Senate passes ethics bill

Second time was the charm, as Republicans (rightly) withdrew their attempt to attach a line-item veto amendment to the package, which derailed an earlier attempt at passage. The unamended bill passed 96-2.

Democrat Robert Byrd, the main obstacle to a compromise, found himself isolated.

For nearly two days, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) -- who jealously guards the Senate's prerogatives on spending matters -- single-handedly blocked efforts to come to an accord on that line-item veto vote....

But Reid found a path around Byrd, offering Republicans a chance next week to add the spending control measure to a bill to raise the minimum wage if they can find the votes. That broke the logjam, and the Senate then began debating several amendments to the bill, with an eye toward completing work late last night.

A good compromise. The minimum wage bill has plenty of momentum, too, and attaching the veto to it could actually increase support by drawing in Republicans who otherwise would oppose the wage bill. That could end up giving the bill a Byrd-proof majority (and veto-proof, too, though that's not a real risk).

The ethics bill is pretty good, but there are still some problems. For instance:

Lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, also talked to lawmakers about excluding from the measure's travel ban trips to Israel sponsored by the group's nonprofit foundation affiliate. The legislation, as written, would allow those trips to continue.

So as long as a lobbying group has a nonprofit affiliate, they can still pay for legislator travel? That's stupid.

And the story notes a big loophole related to fundraising events, which aren't mentioned at all.

It's a good sign, though, that lobbyists worked so hard to derail the bill. It's not a solution, but it's a step forward.

corruption, politics, midtopia

Gonzales pooh-poohs habeus corpus

In yesterday's Senate hearing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tried to argue that there is no constitutional right to habeus corpus -- that is, the right to challenge the legality of your detention.

The link is ThinkProgress; sorry about that. But they've got video and a transcript.

GONZALES: I will go back and look at it. The fact that the Constitution — again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it’s never been the case, and I’m not a Supreme —

SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?

GONZALES: I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except by —

SPECTER: You may be treading on your interdiction and violating common sense, Mr. Attorney General.

Anyone agree with Gonzales? I mean, he's right about the wording -- it doesn't positively grant the right, it says the right cannot be taken away. But he seems to read a positively lunatic significance into that distinction.

I wonder what he makes of the First Amendment, which reads "Congress shall make no law.... abridging the freedom of speech." Nope, no positive grant of the right to free speech either.

No wonder this guy was able to justify torture.

habeus corpus, civil liberties, Gonzales, politics, midtopia

New, improved -- but still flawed -- military tribunals

The Pentagon has released a manual outlining new procedures for President Bush's terrorist-trying military commissions. The manual reflects the bill passed in September by the then-GOP-led Congress.

The good news is that it's better than what Bush had originally proposed. The bad news is that it still contains needlessly troubling provisions, such as allowing hearsay evidence and coerced confessions.

Unsurprisingly, Congressional Democrats say they'll revisit the military commissions law to try to fix the worst problems. And Arlen Specter says he'll support that. It remains to be seen whether such changes would survive a Bush veto, but they should be pursued nonetheless.

As I've written before, terrorists deserve to be treated harshly; but suspected terrorists deserve rights, including a fair trial. The new tribunal rules come 90 percent of the way toward achieving that; let's take care of that last 10 percent and start putting people on trial.

Update: A list of reactions from defense lawyers and human rights groups. Among the comments:

Martin S. Pinales, president, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers:

"Hearsay, double hearsay, and coerced confessions are all admissible, including statements extracted from witnesses by torture. Given the shaky constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act, the detainees' habeas corpus right to challenge their detention -- and the validity of any conviction -- is more important than ever."


Colonel Dwight H. Sullivan, U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, Chief Defense Counsel:

"The rules appear carefully crafted to ensure than an accused can be convicted -- and possibly executed -- based on nothing but a coerced confession."

Yeah, problems remain....

terrorism, civil liberties, politics, midtopia

Pre-emptive strike on Iran

... By Democrats, aimed at the president.

Democratic leaders in Congress lobbed a warning shot Friday at the White House not to launch an attack against Iran without first seeking approval from lawmakers.

"The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., told the National Press Club.

Reid's wording invokes the War Powers Act, a law that no president has ever accepted as valid -- even though they tend to obey it in order to avoid provoking a Constitutional confrontation that they might lose.

As a practical matter, Reid's words are as toothless as the upcoming resolution opposing the troop surge in Iraq, which is garnering increasing bipartisan support. Neither the Iraq resolution nor the Iran warning can effectively prevent Bush from doing whatever he wants in the short-term, in either place.

But they do serve a handful of useful purposes. They put Congress on record as opposing the president's actions; they serve notice that funding for such actions will be closely scrutinized and debated; and they raise the political cost to the president for pursuing such actions, because they essentially isolate Bush. In order to attack Iran, for instance, he would have to acknowledge that he was doing so entirely on his own initiative, without the backing of the people's representatives. In normal political calculations, that makes it less likely that such an attack will occur.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Will Bush simply ignore Congress? He can do that for a little while, but not forever. Will he call their presumed bluff? Risky, if they're not actually bluffing. Will he try to co-opt them? I can imagine him going to Congress in a classified briefing and saying "Iran is about to develop nuclear weapons. Here are the production sites; we need to bomb them." What will Congress do then?

The answer to that last question isn't that important from a constitutional viewpoint; the consultation is the important thing. I expect Bush to play political hardball in pursuit of what he thinks is right; but he should get Congress on board for his plans if he wants those plans to have any staying power after the dust settles.

Tangent: My second link leads with the White House calling Pelosi's attack on the "surge" plan "poison" and not in the spirit of bipartisanship. For my money, Congress is supposed to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with the executive branch; that's what "checks and balances" mean. I expect Pelosi to work cordially with Congressional Republicans; they are her colleagues. And I expect her to seek common ground and compromise with the president where possible and necessary. But the White House complaining that Congress has tired of being a doormat for the president misses the point. Congress is a private club, and the president is not a member; get used to it. Republican deference helped the pendulum of power swing way over to the executive side of the ledger in the last six years; a correction is not only to be expected, but desired.

Iraq, Iran, politics, midtopia

Ney gets 30 months

... in prison, plus two years probation and a tiny $6,000 fine. If he completes an alcohol treatment program, it'll cut a year off of his sentence.

A pretty mild punishment, especially the fine -- he could have been forced to pay up to $500,000 -- but still harsher than the 27 months or so that prosecutors recommended.

Hall of Shame has been updated.

politics, midtopia

That sinking feeling

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales went way out of his way to avoid saying anything useful about the administration's agreement with the FISA court on wiretapping.

He said he might not be able to provide Congress with details of the presidential order authorizing the new program. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said there might be "separation of powers" issues over such disclosure, as well as disclosing anything about individual court orders.

Gonzales also refused to say whether the new program involved individual warrants or blanket warrants that could conceivably cover dozens of people.

Got that? An executive branch agreement with the judicial branch might have to be kept from Congress because.... well, because.

This even though the court in question has no problem sharing the information.

In a letter released at the Senate hearing, FISA Court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, said she has no objection to giving lawmakers copies of orders and opinions relating to the secret panel's oversight of the spy program.

"However, the court's practice is to refer any requests for classified information to the Department of Justice. In this instance, the documents that are responsive to your request contain classified information and, therefore, I would ask you to discuss the matter with the attorney general or his representatives," Kollar-Kotelly wrote in the Jan. 17 letter.

If allowed, the Court will, of course, cooperate with the agreement," she wrote.

The administration is once again demanding that we just trust it, despite plenty of past experience demonstrating that such trust is misplaced. I understand keeping sensitive operational details out of public view; but Congress has to be in the loop for "oversight" to have any meaning whatsoever.

To quote Han Solo: "I've got a bad feeling about this."

terrorism, civil liberties, politics, midtopia

Manufacturing a scandal

A few days ago I slammed Democrats for hypocritically exempted American Samoa from the new minimum wage law. In passing, I noted that one of the beneficiaries of low wages on the island is Starkist, a subsidiary of Del Monte, which is based in Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district.

Partisans have now taken that basic data and run with it, providing a fascinating look at how a scandal can be ginned up out of, literally, nothing.

It started on Jan. 12, when somebody modified the Wikipedia entry on Del Monte to add a sentence claiming that Pelosi's husband, Paul, owns $17 million worth of Del Monte shares -- suggesting, of course, that personal financial interest drove the Samoan exception. The right-wing site Newsbusters picked it up that same day, and it started spreading through the right-wing blogosphere. It gained momentum on Jan. 15, with an unsourced allegation by Rush Limbaugh. Along with the buzz came the usual smug and knowing comments of "I wonder why the mainstream media is ignoring this?"

Perhaps because it isn't true. Setting aside the wisdom of relying entirely on an unsourced Wikipedia edit, Wikipedia erased the edit a few hours after it was posted on Jan. 12.

Then the story morphed to say Pelosi owned $17 million of Heinz stock, and since Heinz owns 75 percent of Del Monte, the Pelosis still have a substantial financial interest.

First, consider that Heinz has 332 million shares outstanding, at a current stock price of $46.56, for a total market cap of about $15.5 billion.

So if Paul Pelosi actually does own $17 million worth of Heinz stock, that means he owns approximately 0.1 percent of the outstanding shares.

Further, this accusation appears to represent a misunderstanding of who owns what. The Del Monte transaction was completed in 2002. But it was Heinz shareholders received shares of the new Del Monte based on their share of ownership in Heinz. Thus Heinz shareholders -- not Heinz itself -- owned 75 percent of Del Monte as of 2002, through separate, non-Heinz stock. Heinz the company has no ongoing interest in Del Monte.

So assuming Pelosi owned 0.1 percent of Heinz in 2002, he would have received a 0.1 percent share of the 75 percent of Del Monte owned by Heinz shareholders. Del Monte is much smaller than Heinz -- $3 billion in annual sales, market value of $2.2 billion. So Paul Pelosi's share of Del Monte would be worth about $1.6 million.

Then consider that Starkist represents just part of Del Monte's portfolio, generating annual sales of about $565 million (you'll have to get the 2005 Del Monte annual report and turn to page 54 to verify this). That's 18.8 percent of Del Monte. So Pelosi's direct interest in Starkist would be about $300,000.

But that all assumes Pelosi owns $17 million of stock somewhere. And he doesn't. If you check out the Pelosi's financial disclosure statement for 2005 (click on the link under Nancy's picture), you discover that not only do they not own any stock in Del Monte or Heinz, but they have only one asset worth anywhere near $17 million -- a vineyard valued at between $5 million and $25 million.

So to sum up: the right-wing blogosphere, up to and including the venerable Rush, fell for and helped spread a completely false slander about the Pelosis -- even though rudimentary logic and standards of evidence should have set off alarm bells, and a few basic fact checks could have shown the whole thing to be bunk.

To their credit, Newsbusters and a few other sites were quick to post updates that at least partially backed away from their initial claims. But Rush remains unrepentant, and the goofballs over at Free Republic took it on faith, as did Red State News and Right Wing News -- even three days after the fact.

I don't know who to slam most -- the sleazebag that made stuff up in the first place, or the willingly gullible partisans who jumped all over it.

Starkist, Pelosi, stupidity, politics, midtopia

To arm or not to arm

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has a solution for keeping U.S. troops out of Iraq: adequately equip Iraqi government forces.

"If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for the American troops will dramatically go down. That's on the condition that there are real strong efforts to support our military forces and equipping them and arming them," Maliki said.

He's right as far as he goes. The United States has been reluctant to provide the latest gear to the Iraqis, including heavy weapons and high-tech equipment. And that has definitely hampered the Iraqi ability and will to fight.

But there's a good reason for that reluctance: we don't trust the Iraqi government to maintain decent control of those weapons, and not simply let them slip into the hands of militias, death squads, Iran or the insurgency itself -- or simply become major tools for the Shiite side of an outright civil war.

It's a classic Catch-22: Iraq can't defend itself and stop the sectarian violence until we give them weapons, and we don't want to give them weapons until they demonstrate they can control the sectarian violence. And Maliki's words don't change that equation: is he asking for weapons in his role as Prime Minister, or in his role as a prominent Shiite with militia and Iranian ties?

Maliki is trying to demonstrate he's serious, most recently by arresting 400 members of the Mahdi Army, Muqtada al-Sadr's militia. But it remains to be seen whether that's a serious effort or mere windowdressing, the sacrifice of a few scapegoats.

While I understand the Iraqi government's dilemma, I see no reason to start shipping them heavy weaponry. Heavy weapons don't win counterinsurgency campaigns; boots on the ground do. Give them armored Humvees and decent APCs, plus plenty of good small arms; those are the kinds of things that are helpful and not particularly sensitive. But a large-scale weapons program should be viewed with skepticism, especially if it involves items like tanks and artillery that have limited application in a guerrilla war but can prove highly useful in ethnic cleansing.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Senate ethics bill goes down

Thanks to Republican hardball.

Senate Republicans scuttled broad legislation last night to curtail lobbyists' influence and tighten congressional ethics rules, refusing to let the bill pass without a vote on an unrelated measure that would give President Bush virtual line-item-veto power.

The line-item measure was offered as an amendment, and the Democrats couldn't muster enough votes to cut off debate and proceed to a vote on the ethics bill sans amendment.

The Post story seems to accept the Democratic line too strongly, because a line-item veto is arguably related to pork-barrel reform, and all that was required to move things forward was allowing an up-or-down vote on the amendment. But things are rarely that simple in Congress, Where a majority of senators support the veto but a large minority oppose it as well. Meaning that in a simple up-or-down vote the veto amendment would pass, but the full amended bill would then likely fail because not enough senators would agree to cut off debate and allow a vote.

The Republicans, however, refused to accept a promise by Harry Reid to bring the line-item veto to the floor later for a separate debate, because they know that the veto needs to be attached to some legislation with serious momentum if it's going to stand a chance. Complicating things further, any compromise is opposed by Democrat Robert Byrd, a known opponent of the line-item veto.

The Republicans (and Byrd) are in the wrong on this one. Let the ethics bill come to a vote, and schedule a later debate and vote on the line-item veto -- or attach it other must-pass legislation later. Such a veto is not a panacea, but it is a helpful tool in eliminating the most egregious forms of pork and waste. Clinton had it briefly until that version was declared unconstitutional (thanks in part to a lawsuit by several senators, including Byrd); there's no reason not to let a GOP president have it, too, and see if it passes constitutional muster this time.

ethics, politics, midtopia

Unpleasant math

What can $1.2 trillion buy?

Less than half of that would let us double cancer research funding, treat every American who has diabetes or heart disease and immunize every child on the planet against measles, whooping cough, tetanus, tuberculosis, polio and diptheria -- all for a decade.

$350 billion would provide a decade of universal pre-school.

$100 billion over a decade would be enough to fully implement the 9/11 Commissions recommendations and provide more aid to Afghanistan.

Or you could choose, as we have, to blow it all on Iraq. And that's a relatively conservative estimate.

The sheer scale of waste and forgone opportunities boggles the mind.

Iraq, budget, money, politics, midtopia

Ex-president Bush

With negotiations -- and protests -- underway over Bush's presidential library, and analysts trying to predict what his legacy will be, I've been musing about a not-so-far-off time. Specifically, what will Bush do once he waves goodbye for the last time and leaves office in 2008?

I figure it's pretty certain he won't be sent on any goodwill ambassador missions like his dad and Clinton have been. I mean, where could he go? Disaster relief? Not after Katrina. International diplomacy? I don't think so. Blue-ribbon commissions? I can envision plenty of snarky responses to that question, but not Bush sitting on one.

Humanitarian work? He just doesn't strike me as the "establish a Habitat for Humanity" type. Donate to charity? Sure. Run a charity? No. Though he could prove me wrong there, especially if he consciously attempts to gild his legacy.

The welcome mat isn't really going to be out at the RNC or the other usual partisan haunts. It's not just disagreement on specific issues. Many of them are mad at him for losing Congress -- and perhaps positioning them for even heavier losses in 2008. That kind of odor doesn't go away quickly. Then there's the whole thing about rampant incompetence. If he doesn't pull something out of his hat, he'll be a political pariah in his own party. Even the neocons will shun him, for setting their cause back 20 years or more.

Recent reports offer one clue: he wants his presidential library to have a conservative think tank associated with it. So maybe that's how he'll spend his time. Of course, that raises the snarky question of "will they actually be conservative, or will they use Bush's definition of the term?" And "Bush" and "think tank" don't really belong in the same sentence anyway. Expect his role to be more of frontman and funder rather than policy wonk.

With so many doors closed, and him not being a real elder statesmen type, I'm having a hard time envisioning him doing much more than going back to Texas and cocooning. Maybe doing some well-paid speeches to the faithful. Maybe organizing his papers. Maybe clearing a lot of brush down in Crawford. But mostly just kicking back and enjoying retirement.

I'm not trying to be mean here; for one thing, who cares if that's all he does? There's no requirement that ex-presidents be any more publicly involved than any other retiree. I think he'll turn out to be a bit like Gerald Ford -- although even Ford was more involved in (and credible on) public policy than I expect Bush to be.

Weigh in with your own opinions. Try to keep it thoughtful; the cheap shots are just too easy, and I think I used most of them already anyway.

retirement, Bush, politics, midtopia

Bush gives in on secret surveillance program -- we think

The fact that such a small step is such a big deal provides sad testimony to the unreasonableness of the Bush administration's previous position, but here it is:

The Justice Department announced today that the National Security Agency's controversial warrantless surveillance program has been placed under the authority of a secret surveillance court, marking an abrupt change in approach by the Bush administration after more than a year of heated debate.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said that orders issued on Jan. 10 by an unidentified judge puts the NSA program under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret panel that oversees most intelligence surveillance in the United States.

Wow. Excellent.

This is a small step because the court is practically a rubber-stamp for surveillance requests. But that's fine: one presumes the government would only bring solid requests to the court, and that the court would err on the side of approval while retaining the right to pull that approval if the request turns out to be spurious. The issue for me has never been "let's prevent the government from listening to bad guys"; it's been "let's ensure that the program is properly supervised, warrants are sought, and the administration can't simply listen to anybody it wants to for any reason."

There's still reason to be cautious, because much is not known:

Gonzales also said that the administration has been exploring ways to seek approval from the surveillance court for nearly two years, but that "it took considerable time and work to develop" an approach that "would have the speed and agility necessary to protect the nation from al-Qaeda."

That could mean a lot of things, including "the court rolled over for us." For instance:

In a background briefing with reporters, Justice officials declined to provide details about how the new program will work -- including whether the surveillance court has issued a blanket order covering all similar cases or whether it will issue individual orders on a case-by-case basis. Authorities also refused to say how many court orders are involved.

Oh, great.

At this point I have to place my faith in the FISA court, and trust they wouldn't have just abandoned their oversight role.

But even if I don't need to be informed of the details, Congress should be... and they haven't.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he welcomed the new approach but called on the administration to provide more details about the "contours" of the program.

Charles Schumer sums things up best, though with a lot more skepticism than I.

"This announcement can give little solace to the American people, who believe in the rule of law and ask for adequate judicial review," Schumer said in a statement. "And why it took five years to go to even this secret court is beyond comprehension."

Congress should demand answers. And if they are not forthcoming, I hope to see another newspaper report like the one that first exposed this program to the light.

Tangentially, Gonzales attempted to portray the decision as not driven by news coverage.

The attorney general sought to portray the administration’s change of posture as anything but grudging. “In the spring of 2005 -- well before the first press account disclosing the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- the administration began exploring options” for seeking such approval, he said.

Uh-huh. That's why they established the program in secret, staunchly defended it when they were caught, spent months heaping abuse on FISA and the FISA court and only abandoned that defense when Democrats took control of Congress. Sure. Pull the other one.

They tried the same "we've been intending to do this all along" tactic when discussing Bush's new/old strategy for Iraq. It wasn't persuasive then, either.

It's also possible that they were lying all along. The conservative Captain Ed, of all people, raises that point:

On one hand, having this process remain in our counterterrorism arsenal is great news. However, for those of us who supported the White House on this contentious point, the speed in which they reached accommodation with FISA will call into question that early support. By my count, we've had ten entire weeks since the midterms and they've managed to scale a mountain that they claimed was insurmountable for the previous five years....

They took everyone along for a big ride, making all sorts of legal arguments about the AUMF and Article II -- and now Gonzales has revealed that even they didn't really believe it.

If they were negotiating with FISA to place the program under their jurisdiction, then they must have agreed with their critics that insisted FISA was a covering authority for such action. And if they've spent the better part of two years reaching an accommodation with FISA, why not just tell people what they were doing when the program got exposed? And for toppers, why didn't they start negotiating with FISA in November 2001 when they started the program?

The Bush administration just torpedoed a large chunk of their credibility. This is in no way a victory for the White House, but a huge climbdown. All of that effort and argument went for absolutely nothing.

This is way Captain Ed is one of my favorite conservative bloggers. He can be partisan and speculative, but he also recognizes when things don't add up, even if the person doing the math is a conservative.
politics, midtopia

Obama aims for the White House

Whoop-de-doo.

He's a nice guy with a great long-term future, but I just can't get excited about him yet. He has to lay out some detailed policy positions and demonstrate why two years in the Senate (plus experience as a state lawmaker) makes him ready for the White House.

His exploratory website is here; a formal announcement of his candidacy is expected in mid-February.

Once Hillary Clinton's bid is announced -- expected in the next few days -- the heavy politicking will really begin.

Obama, Clinton, politics, midtopia

Where does adultry mean life in prison?

Michigan.

Basically, the attorney general, Mike Cox, successfully argued that an obscure Michigan law makes engaging in an adulterous relationship during the commission of a felony a Class I sexual assault, which is punishable by life in prison. He used it prosecute a man in a drugs-for-sex deal.

In November, a unanimous Court of Appeals decided that Cox was right.

The problem is that adultery itself is still a felony under Michigan law, even though nobody has been prosecuted for it since 1971.

To add delicious irony, Cox admitted to an adulterous affair in 2005.

Michigan, adultery, law, politics, midtopia

RNC rebelling against Bush?

Man, you know you're unpopular when your own national committee starts talking about exercising some independence.

Rebellion is brewing among conservatives on the Republican National Committee over President's Bush's attempt to "impose" Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida as "general chairman" of the party, who favors "amnesty" for illegal aliens.

Big deal; so some people on the committee don't like Martinez' immigration stance.

Except:

Unhappy committee members say that, in the past, Republican presidents and RNC leaders have successfully run roughshod over the rules, because the RNC officer presiding over votes at committee meetings have simply overruled points of order and other objections from the floor, with no accredited professional parliamentarians to exercise a check.

This time, the organizers of the rebellion say, their strategy will rely in part on having a parliamentarian present. And violations of Robert's Rules of Order and of the RNC's written rules -- adopted at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York -- could result in legal challenges.

Further:

Mr. Pullen pointed out that Mr. Martinez, who served as Mr. Bush's secretary of Housing and Urban Development before winning a Senate seat, is not an RNC member. RNC rebels say the rules are clear that the person who heads the committee must be a member of the committee. "Outsourcing our leadership at this critical time is not an option," Mr. Haugland said.

Yes, you have RNC members openly discussing suing the RNC and the president if they don't cross every "t" and dot every "i" along the way. I have no idea if this is unprecedented, but it's certainly unusual: I can't recall the last time either the RNC or DNC faced something like this.

Meanwhile, back in Texas:

The Central Committee of the Republican Party in the president's own state of Texas has passed a resolution strongly urging the Texas Republican Party chairman, Mrs. Benkiser, and the two other Texas RNC members to vote against Mr. Martinez.

Et tu, Brute?

BTW, I love that the Texas Republican Party has a Central Committee -- just like the Soviets did.

immigration, Martinez, RNC, politics, midtopia

Iran buying U.S. military surplus

Thanks to lax safeguards in the auction system.

The U.S. military has sold forbidden equipment at least a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries — including Iran and China — who exploited security flaws in the Defense Department’s surplus auctions. The sales include fighter jet parts and missile components.

In one case, federal investigators said, the contraband made it to Iran, a country President Bush branded part of an “axis of evil.”

In that instance, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, speaking on condition of anonymity, say those parts made it to Iran.

Got that? We kept selling parts to a guy who had already been convicted of exporting parts to Iran.

What's really great is that the U.S. is retiring it's F-14 fleet, and as a result putting thousands of F-14 spare parts on the market. Guess which country is the only one in the world to still operate F-14s? Yep: Iran.

One might wonder why we're trying to sell the parts when the only logical interested buyer is banned from having them.

There is a chance that some of this is just poor reporting, revolving around the meaning of "spare parts".

The military notes that an F-14 has 76,000 parts, most of which are basic things like rivets and bolts that aren't sensitive in any way. If those get sold, who cares?

Another 10,000 parts are highly sensitive and will be destroyed.

That leaves 23,000 parts that could be sensitive but still salable. It's that last category, I assume, that is generating much of the controversy.

But the problem isn't just with F-14s, and not just with Iran. You want a rocket launcher? Here's how to get one.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found it alarmingly easy to acquire sensitive surplus. Last year, its agents bought $1.1 million worth — including rocket launchers, body armor and surveillance antennas — by driving onto a base and posing as defense contractors.

“They helped us load our van,” Kutz said. Investigators used a fake identity to access a surplus Web site operated by a Pentagon contractor and bought still more, including a dozen microcircuits used on F-14 fighters.

The undercover buyers received phone calls from the Defense Department asking why they had no Social Security number or credit history, but they deflected the questions by presenting a phony utility bill and claiming to be an identity theft victim.

Fabulous.

bureaucracy, Iran, national security, politics, midtopia

Thanks for the liberation

You may recall that at the time of our invasion, administration officials estimated that Saddam Hussein had killed 300,000 people during his 24 years in power -- not counting combat-related deaths from the Iran-Iraq war or other military operations.

That works out to about 12,500 a year. Not a bad clip. But since we toppled him, we've demonstrated that he was a rank amateur.

Nearly 35,000 civilians were killed last year in Iraq, the United Nations said Tuesday, a sharp increase from the numbers reported previously by the Iraqi government.

Gianni Magazzeni, the chief of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said 34,452 civilians were killed and 36,685 were wounded last year.

The Iraqi government disputes the U.N. figures, claiming the true death toll was 12,357 -- a number that itself is still comfortably close to Saddam's efforts. But there are plenty of reasons to be doubtful of the Iraqi figure, prime among them that the Baghdad morgue alone reported 16,000 unidentified bodies last year, most of which were victims of violence. A Health Ministry official told the Washington Post that the true number of casualties was 23,000. All in all, the U.N. figure seems the most unbiased and reasonable.

We should be careful not to morally equate deliberate executions and massacres under Saddam with the casualties of a multifaceted civil war. And theoretically, the current death rates will hold for only a short period of time, as opposed to ongoing killings under Saddam.

But viewed from the perspective of Iraqis, they have little reason to celebrate our arrival. They're now being killed at two or three times the rate they were before, and the pace has been steadily accelerating, not slowing down.

politics, midtopia

Anti-immigration hysteria

The headline was breathless: "Hasta la Vista, Social Security!" In the editorial in Investors Business Daily, the writer recounts how Bush is about to sign an agreement with Mexico that will let illegal aliens earn Social Security benefits. Even worse, they'll be eligible after paying Social Security taxes for as little as 18 months -- when U.S. citizens need to pay in for 10 years to get benefits.

That got my B.S. meter tingling. The tingling got stronger when the editorial went on to cite doomsday statistics from a study by the Center for Immigration Studies -- a rabidly anti-immigration think tank.

I didn't care that much. Illegal aliens pay Social Security taxes already, even though they can't collect. That's never bothered me much; call it a tax for being here illegally. But letting people collect benefits they've paid for doesn't bother me much, either.

Still, I'm a blogger: I enjoy tracking down provable cases of political mendacity or stupidity. So I did some digging.

The source for the story is a retired veteran's group, the TREA Senior Citizen's League, which is very proud of the fact that they finally got a copy of the "totalization agreement" after three years of trying. Their press release is full of dire warnings of what could eventually happen if this agreement becomes law.

Lucky for me, they posted the text of the agreement (pdf) on their website.

So I read it, and.... they're just flat wrong.

The pact is a reciprocity agreement between Mexico and the United States, intended to keep Mexican and U.S. citizens from being penalized at retirement for time spent working abroad. It solely and specifically talks about *legal* workers -- those sent here for short durations by their employers.

The "18 months" provision appears to be a reference to Article 5, which says that when determining eligibility for retirement benefits, the United States must take into account time credited to the Mexican retirement system. And they don't get benefits after 18 months unless they have 8.5 years of additional credit from Mexico.

Nowhere does it entitle illegals to benefits. It's a mirror of agreements we have with 20 other countries.

Turns out the Cato Institute -- no friend of Social Security -- agrees with me:

This agreement has absolutely nothing to do with immigration, legal or illegal. It concerns Mexicans working legally in this country and Americans doing the same in Mexico, our second-largest trading partner. It would not change current law prohibiting payment of Social Security benefits to people living illegally in the United States. Even if illegal immigrants were someday given a path to citizenship, under the Social Security Protection Act of 2004, they would still be prohibited from receiving credit for Social Security taxes they paid while working illegally.

Immigration, and especially illegal immigration, is a legitimate issue. But breathless, baseless hype like this only points up how some anti-immigration hardliners are willing to play loose with the facts to advance their point.

immigration, Social Security, politics, midtopia

Pentagon proposes more troops

It's about time.

The Pentagon ... is proposing to Congress that the size of the Army be increased by 65,000, to 547,000 and that the Marine Corps, the smallest of the services, grow by 27,000, to 202,000, over the next five years. No cost estimate was provided, but officials said it would be at least several billion dollars.

Other sources say the cost will eventually be $15 billion a year.

The military doesn't really measure things by division anymore, but that's about four divisions worth of troops. The boost will occur over five years, and in any event it will take time to recruit, train and equip the extra forces, so this won't mean a quick boost in deployment capability. But it's good to see resources finally starting to align themselves with strategic goals.

What'll we do in the meantime? The Pentagon also said it was abolishing limits on the amount of time a reservist could serve on active duty. Translation: more reservists will be used to relieve the strain on active units until more active units are available.

The interplay of timetables here should prove interesting. It could take two years before the first of the extra forces make themselves felt. Barring some unexpected successes in Iraq, that means there's a real chance that our large-scale involvement in Iraq will be over by the time the troops necessary to sustain it are ready. The prospect for that is only increased by the interim plan: the extended deployment of reservists will increase both opposition to the war and the economic impact of taking workers out of the civilian economy and sending them overseas.

While the larger military is needed and welcome, the proposal is part and parcel of the administration's recent style: proposing plans that would have made a difference in Iraq had they been adopted two or three years ago, but which they opposed at the time and are likely to have marginal impact at this late date.

Meanwhile, another poll -- CNN, this time -- shows 66 percent opposition to sending more troops, which matches up well with the 70 percent cited in an earlier AP survey.

Given those numbers, if Bush's "surge" doesn't work, he's done. We'll be out of Iraq by the end of the year.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Just for fun

It's Friday, and I've been coming across a lot of really bizarre links lately. So here's another one: The Museum of Really Bad Album Covers.

Update: photo added.

humor, midtopia

Another Democratic fumble

For an example of why earmark reform is going to be messy, consider this: Senate Democrats were forced to delay a vote after nine Democrats joined with Republicans to back a reform bill that is stricter than the Democrat version.

The measure, an amendment to an ethics and lobbying bill, would have adopted a wider definition of "earmarks," specific projects inserted in bills, to include Corps of Engineer water projects, Pentagon weapon systems and items from other federal entities.

The language favored by Reid would require disclosure of only targeted funds directed to nonfederal entities such as city parks, state universities and private contractors.

Good as far as it goes; the Republican bill essentially mirrors language passed by House Democrats. But here are the two most interesting details:

DeMint insisted that the Senate definition would catch about 5 percent of earmarks, saying that in most instances lawmakers insert their pet projects not into the bill itself but into the explanatory report language that accompanies the bill and is not subject to a vote.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said that of 12,852 earmarks found in bills last year, 534 would be subject to Senate disclosure rules....

Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also said the DeMint provision was "unworkable" because it was so broad it could be applied to thousands of projects included in federal spending bills.

This illustrates a common Congressional trick: passing laudable bills, but writing key exceptions into the instructions for federal bureaucrats who actually come up with the regulations and formulas for turning the bill into workable law.

And if Durbin's right, it means lawmakers must first agree on a meaningful definition of "earmark."

But legislation that only catches 5 percent of such deals isn't worth the effort. Congress should come up with an effective rule or stop pretending it cares.

earmarks, ethics, politics, midtopia

Democrats ease on down the sleaze trail

In the opening week of the new Congressional session, Democrats have generally kept to their promises, including their stated committment to clean up the ethics and pork-barrel mentality in Congress.

But now comes an example of why they should be subjected to close scrutiny.

The new minimum-wage bill, which would raise the wage from $5.15 to $7.25, fulfills one of their "100 hour" pledges. But dig into the details, and you find the wage doesn't apply to every location under American jurisidiction. For instance, it will affect the Northern Marianas, home of notorious garment sweatshops. But it specifically exempts American Samoa.

What's so special about Samoa? It has a Democratic delegate to Congress, for one thing. Further, it's dominated by the tuna industry. And one of the biggest tuna canners, StarKist, is owned by Del Monte, which has its corporate headquarters in Pelosi's San Francisco district.

The direct Pelosi link is a bit hyped -- Del Monte is a huge and geographically diverse company, and none of the StarKist operations are in San Francisco -- but the exemption makes no sense. If a minimum wage is good for the Marianas and the U.S. proper, it's good for Samoa.

And the Republicans don't escape untainted here, either. They opposed the minimum wage measure, so it's a bit disingenuous to see them complaining that it doesn't cover every last inch of U.S. territory. And they did pretty much nothing about the Marianas sweatshops when they were in power; at least the Democrats are doing something.

The story notes that canneries in Southeast Asia pay 67 cents an hour instead of the average of $3.60 that Samoan canneries pay, raising the concern that applying the new minimum wage to Samoa would cause the canneries to leave en masse and make Samoa one big welfare client, because the canneries employ about half of the Samoan workforce.

But is making people work for $3.60 an hour really a solution? Doesn't that just perpetuate a bad situation -- and, given the low Asian wages, one that isn't going to get better? Isn't the real answer to diversify the Samoan economy so it no longer has to rely on such low-wage jobs, especially jobs concentrated in a single industry?

The minimum wage should apply to Samoa. And if that causes the canneries to leave, then a two-pronged response is called for: a look at how to draw investment to Samoa to replace them, and an examination of the goals and economic rationale behind the minimum wage.

Opponents have long said that the minimum wage hurts small businesses and low-wage businesses and the workers they employ, both by making those businesses less competitive and by giving them incentive to hire fewer workers. If the canneries leave Samoa, that would seem to prove the opponents right. Supporters would then need to show why Samoa is an exception, or why such localized effects are outweighed by the overall benefit of a higher wage.

Those benefits are usually described in terms of overall benefit: 900,000 workers making $7 an hour collectively make more money ($6.3 million) than 1 million workers making $5 an hour ($5 million). So even though some workers are laid off, as a group minimum-wage workers are better off. And while those 100,000 laid-off workers may end up on welfare, a higher minimum wage makes getting a job an attractive alternative to remaining on welfare, so overall one should see a decline in welfare rolls as well.

Finally, the ripple effect of a higher minimum wage means wages higher up the payscale will likely see a minor bump, too, spreading the benefit to more workers and helping increase real wage gains in an economy, like this one, that has seen wage increases lag far behind corporate profits.

The question comes down to whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and that depends on the size of the various effects: In my example above, if raising the wage to $7 results in a 30 percent layoff rate instead of 10 percent, the group benefit for low-wage workers disappears.

Sorry for the tangent. Bottom line: if the Democrats want to apply the minimum wage, it should apply to all U.S. territories. Anything else is unfair.

ethics, Samoa, minimum wage, politics, midtopia

Iraq plan DOA?

Probably not, but the ranks of Republican opponents is growing in a sort of negative bipartisanship. Several senators took on Condoleeza Rice on the topic today on Capitol Hill.

Some were longtime war opponents, like Chuck Hagel:

President Bush’s decision to deploy 21,500 additional troops to Iraq drew fierce opposition Thursday from congressional Democrats and some Republicans — among them Sen. Chuck Hagel, who called it "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."...

In a heated exchange with Hagel, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, Rice disputed his characterization of Bush’s buildup as an "escalation."

"Putting in 22,000 more troops is not an escalation?" Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and longtime critic of Bush’s Iraq policy, asked. "Would you call it a decrease?"

"I would call it, senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad," she said.

Hagel told Rice, "Madame secretary, Iraqis are killing Iraqis. We are in a civil war. This is sectarian violence out of control."

She disputed that Iraq was in the throes of a civil war. To that, Hagel said, "To sit there and say that, that’s just not true."

More interesting to me, though, is Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who withdrew his support while complaining that the Bush administration had lied to him and the American people. Or George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who did not come out and say he was withdrawing support, but said Bush had not made a convincing case for his plan.

Separately, an Associated Press poll found strong opposition to the president's plan, with 70 percent opposing sending more troops. Polls should be taken with a grain of salt. This one, for instance, largely reflects overwhelming (87 percent) opposition from Democrats and lukewarm (52 percent) support from Republicans. But that's still a solid majority opposed to the idea.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Same old, same old

A steady stream of leaks means there were few surprises in Bush's speech on Iraq, but let's go through it anyway.

First, two reference links: The speech, and the fact sheet.

Bush starts out by acknowledging the obvious: 2006 was a disaster. He says any mistakes are his, and that it's clear a change is needed. All good words, but it's disheartening that Bush was months behind the rest of the country in recognizing the downward spiral in Iraq.

He then asserts that "failure in Iraq would be a disaster." In the fact sheet, the phrasing is even starker: "The war on terror cannot be won if we fail in Iraq." Those are scare words, and simply not true. Iraq is hurting our cause, not helping it. But let's address Bush's specific arguments.

Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits and oil revenue from a "safe haven" in Iraq. Nope. Our presence in Iraq has itself greatly increased extremist recruiting and helped inflame an entire region; I doubt our leaving could boost it much more. Plus, Iraq would not become a "safe haven" for terrorists. The Shiite majority has no use for the Sunni fundamentalists in Al-Qaeda. Nor do the Kurds. Nor do most of the Sunni clans, who resent foreign interference as well as the attempts to provoke a sectarian war against the numerically superior Shiites. If we leave, the insurgency loses most of its momentum and al-Qaeda loses most of its support.

Iran would be emboldened to pursue nuclear weapons. Perhaps. But they're pretty darned emboldened now, and one reason is because we have our hands full in Iraq. Leaving Iraq would give us a lot more options for dealing with Iran.

That's it; that's what he says to support the "cannot be won if we fail in Iraq" claim.

Next he turns to solutions. First, secure Baghdad. He correctly notes that most of the sectarian violence occurs in the ethnically mixed areas in and around the capital. He also correctly notes that all previous attempts to secure Baghdad failed because we didn't have enough troops.

Again, totally unsurprising -- and totally disheartening that Bush has only now come to that conclusion, three years (and at least three "retake Baghdad" attempts) after invading.

He claims the new pacification plan will work. Here it is. Iraqi army and police units will spread out across Baghdad and do most of the heavy lifting. American troops -- five brigades worth -- will back them up. This, supposedly, will finally give us enough troops to clear and hold neighborhoods.

Except that these are the same Iraqi troops that didn't do much in previous efforts, and the same Iraqi police that are riven with sectarian divisions, as well as being underequipped and ill-trained to engage in urban combat. And again, "clear and hold" has been the policy for a long time. Bush is admitting that for months he has been pursuing a strategy that was doomed to fail because there weren't enough troops to make it work. If there weren't enough troops, why was he pursuing such a strategy?

On Sunday, George Will made the point that, Bush's blithe assertions aside, even with the additional troops we still won't have enough forces. He quotes Wayne White, a long-time State Department official, who calls Baghdad "a Shiite-Sunni Stalingrad."

Based on experience in the Balkans, an assumption among experts is that to maintain order in a context of sectarian strife requires one competent soldier or police officer for every 50 people. For the Baghdad metropolitan area (population: 6.5 million), that means 130,000 security personnel. There are 120,000 now, but 66,000 of them are Iraqi police, many — perhaps most — of whom are worse than incompetent.

Because their allegiances are to sectarian factions, they are not responsive to legitimate central authority. They are part of the problem. Therefore even a substantial surge of, say, 30,000 U.S. forces would leave Baghdad that many short, and could be a recipe for protracting failure.

Bush claims that political interference -- read, opposition from the U.S.-supported central government -- hamstrung previous pacification efforts, but this time the Iraqis have pledged to be cooperative. Good as far as it goes -- but the fact that such a pledge is needed speaks volumes about the likelihood of success this time around.

Bush also told Prime Minister Maliki that the American committment is not open-ended, and mentioned the benchmarks he has established for the Iraqi government to show it can become self-reliant. He said Iraq will take over all security responsibilities by November, reform the oil-revenue laws, hold provincial elections, allow Baathists back into government and spend $10 billion on reconstruction.

All good, but mostly surface. The benchmarks are not particularly demanding. "Security responsibilities" is a paper handoff; U.S. troops will still be heavily involved. Elections mean little as far as security. The revenue sharing and deBaathification are solid, addressing two major Sunni grievances.

The $10 billion is kind of remarkable, considering that Iraq's entire federal budget is only $65 billion. The link, by the way, also raises another question about Iraq's ability to achieve self-reliance, because that federal budget is larger than its GDP ($47 billion), and includes a $16 billion annual deficit.

Bush didn't mention a reported pledge of $1 billion in U.S. money. Which is just as well; $1 billion would sound more impressive if his 2007 budget hadn't cut Iraq reconstruction aid from about $10 billion a year to zero.

Let's see, what else: increased training of Iraqi forces? Good, as long as we're not just training and arming militia members. Better coordination of reconstruction efforts? Good, but minor. Increase forces in Anbar province by 4,000 troops? Good, I guess, but probably too few to make a serious difference, and since those troops will simply be reshuffled from elsewhere in Iraq it means the game of whack-a-mole continues.

Intriguingly, he then refers to "interrupting the flow of support from Iran and Syria" -- but gives no details. I'm curious what he means by that. He can't mean diplomacy, because he has ruled out talks with those two. And we don't have enough troops to seal the border. Does he mean cross-border strikes? Aggressive interdiction? That should be a focus of questioning from the press.

He then closes with stirring rhetoric.

The fact sheet fleshes out some details -- a demobilization program for militias, increasing the size of Iraqi security forces, reforming the Interior Ministry -- but little else.

So what's new? Not much. I have to agree with several other observers, including the WaPo's Don Froomkin and conservative blogger AllahPundit: His grand new strategy is just more of the same. Another conservative blogger, Jay Reding, provides some more analysis, but even he was underwhelmed.

We are in trouble.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

The lessons of Somalia

The recent U.S. airstrikes against suspected al-Qaeda militants in Somalia raises some questions and reinforces some points that often get lost in the debate over Iraq.

Reports out of Somalia are, as always, conflicting on that score. Somali officials are reporting that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a key planner of the 1998 embassy bombings, was killed, but U.S. officials caution against believing that and say they aren't even sure he was in the country.

Assuming the strike is not a precursor to something foolish -- like the introduction of U.S. ground troops -- it signals a return to the sort of thing we should be doing in battling terrorism: identifying top terrorists and killing them, as we have with missile-armed drones in Yemen and other such places. It's a pinpoint approach that goes after actual terrorists, rather than the big hammer approach of invasion that inflames whole populations and consumes lives and resources while creating enemies rather than eliminating them.

It's not always the easiest path. It takes elite troops and excellent equipment. It requires that the intelligence be good and the strike accurate. And above all it takes patience -- both political and tactical.

So far, the Somali strike appears to fit the bill. Let's hope we see more of this sort of operation as we begin to extricate ourselves from the mess in Iraq.

Somalia also shows the value of using regional proxies -- Ethiopia, in this case -- to do whatever conventional fighting is required. By avoiding the introduction of U.S. troops, it not only makes such interventions easier politically but also avoids a very practical problem -- the inflammatory nature of a U.S. troop presence. Astute selection of such countries helps develop and strengthen allies in key regions and sends a message to the world: if you fight terrorists, you can expect our help; if you harbor them, you can expect us to help your enemies.

It's not quite that simple, of course: care must be taken not to back allies of momentary convenience, or get drawn into taking sides in a local conflict because of spurious or insignificant terrorist connections. But it worked in Afghanistan, it's working in Somalia and it can work elsewhere, too.

Somalia, terrorism, politics, midtopia

The final voyage of the Swiftboaters

Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, the Republican-backed organization that went after John Kerry in 2004, is no more.

The Federal Election Commission announced today that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth will pay a fine of under $300,000 and disband the 527 organization that expressly (and illegally) advocated for the defeat of Sen. John Kerry in the ‘04 presidential election.

The SwiftVets group raised more than $25 million in unlimited individual and corporate donations during the 2004 election cycle with the chief purpose of convincing voters through advertising, direct mail and other communications that Kerry was “unfit for command.” Such overt messages opposing a candidate should have required SwiftVets to register with the FEC as a political committee and abide by contribution limits.

By registering only with the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt 527 organization, SwiftVets was able to accept approximately $12.5 million in individual contributions in excess of the $5,000-per-year limit to political committees and to accept more than $715,000 in prohibited corporate contributions—commonly called “soft money.”

John Kerry opened his war record up to scrutiny when he made it one of his main qualifications for office. But the Swiftboaters didn't just scrutinize him: they used innuendo, speculation and even outright lies to try to discredit him. Their Republican backing became known pretty quickly; and now we know that complaints about their tax status were justified.

Too bad the ruling comes two years too late. I wasn't a big Kerry fan (and I really, really, really hope he doesn't run again). But such a delayed ruling means the group had their full effect on the 2004 elections and essentially let them get away with illegal fundraising -- in exchange for a $300,000 fee (er, fine).

Better late than never. But let's hope the pace of justice moves a little more quickly in the 2008 cycle.

politics, midtopia

Chavez's tinpot socialist dream

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, fresh off a commanding electoral victory, wants to launch a socialist state by nationalizing industries and ruling by decree.

Chavez said he would submit a "revolutionary enabling law" to legislators through which he would be able to pass bills by decree to rush through socialist economic packages. The measure should sail through Congress, dominated by Chavez loyalists....

Chavez, in power since 1999, said he would nationalize Venezuela's largest telecommunications firm CANTV and unspecified power companies in the fourth biggest oil exporter to the United States.

He has also said that only loyalists can serve in the army or work for the state-run oil company.

It sure sounds like Chavez is setting himself up as a dictator -- and proponent of leftist revolutionary confrontation -- in the world's eighth-largest oil exporter, subverting democracy to his own ends.

What should we do about it? Nothing.

Chavez is hugely popular in Venezuela. He won 61% of the vote in the recent elections. Since opinion polls leading up to the vote showed similar levels of support, it's reasonable to conclude that the vote was accurate.

Further, Chavez is doing everything in the open. He's making no secret of his plans or his goals.

I think Venezuelans will come to regret throwing democracy away, but if they want a socialist dictatorship they should have it, and it should be none of our business.

But wait, critics say. Chavez controls all that oil. What if he uses it as a weapon?

What if he does? Venezuela's production of about 3 million barrels a day accounts for less than 4 percent of global output. He simply doesn't control enough of the market to be able to set prices -- or even influence them much. Further, anything he tries will end up hurting Venezuela more than his target, by reducing oil revenues. And he's going to need those revenues to finance his social programs.

Well, what about a military buildup? What if he invades his neighbors?

Venezuela's military is tiny: about 82,000 total, of which the Army accounts for 34,000 (plus another 23,000 national guardsmen). While the air force is relatively modern, the navy is small and aging and the army's equipment is seriously outdated. Total military spending is less than $2 billion a year, and a tiny fraction of GDP.

To the west, Colombia spends more than three times as much. To the south, Brazil spends 12 times as much. Only tiny Guyana to the east could possibly be a victim, with just 1,600 or so troops. But beyond the general sanction such a move would bring, Guyana is a member of the British Commonwealth -- meaning Britain would take specific exception to any aggressive move. Plus Guyana is a poor country, with nothing of value that Chavez could want.

What about using his oil money to finance leftist insurgencies around South America and the Caribbean? This is the most legitimate worry, as it's the most feasible way for Chavez to stir up trouble if he were so inclined. But it hasn't happened yet, and there's nothing to do until it does. We cannot and should not punish a country for what we think it might do someday. We can only punish it for its actions or clearly imminent actions.

So while Venezuela appears ready to embark on a major mistake, it is their mistake to make. Our role is simply to be vigilant to make sure Chavez's problems stay inside his borders -- and to assist democracy if and when the Venezuelan people grow tired of dictators.

Chavez, Venezuela, politics, midtopia

Implementing the 9/11 Comission recommendations

One of the Democrats' "100 hours" promises was to implement all of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, notably a push to screen every cargo container that enters the country, plus mandates to distribute security funds by need rather than geography.

The latter is a no-brainer, and it has been a badge of shame for Congress that up until now such spending has been subject to the same "every Congressmember gets a share" mentality that has so poorly served the country.

On cargo inspection, however, conservatives are pushing back.

The bill requires that within three years, all cargo on passenger jets be inspected for explosives, as checked baggage is now. The House bill also requires that within five years all ship cargo containers headed to the United States be scanned overseas for components of a nuclear bomb.

Homeland Security Department officials say there is no proven technology for such comprehensive cargo screening, at least at a reasonable cost or without causing worldwide bottlenecks in trade. The screening for air cargo is estimated to cost $3.6 billion over the next decade, and ship inspections could cost even more. “Inspecting every container could cause ports to literally shut down,” said Russ Knocke, a Homeland Security spokesman.

First off, reasonable cost? We've spent or authorized about $400 billion on Iraq thus far, with credible estimates putting the long-term cost at up to $2 trillion. $3.6 billion for a decade of cargo screening is a bargain by contrast.

Maybe conservatives are bad at math.

The more credible criticisms are whether 100 percent screening should be a mandate rather than a goal, and whether the proposed methods would actually work efficiently.

I totally understand cumbersome bureaucracies using ineffective technology: consider the Transportation Security Administration. It would be pointless to spend billions installing a system that doesn't work. For instance:

The radiation detection equipment now in use, for example, probably would not pick up a crucial radioactive substance for a nuclear weapon if the material was shielded. And even if all cargo containers were checked, terrorists could find other ways to smuggle weapons into the United States, including on private boats or ships that carry cars, which would not be not covered by the inspection mandates.

But that's a criticism of a specific technology. And smuggling in radioactive materials in cars or boats opens would-be terrorists to detection by other means, as well as simply making it more difficult. A working nuke, even a small one, weighs a ton and fits in a pickup truck bed. That's a difficult thing to transport, much less move across the border undetected.

In any event, such reservations should be an excuse to ignore the gaping cargo hole in our security net.

Is it worth several billion to improve cargo inspections? Yes. Can we do it without shutting down international commerce? Yes, even if we have to resort to such low-tech methods as hiring thousands more inspectors to physically search more containers, both randomly selected and those identified as suspicious based on port of origin, destination, the shippers involved, paperwork problems, etc.

Such inspections would pay other dividends as well, helping fight both smuggling and illegal immigration. So the cost could be justified on broader grounds than "finding nukes."

Speaking of bureaucracy, consider this beauty:

Homeland Security Department officials said they were researching ways to inspect more air and sea cargo. The agency has tests planned this year at three ports in Pakistan, Honduras and England, where all ship containers headed for the United States will be checked for radioactive substances or dense objects that might be hiding a bomb.

Got that? Five years after 9/11, the agency is researching ways to inspect more cargo. Way to go, guys. Nimble and flexible, that's you.

I'll accept that 100 percent screening should be a goal rather than a mandate. But intermediate steps -- say, 50 percent or 75 percent -- should be mandates, with the specific methodology and timetables emerging after discussions with Homeland Security. Such a two-pronged approach would provide increased security now and the promise of a more thorough and efficient process later as technology matures.

Update: Here's a nice explanation of the difficulties involved in detecting enriched uranium. Plutonium's easy; uranium, much less so.

terrorism, security, politics, midtopia

The U.N. complex(ity)

A large segment of the U.S. public likes to bash the United Nations at every turn, accusing it of ineffectiveness (while paradoxically accusing it of taking over the world), corruption and harboring socialist, anti-Western mentalities.

They have a few valid points, mostly on the corruption and bureaucracy front. But the "socialist, antiWestern" charge mostly applies to the all-but-powerless General Assembly, while ignoring the fact that when it comes to actual action the U.N. cannot do anything without the approval of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Further, the bills are largely paid by the West. Those facts, combined with the United State's economic and military clout, means the U.N. serves our purposes far more than it undermines them.

The "ineffectiveness" charge springs from that, mixed in with a misunderstanding of the purpose of the United Nations and an ignoring of the many good works the organization performs.

So it was refreshing to see this balanced look at the U.N. from the Economist magazine.

It paints a picture of the organizational and political weaknesses that hobble the U.N., as well as the things it does well. For instance:

the UN's once shambolic relief operations are now regarded as second to none. Around 30m people in some 50 countries currently depend on its services for survival. In March a new $500m central emergency relief fund was launched to deliver assistance within hours, rather than months, of an emergency. Another $250m fund, administered by the UN's new intergovernmental Peacebuilding Commission, has been set up to help finance reconstruction in countries emerging from conflict.

Peacekeeping, which is not even mentioned in the UN Charter, is another of the organisation's recent success stories. The explosion of civil wars and of ethnic and religious violence at the end of the cold war caught the UN by surprise. It had no standing army, no effective military staff, and very little peacekeeping experience. What troops it managed to muster, mostly from developing countries, were often poorly trained and badly equipped. Peacekeeping mandates from the Security Council tended to be far too restrictive both in scope and numbers. Some terrible mistakes were made: the UN's failure to stop the slaughter in Rwanda and the massacre in Srebrenica continues to haunt it. But over the past five years or so there has been a marked improvement.

A 2005 Rand Corporation study of American and UN peacekeeping operations concluded that the blue-helmet missions were not only cheaper, but had a higher success rate and enjoyed greater international legitimacy. Another Canadian study attributed the dramatic decline in the number of conflicts and battle deaths over the past decade to the “huge increase” in preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping over the same period, “for the most part authorised and mounted by the UN”. Never has the demand for the organisation's peacekeeping services been so great

To add some detail to that last point, consider another Economist article and a U.N. fact sheet. About 80,000 U.N. peacekeepers are now deployed in 18 hot spots around the world -- and by and large they are doing a very good job at halting hostilities and providing stability. And they do it for just $4.75 billion a year -- about what we spend in Iraq in three weeks.

The peacekeepers are mostly from developing countries, and the bills are mostly paid by Western countries. One can read all sorts of political meaning into that, but it comes down to a simple case of economics -- comparative advantage, to be precise. Developing countries are poor and wages are low, so peacekeeping duties can be attractive. Western countries have money but limited political will or patience for peacekeeping, and few Western soldiers want to be deployed to remote areas for extended periods. So the rich pay the poor to do the work.

The U.N. has also produced a slew of multilateral treaties and economic agreements that would have been difficult to arrange -- and enforce -- otherwise.

Does the U.N. deserve criticism? Of course. Does it deserve absolute condemnation, a U.S. pullout and extinction? No. What it does require is an understanding of its powers and limitations, and the patience to deal with what is essentially a messy and imperfect democracy of 192 fractious members. Sometimes it doesn't seem worth it; but I think we would come to find that a world without the U.N. as a safety valve -- no forum for discussion, no diplomatic cover for U.S. actions, no moral legitimacy for pronouncements on human rights, for example, or the rights of nations -- would be a world much less to our liking.

United Nations, politics, midtopia

A look at dark matter

Dark matter -- a long-postulated mystery substance that makes up at least 6/7 of the mass of the universe -- has apparently finally been found.

One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is about to be unravelled with the first detailed, three-dimensional map of dark matter - the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos.

Astronomers announced yesterday that they have achieved the apparently impossible task of creating a picture of something that has defied every attempt to detect it since its existence was first postulated in 1933.

Dark matter is thought to be some sort of subatomic particle that doesn't interact much with ordinary matter like you and me. Think of neutrinos with mass. Because it doesn't interact directly, the only way to detect its presence is by the gravitational effect of its mass.

Even more interesting is how the dark matter is organized:

"A filamentary web of dark matter is threaded through the entire universe, and acts as scaffolding within which the ordinary matter - including stars, galaxies and planets - can later be built," Dr Massey said. "The most surprising aspect of our map is how unsurprising it is. Overall, we seem to understand really well what happens during the formation of structure and the evolution of the universe," he said.

Astronomers have long been aware of various structural symmetries in the visible universe. For instance, they've identified a "supercluster" known as the Great Wall, a sheet of galaxies 500 million light years long, 200 million light years wide and 15 million light years deep. Another is the Great Attractor.

Such structures are exceptions to theory, which expects a more uniform distribution of galaxies resulting from the Big Bang. Dark matter, it turns out, may be one reason such structures exist.

Cool stuff. And one reason why generous funding of space exploration (manned, robotic and telescopic) should continue.

astrophysics, astronomy, science, space, politics, midtopia

The Bible in Legos

This guy has too much time on his hands (Hmm. As a blogger should I really be throwing stones like that?). But he's created a fabulously funny site with it.

Check out the visual index of Old Testament laws. The best sequence is "Why to Keep the Law," in which we discover in graphic Lego detail what happens if you don't follow God's word.

Legos, religion, politics, midtopia

Senate second thoughts

In a stark sign of how far the political winds surrounding Iraq have shifted -- and a sign of how difficult it will be for Bush to get Iraq initiatives through Congress -- a majority of senators who voted 77-23 to give Bush authorization to invade Iraq now say they regret the vote and would vote differently if the vote were held today.

By ABC News' count, if the Senators knew then what they know now, only 43 — at most — would still vote to approve the use of force and the measure would be defeated. And at least 57 senators would vote against going to war, a number that combines those who already voted against the war resolution with those who told ABC News they would vote against going to war, or said that the pre-war intelligence has been proven so wrong the measure would lose or it would never even come to a vote.

For any Senate vote to switch from 77-23 in favor to essentially 57-43 against is quite remarkable, and far more so for a decision as significant as the one to go to war.

This isn't a comparison of that Congress to this Congress; it's asking those who cast a vote on the resolution -- be they current or former senators -- how they would vote today.

There's a small hole in ABC's methodology, in that they didn't ask those who voted against the resolution whether they now supported it. But that's a tiny thing, because it's highly unlikely that the answer would be "yes."

Hindsight is great, of course. But it demonstrates how impossible it is anymore to paint war opponents as far-left extremists or naive hippies or Al-Qaeda sympathizers.

And there's this observation:

The president, not up for re-election, can try to move forward on his plans for Iraq regardless of public sentiment, Ornstein added.

"But if Lyndon Johnson were alive today, he'd tell the president you can't keep prosecuting a war when the public — and many of your congressional supporters — abandon you," he said. "It makes it much, much harder to sustain it."

Among those who stood by their vote to authorize war were Republicans Dick Lugar, Sam Brownback, Pete Domenici, Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist, and Democrats Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.

There's actually a lot more nuance to the answers than you might expect, so if you want the full taste, read the link.

Iraq, politics, midtopia