genes are fixed influences, so that if a gene codes for some kind of behavior, then a person or organism that has one version will act one way and a person or organism that has another version will act another way. This view is sometimes called genetic determinism.

But it is not how genes work. Genes are composed of DNA and code directly for MRNA (which is now pronounced emarenay, I have learned). MRNA (messenger RNA) is used by cells to produce the proteins that in turn influence the structure and behavior and pretty much everything else that characterizes a living being.

Now here is the really cool thing: while DNA is fixed (except when changed by mutation), the expression of the genes in different Messenger RNA messages is flexible. The way the Chromatin wraps around itself determines how the genes will be expressed in the fully realized organism. That in turn can be influenced by the environment.

For example: adult honey bees ordinarily begin their careers as nurses, working to tend the larvae. After a few weeks the nurse graduates to the forager/soldier. It begins its self-guided education by taking a few test flights from the hive, orienting itself with respect to the sun and the location of its home. Once it begins foraging in earnest, it will know how to return to the hive and indicate the location of flowers by doing a very expressive dance.

But sometimes the hive will lose many or most of its forgers when the environment turns against them. The forager secret a pheromone that alerts the nurse/workers to their presence and gives the latter a sense of how many foragers are coming in and out. When the pheromone concentration in the hive drops below a certain level, the expression of the foraging genes in the nurses changes and they become "precocious foragers" switching to the new role in the first week of their adulthood. Same genes. Different time table.

Likewise, when mother mouse licks her young, this maternal care alters genes that give the young a lifelong resistance to stress, and helps trigger maternal instincts in the females. Again, the same genes are expressed in different brain structures and behavior. That is so cool. Genetic influence is not genetic determinism.

Now, if I get this right, the genes that are under review in these examples exist as orthologs in human beings. An orthologs is a gene that exists in similar form in two species and that was inherited from a common ancestor. Some genes have been conserved with very little change over long stretches of evolutionary history.

One of the themes of this institute is that we are beginning to correlate genes with behavior patterns in human beings. More on that tomorrow, I think. Of course, what we don't know and won't know for a while dwarfs what we do know. It may be possible to correlate this gene here with that behavior over there, but we know very little about the chain of causation that connects the one to the other. What we are learning is that genes do not cause behavior, let alone passions and experience. Rather, gene expression exists in a dynamic relationship with human structure, experience, and behavior, as is the case with other creatures. I think this is the greatest show on earth.

Palin

I was never convinced that Sarah Palin was presidential material.  I thought McCain's choice of a running mate was a gamble at a time when a gamble seemed in order.  She certainly shook the race up.  But she wasn't ready for the big show.

Her surprise resignation is another big gamble, assuming that she really intends to run in 2012.  It runs the serious risk of making her look seriously deranged.  It's hard not to think that that wrecks her chances.  On the other hand, it will give her the chance to do two things she desperately needs to do: spend a lot of time raising money for Republicans, and go back to school.  If she shows back up on the national stage in 2011 and is more sure of herself, able to handle questions about a wide range of national issues, and has command of her image, then she will be back in contention.  Otherwise, she Quayles. 

Happy 4th and Light Blogging Ahead

I am on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus this week, learning about sociogenomics.  If you don't know what that is, neither did I until I was invited to participate in this National Science Foundation funded Summer Institute.  Now I know something about it, having spent the day reading the preliminary material.  Wow is this interesting stuff.  I might do some daily blogging if I have the time. 

Meanwhile, happy Fourth of July.  This evening, as I walked around the campus, I noticed a building with a lot of Lincoln's words etched into the side.  "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand," and "Let Us Have Faith that Right Makes Might."  The campus was founded right after the Civil War, if I got the drift.  Happy Birthday United States of America!

I notice a lot of comments on my Honduras post.  I will try to get around to responding.  If I am slow, it isn't because I don't appreciate the traffic. 

The Honduran Crisis

The odd thing about the military coup in Honduras is that it wasn't a coup. A coup d'état means the removal of a government by hostile forces. The Honduran military this week woke up President Zelaya and packed him off, in his pajamas, to Costa Rica. But it left intact the Honduran Supreme Court, which apparently authorized the action, and the nation's congress. It installed congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as Zelaya's successor (according to the Constitution) until the end of Mr. Zelaya's term in January. That's not what a military coup looks like.

That's not to say that the action was right. President Obama, who can't decide what side he's on with respect to Iran, quickly condemned the action and rightfully mentioned the sorry spectacle of military coups in Latin America. Standing by his side as he did so was Colombian president Alvaro Uribe [Houston Chronicle], whose opinions on these matters I take more seriously than Obama's. If Uribe, who surely has to worry about such things, thinks this ought to be opposed, then I am hesitant to say the contrary.

But to judge well, you'd have to the conduct of President Zelaya that led to the coup. This from Glenn Garvin at the Miami Herald:

For weeks, Zelaya -- an erratic leftist who styles himself after his good pal Hugo Chávez of Venezuela -- has been engaged in a naked and illegal power grab, trying to rewrite the Honduran constitution to allow him to run for reelection in November.

First Zelaya scheduled a national vote on a constitutional convention. After the Honduran supreme court ruled that only the country's congress could call such an election, Zelaya ordered the army to help him stage it anyway. (It would be ''non-binding,'' he said.) When the head of the armed forces, acting on orders from the supreme court, refused, Zelaya fired him, then led a mob to break into a military base where the ballots were stored.

His actions have been repudiated by the country's supreme court, its congress, its attorney-general, its chief human-rights advocate, all its major churches, its main business association, his own political party (which recently began debating an inquiry into Zelaya's sanity) and most Hondurans: Recent polls have shown his approval rating down below 30 percent.

Now if this is right, then Zelaya's unconstitutional actions that precipitated the crisis. He put the Honduran military in a position where it had to choose between abetting his lawless power grab, or obeying the Supreme Court and taking the action that it did.

But were these really the only choices? Edward Schumacher-Matos, writing in the Washington Post, has perhaps the best thing I have seen on this.

It is now clear that if the Honduran Supreme Court or Congress had used legal means such as impeachment before asking the army to remove President Manuel Zelaya, we would be calling events there a constitutional crisis rather than a coup d'etat.

Well, yes. And everyone, except perhaps Manuel Zelaya and Hugo Chavez (and the Castros) would be happier. Schumacher-Matos points out that many of those who are shocked, shocked by this undemocratic action would favor full recognition of the Castro regime, which is about as democratic as Sauron's Mordor.

He goes on to point out that

The threat growing in Latin America, Asia and Africa, according to Freedom House, is not dictatorship but what political theorists call illiberal democracy. Venezuela is the poster case in which a president, Hugo Chávez, is democratically elected and then goes about, through democratic referendums and Congress, constraining freedom by changing laws and institutions. Chávez and others like him create the "tyranny of the majority" that theorists behind the American Constitution warned was the weakness of democracy by itself, without constitutional liberalism protecting the rights of the individual.

That is what the crisis in Honduras represents. Let's hope our President is reading Schumacher-Matos, and not just the rest of the mainstream press that seems more interested in righteous indignation than in information.

The Cost of Cap & Trade

My friend and esteemed Keloland colleague, Cory Heidelberger, has a post worth reading on the Waxman-Markey bill. Here is a gem:

On the costs of cap and trade: How big a pocketbook bite would SHS have had to sell to us to justify a yes vote on ACESA? According to the Truth-o-Meter folks at Politifact.com, the Congressional Budget Office estimates this specific bill would cost $175 per household... a little more than one postage stamp a day.

Well, that sounds manageable. Of course there is a logical problem. The bill is supposed to force everyone from Wal-Mart down to the guy with the shifty eyes in the one bedroom apartment to go green. Is one postage stamp a day really going to do that?

But leave that alone for a moment. Cory thinks that the bill will be cheap. What does Barack Obama think? Here is Jeff Jacoby writing for the Boston Globe:

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, [Obama] calmly explained how cap-and-trade - the carbon-dioxide rationing scheme that is at the heart of Waxman-Markey - would work:

"Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket . . . because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, natural gas, you name it . . . Whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money, and they will pass that [cost] on to consumers.''

In the same interview, Obama suggested that his energy policy would require the ruin of the coal industry. "If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can,'' he told the Chronicle. "It's just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.''

Okay. President Obama wants electricity rates to "skyrocket." He wants to ruin the coal industry, from which we get about 23% of our energy. And all this is going to cost us a postage stamp a day? The thing is, I think Cory might be right. If Waxman-Markey passes, and does what the President wants it to do, a single postage stamp might really cost more than any American can afford.

update: this post was mentioned favorably at one of my favorite sites: No Left Turns. Thanks to Peter Lawler.  

The Anti-Science Obama Administration

For a couple of years I was a participant in a national online meeting on open government.  All over the country groups convened and logged into the national meeting, and we watched a video and listened to a panel of national figures discuss the subject.  Then our local panel discussed before a small audience.  The first year it was quite good.   But the second year the event got hijacked by global warming zealots, including NPR Science Friday host Ira Flatow. 

The theme of that second annual meeting was that the Bush Administration was anti-science because it suppressed the truth about global warming.  The evidence of this was that the Administration didn’t sufficiently publicize the views of individuals working for the various branches of government who thought that global warming was a serious threat.  That theme, that the Bush Administration was anti-science, became a major meme in left wing discourse. 

Well now the executive show is on the other foot, and guess what?  The Obama Administration is doing the exact same thing.  From CBSNews:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

Why was the report “quashed”?  An EPA center director, Al McGartland, wrote this in an e-mail to the author of the skeptical report, Alan Carlin. 

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for
this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. …. I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

Well, there you have it.  Arguments and information that do not “help the legal or policy case” the Administration wants to make will be suppressed.  It is likely that the suppression of this report is a violation of administrative law.  When a Federal Agency is preparing a finding, it is supposed to make available “the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded.” 

But the legal point is not the important point here.  I think the Administration has every right to make up its mind on this matter, and present its policy preferences.  But so did the Bush Administration.  If in doing so Bush was anti-science, then so is Obama.  This is one more example of the Obama Administration working to rehabilitate Bush’s legacy.  Imitation may not be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is flattery. 

Ricci v. DeStefano

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ricci (pronounced Ree Chee, or sometimes Rich ee) and against the City of New Haven, Connecticut. The case has important implications for affirmative action, and less important though interesting implications for the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor.

The Case.

The city of New Haven instituted an exam for firefighters seeking promotion to lieutenants and captains. The exam was specifically designed to be race neutral and involved a lengthy process of fitting the test to the relevant manuals and the experiences of firefighters. The exam included an oral portion. The assessors were drawn from firefighters outside Connecticut, holding higher ranks than the positions open. Sixty percent of the assessors were minorities.

Frank Ricci suffers from dyslexia. He spent $1,000 on books, studied 13 hours a day, and hired a tutor to read him the material. He placed sixth on the lieutenant's exam, qualifying him for immediate promotion. Here is the Court's description of the results.

Candidates took the examinations in November and December 2003. Seventy-seven candidates completed the lieutenant examination—43 whites, 19 blacks, and 15 Hispanics. Of those, 34 candidates passed—25 whites, 6 blacks, and 3 Hispanics. Eight lieutenant positions were vacant at the time of the examination. [The] top 10 candidates were eligible for an immediate promotion to lieutenant. All 10 were white. Subsequent vacancies would have allowed at least 3 black candidates to be considered for promotion to lieutenant.

Forty-one candidates completed the captain examination—25 whites, 8 blacks, and 8 Hispanics. Of those, 22 candidates passed—16 whites, 3 blacks, and 3 Hispanics. Seven captain positions were vacant at the time of the examination. Under the rule of three, 9 candidates were eligible for an immediate promotion to captain—7 whites and 2 Hispanics.

So, although several black candidates qualified for eventual promotion, none qualified for immediate promotion to open positions.

The City of New Haven threw out the test results on the grounds that no immediate promotion for any Black applicants would open them to lawsuits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Ricci and 19 others sued.

The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4

that race-based action like the City's in this case is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute. The respondents, we further determine, cannot meet that threshold standard.

The Court reached that decision on fairly narrow grounds, and did not ask whether the City's actions violated The Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment.

Comment

Ricci was denied a promotion he had worked very hard to obtain and which he was entitled to under the rules the city had set up. He was denied his promotion solely on the grounds that the results of the exam had a disparate impact on Blacks, i.e., that the racial mix of those who qualified for immediate promotion was not to the City's liking.

This looks to me like a de facto quota system. A quota system, as defined in previous cases such as Bakke, is one which sets aside a number of seats or positions for which only persons of a certain racial identity are allowed to compete. Here we have to assume a de facto requirement that at least one immediate-hire position was reserved for a Black applicant (or one each for lieutenant and captain). That would mean that at least two such positions were not open to persons who were White or Hispanic, or anything other than Black. The fact that the failure to fill the quota resulted in throwing out the whole test, rather than in the preferential promotion of a targeted minority, clouds the issue but doesn't make it any cleaner. Unfortunately, the Court did not address this question.

All the results mean is that the City cannot discriminate against White and Hispanic applicants solely on the basis of their racial identification merely because it imagines it might be sued under Title VII. It has to prove that the results were a violation of Title VII. But the Court also indicated that it thinks that the city cannot make such a case. That's not chopped liver. It provides significant protection for city governments trying to find legitimately race neutral modes of promotion. But it leaves four votes in favor of discriminating against Mr. Ricci just because he's the wrong color.

The case has only small consequences for Judge Sotomayor. Four votes side with her on the substantive issue, which supports the claim that she was in the mainstream on this one. On the procedural issue (she heard this case on the lower court, and voted to dismiss it without examination) the result was more embarrassing. None of the Justices agreed that the case did not deserve to be heard. None of this is likely to affect her confirmation.

Frank Ricci and Sonia Sotomayor both rose from humble positions through very hard work. But under the racialist law of affirmative action, they are not equally disadvantaged.

Neverland & Graceland

In the race to the bottom of American culture, I don't want SDP to be left too far behind. So here is a post on the King of Pop and the King of Rock and Roll.

It's not always good to be king. All of us know this and none of us knows this. We understand that power, wealth, and fame can destroy us, but few of us would object to getting a little more of any or all of that. So the examples of Michael Jackson and Elvis Pressley are morally edifying.

A few years ago I visited Graceland for the first time, though Pressley's fabled home was only an hour away from my home town. I found it fascinating and appalling, in equal measure. It was a monument to wretchedness secured by success.

I was never a big Elvis fan, though I liked a lot of his music and, I confess, I liked a lot of his dreadful movies when I was about eleven. He had a great voice, a very serviceable face, and came along at the right time. But he got everything he ever wanted early in life, and had no idea what to do with it. Graceland is full of exhibits devoted to Pressley's attempts to distract himself. One day he got a great idea. He bought dozens of golf carts and he and his entourage played golf cart polo on the grounds. I bet that got old fast. He was bored most of the time, and his typical response was to redecorate another room in more garish colors. But none of that worked. The only things that did work were fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and, of course, drugs.

Michael Jackson was Elvis with even more money and tilted seven degrees to the weird side of the dial. When he and I were young, I liked "Ben." But that was because, despite its soupy presentation, it was about a hyper-intelligent rat that commanded a man-eating army of rats. That's entertainment! I also thought 'Billy Jean' and 'Thriller' to be first rate pop songs.

Jackson's descended into wretchedness in a much more pubic fashion than Elvis. Perhaps because his fame came in childhood, his stunted emotional development made the King of Rock and Roll look like a well-rounded individual. Coming along later, he had more refined nonsense to work with. I remember a photo of Jackson sleeping in an enriched oxygen capsule. And there was the famous transformation from Black guy to white ghost. About his relations with children, I have no interest in knowing enough to comment. But it does seem to me possible that it was entirely innocent, if altogether creepy. He was a child trapped in a bigger than life man, and craved the innocent attention of other children.

There are two lessons here, and both are fundamental. One is that it is bad to be surrounded by people who have to tell you what you want to hear and can never tell you what you need to hear. The other is that there is such a thing as higher culture. Precisely when you have security and leisure, that is the time to put aside conspicuous displays and garish colors, and develop a taste for more subtle and refined pleasures. This, if you want to know the whole story, is the point of the liberal arts. What is beautiful and profound is both stimulating and challenging. In many societies the rich have patronized the arts and sciences because they wanted something worthwhile to spend their money on. Wealth and power without cultivated tastes will end up like Elvis Pressley and Michael Jackson: feeble and bloated or feeble, washed out, and thin, but in either case wretched and then dead.

Cap & Trade Incoherence

The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) passed the House today 219 to 212. The winning coalition included 211 Democrats and 8 Republicans. The opposition included 168 Republicans and 44 Democrats. Apparently, elections matter. South Dakota's own Herseth-Sandlin voted no.

Here is a summary of what the legislation would do, from Ronald Bailey at Reason:

The ACES Act would establish an artificial carbon market by setting a limit on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted each year. Beginning in 2012, a national cap—or total maximum CO2 emissions—would be set and then ratcheted downward annually. Under ACES, the U.S. would emit 17 percent less carbon dioxide in 2020 than it did in 2005, eventually falling to 83 percent less than emitted in 2005 by 2050.

I do not know what the odds of passage in the Senate are, where the party balance is narrower and a filibuster is possible. So I will address two questions: can the bill work, in some sense, and what will its effects on the American economy be?

The answer to the first question is easy. Even if the bill's targets are met, there is no scientific basis for believing that it will have a measurable effect on global greenhouse emissions, and even less for believing that any effect it has will have a detectable influence on climate. Even if other developed nations follow our lead, and most of them won't, developing economies like China and India aren't going to hobble their own economies.

Cap and Trade has been tried in Europe, and it had virtually no effect on carbon emissions. The reason is simple. Governments can issue allowances whenever the effects of such legislation become sufficiently burdensome to their economies, and they sometimes issue permits for more "pollution" than is being produced. No pain means no gain. Waxman-Markey is playing this game in advance. From the Wall Street Journal:

To get support for his bill, Mr. Waxman was forced to water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats. The CBO's analysis looks solely at the year 2020, before most of the tough restrictions kick in.

When you put off the hard part for twenty years or more, it does not inspire confidence. Some Democrats voted against the bill precisely because they think it will do little or nothing.

Judging the effect on the economy depends on whether the legislation has any real effect. If it goes the same way as Europe, it will have no great effect except to create another expensive program and give Congress the means to tweak it so as to punish or please various constituencies and economic sectors.

What will be the economic consequences if the bill is to have a real impact on energy production? Again from Ron Bailey:

The central fact of the cap-and-trade proposal is that it will increase the price of energy. If energy prices don't go up, the goal of getting energy producers, manufacturers, and consumers to shift away from carbon generating fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) toward low-carbon sources of energy (nuclear, solar, wind, conservation) will not be achieved.

The bill can only work by making energy more expensive. That in turn will increase the price of everything that requires energy to produce or provide, which is everything. Of course the theory is that the bill will encourage the development of a new, cleaner economy, with sustainable, green energy production and enlightened small carbon footprint consumers. Al Gore will be encouraged to get rid of Bio-Solar One, his gas guzzling house boat. That is wishful thinking on Bio-Solar stilts.

This amounts to a massive tax on the entire economy, to be levied as the same time that the economy will be trying to pay back the tens of trillions in debt we are currently racking up.

All this looks to me like incoherent policy, a vast project based on subvast and mutually irreconcilable ideas. Conservative thinkers warn it will be a big drag on the economy, but I doubt that. The legislation, if it passes, will be amended into insignificance long before that happens. It will only be a small drag on the economy, with no good achieved. Well done Congresswoman Herseth-Sandlin.

Asian Horror Online Free: Revengeful Ghost & Real Estate

That will catch on your spam filter! This blog is devoted almost entirely to politics, but anyone who has been reading it for a long time (there are such people) will know that I have posted a lot of music reviews and that one of my interests is the horror genre. Especially A-Horror and J-Horror: spooky movies from Asia in general and Japan in particular. I have loved the spooky story since I was a boy. Yes, I was dropped on my head. Anyway, I can blog about what I want to.

I can make a case for serious attention to this genre. I have been engaged in a discussion of culture connected with a recent post. I think all cultures have more in common with one another than differences, but the differences are delightful and instructive. That is especially so when they are disturbing to one another.

In the late 90's a series of Asian Horror movies were made that had a tremendous impact on the horror film genre. The Ring, The Eye, The Grudge, Pulse, and Spiral, were the most important. The Ring was the best of them, based on the superb horror novel by Koji Suzuki. All but the last have seen American made versions. On the American Ring can compare, and I think it might be even better than the American version. Spiral was brilliant, but perhaps too ethereal for mass market.

I recently discovered a website, Asian-Horror-Movies.com, that has a very large collection of Asian movies that you can watch online. All of the above mentioned movies are available. The quality is not great, but the price is right and they are there on demand.

Ju-on, or The Grudge (2003) was one of the most frightening ghost stories I have ever enjoyed. At the small risk of spoiling the surprise, it is a series of small stories, each with the same horrific ending. But American fans may not know that the Japanese movie was itself a remake of a version made for Japanese TV in 2000. I just finished watching that.

The TV version is altogether cheap in production. Poor special effects, modest cinematography (though I can't really judge from the online presentation), good but not great acting, and a very slow pace, all distinguish the TV effort from its polished 2003 incarnation. It was nonetheless marvelously effective. It also fills out the story a bit more.

SPOILER ALERT.

The center of the action in both movies is a modest Japanese house. In the TV version, the real estate angle is prominent. How do you unload a house that is inhabited by a ghost that gobbles up people whole? Answer: you lie. In the later version, there's a social service angle. Social workers show up to take care of people living in the house, and they get gobbled up along with everyone else.

The first version makes more explicit what the movie version mostly hinted at: a jealous husband murders his wife and son, and that sets off the chain of events. The boy ghost, Toshio, appears frequently. He is a tragic figure, but all the more terrifying in so far as he isn't malevolent but always signals the approach of mommy ghost. It is her rage that is immortal and insatiable. Anyone who enters the house is acquired by her, like the target of a smart missile, and once acquired there is no defense. Anyone who comes into close contact with someone who is already cursed risks infection. "The grudge," or curse, is like a virus: it propagates itself.

Ju-on is in one respect more like Western horror than typical A-Horror. In the latter, the spirit world leaks into the living world more or less like an ecological disaster. It doesn't have to be anyone's fault. In W-Horror, the root of all evil is sin. In Ju-on, adultery that is the root cause of the terror. The violation of marriage vows opens a rift in the fabric between worlds, with all manner of unfortunate consequences. Tell that to a few Republican governors and Senators. Another interesting thing about the TV version is that it reveals a deep angst in Japanese society about children. There is a current of tremendous guilt about having and protecting children that flows just under the surface of the film. In a nation that has virtually stopped having children, it's no wonder.

The alternate versions of Ju-on are book marked with two of the most frightening scenes in modern movie-making. At the beginning of the TV version, a woman walks over a railway overpass and then down backstreet. She stops dead before an unexceptional house (the house) and looks in. If you've seen the other version first, that brief response to the malevolent presence is very effective.

In the second version, after nearly everyone has been consumed by the ghost, the camera focuses on a utility pole with a missing persons notice tacked to it. You see the faces of missing girls and boys. Where did they go? Then the camera pans out to the street. It's empty. Paper is blowing in the wind. No cars. No people. Can we conceive that the anger of one young woman, stored in an empty house like a super battery, could eat the whole world? That is a real estate crisis.

If you like a good spooky story, check out Asian-Horror-Movies.com. Tell 'em I sent ya.

The Uninsured

We frequently hear that the number of Americans without health insurance is 46 million. When you hear a number like that being repeated frequently and by the President of the United States, that doesn't mean you can trust it. But seems to come from the Census bureau, which is generally a reliable source. Moreover, if the number were bogus, it would be challenged by the conservative think tanks, and they aren't doing that.

By contrast, you don't hear much more about that 45 million. Who are they and why are they uninsured? And for how long? Are these mostly people who never had or who lost and are never going to get back their health insurance?

According to the Census Bureau, about 10 million of the uninsured are not citizens, a category that includes legal and illegal immigrants. My guess is that it's largely the latter, since legal immigrants usually have sufficient resources and family backing to get into the job market. The point here is not that the illegal immigrants are undeserving, but that it's hard to provide benefits for persons who choose to remain below the radar. Unless, of course, you simply hand out benefits to all who ask, something that might be the Christian thing to do, but would amount to a form of de facto legalization.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, see Julia Seymour at Business and Media Institute, 45% of the uninsured will get health insurance back within four months. I believe I heard John Goodman, of the National Center for Policy Analysis (a free market think tank) say, on Fox, that within two years 90% of the [temporarily?] uninsured get health insurance back.

A lot of the uninsured could afford health insurance. According to Seymour,

More than 17 million of the uninsured make at least $50,000 per year (the median household income of $50,233) – 8.4 million make $50,000 to $74,999 per year and 9.1 million make $75,000 or higher.

See National Bureau of Economic Research.

Finally, at lot of those who can't afford health insurance are eligible for programs like Medicaid and SChip. About 25% of the uninsured simply fail to sign up for these programs.

How many Americans are without health insurance because they can't afford it? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 8.2 and 13.9 million people. I assume that means citizens.

None of this is to say that we don't have a problem. But the problem is largely a gap problem. Most people get their health insurance from their employers, and they sometimes lose it between jobs. People who could afford health insurance but don't buy it are also a problem, because they frequently can't afford being sick and the rest of us end up footing the bill. People who don't go to the least bit of trouble to get access to programs they're entitled to, that's another problem.

But breaking up the uninsured population this way makes the problem look more manageable, and suggests solutions that are within reach. I am not prepared to take side on solutions, but some form of tax credit, amounting to a voucher for the disadvantaged, might be very doable. You could take that with you while you are looking for your next job.

Of course you don't want the problem to look manageable if your goal is not to rescue the uninsured but to use them as an excuse to transform the system in the direction of Canada and Europe. Maybe that would be a good thing. I doubt it, but I was wrong once before, in 1993. I won't say what about. I will say that I don't think European style heath care is likely to happen. Insisting upon it, to the exclusion of more practical policies, will likely result in nothing getting done.

Healthy Skepticism on Health Care 3

Lots of liberal pundits are urging the President to seize the opportunity to reform the American health care system. What, exactly, is he doing? It looks to me like a full court press. But increasingly the Administration spokesmen are saying things like: "this process is in its early stages", or "this thing will take time." Let me translate: it ain't going well.

One problem is that almost all Americans (75-80%) like the heath care we are getting. We like our doctors, and we get to see them pretty quick, and we get treated promptly. We understand that, in the abstract, the system is inefficient and too expensive, and we think it's a good idea if that were fixed. But we want that to be done without the bill going way up or our current arrangements to be modified in ways not to our liking.

Barack Obama has been promising us, since he began running for the Oval Office, that the satisfied 75% of us would get to keep our current health care arrangements. From Jake Trapper, at ABCNews.com:

No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people," President Obama told the American Medical Association on June 15. "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

That sounds like a pretty firm promise. But all those periods turn out to be periodic.

ABC News asked how the president could make such a guarantee if the public run plan were cheaper, thus possibly enticing employers to enroll employees in that plan.

"When I say if you have your plan and you like it,…or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don't have to change plans, what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform," the President said.

Well, that is helpful! So: "you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period," means "you won't get to keep it, but someone besides the government will take it away." That's promise keeping Obama style.

Here's the problem: the President wants a "public option" to be part of any reform. That means that the government will offer health care plans as an alternative to any currently available plans. The public plans will be heavily subsidized, and employers will jump at the chance to dump their healthcare expenses on the government. Since most Americans get their heath care from their employers, that means we don't get to keep our doctors or health care plans, as the President promised. Meanwhile the Government will get a virtual monopoly on health insurance, at a very large public cost (if the Congressional Budget Office is to be trusted).

Of course, that is what the President is counting on. He wants what a lot of Congressional Democrats have long wanted: single payer, government run health care. Socialized medicine, to use the traditional terms. He just figures he has to con us into buying it.

Maybe the President can pull this off. I'm doubtful. The Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress have to wonder what will happen when tens of millions of Americans get cute little letters from their employers informing them that their health care plans are being discontinued. No bother: you'll get a cheaper plan from Uncle Obama. They also have to wonder what will happen when the tens of trillions of debt that our President is sign off on comes due for the American economy. I wouldn't bet on courage.

Chicago on the Potomac

Politics is about coalitions. Put together enough warlords, priests, ward healers and/or visionary activists, with enough men and horses, or crowds with pitchforks, or union muscle, or money walking around in sandals, or all of the above and you get to sit in the big chair and wear the big hat. Of course, the thread with which you knit together your tapestry can be woven out of a lot of different types of fabric. Sometimes it's common opinions; other times, common animosities. But the oldest and maybe the most durable fabric is the simple buddy bond. From the big man on down to the local party potluck, a vast network of status and favor acquires the strength of Medieval chain mail.

Which brings me to the case of one Gerald Walpin, inspector general for the federal agency that oversees AmeriCorps. Salena Zito has the best summary I have seen, at Real Clear Politics:

Walpin became the center of some media attention last week for suspending Barack Obama supporter Kevin Johnson, a former NBA star and now mayor of Sacramento, for irregularities in his use of federal money when he ran a charity.

Walpin was asked by the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service to investigate the charity, St. HOPE, which received an $850,000 AmeriCorps grant to tutor Sacramento students, to redevelop buildings and to develop local art and theater programs.

Walpin's investigation found that the money instead was used to sugar the salaries of the charity's staff, to get involved in a local school board election, and to make AmeriCorps volunteers attend to Johnson's personal needs, including washing his car.

Last May, Walpin's office recommended the suspension of Johnson and an assistant at St. HOPE from receiving federal money.

It's not clear that Mr. Johnson did anything illegal when he ran St. HOPE. It's pretty clear that he did a lot of stuff that was sleazy (or that had the appearance of impropriety, which is what you say when you don't want to say sleazy). John Kass has this at the Chicago Trib:

In an April deal with prosecutors in the Obama Justice Department, Johnson was not charged with a crime. But his St. HOPE Academy charity agreed to pay back half of the $850,000, including $72,000 from Johnson himself.

That looks like about $425,000 in impropriety, including at least $72,000 in personal sleaze. This is the sort of thing we inspector generals are for. But of course little sleaze has big sleaze to mind it, and that is what corrupt party bosses are for.

Ms. Zito tells us what happened next:

None of this was an issue until November, when Johnson was elected mayor of Sacramento. City-hired attorneys concluded this past spring that Sacramento could be forbidden from receiving federal stimulus funds because of Johnson's suspension.

Six weeks later, Walpin got a call from a White House lawyer. The order was clear: Resign within the hour, or you will be fired. Walpin went for the firing.

Unfortunately for the Obama administration, Congress had passed the Inspectors General Reform Act - which then-Senator Obama co-sponsored - requiring a president to give Congress 30 days notice, plus an actual reason, before firing an inspector general.

Obama Incorporated says it decided to remove Walpin because, in one meeting, he was confused and disoriented. Well, Walpin is 77 and old people are like that, aren't they? Of course "confused and disoriented," if adopted as a general standard, would send most of Washington packing. But despite what some of Obama's critics have said, that looks to me like a legitimate reasons for removing an officer. If it's true, that is.

The trouble is that Kevin Johnson was a friend and a political asset (I repeat myself) of President Obama. Having an independent and legitimate reason to remove a threat to an asset would be a happy accident for the President. I am suspicious of happy accidents.

Inspector Generals, unlike independent prosecutors, don't have unrestrained leave and unlimited resources to pursue their purpose. But Congress acted to give them special protection precisely to make sure they do their job conscientiously and effectively. There is no indication Walpin did anything else.

This is Chicago politics come to Washington D.C. It's easier in a local venue, where attention spans are limited and the press underfunded. But it clearly has the potential to make the United States of America more like the windy city. It sends a message that IG's should put the network above the law. This is not an entirely good thing.

When George Bush fired a few Federal Prosecutors because they weren't prosecuting to his liking, the press went nuts. So far, the Walpin case has been slowly percolating through the online press and blogosphere. It is worth paying attention. If you think that Obama brought a new spirit to Washington, you might or might not be correct. It might be better if you are wrong.

In Defense of President Obama

Our President is so accustomed to a servile press and context control that it must be a lot of fun finding himself in charge during the current Iranian discombobulation. No matter what he does, he will look like he has no idea what he is doing. Fred Barnes thinks the President is showing weakness by hiding behind a false choice.

Obama has sought neutrality between a discredited regime and democratic protesters. This actually helps the regime, since President Ahmadinejad and the mullahs don't need Obama's support. The protesters do. In effect, Obama has tilted in favor of the regime. The result is personal shame (for Obama) and policy shame (for the United States).

That, unfortunately, is correct. The Iranian protesters are carrying signs in English for a reason. They nourish hopes that the United States can bring some kind of clout to bear on their behalf. Not doing so surely means supporting the status quo.

Peter Spiegel and Neil King think that pressure is increasing on Obama to "act forcefully."

The uncompromising stance taken by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who on Friday ordered an end to protests, ratcheted up pressure on the Obama administration to take a forceful line against the Iranian regime.

But how forceful, exactly, is a "forceful line"? The Administration is indeed bending under such pressure. Ali Akbar Dareini and Brian Murphy note this:

In Washington, President Barack Obama urged Iranian authorities to halt "all violent and unjust actions against its own people." He said the United States "stands by all who seek to exercise" the universal rights to assembly and free speech.

Is that a "forceful line"? Jeffrey T. Kuhner has forceful words for the President:

President Obama has betrayed the pro-democracy protesters in Tehran. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are risking their lives to contest Iran's rigged elections. They understand that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election was a fraud and that his main challenger, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, is the victim of a stolen election.

The best the president can muster is that he is "concerned" by the election results and "troubled" by the "suppression" of peaceful dissent. His top priority is that America not be seen as "meddling" in Iran's internal affairs. Mr. Obama is convinced that nothing - including a possible democratic revolution - must derail his "grand bargain" to negotiate an agreement on Iran's nuclear program. This is realpolitik at its worst.

The trouble with all of that is that it is a mix of truth, conjecture, and wishful thinking. Yes, the election is a fraud. All elections under the current Iranian regime are fraudulent. That doesn't mean that Mousavi is the "victim of a stolen election," because the thing about fraudulent elections is that they don't tell you what would have happened in an honest one. It seems as like as not that Ahmadinejad would have won a fair election. By contrast, if Mousavi had won he would surely have been as much a regime stooge as Ahmadinejad. Only his official loss has turned him into a champion of democracy.

Obama should come out forcefully in favor of the protesters, not because Mousavi is the rightful President but because the Iranian regime is not a rightful regime. That he does not do so, as Barnes and others point out, is because he doesn't want to overly irritate the Ayatollahs, with whom he hopes to negotiate. But those negotiations are going to come to nothing anyway. Without a credible threat, Obama cannot win concessions. He has no credible threat. So he might as well issue a more forceful line.

But if he did that, he would just as vehemently criticized for playing into the hands of the Iranian regime. He has no good options. So no matter what he does, he will look like he doesn't know what he is doing.  That doesn't mean, of course, that he does know what he is doing.  No signs of that have appeared in English or any other language. 

Meanwhile, North Korea is apparently about to launch a missile toward Hawaii. Welcome to the Oval Office, Mr. President. Don't you miss Chicago?

Miranda's Question & the Two Cultures

My dear friend Miranda raised this question in an earlier comment:

I was watching the protest on CNN earlier today and I noticed that for some reason, the police in the footage had signs that read, "police". In English. Do you have any idea why? It reminded me of the "baby milk factory" incident.

I didn't know why. But this column in Slate has an answer:

Post-election protests continued in Tehran for the fifth day on Wednesday. In many photos, riot police wear uniforms with the English word police on them. Ambulances, too, bear the word ambulance in English. Why not use Persian words instead of their English equivalents?

Because everyone knows English. Like many capital cities, Tehran has its emergency personnel wear markings that are internationally recognizable. Street signs, too, are translated into English, and police cars are generally inscribed in both English and Persian. That makes the city more tourist-friendly without sacrificing clarity for locals. After all, the Persian word for police is the same: polise. (Persian, or Farsi, is an Indo-European language that uses an Arabic script, but people will often use Latin lettering, also known as Penglish or Fingilish, especially when typing or texting.) It's also the same word in French (police), German (polizei), Italian (polizia), Czech (policie), and many other languages. Iranian students are required to take English classes in high school. So using the English word for police actually maximizes the number of people who will understand it.

This is actually an important philosophical point. It occurred to me once while watching a film of Saddam Hussein reviewing his troops that he and they were dressed in Euro-American military garb. Just then I was reading one of Bernard Lewis's magnificent books on the Middle East. Lewis began by setting a scene: two Arab men sitting at a café, smoking, drinking coffee, and playing chess. He pointed out how much of Islamic culture has been imported (well, not so much the coffee or the chess) from the West.

The idea of multiculturalism has been big of late, but it has been surprisingly weak. The reason is that it is based on a mistake. It supposes that there are a vast number of cultures in the world, when in fact there are only two.

One is the centered culture, centered in our people, our city, here. From the point of view of this culture, everything else is "out there." Everyone else is a foreigner, a stranger, an enemy. The ancient Greek word for stranger was the same as that for enemy.

The other culture is the culture of travel. No matter where you go, there you are. In the plains, the mountains look tall; from the mountains, the plains look low. See Herodotus.

Centered culture was once the dominate culture on planet earth. With the growth of trade, it gradually eroded. Herodotus noticed that in different places, people did things different ways, and that each looked strange and even disgusting to the other. With that kind of insight, travel culture was born.

The word "police" on the Iranian police car is a sign that travel culture is now supreme. For historical reasons, travel culture is almost the same thing as Western Culture. This may be a mere historical accident. But it is an accident that happened.

Skepticism on Health Care Reform 2

In the great movie Patton there is a scene where the General arrives to take command of American forces in North Africa. He wakes up a GI and asks him what he is doing. "I am trying to take a nap Sir," the soldier replies. "You get back down there," Patton says, "you're the only one in this Goddamn army who knows what he's trying to do."

So far, in the current rush to reform the American health care system, I haven't noticed anyone as clear headed as that solider. Consider this, from Jeffrey Young at The Hill:

Congressional Democrats and the White House are scrambling to regain their footing after a series of setbacks has stalled political momentum to reform the nation's healthcare system.

A cost estimate hanging a $1 trillion price tag on an incomplete bill, salvos from powerful interest groups and great uncertainty among key Democrats on what will actually be in the legislation that moves through Congress have emboldened Republican critics.

Okay. So this bill is going to cost another trillion. Is that figured into the one or two trillion a year deficits that the Administration is planning on running? I am guessing not. And how does this square with the Administrations current argument that the purpose of health care reform is to rein in costs? Can we really cut costs by spending another trillion dollars that we don't have?

But the more disturbing thing is that "great uncertainty among key Democrats on what will actually be in the legislation." If the Democrats don't know what is going to be in this bill, how can they work on the legislation? Does Obama know what he is trying to do? But it gets better.

The cost of reform and how to pay for it dominated the discussion Tuesday as Democrats were forced to respond to an unfavorable Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of one incomplete part of an incomplete bill.

The CBO looked at one portion of a draft bill written by the Senate HELP Committee and found, among other things, that it would cost more than $1 trillion while providing a net decrease in the number of uninsured people of 16 million.

The CBO also threw cold water on a promise by a coalition of healthcare industry groups to reduce healthcare spending by $2 trillion over 10 years. Obama announced their promise to much fanfare, but the CBO found that while a few of the cost-cutting measures would save money, others would cost money. In sum, they would not have a big impact on federal spending, the CBO concluded.

Now let me get this straight. One "incomplete part of an incomplete bill" is going to cost us a trillion dollars. That's $1,000,000,000,000. For that much dough we are going to insure another 16 million people. That's not even half of the 40 million uninsured folks. Meanwhile, the "savings" of two trillion dollars (that would cover this year's deficit) aren't really savings at all. Some of the proposed measures would cost more money. I suppose I should be comforted that the savings part is "revenue neutral" rather than revenue depleting.

Are we trying to extend more benefits to more people, or are we trying to control health care costs? The President would surely say we need to do both. But is there any indication that anyone knows how to do that? If there is anyone in this Goddamn army who knows what he is trying to do, no one has woke him up yet.

The Lucretia of Badong County

File under Republic: Ancient Rome & Modern China. Here is how the story went the first time around, from Titus Livy:

58. When a few days had gone by, Sextus Tarquinius, without letting Collatinus know, took a single attendant and went to Collatia. Being kindly welcomed, for no one suspected his purpose, he was brought after dinner to a guest-chamber. Burning with passion, he waited until it seemed to him that all about him was secure and everybody fast asleep; then, drawing his sword, he came to the sleeping Lucretia. Holding the woman down with his left hand on her breast, he said, "Be still, Lucretia! I am Sextus Tarquinius. My sword is in my hand. Utter a sound, and you die!"

   In fear the woman started out of her sleep. No help was in sight, but only imminent death. Then Tarquinius began to declare his love, to plead, to mingle threats witll prayers, to bring every resource to bear upon her woman's heart. When he found her obdurate and not to be moved even by fear of death, he went farther and threatened her with disgrace, saying that when she was dead he would kill his slave and lay him naked by her side, that she might be said to have been put to death in adultery with a man of base condition. At this dreadful prospect her resolute modesty was overcome, as if with force, by his victorious lust; and Tarquinius departed, exulting in his conquest of a woman's honour.

In case you don't know the rest of the story, Sextus Tarquinius was the son of the last Roman king, back when Rome had kings. After her rape, Lucretia called her husband and his noble allies to her house. She informed them of the crime and, to make certain that no one could doubt her virtue, plunged a knife into her breast. She was simultaneously killing herself and giving birth to the Roman Republic.

59. Brutus, while the others were absorbed in grief; drew out the knife from Lucretia's wound, and holding it up, dripping with gore, exclaimed, "By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you, gods, to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, with fire, aye with whatsoever violence I may; and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome!"

That, gentle readers, is what I call a story. Here is another, from the New York Times:

BEIJING — On the night of May 10, [Deng Yujiao] said, she was in the room washing clothes, when a local official, Huang Weide, came in and demanded that she take a bath with him. She refused, and after a struggle fled to a bathroom.

But Mr. Huang and two companions — including a second official, Deng Guida, who was not related to Ms. Deng — tracked her to the bathroom, then pushed her onto a couch. As they attacked, Ms. Deng said, she took a fruit knife from her purse and stabbed wildly. Mr. Deng fell, mortally wounded.

Ms. Deng was arrested, investigated for involuntary manslaughter and, after the police reportedly found pills in her purse, variously described as sleeping pills and antidepressants, sent her to a mental ward.

But when a blogger, Wu Gan, publicized her case, a cascade of posts crowned her a national hero for resisting official abuse of power and demanded a fair trial.

Those who blog with contempt for bloggers, put that in your cue and download it.

There was a time when the story of the 21-year-old waitress who fatally stabbed a Communist Party official as he tried to force himself on her would have never left the rural byways of Hubei Province where it took place.

Instead, her arrest last month on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter erupted into an online furor that turned her into a national hero and reverberated all the way to China's capital, where censors ordered incendiary comments banned. Local Hubei officials even restricted television coverage and tried to block travel to the small town where the assault occurred.

On Tuesday, a Hubei court granted the woman, Deng Yujiao, an unexpectedly swift victory, ruling that she had acted in self-defense and freeing her without criminal penalties.

Laying aside a few dramatic details, and the hindsight of that indispensable historian, this is the same damn story. Apparatchik Deng Guida tried to have his way with Ms. Deng and she opened him up like the can of crap he was. Better outcome, says I.

Better yet (though I wouldn't get too excited yet) the sons of Brutus in China seem all to be online now. The outrageous abuses of communist party officials are frequently exposed by internet campaigns which the government tries but is increasingly unable to control.

Most such cases, says Mr. Xiao, the Berkeley professor, spawn tens or hundreds of thousands of mentions on Internet blogs and other forums.

But Ms. Deng's case eclipsed them all, racking up four million posts and counting, he said. Her story resonates with millions of Chinese who not only are fed up with low-level corruption but also prize chastity in young women, causes that transcend politics.

There are those who say that republican government is a mere western conceit, one which we would be unwise to encourage in other peoples. This is the speech of worm tongues. Livy's story of the rape of Lucretia, and the story of one Deng Yujiao, are not ambiguous. There is no mistaking their meaning. Republican government means putting the blade to tyrants. It's both or neither. Take your pick. Meanwhile, God bless Ms. Deng.

Iran

Ahmadinejad does fascism. Literally.

As the streets of Tehran begin to look like a Paris suburb on your average Saturday night (lots of screaming, youths throwing bricks at police, burning cars, etc.), the real question is not the one being asked by the world press. Here is how the WaPo phrases it:

NO ONE outside the inner precincts of Iran's power structure knows who won that country's presidential election Friday. It's possible that a majority voted to reelect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as he claims. It's also possible, as much of his opposition fervently believes, that the election was stolen. What we can say for certain is that the election was neither free nor fair.

I can't disagree with any of that. Iran is not a democracy. It has a popularly elected legislature and President, but neither of these enjoys any real power. The security forces are controlled by the clerics. Moreover, the Ayatollahs get to decide who gets to run for President. I think it entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that more Iranians voted for the clown prince Ahmadinejad than for his rival Mir Hossein Mousavi. As the WaPo points out, under the rules of this game it is impossible to tell.

But here is what I want to know: how can a controlled election result in riots? If Mousavi represented a real opposition party, organized independently of the regime, this would be easy enough to game. You need only ask how strong the popular support for the opposition really is. Then you weigh that against the resources the regime has for crushing opposition. Hint: the party that controls the army usually wins.

But since Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are both establishment figures (or else they wouldn't be on the ballot), don't the riots mean that the regime is coming unglued? Two hand-picked candidates succeed not in consolidating control but in dividing the Persian street.

Michael J. Totten has the best thing I have seen on this. His post is a model of what great internet journalism can be: passages from serious political journalism followed by lots of informative quotes and punctuated by video clips. Totten quotes Andrew Sullivan, who offers a paragraph translated from Farsi:

Grand Ayatollah Sanei in Iran has declared Ahmadinejad's presidency illegitimate and cooperating with his government against Islam. There are strong rumors that his house and office are surrounded by the police and his website is filtered. He had previously issued a fatwa, against rigging of the elections in any form or shape, calling it a mortal sin.

If that's genuine, it's every Ayatollah for himself. I am not optimistic that this will result in real democracy. I suspect the black robes will get their act together and lay down the law. But it is very interesting that the regime that is the greatest threat to Middle East stability is itself, just now, unstable.

Wouldn't it be charming if the power of the Ayatollahs did fail and give way to genuine democracy just at the moment that another democracy is emerging next door?

Jeremiah Wright: The Gift that Keeps On Giving

A gift to Obama's critics, that is. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, mentor to one Barack Obama if I remember correctly, is famous for declaring, flamboyantly, that the U.S. Government invented the AIDS virus to kill people of color (oh, and our government also sells drugs to Black folks for the same purpose). He also thinks, if I remember correctly, that the U.S. Government is responsible for the war against Japan.

When Wright was in the crosshairs, during the recent Presidential campaign, Bill Moyers staged a hagiography of Wright, casting the colorful pastor as a new Martin Luther King.

Well, Wright thrust himself back into the public eye recently, and I think that his recent comment has some relevance to his sainthood. From the Daily Press.com:

In an exclusive interview at the 95th annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference, Wright told the Daily Press that he has not spoken to his former church member since Obama became president, and he implied that the White House won't allow Obama to talk to him.

"Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me," Wright said. "I told my baby daughter that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office. ...

Wright also said Obama should have sent a U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Racism held recently in Geneva, Switzerland, but that the president did not for fear of offending Jews and Israel. He specifically cited the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential pro-Israel lobbying group.

Take just a moment to let "them Jews" sink in.

Exactly what Jews does he mean? He immediately corrected himself:

Wright now says that he misspoke, and that he meant to say the word Zionists instead of Jews. That's a term used to describe those who strongly support the nation of Israel.

Of course "Zionists" is what anti-Semites say when they don't want to admit they are anti-Semites. Reverend Wright just did what he is known for: saying what he really thinks. He thinks there is a conspiracy of Jews infecting the Obama Administration. This is the age old slander against the Jews. They are the infection that has taken hold of our banks and our governments.

Jeremiah Wright is a twenty-four karat, full-tilt Jew-hater. He is a man with darkness in his soul. And, he tells us, he trying to pass that darkness on to his baby daughter. There is no defense, no excuse for this. It is just as bad as any other kind of racism. It is beyond the powers of any Bill Moyers to absolve.