W v. Mister Hope

From "55Ella2007k"


This is a very simple argument, which doesn't make it the least bit wrong.

we don't do body counts

Wednesday, 7 October 2009: 8th anniversary of the first airstrikes in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Friday, 9 October 2009: Obama awarded Nobel peace prize.

''I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance, involving civilians. Let me scratch that. There's been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That's not on the table.''

Barach Obama, 2008


"Please don't bomb Iran, and try not to kill so many Afghans, OK?"

Nobel peace prize committee, 2009

(I think they told Martin Luther King and that broad under house arrest in Burma the same thing when they got their Nobel peace prizes.)

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

9.12. Now what?

First, the nice young lady above is Lori Harfenist of The Resident. I imagine a lot of people, whether they lived in NYC in 2001 or not, share her view that fretting about conspiracies is redundant, while allowing that a generally corrupt government is likely. I wonder if she actually does look at things that way, given how she characterizes suspicion of the government, and I wonder what she and Bob from Pacifica would make of each other's views.

As you may have noticed, I closed the comments on Rob's 9.10 post, "Riding old 9/11". For now, comments still aren't moderated. I'd prefer to avoid that, and I don't want to have to reprimand anybody, regular visitors especially. I regard all the persons who participated in the previous comments as regular visitors, and feel all are due respect, and need to offer it in kind.

Over at A Tiny Revolution, Bernard Chazelle posted "Everything's a Lie" discussing some the same issues Rob and the commenters touched upon below, in Rob's post.

Here's Chazelle:

But here's the funny thing. People don't seem to mind [i.e.the lying] very much. This is pure Hegelian alienation: the acceptance that some creatures, by virtue of their function status, are normatively alien from us. They may do things (lie, kill, steal) that no one else would be allowed even to consider. Normative is the key word here, because they can't just do anything. They are strict norms of conduct they must abide by. So a senator who steals a stamp may go to jail, but if the same senator pushes for a billion-dollar bill to favor a baby-killing (military) industry that will make him mega-rich once he leaves office, that's fine. He can go on and give speeches about taking on the baby killers. If a president lies about his intern's extracurriculars, he gets impeached. But if he lies about a bogus threat and bombs the crap out of the Sudan, that's OK. So it's not true that anything goes. The modalities of lying have to be accepted. It's what you might call a normative alienation. See the division of labor: they get to lie and the little guy doesn't, but the little guy gets to approve the norms and they don't. This applies not just in politics but across all modes of power.

Here's part of what I wrote over at ATR:

I don't know if Walter Mondale was uniformly honest, I imagine he wasn't. But he was honest about the possibility of raising taxes, and got walloped in '84. Bill Clinton promised everybody that he would be a warm, huggable kind of conservative-- essentially-- and was wildly successful.

I'm lying myself, because that's not what Clinton said in '92, but a more accurate description of how he refashioned himself in '95.
[...]
If regular readers of lefty blogs all sit on their hands and stay out of the 2010 midterms, I'm guessing this will reduce turn-out by 1 or 2 percent at the most. If those same blog readers go and vote for whoever among 3rd party candidates make the ballot-- even if it's libertarians-- then presumably 3rd party candidates might poll at 1.5 to 2.0 percent nationally, instead of 0.5 to 1.0 per cent.

But some liberals would blanch at the thought of doing this, in part out of fear that the TV talking heads would spin it as support for social security privatization. (But most who think of doing it but decide against it, I'd wager, would only stop themselves because of the thought that it might mean the republican might get in or stay in.)

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Regarding Hillary's 2008 plan, and individual mandates

I posted this at Dead Horse, in response to Buzzcook, a commenter who encouraged me to read a blog post(referenced below):

OK Buzzcook, I read the lengthy(4,000+ wd) post you referred to in the comments,
"An analysis of Clinton's [2008]Health Plan Proposal"

Robert Laszewski talks about how H. Clinton's 2008 healthcare plan(hereafter I'll just call it HRC-08)says that there will be a public option allowing regular people to buy a plan that's the equivalent of the "Federal Employee Health Benefit Program", something a lot of pols talk about.

Yes, the healthcare plan for federal employees is pretty good, but SO WHAT? If you've ever actually looked at buying health insurance on your own, you'd see that the major companies don't offer a one-size-fits-all plan for everybody, but rather a pretty wide array of plans, with the economy plans offering negligible coverage with high deductibles, and the top of the line plans offering at least as much coverage at the "FEHBP" plan, sometimes more. If you're curious, go to www.ehealthinsurance.com and plug in your personal data and see what's available to you. Blue Cross and Humana, for example, offer an especially wide range of plans, but the prime ones are well out of my reach.

(incidentally, the reason I recommend you look at ehealthinsurance is because they don't ask you, as of this writing, for an email or home phone number, which many of the other online comparison services do, presumably so agents in your area can subsequently pester you. For the record I have not purchased anything from them, just window-shopped.)

Laszewski also discusses the HRC-08 approach to individual mandates,

"Limit Premium Payments to a Percentage of Income: The refundable tax credit will be designed to prevent premiums from exceeding a percentage of family income, while maintaining consumer price consciousness in choosing health plans."

OK, the devil in her plan finally shows itself. Tax credits are all well and good, but what if they're not enough to purchase decent coverage? Then you have to purchase sub-standard coverage(I guess that's where "consumer price consciousness in choosing health plans" comes in.)

I'm a male in my 40s, and from what I've looked at, it would cost me at least 250/month to purchase meaningful coverage, as opposed to plans with 3,000/yr or 5,000/yr deductibles* that don't cover dr's visits until the deductible is satisfied, which are often more "reasonable."

Except they're not. The canard that individual mandate proponents often trot out is that individual mandates will force healthy people to buy coverage when they're well, and quit gaming the system by waiting until they're sick, implicitly suggesting that is what the bulk of the nation's 45 million plus uninsured are doing.

I don't believe that for a moment. If I had a spare 250 dollars a month I would buy a policy, but I'm really poor. I'll wager that most people who don't have health insurance just can't afford it, and some have looked at the bargain-basement policies and figured out they're essentially worthless. And of course some had insurance and were bumped by their insurance companies, and can't find anybody who'll cover them, except at exorbitant rates.

Let's say you are a cashier or a short-order cook, earning 8.50 or 9 bucks an hour. (Let's also assume you have no dependents and no pre-existing conditions.)

Sure, maybe you could, with some difficulty, afford to enroll in a plan that only costs 80 or 90 bucks a month, assuming you can stay healthy and don't actually need that 80 or 90 bucks that month, should you actually need to see a doctor and buy some medication, something the economy plans generally wont help you with, or will only help you a spitting-in-your-poor-face, token amount.

Let's see. You're paying 80 bucks a month, 960 dollars a year, the doctor charges 80 bucks for a visit, and the 80 bucks a month plan reduces your out-of-pocket expense to 45 bucks? Wow! But you don't have 125 bucks to spare on healthcare for the month, not if you want food, and some electricity? You're a bum.

And since you're making, say,18,000 dollars/yr, that 960 bucks a year is still too little to deduct off your income tax, because even if it's more than 7.5% of your taxable income, you still don't make enough to be able to itemize.

My point, buzzcook, is that plans with individual mandates are eminently gameable-- they're designed so the politicians can take credit for dramatically reducing the number of uninsured folks while forcing a large segment of society to buy junk policies, by defunding vouchers so they only pay for worthless coverage, or by making eligibilty for tax credits that phases out below a certain point, in the same way that making something tax-deductible means only people who make enough money to itemize may benefit.

Do I know HRC created a plan with this aspect designed to be a deliberate gimmick? No, but I don't have to. It's not about her, any more than it's about Obama now that he's president. It isn't even about the democrats. It's a systemic vulnerability that's built into individual mandates and that's why it's foul public policy, period. I'm sure you've heard of unfunded mandates in other contexts.

They won't call it cutting the plan off at its knees;

they'll call it "reaching a bipartisan solution" or

"allowing the private sector breathing room to innovate"

and when a New York Times story about some Duke or University of Michigan study questioning the effectiveness of individual mandates comes out 3 or 4 years later, it will studiously avoid connecting the dots, to prove that the democrats deliberately created legislation to "allow" themselves to be played by the other guys, as they both wink at each other from across the aisle.

That's why I think my criticism of HRC-08(and BHO-09) is legitimate.

Later this week I'll post about my thought on how to fix healthcare. Maybe my ideas will be just as flawed, just differently flawed. We'll see.

(*I've even seen some companies offer 7,500/yr deductible plans, although they're still rare.)

Af-Pak, pt 2

photo: Getty images/BBC

Jeremy Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal, "Ex-ISI Chief Says Purpose of New Afghan Intelligence Agency RAMA Is ‘to destabilize Pakistan’"Aug. 12th

Carlotta Gall, New York Times, "Peace Talks with Taliban top issue in Afghan Vote", Aug 17th,
Anne Applebaum,Slate, "It Doesn't Matter Who Wins the Afghan Election" Aug. 18th,
Stephen Walt, Foreign Policy, 'The "safe haven" myth', Aug 18th,
Peter Bergen, Foreign Policy, "How realistic is Walt's Realism?", Aug 19th
Christopher Allbritton, Insurgency Watch, "Why Pakistan's Delaying its Waziristan Push" August 19, 2009
Juan Cole, Salon, "As Afghans Vote, American Support for Afghan War Collapses" Aug 20th,
Helena Cobban, Just World News"Does Afghanistan's election matter? How, exactly?" Aug 21st.
Chris Floyd, "Af-Pak Masquerade", Aug 21st,
CNN:"Taliban cut off fingers of Afghan voters" Aug 22nd.
Christian Science Monitor, "More US troops to Afghanistan? Why Mullen won't answer", Aug 23rd

(and "Af-Pak pt 1" is here.)



Starting with the most recent item and moving backwards, Mark Sappenfield in the Christian Science Monitor writes:

America has never before had a plan – or the resources – to do what must be done. Mullen put it this way: "This is the first time we've really resourced a strategy on both the civilian and military side."
The reason, of course, is Iraq. Almost all the Pentagon's top minds and money went to Baghdad. This was particularly true in the surge, and that helped turn the tide of the war. In Afghanistan, that process truly just began this spring, when President Obama for the first time announced a clear strategy for American forces in Afghanistan.

To do what must be done. Sounds ominous to me, especially since it suggests that "what must be done" is so undeniable, has already been agreed upon, a fait accompli-- and it doesn't sound like the negotiating of peace that the New York Times' Carlotta Gall suggests is primary in the mind of Afghan voters. Politicians in the US don't always listen to what American voters want, but this is never referred to in our press as corruption or in any way an issue of the government's legitimacy, but American politicians and journalists seem very worried that this week's Afghan election be perceived as legit in the eyes of Afghan voters, as well as elsewhere, like across the border in Pakistan.

Was the election legitimate? Who knows? The Taliban actively discouraged people from participating, decrying the whole process as illegitimate. Sociologists study the often illogical factors that people weigh when making their decisions, such as when American liberals weigh a candidate's "electability" versus her stands on issues. I wonder if any voters in Afghanistan, viewing incumbent Karzai as a US puppet, considered their options, then, deciding that the election is a sham anyway, said maybe if they re-elect the candidate the US wants, the soldiers will go home?

Helena Cobban seems to think that as long as the winner is seen as acceptable to the Afghan public, proves "manageable", and the no. 2 candidate doesn't put up too much of a fuss, the US and NATO are unlikely to care very much who wins. I imagine she's right. It also occurs to me that both the Taliban and the Pentagon benefit from low turnout. Since low turnout suggests the result was not legitimate-- good for the Taliban, as well as proving that US forces are needed to stay (for years on end?) because the security situation clearly isn't good-- good for Pentagon appropriations. But that's just silly, right?

Jeremy Hammond talked to Hamid Gul(above), a retired Pakistani general and former head of their intelligence. Gul says that the US, India and Israel are all involved in assisting the TPP(the fundamentalist group fighting the Pakistani government) because one of the purposes of the Af-Pak war is to destabilze Pakistan. Naturally I hope Gul is wrong, but he lays out a compelling case. Hammond also notes that the US government has accused Gul of aiding the Taliban in the past, which he denies.

Both Gul and Chris Floyd discuss Unocal's refusal to ink a deal with Taliban for a pipeline in 2001, and Gul reminds the reader of Taliban leader Mullah Omar's offer to send Bin Laden to a third country, not the US, where he would receive a trial according to Sharia law, which George W. Bush refused.

People in the west, or at least here, often forget this detail.

The problem with accommodating such a face-saving request would have been that Bush Jnr would essentially have conceded that the US way of doing things isn't always the best way.Critics on his right flank, and maybe even on his left, would have become livid that the ragheads were telling us how to do things. All "they" understand is force, American force.

In "Obama's magnificent opportunity", although he doesn't say so directly, Rob Payne suggests that Obama has a real chance to halt America's slide into the post-imperial ditch we've been digging for the past 30 or 40 or so years. Of course Rob seems to be making his point in a roundabout, playful way-- being the wiseacre that he is-- and recognizing the narrowness of Obama's careerist vision for what it is, knows this is just the kind of dream you have when you had too much spicy cheese before you went to bed, or something like that .

Some two years ago Arthur Silber observed:

...in terms of fundamentals, there is no difference at all between Republicans and Democrats in the realm of foreign policy. Both parties, our governing elites, and most bloggers all hold the same unchallengeable axiom: that the United States is and should be the unequaled, supreme power in the world, with the capability of directing events across the globe and intervening wherever and whenever we deem it necessary for our "national interests." As [Christopher] Layne notes, all our prominent national voices are united in their conviction that no other state "entertain the 'hope of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.'" Military power on a scale never before seen in world history is the most certain means of ensuring that goal.[...]

I will be blunt: I submit that, considering these facts and the staggering reach of our global military power, any relatively sane person ought to be aghast that our governing class, together with almost every pundit and blogger, will look at these same facts and say only: "More, please!" But this is the inevitable result for a people who are entirely comfortable with the fact that their nation dominates the world, and of their belief that it does so by right.
[...]
Occasionally, I have referred to the phenomenon of pathology as foreign policy. When one contemplates these facts, it is very hard to conclude that anything other than pathology is involved. Our strategy is indefensible, irrational and immensely destructive, and yet almost no one questions it. But this particular pathology is so inextricably woven into our myths about the United States and about ourselves as Americans, that we believe this is simply "the way things are," and the way things ought to be.

Arthur is rarely accused of having a light touch-- but he doesn't mince words to avoid uncomfortable conclusions.

Although I'm not convinced that Silber is entirely correct about the attitudes of ordinary Americans, ultimately we do give our consent, in terms of our passivity if nothing else. But what else can regular people do? Students who riot will have their loans revoked, workers who protest will be fired. But we're free. The nice man and nice woman on the television tell us this, and they wouldn't be on TV if they didn't know. Supposedly we're also bringing freedom to Afghanistan, even if it appears we're not doing a very good job, otherwise we'd be done freeing them after 7 years and counting. You'd think.

Ann Applebaum, who also writes for the Washington Post, writes in Slate:

The Taliban is sometimes described as an ideological force, sometimes as a loose ethnic coalition, sometimes as a band of mercenaries, men who fight because they don't have anything else to do. But perhaps with this election, we can now start to use a narrower definition: The Taliban are the people who want to blow up polling stations.The threat is also useful in another sense: It reminds us of what we are fighting for—by which I don't mean "democracy" as such. After all, we are not trying to create some kind of Jeffersonian idyll in the rugged heart of Central Asia, but merely an Afghan government that is recognized as legitimate by the majority of Afghans—a government that can therefore prevent the country from turning back into a haven for terrorist training camps. If there were someone acceptable to all factions, we might presumably consider helping the Afghans restore the monarchy. For that matter, if the Afghans were willing to accept an appointed American puppet, we might, I'm guessing, consider that, too, at this point. But there isn't, and they won't.

I'm guessing, if you met Anne Applebaum, she would seem like a nice person. She probably is a nice person, in the interpersonal sphere, just as nasty commenters in cyberspace are probably mostly nice in person, just like the guy from the Christian Science Monitor is probably a nice person, as , I imagine, even General McMullen is, and so forth. Anne Applebaum's Wikipedia bio mentions that she won the Pulitzer prize a few years ago, that that she went to Yale and the LSE, and that she's an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her Slate byline just says that she also writes for the Post. Maybe they left the other stuff out because of reactive modesty, going on the theory that Anne probably wouldn't want them to brag about her accomplishments, making her seem all stuffy and pompous. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't very cricket of them to leave out her association with the neocon AEI. I'm guessing they felt that was OK because she isn't writing an editorial, but reporting about the election. Or maybe because she's not a real AEI fellow, just an adjunct.

More likely the former, at least in the eyes of the Slate/WaPo folks, which illustrates Arthur Silber's point about how

'we believe this is simply "the way things are," and the way things ought to be.'

Otherwise, how can you make any sense whatsoever of what Anne Applebaum says, that

if the Afghans were willing to accept an appointed American puppet, we might, I'm guessing, consider that, too, at this point. But there isn't, and they won't.

Does she really believe that? She went to Yale and won the Pulitzer, so she's supposed to be smart, right?

Afghan villager: Excuse me, mister American soldier. This one you chose for us, we don't like him.

American General: Yeah, what was I thinking. Sorry about that. OK, I'll kill him.

Afghan villager: No, no, please! No more killing.

American General: What do you mean, no more killing? Are you Taliban, trying to mess with my head? Do I need to send a pilotless drone to buzz your village?

Afghan villager: No, no! He's OK! He's great!

An airstrike here, an airstrike there. Oops, a wedding. Oops, farmers, not terrorists. You can't just keep killing people in a country you've invaded, for years on end, and keep telling them, "don't look at my actions. My intentions! Jeez, what's wrong with you? My own people back home believe I mean nothing but the best for you, so why don't you?"

Anne: "After all, we are not trying to create some kind of Jeffersonian idyll in the rugged heart of Central Asia..."

No, of course not. She's not saying they're a bunch of savages or anything, just that they need a...more rudimentary government, one that

"merely... is recognized as legitimate by the majority of Afghans—a government that can therefore prevent the country from turning back into a haven for terrorist training camps."

I'm guessing however, that Anne, though she may be a wonderful person in many respects, doesn't really care if the Afghans see their government as legitimate or not, just that they don't cause that government terribly much grief and that said government is also well-behaved and kowtows to the US and NATO, possibly handing over the occasional troublemaker to the west for extraordinary rendition to Jordan or Croatia or God knows where.

Maybe I'm a horrible person for thinking that's what Anne is really saying. But if you stop and think about it, apart from rendition overseas, isn't that what American elites expect from Americans as well?

Meanwhile the establishment press marches in lock-step, parroting the safe-havens bit. For my part I fail to see what so-called terrorist training camps do. If the 9-11 attacks are the reason for all this subsequent bloodshed, how are terrorist training camps, whether in Afghanistan or anywhere else, relevant? Didn't all the fateful connecting flights the 9-11 attackers took originate here? Maybe we need to get some special ops to attack various US airports and shut them down, so they never board another terrorist? Ridiculous? Sure, but how is it more ridiculous than what we're doing in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are terrorists because

1.They used to run the country(after being elected)

2.We invaded and deposed them, and

3. They're fighting to reclaim their country?

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the Taliban will create "some kind of Jeffersonian idyll" either, and I am aware of their less than salutary track record with respect to women's rights. But apparently the voters in Afghanistan want peace negotiations, and facile protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, it doesn't look like the US does. I'm guessing, in fact, that when the US does finally leave, it will turn out that the longer we stayed, the more likely that the government and the society left in the detritus of our occupation will be a harsh and fundamentalist one, and the sooner we leave and allow the presently standing government the breathing space and political leeway to negotiate for peace, the more likely a stable and heterogeneous society, "Jeffersonian" or otherwise, will take root. And it will largely be in spite of, and not because we were there.

Chris Floyd quoted the NYT's Carlotta Gall. I also think this is apt:

Abdul Wahid Baghrani, an important tribal leader from Helmand Province who went over to the government in 2005 under its reconciliation program, negotiated the surrender of the Taliban in 2001 with Mr. Karzai. Now he lives in a house in western Kabul but is largely ignored by the government, despite the enormous influence he could exercise.

Three months ago his eldest son, Zia ul-Haq, 32, was killed, along with his wife and driver, when British helicopters swooped in on their car as they were traveling in Helmand. Two Western officials confirmed the shooting but said it was a mistake. The forces were trying to apprehend a high-level Taliban target, they said.

"My son was not an armed Talib, he was a religious Talib," he said. The word Talib means religious student. "From any legal standpoint it is not permitted to fire on a civilian car.

"This is not just about my son," he said. "Every day we are losing hundreds of people, and I care about them as much as I care for my son."

Despite the deaths, he has remained in Kabul and still advocates peace negotiations. He said it was wrong to consider the Taliban leadership, or the leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, as irreconcilable. "It is not the opinion of people who know him and work with him," he said. "Of course it is possible to make peace with the Taliban — they are Afghans," he said. "The reason they are fighting is because they are not getting the opportunity to make peace."

We pay a high price for our delusional, imperial self-image. Of course others pay for it too.



see also,

Ramzy Baroud, "Drones and Democracy in Afghanistan", Aug 24th,

BBC[video link]:"Afghans talk about their daily struggles"

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Janis Karpinski

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is from Tuesday or Wednesday night, I think. (I don't have access to most cable channels, so I haven't actually seen Olberman's show in quite some time. You may recall that Janis Karpinski was the general in command at Abu Gharib, and consequently one of the fall guys for the scandal.

the politics of lyme disease

Sara Robinson of Orcinus has an exceptional essay on Lyme disease and the politics of restricting treatment, apropos of a recent shooting at a Baptist church in Illinois. It's a lengthy article, well worth reading in full. Here's an excerpt:

The shooter, Terry Sedlacek, had struggled for years with long-term, chronic Lyme disease, contracted after being bitten by a tick some years ago. Though this description of his symptoms seems extreme even among Lyme patients, his struggle to get treatment is an infuriatingly common one. The media debate over the role this disease may have played in the shooting has tapped into one of the most furious and tragic medical debates in modern medicine. On one hand: there are doctors on TV claiming that it's entirely possible that Lyme can create the kind of psychiatric problems that would lead to this kind of catastrophe. On the other are doctors saying that it's impossible -- Lyme is a relatively benign bacterial infection that's easily treated with a few weeks of antibiotics.

Infectious disease specialists-- represented by the Infectious Disease Society of American (ISDA) -- have for decades held to the firm position that Lyme is a spirochete that can be killed with a 28-day course of doxycycline. If you're still sick when the month is over, whatever you have isn't Lyme (and, in practice, is generally assumed to be psychosomatic). And this is true, as far as it goes: if you're lucky enough to catch the disease in the first few months after you're bit -- or you've got one of the many strains that's amenable to this treatment -- a short course of doxy usually does do the trick.


However, once some strains of Lyme get dispersed and embedded in the body's tissues, the standard treatment won't touch them. Worse: the standard Lyme tests won't, either, so the results will likely come back negative. The shady politics of how the approved Lyme tests were developed would take a whole separate post to explain; but suffice to say that they're only 70% accurate on their best day, which would make them patently unacceptable as a diagnostic tool were it any other disease. Far more accurate and sensitive tests are available, but insurance companies won't cover the $400 fee.

That's because the IDSA panel doesn't approve of these tests (even though the "controversial" proteins it tests for -- the only ones common to all Lyme strains -- are the same proteins some of these same doctors once tried to build a Lyme vaccine on). It also doesn't accept Lyme's shapeshifting nature; the existence of a chronic form of resistant Lyme that requires long-term treatment; the importance of seeking out and treating co-infections; or the neurological and cognitive issues it can cause. All of these facts are well-documented by the peer-reviewed science; but IDSA's Lyme panel has actually purged new members who brought these studies up for consideration.

All this is part of the background for the dueling doctor interviews we're seeing on TV this week.

The Great Divide
Why would ostensibly caring doctors be so resistant to accepting new and better data? As always, follow the money. The IDSA's minimalist view of Lyme is greatly favored by insurance companies, who really don't want to be on the hook for expensive testing or more than a month of treatment. On a broader note: they're absolutely terrified (with good reason) that Lyme could turn out to be another huge budget-busting epidemic like AIDS, and want to do everything they can to make sure they're not stuck with the bills for it. To that end, they've made sure that the ISDA's Lyme experts have been richly rewarded with grants, consulting fees, and so on for aggressively defending the narrowest possible case definition and the most limited treatment standards. For their part, IDSA's Lyme group has held up their end of the deal so reliably that last May, they became the first medical standards board in the history of American medicine to be successfully sued (by the attorney general of Connecticut, no less) for corruption.

I don't normally make a habit of quoting so extensively, but I want to encourage you to go read her essay in its entirety, here.

Cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Jim Rogers, "helping your friends"

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Cécile Manorohanta

afp-Getty


BBC,"Madagascar defense minister quits":

Cécile Manorohanta said her conscience could not endure the bloodshed. She was replaced by the chief of military staff, Mamy Ranaivoniarivo. It comes amid a bitter power struggle between President Marc Ravalomanana and opposition leader Andry Rajoelina.

VOA News,"Madagascar Defense Minister Resigns After Bloodshed":

Opposition leader Andry Rajoelina has vowed to continue demonstrations that began last month. Rajoelina accuses President Marc Ravalomanana of being too authoritarian.

Over the weekend, police killed at least 28 demonstrators in Madagascar's capitol and Ms. Manorohanta resigned in protest, citing, besides her conscience, her role as a mother. I'll admit that before this weekend I didn't even know about the recent political unrest in Madagascar, let alone had I heard of Manorohanta.

But when I came across this news today, I couldn't help but think of Donald Rumsfeld, our last defense minister, er, secretary, to resign prematurely, and how different his reasons were: because he served "at the pleasure of the president", and the president was embarrassed by the outcome of the 2006 mid-terms. I also thought that I could never see anybody in the Bush II OR the Obama administration resigning over something like that. Condoleeza Rice? Hillary Clinton? Robert Gates?

Am I being unfair? I don't know. Although I think in many ways our government is probably just as corrupt as Marc Ravalomanana's seems to be, nobody's shooting Americans in the streets. And although it would be nice if Americans cared about their own government's many failings the way Madagascar's protestors do, obviously we shouldn't wish for a leader as (openly)thuggish as Ravalomanana.

But I also wonder: do people here make the connection, when we occasionally hear about stories like this one, why is it that Americans sometimes say that other countries need to be "taught" about democracy? I don't know what the level of formal education of the anti-government protesters who died this weekend might be, but I seriously doubt they wanted or needed any lessons from Americans about democracy.

one last snippet(it might be helpful to ignore writer Jonny Hogg's Thatcherist attitude, but I thought I'd include it anyway, for perspective):

BBC, "Deadly power struggle lays Madagascar low":

The damage to Madagascar's international reputation could be equally harmful. Under President Ravalomanana the country had been taking its first tentative steps into the global market after decades of socialist stagnation. Multinational corporations including Rio Tinto and Exxon Mobil have arrived, pouring millions of dollars into government coffers. The president himself has seen his own business interests - anything from dairy products to cooking oil - rise and rise.

However, in appealing to foreign investors the government alienated many Malagasy people. Food and fuel have become more expensive whilst the foreign funds have not improved the quality of life for most people. President Ravalomanana's reputation in the eyes of his critics has not been helped by his aggressive business approach and the fact that as his wealth continued to grow, the population was becoming poorer.

Equally harmful?

cross-posted at Dead Horse

History repeating itself

Helena Cobban: "China and Japan's stakes in the US financial crisis"
as well as,

"China's condition to bail out the US: Taiwan?"

Andrew Leonard in Salon, "Not so fast, Secretary Paulson!"

look past the florid ridiculousness of Leonard's opening paragraph("this kind of profound remaking of capitalism..." ), as well as some(OK, many) of his assumptions, to this worthy passage:

You don't often find a Democratic senator and a University of Chicago free-market true-believer economist on the same side, but Luigi Zingales' widely circulated "Why Paulson Is Wrong" essay provides strong support for the idea that the government should get a piece of the action, framed in terms of debt forgiveness in exchange for equity.

Zingales argues that a reduction in debt can benefit both equity holders and debt holders because "there are real costs from having too much debt and too little equity in the capital structure." But debt holders tend to resist government-ordered debt forgiveness for the very simple reason that a government bailout is a preferable solution, for them.

Daniel Gross in Slate, "The Political Cowardice and (Hypocrisy)of the Wall Street Bailout"

Congress and the president favor a $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but they're afraid to say how they'll pay for it...

Xymphora: "Then they came for the Lehman Brothers, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Lehman Brother"

(not his best piece, but the title is irresistible.)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the UN: "American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders"

invest like a pirate day

Dead Horse Pt 2: or, are you a domesticated goat?

From wikisource, "The Goatherd and the wild goats"

A Goatherd, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, said to him: "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves."

Given that I've decided to call the new blog "Dead Horse", I probably should be careful about mixing my animal metaphors. Nevertheless I come back, time and again, to this story whenever I listen to practically anything that comes out of Obama's mouth, he of the silver tongue that makes lefty swooners swoon. I'm not so impressed with Obama myself, and I'm inclined to think his reluctance to define his politics will ultimately hurt him, even if he has more charisma than Kerry or Gore. (Of course most warm-blooded organisms have more charisma than Kerry or Gore, but that's another matter.)

All the same, even if Obama doesn't do anything for me, I recognize that millions of people do respond to him. And yet, he seems doggedly determined to squander his opportunity to help remake American politics at a time when we, the otherwise very conservative public, are more ready for meaningful liberalism and activist government, and yes, change, than we have been in a very long time. The economy appears to be teetering, government corruption and scandal, mostly republican, has soured people on incumbents and the "establishment" and we are mired in (at least one) costly and highly questionable war.

But we have Nancy Pelosi, the supposedly far left-wing democratic speaker of the house, loudly telling everybody who'll listen about her table, the one that will not allow impeachment of the most blatantly crooked president since Richard Nixon(who was pardoned 34 years ago tomorrow, on September 8th, 1974), and Obama and his running mate Joe Biden eagerly praising their opponents on Fox News and assuring anybody who'll still listen that they needn't be concerned about criminal charges being leveled against George Bush, jr.

What's wrong with this picture? Where do you even start?

This is why I'm starting "Dead Horse", which is meant to be a conversation about

1.the dysfunctional democratic party, and whether or not it can (or should) be saved.

2. our post 9-11, post-constitutional republic, a screwed up simulacrum where things are rarely as they seem, at least as far as I can see-- because

2b. It's not just the democrats "suddenly" having become dysfunctional, but a process of unraveling which seems to have been going on for a long time.

Or maybe I'm wrong(not 2b. Sorry, I can't resist...) That's why I want, from the get-go, for DH to be a group blog, for which I'm sending several invitations, both to bloggers who I feel are in approximately the same "camp" as I am, as well as a couple of others who might feel somewhat sunnier about the prospects for our future. I want to try to create the conditions and a venue for a useful conversation, not just an echo chamber. More soon, and hopefully not just from me.


cross-posted at "Dead Horse"

A is for Arthur, B is for Bear

Only nobody bailed Arthur Andersen out.(weren't they ALSO "too big to fail?") Jim Rogers(above) says that if Bear Stearns had declared bankruptcy, some of the top level people would have had to give back their bonuses, which were apparently paid out fairly recently, by the way...)

Meanwhile we have polls on every little thing, but I haven't seen anything on whether people think the Bear Stearns bailout represents a corrupt government. Of course asking the question that way is probably verboten, so it should be something like "do you think the Bear Stearns bailout was fair?", so it would pass muster with a kindergarden teacher polling her charges. But not even that-- instead we get this:

"Americans confident in 2009 turnaround":

A national CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that 60% of respondents think economic conditions in the United States will be "good" next year, as opposed to the 75% who think the economic situation is "poor" now.

"Most people realize that the economy has cycles of ups and downs," said Wachovia economist Sam Bullard. "Fortunately, the last two recessions were some of the shortest on record, so in 2009 we should be pulling up out of this."

What does this mean? Does it mean that 60 percent of Americans(or 60 percent of CNN/Orc poll respondents, at any rate) are:

a.plucky optimists,

b.rugged individualists who don't need the government to help them out, or

c. just buttf**kingly stupid?

A note: I wrote this post some time back, so perhaps it is not so timely, but I just saved it meaning to flesh it out. But I have nothing else to post for a few days so I'm putting this up. Regard it, if you must, like day old bread, or revel in its timelessness, if you can detect any.

I'll miss this guy

George Carlin, May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008.

"There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions," he said. Yet, out of 400,000 words in the English language, there are seven: "That will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war...."

briefly(10June08)

BBC News: "Iraq's reconstruction probed" (video, 2:40)
here's one quote:

"The American public have little idea of the fraud and waste of their tax dollars. Seventy court cases are subject to a US gagging order, preventing discussion of the allegations against some of the biggest names in corporate America."

It's somewhat annoying to me that the BBC has disabled embedding of this video(posted on their channel at Youtube), but perhaps it's just as well if you haven't yet had a chance to see Rob Payne's excellent essay, "Road to Iran", directly below, as I don't want to distract you overmuch from it-- so go read it.

The April fool is you

ok, in a nod towards thoroughness, the above links are here:

"Clinton n' Obama shake their fingers at oil guys"

• Oil executives defend soaring profits
• CNNMoney: Congress lays into oil execs
• CNNMoney: Issue #1: America's Money
• iReport.com: What would you ask Big Oil?

Senators Clinton and Obama care(a lot), and they're angry, and they're not afraid who knows it. When HRC voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002, undoubtedly it had nothing to do with oil, any more than her subsequent unwillingness to defund the war or commit to ending the war in the next four years. Of course Obama has also demonstrated an unwillingness to defund the war or commit to getting out by 2012, but that's different-- he had the guts to oppose the war as a state legislator. Then, when he was running for the US Senate in 2004 and was invited to speak to the democratic convention that summer, he had a chance to reiterate his stance on the war before a national audience-- but he recognized that might embarrass the headliner, old for-it-before-he-was agin' it John Kerry, and decided not to. (I guess that's different too.)

But with the "off the books" financing of the Iraq debacle-- and the utter unwillingness of Obama and Hillary Clinton to publicly draw the connection between the war,the weakening dollar, and the ever-upward spiraling of dollar-denominated oil prices, I question whether the democrats represent a substantially more sober answer.(yeah, you care-- but who cares?)

I'm sure John McCain cares a lot too, but his nomination is nicely sewn up, so it's not so pressing for him to be so demonstrative this early.

I don't know when I first watched a tv report about congress calling executives in front of them to scold them and beat their chests in righteously populist fashion for the cameras. When I was 11? 12? I used to love watching the news when I was a kid, and although I don't remember for certain, I imagine I took these sorts of dog-and-pony shows at face value when I was a kid and I watched the CBS morning news with Hughes Rudd before going to school.

That was such a long time ago, and although I remember the news in the late 70s being less mediocre, journalistically speaking, than today's focus-grouped soft-edge presentations, I also wonder if that's just the natural consequence of a middle-aged man romanticizing something from his youth at the expense of the present. I DO remember that news about celebrities wasn't a big deal in those days, as well as Rudd's wizened, subtly sarcastic manner. CNN's Jack Cafferty is the closest thing on TV news to a similar sensibility, and he seems like something of an artifact, what with CNN having gone (fairly precipitously) downhill in the past eight to ten years, especially after Lynn Russell left(I often think that maybe she saw the writing on the wall and decided she didn't want to be part of the crappy new order.).


Was the news coverage better? In spite of today's 24 hour news channels, I'm inclined to think so. Does that mean that better news coverage makes for more sensible, skeptical citizens-- in other words, were people smarter back then? Well, they did foist Ronald Reagan on us in November of 1980, the start of our modern age of the unraveling social compact, but the Ayatollah had our hostages, and there was that botched rescue mission, etc. Besides, how were they to know Reaganism would have such far-reaching effects?

When I watch the news, especially when the reporter cherry picks one or two presumptively representative man in the street interviews, I wonder about whether or not people are dumber as a consequence of post-deregulation Potemkin village news. And of course, there's also the pressure of Reagan-style federal tax cuts, shifting spending to the states, which consequently spent less on education. I don't know how you'd objectively factor in the effect of the more extreme religious fundamentalists, who insist that science may not offend when kids come home with tales of degenerate relativism, etc.

(The fact that, in spite of how outrageously the domestic media has sucked up to Junior and protected him from our knowing more about the conduct of the war, the war and the president are still as unpopular as they are, suggests holding out some modest hope that our collective intellect still has some functioning grey matter.)

What I do know is, selective man in the street interviews and stories asking "what would you ask Big Oil" notwithstanding, certain questions wont get asked, on tv, or even in print(and in print online) . How about a story asking

"are the congressmen just covering for their own failures in trotting out the oil executives?" or
"When congress scolds big business on tv, does anything get done as a consequence?"

(The silence is part of the disinformation-- so when you have such thoughts, if you do, you are more likely to dismiss them, maybe out fear that you might be a crank, or seem like one to others.)

Or, "should we spend more on public transportation?"

Or, "do you think we should bring back the 55 mph speed limit to reduce oil consumption?"

Of course, the lawmakers could just do that without putting on a show. I'd favor a 100 kph(@61 mph) national speed limit, and maybe by getting people to learn the conversion they'd start using their noggins too.

Now, I don't believe the lawmakers mean to do any of those things-- they're boring and don't involve an immediate or certain political reward. So I'm inclined to think today's event on capitol hill may have been scheduled for April first by persons with a sense of humor, albeit humor that involves laughing at you and me.


see also, Christian Science Monitor: "With gas costly, drivers finally cut back:
A decline in miles driven is the first since 1980"

[922]

Sleep well, knowing Rummy's still rich

There are many things I want to discuss in the next few days, still including the events in Gaza and Kucinich's withdrawal from the race, as well as that of John Edwards. And, some additional thoughts on the SOTU and the recession which we can't call a recession yet, given how relentlessly sunny we are supposed to be. Of course if you're not feeling relentlessly sunny, take a pill or something.

1.Xymphora (2006):"it's a small world, anthrax edition"

• Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld owns a considerable number of shares in a corporation called Gilead Sciences;
• Gilead owns the intellectual property rights to Tamiflu;
• Tamiflu is a pharmaceutical touted by the Bush Administration as a remedy for anthrax (although in fact it is not indicated for anthrax);
• the anthrax attacks on the United States vastly increased the demand for Tamiflu, and thus increased the value of Gilead, and thus made Rumsfeld a lot of money;
• the anthrax for the attacks almost certainly came from an American military laboratory at Fort Detrick;
• one of the named suspects at the lab is Philip Zack, a man who left the lab in 1991 after being involved in a racist attack against a fellow scientist of Arab origin, and a man who was observed having unauthorized access to the area of the lab containing the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks, around the time that some of the anthrax went missing.
• Philip Zack, as neatly described here (found via here), went on to work for Gilead (identified from a scientific paper published in December 2000).

and 2.(2008) in which X takes note of this Doctors without borders bulletin:

Patent revoked on Tenofovir
US patent office’s move to revoke patents on key HIV/AIDS drug could mean increased access in developing world

In a move that could have major implications on access to a cornerstone HIV/AIDS medicine across the developing world, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on January 23, 2008 revoked four key patents held by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences on the drug tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF).

The public interest group Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), which challenged the patents in the US, submitted evidence that TDF was already a known substance at the time of Gilead’s application for the patents, and therefore a patent should not have been granted. The evidence used in the patent office’s ruling may have an impact on whether the drug will be granted patents in other countries, such as India and Brazil.

3. Rob Payne calls my attention to this item by Dennis Perrin, "pre-soaking your sane"(and says some unwarranted nice things about me.)

4.Speaking of copyrights, here's a story from London to Lubbock.

in passing: Suharto

Initially I wanted to make the crack about how "only the good die young" upon hearing of Suharto's passing, but it occurs to me that in the recent geopolitical context that would suggest an appreciation of Benazir Bhutto that I never had.

While I didn't cheer her untimely death in December by any means, I recognize she and her husband were also judged to be kick-back dealing crooks, if on a somewhat smaller (and substantially less bloody) scale than Suharto and his family.

some additional thoughts[1.28]: occasional guest varmint Rob Payne has some pointed commentary about the US role in the subjugation of East Timor over at Halcyon Days.

Just as the US media tends to skip lightly over that, for some reason Suharto's US ties are also glossed over in The Year of Living Dangerously. Well, at least in the film. Anti-intellectual boob that I am, I dunno about the source novel. Then again, as Billy Kwan says, "If it's in focus, it's pornography, if it's out of focus, it's art." Maybe this is a guiding principle of journalism in some circles.

Wexler and impeachment

from the stalwart Jonathan Schwarz:

"Rep. Robert Wexler has set up with Luis Gutierrez and Tammy Baldwin a web site calling for impeachment hearings for Cheney. The significance of this is that they're all on the Judiciary Committee, where the hearings would be held -- and Wexler is seen as "moderate" (he's not even in the progressive caucus) and is listened to by other Congressmembers in a way, say, Kucinich is not. This indicates the Democratic center of gravity is shifting on impeachment."

www.wexlerwantshearings.com

is it possible to remain hopeful while being exceptionally cynical about the likely end result? I don't know-- I try to be as positive as Jon Schwarz, and franky wonder from time to time how he manages it. So, I encourage you to click over and sign Wexler's petition, which I'm told has had over 60,000 signatures in the 1st 48 hours.