I'm looking through you

I'm pretty sure that it's not the correct quote nor the meaning of the correct quote, but it is hard not to think these days that "the media is the message", in that many of the stories that they dwell upon endlessly are basically the stories that only they feel the need to dwell upon endlessly. The shoe bomber sequel is perhaps the most recent example, in that the media is in a panic, Republican operatives are having a field day making attacks that they themselves would have called treasonous way back when in 2001 when Richard Reid tried the same exact thing, and honestly I'm not sure if anyone else really cares. By this point, if you haven't figured out that much of airline security is theater designed to make us feel safe, learn to love Teh Google, as there are 63,000 hits that can basically go over the concept for us. No, I think we all realize to some extent that while the government is good at retroactively preventing attacks that have already been attempted, there is inevitably a chance that someone will come up with a new way to attack a plane.

Quick aside: Like Kevin Drum in the following link, I think it is true that the fact al Qaeda always attacks planes and/or buses is a sign of weakness. Since 9/11, Afghan militants, Filipino militants, several African generals, and a bunch of other groups have figured out clever ways to slaughter the innocent. Al Qaeda likes to attack planes using shoes and underpants. They've tried twice in a decade, and failed both times, with the gravest injury being to the crotch of the most recent attempted bomber. As Nate Silver points out, airline travel is not just safe, it's ridiculously safe:

Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

If you are content leaving home without a lightning rod in your pocket, you should probably feel ok to fly. Honestly, I think people already know this, and the media freakout is basically an orchestrated show for the right wing to land free potshots and the hyperventilators to show how panicked all the rest of us should be. Remember during the past decade, of course, when across America the government and media hypervintilated about terrorism and New Yorkers, the people hit hardest and most likely tobe hit again, almost universally said "Al Qaeda? Fuhgeddaboutit. Fuck 'em." and managed to live life while small midwestern city governments built concrete fortifications around obscure county buildings.

The situation is so bad that David Brooks of the NYT is being held up as a voice of reason for his New Year's column. While agreeing in part with him, I think he misses a key point:

Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.

But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.

We do have a resilient society, by and large. The outraged calls and demands are a product of the media, by the media, and for the media. The rest of us were singing Auld Lang Syne badly, watching football, and other similar pursuits.

That said, while I think those calling for random insulting ways to racially profile Muslims really have no grasp of what drives a lot of the hatred of the US, I have to say that the proposal to put in many more full body scanners in airports doesn't really bother me. Even the two year old is starting to learn the names for various parts of herself, and I hope it comes as no surprise that there really aren't that many variations in all our parts. To put it mildly, even though many of us spend way to much time obsessing over penises and boobies, I'm pretty sure that after an airline scan technician looks at a few hundred, most of the prurient thrill will be gone. Your first glimpse of unobscured anatomy is a thrill, the thousandth, not so much. If this is what it takes to make a few people feel better, I can live with it, as the idea of just having everyone fly naked is hampered by sanitary and climate control issues. For those worried about privacy, the big threat is not a full-body scan, it's google if you've ever posted a single detail about your life on the internet, or if someone else has (hint: someone else has, trust me). Between google, facebook, and all the other easily searchable ways to find out info about people, our private lives are rarely private these days. If you haven't done so recently, try googling yourself. The only hope any of us has for anonymity these days is not a high level of privacy, but rather a common name. Matthew Smith, you are in luck. Me, somewhat, as there are a few of me and my googlegangers to obscure exactly who is who and who did what. In light of this, I just have trouble getting worked up about the idea of an airline screener staring at the outline of my genitalia for three seconds in a day full of body after same generic body.

Is such a step necessary to feel safe at the airport? Not at all! Driving in snow is a vastly bigger risk than a flight, and the biggest fear I have of air travel is having to sleep overnight in some of the country's lovely connecting airports after the restaurants have closed. Still, it's just not a big deal, and if it helps us as a society to get over some of our bizarre body issues, all the better. In the end, our genitals are our own, but they are basically like half of everyone else's too.

----------------
Now playing: The Beatles - I'm Looking Through You
via FoxyTunes

I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill

An incredibly hostile FAQ about healthcare reform (aka, HCR):

What is the key issue to remember when discussing HCR? That Congress is broken, and to the extent it works, it's generally to funnel money to the lawmakers themselves.

Wait, what about HCR? We're getting there, hold on a sec...

OK, why is Congress so broken? Well, one party acts like we have a parliamentary system, where party discipline is king and there is no need to negotiate across the aisle, whereas the other is famously disorganized, full of corporate sellouts, and actually does take no steps to maintain party discipline, as Chairman Lieberman can attest. The House passes stuff, but is full of idiots from both parties who don't even understand the work of the committee they chair, speak loudly without saying anything, and needless to say the one nuclear scientist in the room must often feel like he's talking to the furniture.

Wait, if they are so useless how do they pass stuff? Two answers: Nancy Pelosi and lobbyists. In Pelosi's defense, her job is to pass decent legislation, and the house does do so. To go into more depth, congresspeople don't write legislation, they put their names on lobbyists' legislation. Their job is to choose which lobbyists get to write it. I'm pretty convinced lobbyists earn their money not by being evil, but rather by appealing in broad ways to the interests of sitting legislators and then working in sweet deals fro their clients at the margins of bills. I can say for darn sure that the average house member has no concept whatsoever of the content of an average bill, even if they wrote it. Think of it like a university research time. The legislator (professor) is busy with meetings and other important functions, so they hire a team of aides (postdocs) who do know their stuff, but can't handle all the volume of what they have to do, so much of the grunt work is done by lobbyists (grad students), who work for peanuts (large comissions) and scrape by (live comfortably) based on leftover free food (hefty payments by their clients). See, it's a nearly perfect analogy (not a perfect analogy).

Anyway, what about the Senate. How does it work? Bribery. Mary Landrieu was bought off for $100 million, which is pretty cheap considering that they really needed her vote. Ben Nelson got such a sweet deal that he's now actually embarassed by it. Lieberman is just a prick.

So the bill is a product of corruption and idiocy? Yes.

So we should hope it goes down to defeat, right? WRONG!

We should support it, because it is a product of corruption and idiocy? No, as we established, all Congressional bills are like this, but this one happens to help millions of Americans get health insurance.

Why shouldn't they blow up the current bill and start from scratch on a better one? Naive sucker, Congress. Congress, naive sucker. It never gets better, it's Congress. It only gets worse over time. To draw a historical analogy of which my wife is fond, Lincoln was attacked viciously during the civil war because the Emancipation Proclamation was seen as overly compromised, not freeing all slaves in the country. I think his judgment looks OK in hindsight, because it was better than not doing anything.

Why should we make people buy insurance with an individual mandate? Because that's how social contracts work, people. The whole point of insurance is to have the healthy pay for the sick, otherwise, we wouldn't need it. Something has to make the healthy overpay, on the chance they might become sick, or otherwise the sick have to pay the full amount, and that's really not a good thing.

What about the increase in the stock prices for the health insurance companies? They think it's a great deal for them... The stock market is driven by people not much more accurate than Jim Cramer over the long run. They basically put a finger to the wind and then say to buy if some idiot on CNBC says he has a hunch. It's also been pointed out that food stamps are a great boon to supermarket chains and the tycoons of companies like ADM, who are hardly liberal heroes, but that doesn't argue for cutting off food stamps.

I still want Medicare for all. Why can't I have it? Congress! How many times now? It takes $100 million to bribe a powerful senator, and much less for the average congresscritter. For any issue that could cost an industry more than several billion dollars, they will generally be able to bribe their way into getting what they want, since it is in their economic interest to act that way.

Medicare-for-all pretty please? Look, I agree with you, which is why they should have pushed for lowering the eligibility age over time down to 55, maybe by 1 year per year or two. They didn't, and instead the public option was basically stripped of all its power in the house, then killed completely by jackass centrists in the Senate, and then Lieberman poked a stick in everyone's eyeby pushing for, then against, the Medicare buy-in option.

I'm depressed, we should blow up the whole system and rebuild something better from the ashes... This was actually the argument of a popular post at Daily Kos, arguing that the "technocrats" like Ezra Klein (who along with Jon Cohn and Nate Silver are the three people everyone should consult on this issue on a daily basis) were wrong about Iraq, while the Dirty F'in Hippies were right, and the same split is playing out on the left over Health Care reform. Unfortunately, the argument is backwards. As a general rule, it is very worrisome when people agree to risk immediate harm to others in return for some greater good in the future. In Iraq, we were fighting for some sense of security in the future (read: oil profits) that was never really at risk (read: oil profits going to other countries instead!). Those many deaths were traded for the broken and illusory promise of a brighter future, which remains a moral stain on our nation and will continue to do so long into the future.

With healthcare, we have the chance to make a tangible gain now, admittedly one that falls far short of what many of us would have liked to see. Blowing that chance up for some possible future healthcare panacea is just as immoral in a priori terms, as there are real people who will suffer while we place our trust in the American healthcare system to break down and then Congress to step in and fix it. Needless to say, while the former is certainly decent bet, the latter is pure fantasy. While imperfect, the current bill helps a great number of people, an that is the true standard on which it needs to be judged.

No Justice, No Peace

Before getting started on this morning's post, I should link to a great editorial in the WaPo from a counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the good guys), arguing that since filesharing is so incredibly easy, the RIAA and universities should just bundle in a music-sharing license in with preexisting fees currently paid by universities to musicians to cover various performances on campus. Anyway, I'll try to post some recent vacation photos tonight, but until then, onto the news of the day.

No Justice: For those not following it, or unable to figure out from the news coverage of the current scandals at the Department of Justice, here is a brief recap. Throughout the Bush administration, but more frequently during the period 2004-present, political posts throughout DoJ were filled with young lawyers lacking any proper experience who happened to be extremely loyal (and thus easily manipulable) conservative Republicans. This list could include Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and yesterday's Congressional hearing embarrassment, Bradley Schlozman (click on links for bios). Said employees seem to have made it their mission to try to politicize the entire justice department by preferentially hiring Republicans, even though this is completely illegal for career positions at DoJ. Why would they do this? Well, the primary offenses revealed so far were at the Civil Rights division, the Voting Rights division, and the US Attorneys themselves, who are responsible for prosecuting crimes involving those two departments. It doesn't take much to infer that the goal was to steer voting rights/voter fraud lawsuits against Democratic groups, and prevent such lawsuits against Republicans. About half of the US Attorneys fired had refused to indict Democrats who weren't guilty of anything, and the other half seem to have been involved in actually prosecuting guilty Republicans, which is an unforgivable offense to the administration. I should make clear of course, that "voter fraud" by minorities, which Republicans like to throw around, is largely a myth designed to suppress the minority vote, since it leans heavily Democratic.

One can further infer who is behind this affair. It can certainly be suggested that the reason so many youngsters were placed in positions of power is because their strings can be pulled by a puppet master, and so far all signs seem to point to Karl Rove. Recall before the 2006 elections, he claimed Republicans would succeed because he was entitled to "THE math" on the elections. Though he never stated such, one could suggest that carefully arranging the balance of who is actually allowed to vote might explain why one might be overconfident. Unfortunately for him, his dreams of a "permanent Republican majority" actually fell victim to the fact his party was perceived as vastly too corrupt to remain in power. Shucks.

No Peace: On the international front, it seems crazy to me that there are forces in the administration pushing for war with Iran, even though Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly going well. Who could be doing this, you may ask? Would it shock you that it is the Vice President, Dick Cheney? From Newsweek:

A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that Cheney's national-security team has been actively challenging Rice's Iran strategy in recent months. "We hear a completely different story coming out of Cheney's office, even now, than what we hear from Rice on Iran," says a Western diplomat whose embassy has close dealings with the White House. Officials from the veep's office have been openly dismissive of the nuclear negotiations in think-tank meetings with Middle East analysts in Washington, according to a high-level administration official who asked for anonymity because of his position. Since Tehran has defied two U.N. resolutions calling for a suspension of its uranium-enrichment program, "there's a certain amount of schadenfreude among the hard-liners," says a European diplomat who's involved in the talks but would not comment for the record. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the veep's team seems eager to build a case that Iran is targeting Americans not just in Iraq but along the border of its other neighbor, Afghanistan.

Lest anyone think this is just rumor, It seems to have been confirmed by a bunch of people:

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

What happens, one can ask, when the administration is basically at war with itself, not to mention a bunch of other countries. well, for one thing, you end up with a badly understaffed foreign service. Also, you end up with a bunch of people lying about various matters to all sorts of people. Should the former by Chief of Staff to the Veep, and the latter by a US Attorney, this is not always a good idea, and can end up with said Chief of Staff residing at the Crossbar Hotel for 30 months (can we now call it the Paris Hilton Hilton?).

Send lawyers, guns and money...The shit has hit the fan

Tonight's title comes from the late Warren Zevon (better known perhaps for "Werewolves of London"), and happens to be the inspiration for one of my favorite blogs, found over to the right side in the blogroll. Also, take a look over there at our two new additions, Mad Poet at the Gate, featuring the poetic stylings of the lawyer most closely related to me, and Elaine's blog, featuring the poetic stylings of of someone who is a very kind and generous soul in spite of the fact she married a lawyer.

There are two important political developments to talk about in the news the past few weeks, which, much to my continued amazement, show Democrats showing good sense and fierce organization (?!?) and Republicans neither whatsoever. The Democrats did a good thing with the passage of today's Iraq War funding bill. Everyone in the world admits it's not perfect, but it does put the President in the awkward position of needing to veto a bill finding the troops in order to avoid having to meet some actual benchmarks for a change. To quote Atrios:

Shorter GWB: The troops need funding which is why I'll veto the bill which would give it to them.

I think the most persuasive statement about the morality of this bill came from Chris Bowers at MyDD, who wrote the following to liberal critics of the bill:

My point is this: don't tell me that I am less principled, moral or ethical than you because I am supporting this measure even though I don't think it goes far enough. I am certainly not going to do the same thing to you, because I don't really see how either of our positions will result in a more ethically acceptable outcome. I arrived at my position because, in my final analysis, I believed the politics of the situation demanded it. You could respond that I should appreciate the ethical values of actions in and of themselves, rather than in the context of their consequences, but if that is your position than ultimately it represents an ideological difference between the two of us that will not be settled either in the discussion of this post, or before the House vote tomorrow. I do not see an ethical high ground in the progressive debate on this vote, and thus political considerations take precedence. Now, I don't think we handled the politics of this vote as well as we could have, but a progressive engineered defeat of this bill would make the political situation even worse. Republicans have to be the ones who hold this bill up, and / or fail to implement it, not Democrats and not progs. If the war will continue either way, then it must be clear that it was their decision to continue it, not ours.

If we must have this war, and given the lack of veto override numbers in Congress, we will certainly have this war, it is time to make sure Republicans own it, so the nation as a whole can let them know the depth of our profound displeasure in 2008. The choice must be as stark as possible, and the House has gone a long way towards accomplishing that task. From a pragmatic point of view, and let's face it, that's all we have for the moment with our bellicose and incompetent leadership running the show, tonight's NYTimes headline says it all: Democrats Show Surprising Unity.

On to Republicans who seem completely disorganized. This isn't just a passing phase, by the way, their incompetence has driven the number of people identifying as Democrats to the highest numbers recorded for decades, and R's to the lowest. Still, the bungling of the Justice department with respect to the US Attorney's firings is staggering, even before the news that Alberto Gonzales apparently blatantly lied to Congress about meetings he attended but claimed he did not. Note in the story how many different stories DoJ officials are still telling: in general, when you have so many diverging and contradictory stories, it is because everyone (perhaps minus one) is lying. At it's heart, the story is exactly what Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking points Memo has been saying for months (he's the blogger/journalist who the media is belatedly recognizing as kicking their asses on this story): Karl Rove and GWB tried to turn the Justice Department into a partisan enforcement arm of the Republican party:

Now we know with crystal clear proof what we really already knew a week ago: that Alberto Gonzales was lying about his role in the US Attorney Purge. So add that to the list of all the other things he's lied about.

But don't get distracted by the lying or even the cover-up.

Right-wing shills want to chalk the blundering administration response to US Attorney Purge scandal to incompetence. But just as we can infer the force of gravity from the descent of the falling apple, the panicked succession of lies and dodges out of the administration implies not incompetence but guilty knowledge of underlying bad acts.

This isn't about the AG's lies. It's not about the attempted cover-up. It's not about executive privilege and investigative process mumbojumbo.

This is about using US Attorneys to damage Democrats and protect Republicans, using the Department of Justice as a partisan cudgel in the war for national political dominance. All the secrecy and lies, the blundering and covering-up stems from this one central fact.

Even though many of the "finest" legal minds on the right, and a number of befuddled centrists fail to see how this is so troubling, let's lay it out, very simply and cleanly.

1. Karl Rove, acting as the President's political advisor, has long wanted to use the DoJ as a partisan operation for permanent Republican dominance, seemingly forgetting that his entire party is vastly incompetent at governing. This is, for instance, how over 80% of local investigations by US Attorneys turn out to be targeting Democrats. Still, some US Attorneys seem to be reputable, so the White House decides to remove them from office.

2. The White House has the power to do this legally, since they got Senator Arlen Specter to allow a provision into law to replace US Attorneys without Senate confirmation. They then pushed out 8 US Attorneys, including many in key swing states who had the gall to investigate criminality by Republicans, or alternately fail to prosecute innocent Democrats on trumped up voter fraud charges. This is not to say the entire process is legal. Senator Pete Domenici, Representative Heather Wilson (both of New Mexico), and Republican party officials in Washington State may have very well obstructed justice by attempting to interfere with ongoing investigations by leaning on prosecutors.

3. Even though the White House actions may have been technically legal, if the details got out they were so blatantly anti-democratic that even our tepid media would have erupted in outrage. Thus, they did what administrations like this always do: they lied to everyone who asked about these issues, claiming no political interference. Lying to the media is one thing, however, lying to Congress another. The latter is criminal, and apparently encompasses a number of the higher-ups at the DoJ, including the AG himself. Remember, lying to Congress is a crime.

4. Some in the media continue to focus on the details of the firings, which, as we just went over, were technically legal. This ignores both the reason behind the firings, which was to turn the DoJ into a partisan enforcement service, something that should worry any rational human being. It also ignores the coverup, which is blatantly illegal. There is an important reason why you cannot legally lie to Congress: they provide the only oversight over the executive branch until November 2008!

Of course, this is the bush administration, so we can be pretty sure that Gonzales also lied about not giving DoJ investigators the right to investigate the warrantless wiretapping program, even though it was his conduct that was going to be investigated. WE can save that for next week, however.

Liar, liar, pants are on fire, your tongue is as long as a telephone wire

Today was a bad day for the administration. In the morning, we had suicide bombers killing over 100 Iraqis as reports filtered out of 9 more US troop deaths. Around noon, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, was found guilty on four counts of obstruction of justice and perjury. All day long, Congress heard testimony from US Attorneys forced out of their jobs, supposedly for performance reasons, but apparently for either prosecuting Republicans or not prosecuting democrats enough. One thing is clear from the last two items: nothing coming from senior levels of the administration can be trusted anymore. Here is a basic summary of their malfeasance:

1. They let subordinates lie for them, and then fall on their own swords to protect the boss. This is clearly the case for Libby, who lied to protect Cheney when everyone else in the administration actually told the truth to the FBI. Note that this indicates that Cheney is the paranoid power behind the throne; Karl Rove told Patrick Fitzgerald the truth about leaking a CIA agent's name, knowing that the media would follow up ineffectively. By the way, regardless of the ongoing trial, Bush promised to fire anyone connected to the leak, and Cheney and Rove both admitted doing so under oath. I somehow doubt they will be tendering resignations any time soon. Perhaps the media should harp on this a bit.

As to the prosecutors, they were honorable in their duties, even in the face of government interference that they considered tantamount to obstruction of justice. The higher-ups in the Justice Department smeared them anyway,m because that is what they do, and are now being bitten in the ass for it.

2. There is no accountability in our government, because the media gets too distracted. Anna Nicole's death, in the days that it happened, was still a smaller story than the continuing suffering in New Orleans, or Darfur, or Iraq, or any number of places. The Bush administration never fixes any of these, they just wait for the focus to pass. This is good for them personally, bad for their party, and horrible for the nation. As I mentioned yesterday, though, they don't really seem to care, so long as the bucks keep flowing their way. Look at Walter Reed, whose problems were outsourced to a former Halliburton executive, or Iraq, many of whose problems were outsourced to Halliburton, or ...you get the point.

In scanning tonight's news, there were stories in the NYTimes and WaPo about the administration's failure of credibility, but we all know tomorrow that they will still report the government's side in the interests of "fairness" failing to properly note the administration's global lack of any credibility on just about any issue. This needs to change.

3. Democrats are still being very, very cautious, which is dumb. It is time to say, repeatedly and publicly, that the administration specifically and Republican party in general is no longer a credible governing force. Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans, Walter Reed, Congressional pages, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Macaca, Ann Coulter, the list is endless, on every issue one could name. Time after time, it is time to treat them with the scorn that they've earned for years now. Rather than embrace a phony bipartisanship to sound nice, Democrats need to claim an alliance with the American people, fighting for the issues we support against a government that has functioned for the past six years as a kleptocracy. Taking the other side seriously as anything but an impediment for passing an agenda worthy of the American people is a waste of time at this point. They've fucked us over for long enough, and it is time for the grownups to take over. End of story.

Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today.

In the continuing furor over care at Walter Reed, it seems even more bizarre that the VA system is considered to be the best healthcare system in America according to any number of recent surveys...until you realize that the two statements I just made have no relation to each other at all. Walter Reed, like many of the problematic medical facilities out there, is a military hospital run by the Department of Defense, in this case by the Army. Bethesda Naval hospital, as the name implies, is run by that service branch. The VA system, on the contrary, is run by the Department of Veterans' Affairs, a completely different branch of the government. The latter has been hurt lately by an influx of new wounded veterans without a corresponding increase in its budget and the fact that it's current head, Jim Nicholson, is a Republican toady:

He has been accused by some veterans and the organizations that represent them of being primarily a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and of being slow to respond to increasing strains on his agency as returning soldiers move from facilities like Walter Reed, which is run by the Defense Department, into the veterans affairs system.

Critics say he has under-emphasized his agency’s budget needs to Congress, has not responded to calls for more mental health workers and brain trauma specialists and has failed to overhaul disability claims procedures. Some leaders of veterans groups say Mr. Nicholson is less communicative than his predecessors.

Still, VA care is among the best in the country, as this Washington Monthly story demonstrates:

And so it goes today. If the debate is over health-care reform, it won't be long before some free-market conservative will jump up and say that the sorry shape of the nation's veterans hospitals just proves what happens when government gets into the health-care business. And if he's a true believer, he'll then probably go on to suggest, quoting William Safire and other free marketers, that the government should just shut down the whole miserable system and provide veterans with health-care vouchers.

Yet here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11 measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures, the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be "significantly better."

Here's another curious fact. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a study that compared veterans health facilities with commercial managed-care systems in their treatment of diabetes patients. In seven out of seven measures of quality, the VA provided better care.

It gets stranger. Pushed by large employers who are eager to know what they are buying when they purchase health care for their employees, an outfit called the National Committee for Quality Assurance today ranks health-care plans on 17 different performance measures. These include how well the plans manage high blood pressure or how precisely they adhere to standard protocols of evidence-based medicine such as prescribing beta blockers for patients recovering from a heart attack. Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose this year's winner is: Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the VHA system outperforms the highest rated non-VHA hospitals.

Not convinced? Consider what vets themselves think. Sure, it's not hard to find vets who complain about difficulties in establishing eligibility. Many are outraged that the Bush administration has decided to deny previously promised health-care benefits to veterans who don't have service-related illnesses or who can't meet a strict means test. Yet these grievances are about access to the system, not about the quality of care received by those who get in. Veterans groups tenaciously defend the VHA and applaud its turnaround. "The quality of care is outstanding," says Peter Gayton, deputy director for veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. In the latest independent survey, 81 percent of VHA hospital patients express satisfaction with the care they receive, compared to 77 percent of Medicare and Medicaid patients.

No, the current problem lies with Walter Reed and the military's hospital management. In many ways, they are suffering from the same problem as a number of government agencies do: complete hubris and incompetence in the face of a Congress and media that basically spent six years ignoring their roles as guardians of the public interest. Just like the Justice Department decided that it could can a bunch of US Attorneys and no one would notice, just like the administration decided to put cronies in charge of FEMA and no one would notice, just like they decided to make up the reasons to fight a war, and are trying to do it again, hoping no one will notice...it's just the way that they operate.

If I told you that Halliburton is ultimately at fault, would you be shocked? At this point, you shouldn't, because Halliburton's fingerprints are all over the scandal:

In a letter from the committee to Weightman, the members said the Garibaldi memo “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel.’ ... According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”

The committee’s letter also noted that Walter Reed awarded a five-year, $120 million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

The committee also noted that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed dropped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with 50 private workers.

“The conditions that have been described at Walter Reed are disgraceful,” the committee statement said.

“Part of our mission on the oversight committee is to investigate what led to the breakdown in services. It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers.”

The committee letter said the Defense Department “systemically” tried to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for facilities management, patient care and guard duty — a process that began in 2000.

“But the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002,” the committee letter states.

During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states.

“The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”

The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission has grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.

“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”

Seriously, it's not a new scandal each time, it's the same scandal being created by the same folks, whose effect always seems to be to poison this country. It's not that all of them are evil, though some may be, it's just that they don't really give a shit, and that's a bad thing for the people running the country to think.

Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I'm so forlorn

Some days, the news is just too ridiculous to not comment about it. First up are some cool cats who might be a bit too cool for their own good:

More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. The devices depict a character giving the finger...

Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.

Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball.

From the category of rats, we've got the kind screwing up the war we've been fighting in Iraq:

Tens of millions of U.S. dollars have been wasted in Iraq reconstruction aid, some of it on an Olympic-size swimming pool ordered up by Iraqi officials for a police academy that has yet to be used, investigators say. [ed. note: try hundreds of millions, not tens]...

According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds that has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorized by the U.S.

U.S. officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.

Responding, the State Department said in the report that it was working to improve controls

Needless to say, next time perhaps they can try tracking how they spend BILLIONS of dollars before they just hand it out. Just suggesting...

Anyway, our other rats are those trying to get us into our next war:

Investigators say they believe that attackers who used American-style uniforms and weapons to infiltrate a secure compound and kill five American soldiers in Karbala on Jan. 20 may have been trained and financed by Iranian agents, according to American and Iraqi officials knowledgeable about the inquiry.

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

You'll note that there is not a single shred of evidence that the Iranians were involved, except for the fact that the attackers were "sophisticated". So help me, if the attack had been "intricate", we might be at war already. WTF is wrong with people to believe this crap?

On to elephants. First the kind in the New York State Senate who truly have their priorities straight with regard to who needs to be looked out for in next year's state budget:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer will propose a budget of more than $120 billion Wednesday that would increase overall spending by more than 6.3 percent, a larger increase than his predecessor, George E. Pataki, proposed last year but significantly lower than the budget enacted by the Legislature, people briefed on the plan said.

After talking for months about the need to rein in spending, the governor had to reconcile his campaign promises to substantially increase funds for education and lower property taxes, while also moving to make health insurance available to all of the state’s children and increase aid to distressed municipalities.

The governor’s plan for property tax cuts is aimed at the middle class, adding $6 billion over three years to the existing School Tax Relief program, known by the acronym STAR. Benefits under the plan decrease for upstate households with incomes exceeding $60,000 and households in New York City and its suburbs with incomes exceeding $80,000.

Some Senate Republicans criticized his proposal for not doing enough to help constituents with higher incomes.

It's always a shame when politicians fail to look out for the interests of those with higher incomes. We may see riots all the way down Wall Street, if they weren't so busy taking advantage of all their federal tax cuts that Republicans in Washington have been handing out for the past few years.

Finally, the best news story of the day, about elephants...as in pachyderms. The military has blacklisted them, but with an important caveat. From Too Hot for TNR:

According to a recently-issued Special Forces manual, while certain pack animals are acceptable to use for spec-ops purposes (donkeys, mules), elephants "should not be used by U.S. military personnel." In the assessment of the manual's authors, "Elephants are not the easygoing, kind, loving creatures that people believe them to be. They are, of course, not evil either."

There you have it. The military has concluded that elephants aren't actually evil. Giraffes, on the other hand, are either with us or against us, and we must fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans, I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

For those of you with an adverse reaction to football discussion, please skip down to the next paragraph, in which we use sports as a vehicle to make a broader comment on society. Everybody else, today's game can't help but make me a bit sad, not so much because I hate the Chicago Bears, but because it is bad from the perspective of being a general football fan and an American. As to the first, I am a New York Giants fan, and can't really claim a preference either way between Chicago and New Orleans. We lost to both this season by substantial margins, but don't have a huge history in my viewing lifetime to consider either much of a direct rival. Having seen just about every Bears game this season, on the other hand, I can tell you they are one of the ugliest teams in the NFL to watch, whereas New Orleans can be one of the best. The Bears have an awful quarterback who occasionally manages to hit his speed receiver, Bernard Berrian, for a 40-yard pass, but generally misses everyone else most of the time. Most of their scoring comes directly from the defense, the best in the league at forcing opposing fumbles. Watching their games involves long periods of utter boredom punctuated by turnovers resulting in scores, followed by more boredom. New Orleans had an exciting attack, mixing running and passing, and were actually fun to watch. This may sound like a strange complaint coming from a Giants fan, as our great teams were known for superb defense and capable offense, but the comparison doesn't hold up. Our Super Bowl winning defenses were sack monsters, not fumble inducers, leading to highlight film hits (and occasional ends to careers in a famous case). Moreover, Phil Simms may not have been all that exciting, but he was an accurate passer capable of driving the offense when necessary, famously connecting on 22 of 25 passes to set the Super Bowl standard for accuracy in 1987. The Bears' only forerunner in all of Super Bowl history, combining a pretty poor offense with an insane turnover-oriented defense, are the Baltimore Ravens of Super Bowl XXXV, who beat my Giants. God, I hated the Ravens then (still do, in fact), and wish I didn't have to watch their onfield doppelgängers play in two weeks.

The more important story for this Super Bowl, however, is that it represents a lost opportunity to bring New Orleans back to the forefront of America's attention, breaking through our cultural ADHD. If Bush is the worst president we've ever had, reason #1 is starting a preventive war of choice against a vastly outmanned opponent and still managing to lose, all while we forgot to finish yet another war that was extremely winnable at first but is growing less so as our troops our sucked away, in both cases failing utterly at providing the humanitarian assistance that was our clear moral obligation. Reason #2, however, is that Bush managed, through his own inaction and the inaction of his incompetent cronies, to lose an entire American city!?! Dkon can comment more on the state of things there, but suffice it to say the Big Easy will never be the same, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, suffered because of the direct incompetence of our government. How this isn't a bigger issue still, less than a year and a half later, mystifies me. New Orleans appearing in the Super Bowl wouldn't have directly solved any of the city's problems, but it would have focused the media spotlight back on the city where it belongs. Admittedly, we would have heard a nearly endless succession of heartwarming pieces about the gritty families who have returned and the troubles they've overcome, but we would have also heard the occasional bit on the greatest diaspora America has seen since we decided to move most of our Native American tribes two time zones to the West. Thank God John Edwards seems to have noticed we as a nation still have a huge, completely morally unacceptable problem here, and hopefully the media will wake up again sometime before the election to ask if our candidates plan to do jack to improve the situation there. The Saints in the Super Bowl would have provided an immediate opportunity to start the process, but unfortunately the Monsters of the Midway were too strong on defense. Look for either the Pats or Colts (it's currently 7-zip Pats, eight minutes into the game) to make them pay for their disservice to America and the displaced residents of what was once The City that Care Forgot.

Devil Eyes/Go To The Moon/Tapped (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #3)

Friday Catblogging

If you try to take the remote control away from Karina, you are liable to get the devil-eyes. Then again, control of the remote is a standard privilege for the small and furry.

Friday's Free Concert Clip

Since I used them for Wednesday's NASA article title, we're going to go with a video of Moxy Früvous's You Will Go To the Moon, complete with science nerd graphics. I particularly like the simulation of Earth's impact with another object that formed the moon back when the solar system was young.

It turns out that they played the song at their November 24, 1999 show at the Harro East in Rochester, and that I'm pretty sure at some point during the show you can hear Alex and I whooping in the background...but that's not the reason I'm mentioning the show. Let's face it, I saw them over 50 times, so it's not hard to pick shows that I attended. No, I would suggest that one of our readers, and he knows who he is, play tracks 13 and 14. That is all.

Better Know a Blog

I've danced around this one long enough. If you like some policy with your politics, there is no better blog out there than Tapped, the official blog of The American Prospect magazine. Situated comfortably between The Nation and The New Republic, though thankfully closer to the former, it may very well be the finest political weekly in the land. They cover both foreign and domestic policy, generally with a bit of wonkishness, but not so much that the reader is expected to be an expert. Unlike the strident voices that my co-blogger finds occasionally grating (and I can't blame him), they tend to maintain a bit more decorum, though they have been known to light up those who make foolish statements (Jonah Goldberg, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and the rest of the gang at the consistenly wackily conservative National Review are always popular targets). Popular topics at Tapped include healthcare (they're for universal coverage, as we all should be), foreign policy (they prefer strategy to strategery), electoral politics (they're not sold on the mainstream media's bizarre notion that the Democratic congressional class of 2006 is conservative, primarily because it's not), and organized labor. The latter topic deserves mention: organized labor is a key part of the democratic movement, but is very poorly represented in the blogosphere, and it is good that they're doing their part to include it in the discussion. Beyond the main blog, they run two additional blogs via the magazine and several of their contributors have blogs of their own, all of which I'll mention in the coming weeks, focusing on, respectively, politics and the media (Horse's Mouth), global economics (Beat the Press), foreign policy and hardcore music (Spencer Ackerman's toohotfortnr), and everything under the sun (both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein). Reading Tapped regularly will give you an amazing grasp of political events with which you can impress your friends and acquaintances at wine and cheese parties. Print and online subscriptions are available as well.

Get a Job, Sha na na na, Sha na na na na na

On the whole refugee matter discussed in the previous post, it should be noted that the US official in charge, Ellen Sauerbrey, is another recess appointee with as much experience in dealing with refugees as any of us, unless we actually have any readers with any experience whatsoever, in which case she's less qualified than them. From Steve Benen (guest hosting at Political Animal), though usually from the Carpetbagger Report:

As it happens, the crisis is for the desk of Ellen Sauerbrey, the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration. Sauerbrey, of course, was given the job despite literally no background in responding to refugee crises, setting up camps, delivering emergency supplies, and/or mobilizing international responses to humanitarian crises. Her only "qualification" for the job seemed to be that she was a Republican activist looking for a job in the administration. (Sauerbrey is a former member of the Republican National Committee and was Bush's Maryland state campaign chairwoman in 2000.)

Heckuva job, redux. Actually, let's just quote Apocalypse Now and leave it as the default response until further notice:

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

Nothing changes on New Year's Day

This may come as a shock to anyone who's been noticing the trend in recent posts, but I promise this one will have a nice discussion and pretty pictures. No joke, actual pretty pictures that can make you smile. First, of course, two clear examples why the passage of time in no way inherently indicates progress.

It was the worst of times...

First, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, showing a clear sense of priorities:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made judicial pay the sole topic of his second annual report, issued on Sunday, declaring that the failure by Congress to raise federal judges’ salaries in recent years has become a “constitutional crisis” that puts the future of the federal courts in jeopardy.

Just for some background, Patrick Leahy, the incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already said that he plans to push for a pay raise. Perhaps more importantly, THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT PROBLEMS FACING THE GOVERNMENT AT THE MOMENT!!!. Off the top of my head, we've got the executive branch breaking the law with regard to warrantless wiretapping, the legislative branch stripping detainees of their habeas corpus rights, the "revolving door" policy where government officials are allowed to lobby their former colleagues in what is essentially legalized bribery, congressional staffers being lobbied by spouses and other assorted family members, executive branch officers classifying information because it is embarrassing rather than secret, and any number of Abramoff linked figures still in Congress. I'll admit that federal judges probably do deserve more pay, but how about some perspective?

While Roberts may have misplaced priorities, many war supporters are going to be facing a year where their rosy predictions are disproven and their credibility shot with everyone but the mainstream media, who will continue to describe them as "respected pundits". Perhaps no one deserves less respect that Marty Peretz, the owner of The New Republic magazine, which he purchased using his wife's fortune (she's heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune). Marty, an anti-Arab blowhard, has this to say about Iraq at his blog, referred to by other TNR readers as "his padded cell":

The Sunnis Respond: These are the incorrigibles, the irreconcilables, the bitter-enders. BBC tells us that among their slogans were "Saddam is the pride of the nation" and "We sacrifice our blood and soul for you Saddam." It certainly isn't poetry or pretty. In fact, these are ugly thoughts. And, if Saddam is, in fact, the pride of the nation, what a miserable nation it is. Well, the Sunnis of Iraq were content with the tyrant's murderous rule. And, now, they must face Shi'a revenge. Which makes Shi'a Iraq also murderous and grotesque.

If this is indeed the case, then why exactly DID YOU SUPPORT THE FRICKIN WAR, WHEN EVERYONE WITH HALF A BRAIN KNEW THIS WOULD BE THE RESULT!!!

It was the best of times...

Anyway, the new year is a time for idiocy, but also for new hope. My wife and I visited Allerton Park in Monticello, Illinois this past weekend, and took some pictures. Thanks possibly to global warming, the weather was a lovely 50 degrees (10 degrees centigrade), making it an ideal winter day for a hike.


S. and the alpha Fu Dog trying to establish dominance.

Honestly, I'm pretty much convinced that if he came home with us, he'd be Karina's worst nightmare.


That's when I fell for The Leader of the Pack...(by the appropriately named Shangri-Las)


Playing groupie in the garden of the Chinese musicians.