March 31, 2004
New Woodward Book
From the NY Daily News via The New Republic:
- I hear that "Plan of Attack," supersleuth Bob Woodward's still-secret study of President Bush's war on terrorism, will be very bad for the Bush reelection campaign - which is still reeling from gun-toting former terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's critique of Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other administration figures in "Against All Enemies."
Woodward's book, to be released next month, will receive not only a multipart series in The Washington Post, but also the Mike Wallace treatment on "60 Minutes" April 18 - when I am absolutely confident that the common corporate ownership of CBS and Woodward's publisher, Simon & Schuster, will be mentioned.
What I Did Over the Holidays
In the April edition of the "Class Notes," fellow MIT alumnus, Owen Franken (MIT '68), shared an account of his most recent Hannukah, during which he followed his brother, Al, on his 4th USO tour entertaining troops abroad. Owen's brother sounds like a pretty funny guy.
(With pictures!)
From Owen Franken:
The Holidays aren't over yet, but here goes: I just came back from eight days as the USO photographer on a trip with my brother, Al, in Kuweit, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan.
Al and I seemed to be the only "Liberals" on the trip, and we got along with everyone fantastically including some real redneck country singers and two people from Fox News, the Army's favorite. We did run into a lot of soldiers who asked Al to sign his book, Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them, a Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.
It was great to be around so many people with a crazy sense of humor, including a very jolly fat guitar player, who when told that in Iraq in the summer it is 140°ree; in the sun, told us that he might go back there then and sell his shade.
One highlight of the trip was the lighting of Hannukah candles in one of Saddam's Palaces in Baghdad. We had this funny idea that the candles would fall over and CNN would be reporting that the Palace of Saddam Hussein was burned down by Jews. Other highlights:
- The Taliban Cheerleaders. Al introduced them, but they could not perform because they could not dance or even listen to music. He convinced them that Afghanistan had been liberated so they did a raunchy routine and stripped off their burkas to reveal that they were in fact the Washington Redskin Cheerleaders, much to the joy of the screaming troops.
- Al Franken as Saddam Hussein in handcuffs trying to make a deal to tell where the WMD's are if they uncuffed him and gave him a fifteen minute headstart ("That's all I need"). When refused, he broke away from his MP guards and ran to the edge of the stage yelling "f--- y--" at all the soldiers. [A "G rated" version of this skit was done on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion and can be found at this URL]
- Daryll Worley's moving song, "Have you forgotten?" about 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. Even I was in tears when he sang it, especially the night he made a private concert for about five of us in Saddam's marble Palace at one am, after the Hannukah lighting.
As for the soldiers, they all want to go home, and they individually have different senses of their missions. The soldiers in Afghanistan have a better sense of why they are there than the ones in Iraq, especially those National Guard persons and reservists. In Iraq they are very nervous about their security, as you can imagine, but realize that now there, they have to stay and stick it out and try to secure the place. They are the victims of an administration that only considered the best case scenario.
Enjoy These Images:
Bush Continues to Smoke His Own Shit
The New York Times reports today that President Bush campaigned in Wisconsin on Tuesday, saying he was optimistic about the economy and urging Americans to have faith in their ability to compete with the rest of the world rather than taking refuge behind what he called "economic isolationism."
With another member of the Staton Jones Report editorial board facing unemployment, we have to express the greatest disdane for Bush's continued ignorance of the plight of middle-class, college educated worker. The simple fact is that Bush is promoting foreign trade that is hopelessly unbalanced, and then ranting about "socialism" and "unions" as if government-based attempts to provide minimum standards for workers of all stripes is somehow inhuman, or at least, not-profit enhancing.
He's dead wrong.
This nation's greatest growth period coincided with massive improvements in manufacturing job safety conditions and wage increases, and only took a nose dive when forced to compete with nations that have no intention of doing the same for their workers. The same thing is now happening in the white-collar economy, and it will result in the U.S. losing almost all it's edge in high-tech, a drought of "brain power", and ultimately, 2nd or 3rd world status, just so EDS can offshore more jobs.
Former Perry Cabinet Member in Dem Recount in South Texas
Henry Cuellar, an Hispanic lawyer who once served on Gov. Rick Perry's cabinet is embroiled in a recount fight for the newly redistricted District 28 runoff for the Democratic House nominee. The incumbent, U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, is claiming voter fraud when, during the recount requested by Cuellar, 300 "missing" ballots appeared.
I have no idea what is really going on there but I think we're going to see more and more of this kind of razor-edge voter fraud leading up to the general election, when Rove will try to finesse the election any way he can.
And by "finesse" I do mean electronic voter fraud.
"An Outrageous Lie"
Startling new evidence that President Clinton did have sexual relations with that woman!
Just kidding.
It's another former intelligence agent talking about the Bush Administration. I can't get to the streaming media from work, but the Democracy Now radio/television show has the interview on their site.
We speak with former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, who was hired shortly after Sept. 11 to translate intelligence gathered over the previous year related to the 9/11 attacks. She says the FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned before Sept. 11 and calls Condoleezza Rice's claim the White House had no specific information on a domestic threat or one involving planes "an outrageous lie."
Golly.
Apparently, the FBI has been stalling Ms. Edmonds' FOIA request for 1500 documents that support her allegations.
Update:
I missed a Salon article about this last week. If you want to view the MRWZ take on this, David "I used to be liberal" Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine web site has a withering attack on Edmonds that — oops — forgets to mention Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa affirming her credibility and citing corroborating witnesses.
Simpsons Outsourced To India
In a scoop worthy of Matt Drudge, the SJR has uncovered efforts to move the popular Simpsons television series to India, in order to lower production costs. A preview of the newly-revamped series is available (Flash player required).
Write your congressional representatives or something.
Faith-Based Initiatives
"Why can't we give tax money to churches?" whines the "Rite" Wing in this country. I don't know either, guys, but it has something to do with the same thing that keeps up from replacing the Constitution with the Ten Commandments. Either that, or Liberals just hate Jesus.
Naturally when liberal Democrats, Senator Chuck Schumer and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York, are fundraising for a faith-based organization, well, that's intolerable. The problem isn't their failure to use tax dollars to support the religious organization, it's that it's not associated with the One True God. It's aligned with Scientology.
And while Scientology is evil, we know that isn't the real issue. Conservatives just hate Xenu.
CultNews.com has more here.
[Xenu flyer in PDF]
March 30, 2004
H.R. 3920
This from What We Now Know (issue 3/29/2004), a relatively conservative newsletter I receive in the mail (the rest of this post is a direct quotation):
CHALLENGING THE COURT
A new bill just introduced in this congressional session threatens to reopen a debate about the separation of powers that has been closed for two hundred years. Some would say it takes dead aim at the Constitution itself.
The bill, H.R. 3920, was introduced on March 9 by Rep. Ron Lewis (R-KY) and co-sponsored by eleven others: James DeMint (R-SC), Terry Everett (R-AL), Richard Pombo (R-CA), Howard Coble (R-NC), Mac Collins (R-GA), Virgil Goode (R-VA), Joe Pitts (R-PA), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Joel Hefley (R-CO), John Doolittle (R-CA), and Jack Kingston (R-GA).
What it proposes is that Congress shall have the authority to, in its wisdom, override the Supreme Court's decisions as to a law's constitutionality. It may sound like a phony Internet story, but it isn't. To see for yourself, go to http://thomas.loc.gov/, type hr3920 into the "bill number" box and click, and you will be led to the Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act of 2004. Where you'll find that:
The Congress may, if two thirds of each House agree, reverse a judgment of the United States Supreme Court--
Lewis, a former Baptist minister and owner of a Christian bookstore, is concerned that the present Court may rule later this year to remove the word "God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. That, he maintains, would be judicial activism, and he wants Congress to have the power to curb it. "America's judicial branch has become increasingly overreaching and disconnected from the values of everyday Americans," Lewis says.
For authority, H.R. 3920 cites Article III, section 2 of the Constitution, which most Americans probably think created a court which would have the last word. It didn't. Instead, it granted the Court ultimate jurisdiction, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
That was pretty vague, so it remained for the Court itself to establish its identity as co-equal with the other two branches of government and supreme in all matters judicial. This didn't take long. Chief Justice John Marshall settled the issue in the landmark decision Marbury v. Madison (1803). In it, Marshall wrote: "Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently, the theory of every such government must be that an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void." The Court's right to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional was thus firmly established, and so it has been ever since.
Today, few even question the principle. At the time, though, Marbury was the subject of heated controversy. Thomas Jefferson, for one, vigorously opposed it. In 1804, he wrote: "The Constitution ... meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."
Were H.R. 3920 to be enacted and signed by the president, the result might well be chaotic. Suppose the Court (as it surely would) declared it unconstitutional. Then suppose that Congress voted to override the Court's decision, and that that vote was later declared equally unconstitutional. And so on, in a loop without end.
(For the record, it might be well to ask how often the Court actually invokes the Constitution in its rulings. And the answer is: rarely. As of the end of 2002, it had struck down only 158 provisions of federal statutes, with eleven of those decisions coming in the years 2000-2002 alone. Rep. Lewis, surely no liberal, might be surprised to learn that the supposedly conservative Rehnquist Court has been far more activist in this regard than earlier courts ever were.)
Our personal opinion is that, should H.R. 3920 become law, and should the Supreme Court uphold it, then a door would open upon much potential mischief at times when one party was in firm control of both the executive and legislative branches. We feel that Congress would act far more appropriately by proposing an amendment to the Constitution, a step Lewis says he is prepared to take if his bill fails.
Ron Lewis may be no Jefferson, but he has taken on an issue that deeply troubled the sage of Monticello. Somewhat unexpectedly, it still resonates today, and may well prove to be as divisive now as it was two centuries ago. We invite our readers' reactions.
Freedom, American Style
In 1958, the Iraqi people — well, the Iraqi military elite, really — ousted the monarchy that Britain had thoughtfully installed years earlier. Since an angry mob had shredded the Royal family and scattered their body parts throughout the streets of Baghdad, it wasn't looking good for a replacement monarchy. Thus, Iraq became the Republic of Iraq and drafted a new constitution making it a Parliamentary Democracy.
That constitution was pretty much ignored by Saddam Hussein, and now it's being ignored by George W. Bush. Iraq's new constitution identifies Iraq as an Islamic Republic, thereby draining the only oasis of religious tolerance in the Arabian desert. If "exporting" American democracy results in theocracies, maybe we should be doing a little quality-control back here in the Freedom Factory™.
On a more recent note — just yesterday, in fact — American GI's demonstrated the blessings of liberty by shutting down a newspaper for being critical of the Bush Administration. Officially, the paper is being accused of printing wild rumor and speculation which Colonial Overlord Bremer fears will incite violence in Iraq. Naturally, Iraqis are outraged at American hypocrisy (why aren't more Americans outraged by American hypocrisy?).
Me, I applaud the shutdown of the paper. And to deflect accusations of hypocrisy, I think that we should shut down other news outlets that publish lies and rumors which might lead to violence in Iraq. Let's start with Fox News.
Other than undermining the credibility of U.S. efforts to bring "freedom" to the Iraqi people, the closure of the newspaper has acheived nothing. The violence continues, unabated.
This Sucks
Alistair Cooke has died.
OK, no big shock — he was 95 — but the average worldwide level of human quality just dropped noticably.
Tom DeLay is still alive.
Sigh.
March 29, 2004
Hydrogen: the "Un-fuel!"
Steve indicated a while back that I should say a few words about hydrogen, perhaps to debunk the notion that solving all of our energy problems is as simple as switching everything over to hydrogen fuel cells. Maybe I'm not using the right keywords, but I've been having a slightly hard time Googling for a good site that addresses the issues in a reasonably balanced way.
While this Dallas Morning News article isn't perfect, it does touch on (most of) the issues with the proper tone (ie, not saturated with naive optimism).
In general, I think it's easy to avoid the common trap of instantly believing that hydrogen -- or any other "fuel" -- can easily solve our energy and environmental problems by remembering a little thermodynamics, by understanding a little about the nature of oil vs that of, say, sunlight or wind, and by noting rates of consumption of finite resources, and in particular, the effect that increases in those rates over time has on the depletion of the resource.
The third law of thermodynamics tells us, basically, that we don't get anything for free. Any time you do any kind of work, including converting from one form of energy to another, you always lose. And, what's important about oil is that it is a highly concentrated form of energy. Oil contains energy that the sun delivered over many millions of years. Sunlight, by contrast, is relatively "thin," energy-wise, and difficult to harvest efficiently for practical use.
Regarding rates of depletion, if someone tells you that we have 200 years worth of coal, they ALWAYS mean 200 years at current consumption rates. If growth in the rate occurs at a moderate 3%/year, that 200 years really translates to about 64. Now, consider that by switching from gasoline to, say, coal, the initial 200 years might really be halved, which means we're really talking about 45 years. From 200 to 45 in just a few simple steps -- that's what's important here.
To begin an analysis of hydrogen fuel viability, we should try to figure out our real energy requirements. Since hydrogen fuel cells mainly target highway transportation, we'll start there. The U.S. DOE EIA says that, in 2002, 27.3% of energy consumed in the U.S. was for transportation, representing about 26.7 quadrillion BTUs ("quads"). Of that, about 16 quads went to highway transportation (including trucks, buses, etc.) Luckily, internal combustions engines tend to be (very roughly) about 30% efficient, so our real highway transportation energy requirement is 4.8 quads. That's the energy that we would need, as a nation, to get the same work of getting people and things from one place to another on the ground, assuming 100% efficiency.
The next step is to figure out how much hydrogen we're gonna need. I've heard before that hydrogen fuel cells ultimately operate at about 50% efficiency. (Can't remember where I heard that, so sorry -- no reference. But, I think it might have been SciAm.) That means we need about 9.6 quads/year of energy stored in the form of hydrogen gas.
So, where do we get the hydrogen? We need a feedstock. The two most likely candidates currently are natural gas (using steam reformation) and water (using electrolysis). Steam reformation is somewhere around 60% efficient (on average; I've seen higher figures), which means we'd need probably close to 16 quads/year of natural gas (at least). And, remember that the U.S. currently uses upwards of 23 quads of natgas per year, and we're already finding ourselves strapped for supplies of this fuel, which is finite and a GHG producer.
The other option is electrolysis. While it looks good from the standpoint of being able to use electricity from solar, wind, nuclear or other "convenient" electrical energy sources, it pretty much sucks as far as efficiency. I think about the best you can hope for is around 50%, which means we need to find around 20 quads of electrical energy. The logistics of getting that from solar (at 10% efficiency), wind (perhaps the most promising, although logistics certainly becomes an issue) or nuclear (don't forget to consider how many additional plants we'd need, and the rate of consumption of available uranium) is left as an exercise for the reader.
Karl Has a Bad Day
Apparently there are some drawbacks to being evil. From the Washington Post:
- Several hundred people stormed the small yard of President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, yesterday afternoon, pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants.
Protesters poured out of one school bus after another, piercing an otherwise quiet, peaceful Sunday in Rove's Palisades neighborhood in Northwest, chanting, "Karl, Karl, come on out! See what the DREAM Act is all about!"
Rove obliged their first request and opened his door long enough to say, "Get off my property."
"Seems like he doesn't want to invite us in for tea," Emira Palacios quipped to the crowd.
Others chanted, "Karl Rove ain't got no soul."
The crowd then grew more aggressive, fanning around the three accessible sides of Rove's house, tracking him through the many windows, waving signs that read "Say Yes to DREAM" and pounding on the glass. At one point, Rove rushed to a window, pointed a finger and yelled something inaudible.
What the American Public is Buying
The Bushies are selling their finest fertillizer — and it's on special lately. While there is some value in what you get out of the back end of a bull, the stuff that comes out of the back end of Karl Rove is only likely to grow the deficit. But enough about the supply-side, what are people buying?
As of now, the #1 and #2 books on Amazon.com are:
#1: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
Geez! What are George W. Bush and his cronies going to do about that pesky American People?! They're ruining all the fun. Game's over in November, boys.
March 28, 2004
Education and Outsourcing
From Jared Bernstein in The American Prospect via Brad DeLong
- ... The topic was the role of education in a "knowledge economy." Greenspan's testimony offered eloquent, if conventional, wisdom leading to this punch line: "As history clearly shows, our economy is best served by full and vigorous engagement in the global economy. Consequently, we need to increase our efforts to ensure that as many of our citizens as possible have the opportunity to capture the benefits that flow from that engagement… one critical element in creating that opportunity is the provision of rigorous education and ongoing training to all members of our society." True. Education is surely critical. It's just not the only policy solution to our short- and long-term challenges -- and sometimes not even a particularly useful one.
First, the collapse of job creation in this recovery cannot plausibly be blamed on the supposed educational or skills shortcomings of our workforce. The problem isn't the lack of skilled workers; it's the lack of jobs. Don't blame the supply side for the failure of the demand side. Our most highly educated workers are having a historically tough time in the current job market. In fact, the employment rate for college graduates hit its lowest level in 25 years at the end of 2003. This trend is even more pronounced for recent college grads, whose newly minted skill sets should be most in demand. Their real wages have fallen slightly as well, both in 2002 and 2003. That doesn't sound like evidence of a skills gap. Few will disagree with my contention that more education can't help us in the short run. But what about longer-term issues? For example, a more highly educated workforce has been offered as the solution to a new problem: the offshoring of white-collar jobs. (Trotting out this argument was a main reason for the hearing.)
- When global competition was confined to manufacturing, our non-college-educated workers were placed in competition with less-skilled workers from countries with far lower wages and similar value-added. Our comparative advantage, it was argued, resided in our large relative stock of skilled workers and our greater ability to produce an increasing flow of such workers. However, some less-developed countries have been sharply increasing their own supply of skilled workers, giving offshoring trends the potential to erode our comparative advantage both in terms of stock and flow. India, for example, is adding about twice as many college graduates to its workforce per year as we are (2.5 million in India versus 1.2 million in the United States). Of these Indian graduates, over 250,000 were "engineering degree and diploma holders" in 2002, compared to 70,000 bachelor's degrees in engineering awarded here. What's more, the 2003 entering class for Indian engineers has reportedly jumped to 375,000, suggesting that the Indian population is responding to the signals of forthcoming global demand in this market. This supply shock threatens to significantly depress the earnings of skilled workers here, who enjoy a very substantial wage advantage over workers with similar skills in less-developed economies.
The education solution assumes that we can increase our skills even further, forever engaging in more highly value-added work. This, the solution implies, will rejustify existing wage differentials in a global labor market with far more skilled workers than were available to American firms just a few years ago. The plausibility of this endeavor depends on how high the bar is raised. If, as has been reported, our firms already outsource radiology, financial analysis, and programming jobs to low-wage counties, can we conclude that our displaced workers need better skill sets? The presumptive logic crumbles when we realize that such workers are already among the most highly educated in our country, if not the world. To accept the notion that they need to re-skill raises the bar for education requirements far beyond anything we've contemplated in this debate...
March 26, 2004
Libya: Proof That's Bush is Winning! Since 1998!
Brainless right-wing mouthpieces are rejoicing as Libya steps up to the plate to fight Al Qaeda. As one cheering Freeper puts it:
- Looks good, doesn't it? I'll be surprised if we get much out of him, but it does look good. Bushes' 'War on Terror' is working, no matter how the rats spin it.
Apparently, "The Bush Doctrine" is so persuasive, that it affected Libya's anti-Al-Qaeda stance before Bush even took office. In 1998, Libya became the first country to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden on charges of terrorism. This warrant may have been ignored because MI6 was working with Al Qaeda at the time. If you look at OBL's record at Interpol, you'll notice that the last — therefore, the oldest — warrant listed is attributed to "Tripoli/Libya."
Clarke puts Bush in Catch-22
Bush has a distinct advantage over Clinton when it comes to recovering from credibility gaps: people readily believe that Bush was too stupid to know better.
For example, a steady trickle of evidence suggesting that the Bush Administration ignored clear warnings of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was met with claims of ignorance. Either the warnings didn't exist, or they weren't that clear. Oh, and, no, you can't see them.
FreeRepublic — the home planet of "Freepers" — serves as a bottomless repository of strident support for everything the Bush Administration says or does. For a couple of years, this meant parrotting the party line that the FBI and CIA failed to alert the executive team of the threat, denying Bush and his staff the opportunity to respond to it.
Then came Richard Clarke.
Clarke documented strenuous efforts to get the attention of the Oval Office and the clueless, "eyes glazed over" response those efforts garnered. The frenzy of Clarke-bashing from the likes of the Freepers has caused — as do many of their frenzies — a rip in the fabric of Logic and Reason.
In an effort to prove how clued in the Bush Administration was, a Freeper posted an AP Newswire Story from July 25th, 2001. This news item features bin Laden bragging about a big surprise due in the coming weeks, and describes the U.S. reaction:
- The State Department issued a "worldwide caution"on Friday, saying U.S. citizens and interests abroad may be at risk of a terrorist attack from extremist groups. It mentioned groups with links to Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization as a possible source of a threat.
See! The Bush Administration knew everything! In fact, John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines the very next day, July 26th, 2001. Well, now we know why, but we're still left with Dan Rather's question as to why the American public wasn't similarly protected.
Black Gold
The Economist on the price of oil and China's growing appetite for it:
- That the rise in the oil price might be more than a temporary blip is best illustrated by the price of oil for future delivery. When the spot price of crude (that is, oil for immediate delivery) spiked in the past, notably on the eve of both Gulf wars, the forward price rose only slightly, mainly because the market expected the interruption to be short-lived. This time, not only is the oil price rising, but the forward price is going up sharply, too. On March 18th, the recent high, when West Texas crude rose to $37.93 a barrel, the price for delivery a year hence rose to $32.51, its highest ever.
Last week, the spot price of crude rose to its highest level (in nominal terms) since 1990. The proximate cause was an announcement in February by OPEC, the producers’ cartel, that it would cut production by 1m barrels a day from the beginning of next month. But other factors are at work, too. There have been supply problems both within and without OPEC. Some of these problems are likely to be temporary, but then analysts have been saying this for months.
OPEC’s desire to force the oil price up is almost certainly linked to the falling dollar. All crude is priced in dollars, and exports are thus worth a lot less because the dollar has plunged. Many think that this is one reason why OPEC is happy to see the oil price remain higher than its self-imposed band of $22-28. Possibly, too, Arab-dominated OPEC is rather less enthused by America’s war in the Middle East than George Bush.
If oil supplies have been tight, demand has been expanding briskly, and in China—where else?—it has been growing at a breathtaking pace. China’s rapidly growing economy will account for 40% of the 1.65m-barrels-a-day increase in demand expected this year by the International Energy Agency, according to David Fyfe, one of its analysts. Last year, China overtook Japan as the second-largest consumer of oil after America.
And then this bit from the same article about the effect of oil prices on the economy:
- Costs are rising for companies as the price of oil and other commodities goes up. In the past, this would have been inflationary: companies simply passed these higher costs on to consumers. But as Stephen King, the chief economist at HSBC, points out, that link seems to have gone, perhaps because of excess capacity at home, or because China’s increasing presence in world trade pushes the prices of manufactured goods and labour down. As a result, wholesale prices have been rising much faster than the price at which companies are able to sell their wares.
To stop profits from falling, American companies must keep a tight lid on labour costs. As Mr King puts it, shareholders have been benefiting at the expense of those who work for them (though not CEOs, of course). A prolonged rise in the price of oil and other commodities would make this problem still more acute: America’s jobless recovery is likely to stay jobless. This would eventually kill the recovery, since consumers in fear of their jobs are unlikely to carry on splurging.
March 24, 2004
DeLay Stepping Down?
Calpundit has an article claiming that rumors are spreading that Tom DeLay is planning on stepping down if indicted by the Austin grand jury investigating him.
The "Hammer" is getting the boot! Joe Bob sez check it out!
275,000 More Offshore Jobs
According to InfoWorld, 275,000 telecom jobs will be off-shored by 2008.
According to the article, Telecommunications operators will be the next group to benefit from the cost savings and enhanced services made possible by moving operations overseas, according to a new survey conducted by Deloitte Research.
More good news for Bush's economic advisers!
FundRace
Check out this link to Fund Race, a GIS website that lets you identify individual donors to all Presidential candidates by amount, ZIP and name. It's amazing. I looked up Staton and found most (all but two) gave to Bush, and for $2000 at that. I'm so embarrassed.
Crazy Nation
We have seen that obesity is emerging as the #2 killer of Americans behind smoking. (Too bad Bush is opting, er, being forced to cut CDC budgets for physical activity promotion projects...) And, childhood obesity is reaching epidemic proportions. As fat Americans age, they place a burden on the Medicare system.
Compounding this problem, baby boomers are reaching the age of Medicare dependency. These are folks who grew up with TV dinners and drive-in restaurants, and to a large degree passed this new fast-food, car culture, nurtured by corporations recognizing huge market opportunities, on to the next generation.
Yet, we fight expensive wars, in part, to protect access to cheap energy. In addition to having questionable efficacy, given escalating gasoline prices (not to mention that these higher prices still don't even come close to the true cost of gasoline), the strategy seems particularly wrong-headed because, as a recent New York Times article on the transportation bill that's now before the House of Representatives points out,
"... at a time when the nation is obsessively worrying about obesity, the bill seems to do everything it can to make sure that Americans continue sitting in their cars for as much time as possible."
Now, consider the quality of air we breath in urban areas, where sprawl reigns supreme. Consider the potential for devastating effects from anthropogenic global warming. Consider that 40,000 Americans are killed each year in car crashes -- the equivalent of upwards of some 100 jumbo jet airliner crashes each year (that's one every few days), or of more than one WTC attack each month.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. We arrive at the current insane policy by the hand of a president who passed a law increasing tax incentives for the purchase of gas-guzzling SUVs.
Oh well. I'm done with my post-commute cool down now, so I gotta change outta my bike shorts.
Oregon County Bans ALL Marriages
Check out this CNN story about Benton County, OR. The county commissioners voted to halt issuing any marriage certificates until the gay marriage issue is resolved in their state's supreme court.
"It may seem odd," Benton County Commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters in a telephone interview, but "we need to treat everyone in our county equally."
This is easily as idiotic as the Supreme Court's decision in 2000 to halt the recount because they couldn't decide on a way to rule fairly in light of the Voting Rights Act, which is another way to say "we had to kill them to save them." Under most wingnut wordings of the Anti-gay Marriage Amendment, my non-church wedding would not be recognized either.
March 22, 2004
Thought for the day
Just musing a bit, but...
Remember:
1. The Aznar government failed to protect the people of Spain from al-Qaeda terrorism (~200 dead, 11-March-2004).
2. The Aznar government lied to the people of Spain about the reasons for the war in Iraq.
3. The people of Spain voted out the Aznar government.
Compare:
1. The Bush government failed to protect the people of the United States from al-Qaeda terrorism (~3000 dead, 11-September-2001).
2. The Bush government lied to the people of the United States about the reasons for the war in Iraq.
3. Recognize a good idea when you see it, America.
Re-Defeat Bush.
Clarke Interview
I missed the interview with Richard Clarke last night on 60 minutes, but word is that it was pretty devestating:
- Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously.
"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.
"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.
[...]
Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.
For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.
Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'
"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."
Idiots.
March 19, 2004
Sadly Credible
I recall reading, about a year ago, some right-wing pro-war droolbot opining that he kinda sorta hoped that no WMD's would be found in Iraq. After all, he wrote in some vain attempt at insight, the Liberals would just claim that the WMDs were planted by the US to frame Saddam Hussein.
Well, that guy may get see both things happen. We already know that no WMDs have been found, and that the survey teams have all but packed up and left. Still, the Bush Administration keeps claiming that they still hope to find Nicole Simpson's real killer... er, I mean Saddam's WMDs. Is this a lame attempt to save face, or do they actually expect to find WMDs?
Well, the answer is the latter, if we are to believe a disturbing report from the Tehran Times, an English-language newpaper published in Iran.
- TEHRAN (Mehr News Agency) – Over the past few days, in the wake of the bombings in Karbala and the ideological disputes that delayed the signing of Iraq’s interim constitution, there have been reports that U.S. forces have unloaded a large cargo of parts for constructing long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the southern ports of Iraq.
Don't the Iranians hate the U.S.? Yes, but they hate the Iraqis even more, so it's hard to say what bias may be present in their report. The sad thing is that the Bush Administration is so deeply mired in chicanery and deceit that it's I can believe they'd pursue this pathetic ruse.
Smells like Rove...
Speaking of conservatives fighting among themselves, this from Andrew Sullivan:
- Imagine for a moment that there is a Democratic administration in the White House. Now imagine that at a time of soaring deficits and a looming social security crisis, the president endorses a huge new entitlement program for seniors, designed purely for electoral purposes. Now imagine that he deliberately low-balls the costs of this program, to the tune of something like 30 percent. Would Republicans be outraged? You bet they would. Now imagine that the official designated to provide accurate costing figures was told that if he released the real numbers, he would be fired. Now stop imagining. It appears that all this occurred in the Bush administration over the Medicare prescription drug program. The administration pressured its own officials to mislead the Congress and the public about the scope of the expenses involved.[...]
- What on earth was going on here? I thought conservatives were supposed to be responsible for conserving the country's fiscal health and honest about the costs of entitlements. I smell Rove here. He wanted a political victory. He has no principles. He doesn't give a damn about the country's fiscal health. So he lied and put pressure on others to lie. [emphasis mine]
March 18, 2004
Twilight for the Neo-cons?
Is the Republican Party becoming even more fractured than in the days when issues like abortion produced those tell-tail hairline cracks? Along one axis, we now have fiscal conservatives red in the face about budget deficits. The administration's hypocrisy (vis-a-vis when it criticizes tax-and-spend liberals) can't help. But (along a different axis) perhaps we can infer something from a piece by (interestingly enough) Pat Buchanan in The American Conservative that predicts that the days of U.S. imperialism we now kindly refer to as neo-con-dominated foreign policy may be drawing to a close.
BTW, for those interested in analyzing the emergence of neocon influence, I found Neoconservative Ideas and Foreign Policy in the Administration of George W. Bush: A German View, a paper by Patricia Greve, to be pretty interesting.
March 17, 2004
Rummy
If you haven't seen this video clip of Rummy on Face the Nation last weekend trying to spin the old "we never said Iraq was an imminent threat" line, you should check it out.
Who's gonna take the fall?
Is the Bush administration looking for a scapegoat? According to the neo-con's favorite Iraqi exile-turned-politician, convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, the answer appears to be "yes," as discussed by the Inter Press Service News Agency...
" The Telegraph reported that Chalabi merely shrugged off
accusations his group had deliberately misled the administration. 'We
are heroes in error,' he said.
'As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful,' he told
the newspaper. 'That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in
Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush
administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our
swords if he wants.'"
Or, what about Tenet? Is he offering to take the fall for Neo-con intelligence hijinx? According to a recent article from IPS, it would appear possibly so. Or, not?
Or, we could just continue with the focus shift. Who cares why we went to war. Look at how much better things are now that Saddam's gone! Or, as Jay Garner says, ...
"'Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century: they were a coaling station for the navy, and that allowed us to keep a great presence in the Pacific. That's what Iraq is for the next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence in the Middle East,' Garner added."
Powell Reassures ... Indians
Colin Powell reassured a group of Indian students that the Bush Administration was going to do nothing to ebb the flow of offshoring jobs. Read more about this in the article in today's N.Y. Times.
March 16, 2004
Anti-Elitism in the Bush Camp
I caught an article in Washington Monthly that seems to hit a nerve. Titled Creative Class War: How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy, it's an interesting read. I'm appalled by the bubba-platform ("don't vote for smart people!") that the GOP runs (and wins) on.
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You
Actually, the new documentary on Karl Rove, based on the book Bush's Brain, is not being released in theaters, but I wish that it was:
The documentary, based on the book of the same name about presidential adviser Karl Rove, had been kept tightly under wraps before making its world premiere to a packed theater at the South by Southwest film festival.
Both the book and the film depict Rove as the true brains behind the Bush administration, and practically a co-president.[...]
In interviews with Republicans and Democrats, we learn that Rove had his eye on the White House long before Bush ever did.
Rove helped Bush get elected as Texas governor in 1994 and again in 1998 before leading the charge toward the presidency in 2000. Even former Texas GOP Chairman Tom Pauken acknowledges that Bush wouldn't be president without Rove.
But Rove also helped Republicans get elected to key positions throughout the state -- and it's suggested that he doesn't simply want to beat the opposing candidates, he wants to destroy them.
"He seems to effectively rationalize and compartmentalize," said Moore, a former television correspondent who has covered Bush since his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978. "I think he is able to say to himself, `Yeah, this is maybe outside the rules, this may be wrong, this may even be illegal, but I'm doing it for the greater good of the party."'
BA and FleetBoston to pay mutual fund fine
Eliot Spitzer shoots and scores again with an enormous fine, penalty and restructuring of Bank of American and FleetBoston (both firms are merging) for mutual fund fraud. This is a big story and it's being covered by:
Where Have the U.S. Jobs Gone?
Today's lead economic story in The Globe and Mail is titled U.S. employment still weak. The report condenses and reguritates what astute readers of the Business Sections already know ... the U.S. job situation is defying all the models and is well on it's way to being 3 million jobs shy of where it should be.
March 15, 2004
Where Have You Gone, Mr. Greenspan?
In the New York Times, an article about Alan Greenspan says that he's no longer worried about the deficits or even consumer debt, now at über levels. He apparently thinks that raising (or to call a spade a spade, returning) taxes to their former rates will do more damage than the current borrowing by government or consumer.
I personally think he's off his nut. Less than ten years ago, he urged Bill Clinton to pursue tax increases to stem a wildly out of control deficit. You know, that mid-sized animal roaming outside the house. Now it's the size of an Indian elephant, and he's less worried?
The article notes that American consumers, and the world in general, are becoming "addicts" for low cost debt. How long low interest rates can continue is definitely a hedge question. Consumers won't be buying $45K SUVs if they cannot get zero-percent interest on seven year car notes, are they? Greenspan contends that Americans enjoy more sophisticated and powerful financial instruments and with these, they can handle more radioactive levels of debt. I say "hogwash!" ... debt is debt, no matter how well your reword it. If you cannot pay it back, you're in over your head. Anyone who suffered through the Great Depression will gladly explain it to you.
And many economists seem to think Greenspan is just plain wrong about this one. I'm not an economist, but I have to concur. With personal bankruptcy exploding in the Dallas area, and the jobless recovery preventing the consumer from gaining traction, this consumer debt is doing exactly what the Federal debt does ... eat away at the real buying power of the people and the government.
The energy landscape: Crude Calculations
Well, as the "energy editor," I guess my first entry oughtta be something about energy. So, I'll offer this as a level-setting lay of the energy landscape.
Smart Money published a story today that I think presents a fairly balanced view of the current oil situation. I won't provide any excerpts here, as the article really should be taken as a whole. In short, there's a very real probability that we may be witnessing the end of cheap oil. The "cheap oil" distinction is important. We'll NEVER run out of oil. There will ALWAYS be oil in the ground. The question is, at what point does it become economically infeasible to extract it. When we reach that point, the price of oil will begin to escalate dramatically. And, given the current rise in demand from not only the good ol' USA, but from China's and India's growing thirst, competition for remaining resources will be ever more intense. One might even be inclined to speculate that this sort of knowledge might lead a country to even go to war to ensure future supply, but let's not get too far out on a limb, eh?
So, is that the lay of the land? Of course not. There are all sorts of alternatives. In future posts, I'll try to cover some of these, and explain why none of them comes close to the bang-for-the-buck that our current addiction affords us.
IEA Report: Costly Gas Necessary Evil
The Globe and Mail published a story today about the International Energy Agency's report calling for much higher prices for oil and gas to stem the environmental damage caused by its use.
"We believe that oil prices in the seventies and eighties did more to reduce emissions and improve efficiency than what happened with the policies of the nineties," says Fridtjof Unander, a senior energy analyst at the IEA and the author of the report released earlier this month. Even steep pump price increases will take years to push consumers into more fuel-efficient vehicles, the IEA warns, pointing to a painfully slow path to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. "There are no quick answers to transport," Mr. Unander says.
The article contends that the only stimulus to the energy sector that reduced consumption and increased efficiency was large and long-term increases in the price of fuel. Once consumers became convinced that high prices were a permanent fixture of the economy, they adjusted their choices. The trend started with the first two oil embargos of the seventies, but reversed itself in the nineties when gas prices were kept low by the first President Bush's quid pro quo with the Saudis and Kuwaitis. The report says, in effect, that pain at the pump is the only long term way to reduce consumption.
The 18 Key States in 2004
According to an article in the Washington Post, only 18 states are in the running this year for the race to the White House. The other 32 states are essentially locked in by one side or the other, and won't affect the outcome of the election at all. As a result, both the Bush and Kerry campaigns will focus all their hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign war chests on these critical states.
The states include: Florida, West Virginia, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, New Hampshire, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Maine, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
Energy Editor
I'd like to welcome our energy editor, Lane Wimberley, to our weblog.
Lane is quite taken by energy issues and makes careful analysis of complicated oil, gas and nuclear economic issues. Look for his postings and don't think about investing in energy markets without reading them.
Taxes and Unemployment
The Washington Post says that there is no link between tax levels and unemployment:
When President Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, the unemployment rate dropped, from 6.9 to 6.1 percent, and kept falling each of the next seven years. When President Bush cut taxes in 2001, the unemployment rate rose, from 4.7 to 5.8 percent, then drifted to 6 percent last year when taxes were cut again.
It has become conventional wisdom in Washington that rising tax burdens crush labor markets. Bush castigated his political opponents last week for "that old policy of tax and spend" that would be "the enemy of job creation."
Yet an examination of historical tax levels and unemployment rates reveals no obvious correlation.
"The fact of the matter is, we have much higher rates of employment today than we did in 1954, but our level of taxation is considerably higher," said Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution. "You simply can't look at total taxation to find employment levels."
The Terrorist Have Won
On CNN this morning, Bill McCaffery was loudly declaring that "the terrorists have won" in the elections in Spain, which went against the hardline government that joined Bush's coalition.
It's certainly likely that the terror bombing had an effect on the voting populace, but not the way that the wingnut pundits are calling it. Far from joining al-Qaeda in rejecting the Aznar government, the voters rejected the Aznar government for participating in the war that 90 percent of the population opposed. The protests for the war and the protests against the bombing were striking in that so many citizens showed up in both cases, and the people responsible for these protests are so unswayed by the events. At least the Aznar government paid a price for their choice -- but so did hundreds ordinary people.
This is a warning to the Dems. in the general election -- the GOP will declare a win for Kerry to be "a win for the terrorists", which is exactly the kind of below-the-belt tactic Karl Rove is famous for. If we can't vote against Bush (or, let's all say it together, "the ... terrorists ... win") they why have an election? My guess is that is Rove's greatest wish.
Canadians Reject Bush War
This entry introduces the category for news and perspective from outside the U.S.'s "bubble".
Today in The Globe and Mail, a cover story shows that Canadians overwhelmingly think the U.S. (and President Bush in particular) lied about the capabilities of Saddam's WMD to justify an illegal war.
"Two-thirds (67 percent) of adult Canadians said they agreed with the statement that Mr. Bush 'knowingly lied to the world to justify his war with Iraq' a year ago, The Globe and Mail-CTV News poll says.
Moreover, almost three-quarters (74 percent) of the poll respondents said that the federal [Canadian] government made the correct decision by not joining the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq, the polling data show.'
Ironically, 87 percent of respondents think that the world is a better place without Saddam. Tell that to the Spanish.
March 14, 2004
Is Rove Losing his Touch?
Josh Marshall describes a political machine that isn't firing on all cylinders. Marshall lists the examples of the alienation of swing voters on the gay-bashing amendment, the undermining of the 9/11 commission, and the crass attempt by Bush to use the flag-draped coffins of the 9/11 victims to justify his failed presidency:
Taken together, these and other examples paint a picture of a White House that is going from stumble to stumble or just can’t catch a break. But when we look at each of these goofs, we can see a deeper pattern at work.
If the president had run similar ads in the 2002 election cycle, would he have caught the same flak? I doubt it.
He almost certainly would have gotten away with stiff-arming the Sept. 11 commission, too.
But something has changed. And you can see it in the reaction to the gay-marriage-ban-amendment gambit as well. For years the president has profited from a majority of the public’s gut-level belief that his motives are sound.
The simple truth is that this White House’s public credibility has atrophied dramatically over the last eight months. It can’t get away with stuff it could have managed easily less than a year ago.
The president and his advisers keep stumbling because they’ve yet to truly realize how much the ground has moved beneath their feet.
And they’ll keep stumbling along until they do.
Democracy, RIP
Someone mounted this sign at the point in Austin where three new GOP devised districts intersect before heading off for literally hundreds of miles in each direction. The sign is meant to protest the redistricting instigated by Congressional House Rep. Tom DeLay-R of Sugarland, TX over the opposition of Texas Democrats in both the State House and Senate.
Thanks go to Tom White for providing the image from the Austin American Statesman.
Introductory Post
Welcome to the Staton Jones Report. This is basically a political blog, but we're not afraid to get downright silly, and we're sure as hell not afraid of diving into the most arcane details of economic policy, even if we get those details completely wrong. Also, if you would like to post on this blog, just let Steve know and we'll add your last name onto the title ( we reserve the right to shuffle the names around to make silly acronyms ).
Also, try not to confuse me with the other Mike Jones in New York, who has a real blog that people actually read.