Sunday, January 29, 2006

My Advice To The Whitehouse

posted by Will
Don't listen to Sen. Chuck Hagel. Keep it secret. It'll work out great. Seriously.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

An Instructive Thought Experiment

posted by Will
Imagine, if you will, James E. Hansen's opposite. A NASA scientist, who, during a Democratic president's second term, tries to make an argument that carbon emissions are no big deal and play no role in climate change (if you can imagine a scientist saying such a thing). Now, imagine that this all-too-fictional Democratic administration silences him, telling him to be loyal. What would the Republican opposition say then about intellectual freedom, career-Fed independence from political pressure, etc., etc.?

If the situation were reversed, Republicans would be calling for everyone involved to be fired.

Responsibility, Government, and Health Care

posted by Will
The Biggest-Big-(Dumb)-Government "Conservative" in history (Defense spending! Deficit "management"!) will be proposing his health care "fix" in a few days at his first post-Katrina State of the Union. It amounts to making sure that upper-middle-class families (who already have more health coverage than, say, your average Wal-Mart employee) have enough money in tax-exempt accounts to guarantee they can afford their own healthcare costs, thereby putting "market pressure" on costs as a whole. That's fine, and the plan, if it actually works, might increase the number of people insured in this country ... some. But many people cannot afford such accounts, and there seems to be very little suggested for how to help those at the bottom. Let alone the problem that the plan is likely to be written by the same geniuses who forged Bush's prescription drug program. (That's right! Lobbyists! Can you hear the pitter-patter of thousands of little Abramoffs? Scuttling, scuttling...) Also, the program may amount to a big safety net for the Frist family business. HMO protections, exemptions, loopholes, etc., that will guarantee that those skyrocketing twice-the-rate-of-inflation healthcare costs continue to funnel into private coffers. Should the government be giving out more corporate welfare, especially in this sector? And then there's the question of whether it will actually do anything to improve the cost problem.

The Bush plan is far from a panacea, and it will likely amount to nothing but an meanspirited, wrong-headed, anti-government, anti-poor ideological experiment that will make Hillary's debacle of old at least look kind-hearted.

While only thematically related to health care, one thing that Hurricane Katrina taught us, hopefully, is that when government fails, terrible things can happen to the most vulnerable. The answer, faced with such possibilities, is not to get rid of government; the answer is to fix government, to make it address problems rather than whine and complain about the existence of problems. We must demand that we all, through government, do our best to provide for those amongst us who will be left with nothing, left powerless and undefended, while the rest of us are feeling very proud for "fending for ourselves" and keeping our own costs down, thanks to a different kind of government assistance.

Government will be involved in any potential heath care system, either because of what it does, what it fails to do, or what it neglects to do. We all have to decide what we're comfortable with, as citizens who have duties to our fellow citizens. President Bush has already made up his mind ... If that is the correct phrase.

Does anyone in this administration even remember how to spell "compassion"?

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Spying, Spying, Everywhere...

posted by Will
President Bush says "Now, my concern has always been that, in an attempt to try to pass a law on something that's already legal, we'll show the enemy what we're doing." First of all, the only opinion that what he's doing is legal comes from ... him! We don't know fully what his administration is doing except what they claim, and they are also claiming that only they may interpret whether it is legal (or constitutional). No checks, no balances.

3 points:

(1) The enemy has always assumed they are being spied on at all times. They change sat phones frequently, they use codes, they share email accounts so they can send messages back and forth without actually transmitting them, they probably use regular mail, or even FedEx. These are not people to whom it has simply not occurred that there might be someone listening at all times. They assume as much, and that is one of the ways their leaders, Bin Laden and Zawahiri for instance, have avoided capture. So, I don't see how writing a law about how and when domestic spying can be engaged in would clue them in on some secret they don't already know. Whatever we could possibly be doing to listen in, they are already assuming we're doing it.

(2) Bush has said, out loud, for the enemy to hear, that we are not listening in on calls entirely within the US. So, couldn't The Enemy simply do that? What if there's a guy in New York and another guy in Los Angeles? Are we incapable of doing anything to track them? The president said as much. That doesn't make me very confident. Why not write a law--and in it, Congress could make that legal, too? But with checks and balances.

(3) The claim continues to be that we only listen in on people with Al Qaida connections. How do we know about anyone without spying on them already? If we're only listening in on people we know are involved, it seems to me that's a pretty weak plan. Why not set standards, legal standards, for suspicion of terrorist involvement that make it possible to make a case that even domestic-to-domestic calls should be tapped? Have a little judicial review of those few cases. Checks and balances.

K Street

posted by Will
Senator Santorum is "distancing" himself from the K Street project. The job opening memos won't be circulated at high-level meetings with lobbyists anymore. If making an official corruption scheme slightly less official is supposed to fix the problem, hopefully the Republican Congress has another thing coming. I hope they can't get away with it by just saying, "well, we don't do the K Street project at high-level meetings anymore." That is roughly equivalent to saying they won't take travel reimbursements from lobbyists anymore--they'll just get an envelope full of cash under the table every now and then to cover their costs. The Republican culture of corruption is a cancer on the government and a cancer on the future prosperity of the country.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

War Powers? You Need A Declaration, Chief...

posted by Will
Instead of engaging in a politically charged debate, one that accomplishes nothing but putting issues of national security in even more partisan terms and that is going to end in a stream of cheap stunts on both sides (though this is a fairly good picture), why doesn't the administration now simply ask for the power to do what they're doing? You can't claim now that asking for permission would "aid the enemy". As ridiculous as that claim always was, the story is already out there. Therefore, they should now just go to Congress and create a legal version of the powers they claim they need. Get some oversight. Checks and balances, etc. Stop saying "trust us" and start operating from within the bounds of the Constitution. That would be refreshing. Also, if the claim continues to be based on the concept of unique "war powers", an actual declaration of war would be nice. Nostalgic, too.

More On The Odious Administration

posted by Will
WaPo's Harold Myerson on Iraq, Katrina, and Medicare. It's just despicable. There was actually a memo that might as well have been titled "Hurricane Katrina Determined To Attack Inside The United States". Now they won't release all their documents. Executive privilege can be so convenient when you have pesky, embarrassing things you don't want to talk about anymore--like a major city being destroyed. I can only imagine what conservatives would be saying about a (purely hypothetical) Democratic president who had bungled all this so badly. There would be a coup--or at least an attempt at one. Chances are they wouldn't plan it very well. I guess it's the thought that counts.

Then there was the Kansas speech, especially the part the Daily Show focused on, showing the president unable to recall whether the Republicans had cut 12.7 billion dollars from higher ed loans. Amazing. He sure can talk and talk about coyotes, though.

Meanwhile, there are much more desperate situations all around the world that make even our domestic catastrophes pale in comparison. What good is American power if we cannot at least attempt some solution to all major crises? How about a new dawn of liberty--"freedom spreading like a sunrise"--in Sudan?

As for health care: a billion here, a billion there... At least there's an attempt to address one part of the problem. It's a start. Good luck. Now get busy with the rest of federal policy.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Scalia, Alito, "Objectivity" and "Activism"

posted by Will
William Saletan has the best summing up of what's wrong with Justice Scalia, and with the broader Constitutional debate that forms the battleground for the culture war. Principles, rules, and even theories of interpretation go straight out the window, even for "originalists", when their personally held political beliefs come into play. "Activist judges" are, essentially, all judges. We just use it to describe those judges we disagree with. No one can rightfully grab the mantle of judicial objectivity.

That, my friends, is why no matter what Judge Alito had to say about stare decisis, he will be, as most judges are, representative of his particular ideology on the court. It is time to be honest about that. All judges are subjective. Occasionally, they are open minded enough to be convinced of something, or change their minds. But they are initially and naturally opinionated and biased toward their own beliefs and the ideology that put them in power. Alito's beliefs happen to be, as I think everyone would agree (including the ultra-right, who are busy high-fiving each other in a yacht club/church basement), somewhere in between Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh--except that Alito has a better command of vocabulary and (hopefully) less chemical imbalance.

The only test that should matter, then, when the Senator deliberates on a confirmation, is the following:

Would the people that you represent want this person to be on the court for life where he can subject every decision he makes to an initial ideological smell test? Is that ideology something the broad majority of people I represent support, or at least something that doesn't directly contradict a great many of my values?

Would a Justice Alito, like Justices Scalia and Thomas (and probably Chief Justice Roberts), take value judgments and moral questions that the American people and the rest of the court recognize as complicated and simply declare them settled in the way they prefer to see them settled, using that as a starting point for "strict interpretation" of "original intent"?

Patrick Leahy, quite rightly, has decided Alito would not pass any such test. Bravo. It's nice to dream a little dream that it will matter. Arlen Specter, if he's honest with himself and honest about the role of prejudice in Supreme Court proceedings, would conclude the same thing. If only...

So, let's be honest and drop our infatuation with Latin for a second: stare decisis means bupkis as soon as a Justice has decided he has a Mission to Accomplish. Alito sees himself as another Conservative Crusader, and very soon he'll be part of Bush's Gang of Four who would work to overturn any precedent if they thought it might bring back the halcyon days of the 1950's. Nothing else matters.

(Come to think of it, a President Eisenhower right about now would be refreshing.)

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

E.O. 12333

posted by Will
New Year's brings no relief and no fresh start for the incumbents.

Learn this number: 12333. A 1981 Reagan Executive Order is all the authority the NSA needs to do whatever it wants--but they can't discuss details. This will and should be a bigger scandal than many think. It was a matter of congressional complaint in 2001, long before the rest of us heard about it, which renders the President's claims in 2004 about proceeding with surveillance only with warrants even more ridiculous. Again, someone needs to ask President Bush this question: why are you so concerned about the PATRIOT act being renewed if you believe you have the inherent authority to single-handedly order the implementation of its provisions without Congress?

One scandal will also feed off of another. One sure thing: Abramoff guarantees that '06 will be interesting.