pre-SOTU sentiment

Dan Drezner has a fairly sincere walkback of his support for the Iraq war, in the process even apologizing to Al Gore.

Meanwhile, for John Cole, Bush changed everything, not 9/11.

The incompetence, the deceit, the disdain for the law, the pandering to the religious nuts, and the fact that Bush diehards continue to swallow everything these losers throw at them has had a far greater impact on my life and my politics than 9/11.

And Jim Henley applies Hayek to Iraq:

The article is another angle on “the knowledge problem,” something I’ve talked about since before the invasion phase of our long war with Iraq began. Applied Hayek. Society works by widely distributed information invisible to any central authority. The necessary dispersal of information severely limits the constructive coordination of society by a central authority. What’s more, attempts to centralize social direction destroy information they would require to work. Hayek explained that this was true for economic central planning, nationalized means of production. But the same phenomenon applies to transformative foreign intervention.

As we say on the internet, we’ve been over this. The only Americans who move among Iraqis are heavily armed, heavily armored, traveling in packs, ignorant of the local language. The conditions in which they contact Iraqis severely limit the kinds of things they can learn from the meetings.

I’m told these men supported Bush at one point. It seems there are not too many libertarians among the 28% who still think he’s doing a good job. (via Atrios)

never admitted--so what?

From the NY Times:

During the past two years, when Brian T. Valery was representing a Stamford drug company in connection with product liability lawsuits involving the painkiller OxyContin, William E. McGrath Jr., a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, found Mr. Valery “unduly aggressive” but never questioned his abilities.

In another case, Steven Maass, who hired Mr. Valery’s former law firm, Anderson Kill & Olick, after Mr. Maass’s electronic trading business was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, thought Mr. Valery unimpressive but chalked it up to inexperience.

“All first- and second-year attorneys are pretty terrible,” Mr. Maass wrote in a recent exchange of e-mail messages.

But it turned out that Mr. Valery, who billed roughly $300 an hour as he deposed insurance executives and coordinated the testimony of two expert witnesses from Harvard Law School, had never actually been admitted to the bar. Or, for that matter, attended law school, something that eluded his colleagues at Anderson Kill, one of Manhattan’s white-shoe law firms, not to mention the editors of journals for which he co-wrote articles on environmental law and property insurance.

. . .

In October, the firm alerted authorities in Connecticut to the misconduct, leading to Mr. Valery’s disbarment last month. Connecticut authorities debated what Mr. Dubois called the “metaphysical question” of whether they could even disbar someone who was never a lawyer and had only temporary privileges to practice in the state. They decided they could, and should, to keep other states from issuing privileges based on the faulty Connecticut credentials.

Those who monitor the legal profession say it is difficult to defend against an impostor like Mr. Valery, who appears to have lied about his education and experience through a decade of work at the firm since he began as a paralegal in 1996. Anderson Kill partners say they blame themselves for treating Mr. Valery as a “trusted employee” and for failing to corroborate what he told them.

To me, this brouhaha just highlights the silliness of the legal profession. If this guy worked as a paralegal for 10 years, he was almost certainly more qualified to do what he was doing than any first or second year associate would have been. In many cases, law school only marginally prepares a person for what they will actually do at a firm. But someone who goes to law school is endowed with a magical quality that enables them to act as a “lawyer,” doing the same things many paralegals do but getting paid more.

More of this silliness is evident when you consider that most judges have people fresh out of law school—many of them not even admitted to the bar yet—write the bulk of their opinions who get no credit or are held accountable in any way. This includes Supreme Court justices.

Lawyers who were admitted to the bar have screwed things up much worse than this imposter ever did. Much of the legal profession rests on the fiction that you need to go to law school to do legal work. This allows lawyers to maintain high barriers to entry to the profession and charge exorbitant fees. It’s a government-sanctioned monopoly that often serves clients poorly. I think some sort of deregulation is in order.

America in protest

Todd Gitlin weighs in from Sundance on a movie about the Chicago protests of 1968:

In Park City, Utah, an audience of some 1500 cheered. That was Sundance's third sold-out auditorium in a row for Chicago 10, which opened the festival out here where the crisp air ought to concentrate the mind. This morning, the Salt Lake Tribune fronted this: "'I made the movie because it was the kind of movie I wanted to go see, to mobilize the youth of this country to get out there and stop this f---ing war,' yelled filmmaker Brett Morgen."

One thing the frigid air ought to concentrate the mind on is that a majority of the people in 1968 who watched the awful Chicago riot coverage in their living rooms sided with the police who were smashing the demonstrators' heads.

But you won't learn this from the film. Nor will you learn that a bit more than two months after these stirring events, the American electorate went to the polls and chose Richard Nixon president of the United States--and he proceeded to wage that horrible war in and on Vietnam for several years, and millions of casualties, more.

It's the black magic of movies--your viscera get a workout because emotion lacks consequence. You watch the streets fill up with angry, brave, sometimes funny, sometimes creative, sometimes merely provocative crowds (and the agents provocateurs among them, well represented in Morgen's selections from the trial transcripts) without being invited to reflect on how wild confrontations backfire.

As the American public was turning against the Vietnam war, it was also revolted by the antiwar movement. And the public's acrimonious turn not only helped Richard Nixon reap the whirlwind, it helped the right win the post-war recriminations...whereupon you can flash forward to George W. Bush and his awful, unending, crackpot war.

That’s quite a fast forward. In it, you might have missed the 20 years or so in which we didn’t start any wars, and the ten years in which we waged a couple of wars that had widespread international support. That’s nothing to snort at, given our record during the past 5 years.

The reason I'm taking your time for this stroll down memory lane, in case you were wondering, is that today's antiwar movement is about to accelerate. The discipline that kept it brilliantly focused on defeating the war party in '04 and '06 finally paid off in the Democratic Congress that is just beginning to strut its stuff. It would not at all be surprising if 2007 turned out to be a big year for antiwar demonstrations. The focus will be off Congress and onto the streets. I would guess that the January 27 march in Washington will be big.

The netroots have been much savvier, if less colorful, than the '68ers. They are not inviting a backlash. Those who go to the streets now ought to tread just that carefully, too.

An objection to Gitlin’s warning: the antiwar protests in 2003 had this in common with MLK’s marches: they were nonviolent. Mainstream America in the ‘60s was unsettled by many things about the protesters then, one of which was their sometimes violent methods. From what I’ve seen, violent protests of the kind seen at Seattle in 1999 have been absent in today’s antiwar movement. The marchers I saw in 2003 were boomers with families, professionals, veterans, and yes, students as well. They looked like people you’d see on the subway—a pretty good cross-section of middle-class New York City. I don’t see this crowd clashing in the streets with police and raising fears of the dissolution of society.

Children of Men

A couple of initial reactions:

--I did not like Julianne Moore in The Vertical Hour, and this movie confirmed my opinion.

--Having a gun was no guarantee of safety; in fact, the reverse seemed to be true.

--The “post-apocalyptic” vision of the world portrayed in the movie is currently a reality in many parts of the world. Haiti, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Somalia. Except in the world we live in, the walls and fences keeping poverty and violence out are not visible in daily life and it’s easier to forget that bad things are happening now. For instance, Rwanda and Srebrenica are recent examples of situations which were much worse than those depicted in the film.

--It was riveting.

Haitian blues

Haiti is on the doorstep of the U.S. and is one of the most messed-up countries in the world.

Haiti was judged by Transparency International as the most corrupt country in the world in 2006. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has one of the highest levels of poverty outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Armed gangs run the country. Politically-motivated killings are often indistinguishable from organized crime or random violence. Recently, vigilante killings have emerged as a response to the lack of government-enforced security. This has been a phenomenon seen in troubled parts of Latin America and often leads to serious human rights abuses. Waves of refugees have periodically washed onto U.S. shores since the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier in 1986. The U.S. has a long history of involvement in Haitian politics, and invaded the country a couple times in the 20^th Century. Some less savory characters in Haitian politics have found their way onto the CIA’s payroll.

But since Haiti is poor and black, and since Haitian communities in the U.S. have not managed to accumulate political clout the way some other immigrant communities have, Haitian refugees and asylum-seekers are routinely deported back into the maelstrom to fend for themselves.

Some Haitian-Americans have lived their entire lives in the U.S., but had the misfortune to be born in Haiti instead of in the U.S. like their younger siblings, and find themselves in middle age being sent back to a country they don’t know anything about. There they are targeted for being (relatively) wealthy, for being American (Haitians are unhappy with the U.S.’s recent roll in exiling Aristide), and often are scapegoats for anti-crime public sentiment.

The U.S. is famous for stirring up trouble in its backyard and then ignoring the human consequences, but it has perfected this technique in Haiti.

border games

Some enterprising Americans have filmed a cross-border game of volleyball, played with the border wall as the net. Video here (click on "Walleyball").

Contra Ezra, I don’t think this sport is in danger of taking off anytime soon.

on a different note . . .

Watching American Idol tonight was a distressing experience, apart from the reasons you might think. This will come as no surprise to people who’ve seen the show, but many of the contestants were just terrible, but had absolutely no idea they sucked. And they were not just kind of bad—they were embarrassing. They made you want to hide your head under the pillow like you’re about to witness Borat do something heinous to an unsuspecting bigot. Some of these terrible singers had family, friends, and coworkers so confident in their loved one’s abilities that they traveled great distances to the audition to lend their support.

Now with some of the borderline singers who I thought could have gone one way or the other, one of the judges (invariably Randy or Simon) would lead the pack, laying down a marker—“this is crappy” or “this is good stuff”—and the others would follow their lead. I’m almost certain in a couple of cases that if the leader had laid down the opposite marker, the others would have followed. So a good amount of this was subjective. You judge talent by how people around you judge it. Once a singer gets positive feedback, they grow more confident and sing better, gaining more praise and confidence, and so forth.

But for some, the positive feedback loop had gone awry. Someone should have introduced some negative feedback into the loop at some point to derail that particular misguided ambition into a more productive pursuit, like banking or driving a bus.

And it made me think . . . God help me, what if I’m like that, too? What if I’m not all that great at what I do for a living, or what I do for fun, and no one can muster up the nerve to tell me? Or what if, compared to my family and friends who don’t share my occupation or particular interests, I’m relatively good but really bad compared to others who do what I do? It stands to reason that there are any number of people who go about their daily lives, convinced that they are pretty good at what they do, when in reality they are mediocre at best. Or maybe most people don’t think of their work or hobbies in those terms. I don’t know, but staring into this Idol-induced existential abyss was fairly unnerving. Thank God there are not four bored and snarky (or drunk) middle-aged adjudicators waiting to validate or destroy my hopes and dreams based on a thirty-second sample of the best a capella legal analysis I can summon up. I don’t know if I could handle the verdict.

"declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism"

MLK fought against not only racism, but also poverty and violence. His entire movement was predicated on the principle of nonviolence. If, at a march in which he was participating, his fellow demonstrators resorted to violence, he would withdraw. His adherence to these principles led him to denounce the Vietnam war long before this was a mainstream position. For his troubles, he received sharp criticism in the national press and from liberals. His criticism of Vietnam was viewed by many as a diversion from the civil rights battle. He did not see it that way; to him, poverty, racism, and militarism worked in tandem to subjugate people in the U.S. and abroad, and as he famously put it, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." His words delivered in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was murdered in Memphis, are more relevant today than ever.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

. . .

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

. . .

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

. . .

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Hat tip: Jesus' General.

Update: Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

King and other leaders of the civil rights movement apparently took their Christianity more seriously than a lot of people do, however, and, following in part in the political example of Gandhi, set out on a different path. A path that, seemingly, actually generates much more success than do strategies of violent insurgency. Nevertheless, you tend to see all around the world on both sides of various issues, a tendency to massively overstate the utility of force.

I've heard Noah Feldman say that if the Palestinians took to the streets in large scale nonviolent demonstrations, they would attain their goals fairly quickly with the world on their side. We as a nation, however, are not willing to use nonviolence as an organizing principle of foreign policy. So far, we've not suffered much for our willingness to use violence since we're the biggest kid on the block and have been for the past 60 years. But that may not always be the case. Sooner or later, we'd be well advised to revisit the reasons for the success of Dr. King's movement.

Tears of the Black Tiger

The gayest Thai western you’ve never seen has finally made it to the U.S. It only took 7 years. More like this one, please.

God Grew Tired of Us

Tonight I went to the premier of the new documentary God Grew Tired of Us. The film follows a group of “Lost Boys” of Sudan who had made their way on foot across 1,000 miles of the Sahara to a refugee camp in Kenya, and then were stuck there for about ten years.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

Young black Sudanese boys were targeted for slaughter in Sudan’s civil war in 1987, causing some 27,000 of them to flee across the desert. Young boys suddenly became caretakers for even younger boys. Thousands died of disease or starvation. Roughly 12,000 eventually made their way to Kenya were they lived without family, unable to return to their wartorn homes, with barely enough food to survive on and no material possessions to speak of. Some two million people died in the war.

From Wikipedia:

Most of the boys were orphaned or separated from their families when government troops systematically attacked villages in southern Sudan killing many of the inhabitants, most of whom were civilians. The younger boys survived in large numbers because they were away tending herds or were able to escape into the nearby jungles. Orphaned and with no support, they would make epic journeys lasting years across the borders to international relief camps in Ethiopia and Kenya evading thirst, starvation, wild animals, insects, disease, and one of the most bloody wars of the 20th century. Examiners say they are the most badly war-traumatised children ever examined.

When villages were attacked, girls were raped, killed, taken as slaves to the north, or became servants or adopted children for other Sudanese families. As a result, relatively few girls made it to the refugee camps.

In 2001, several thousand Lost Boys—now men almost 15 years after first fleeing Sudan—were resettled in the United States. The movie follows three in particular who appeared to be in their twenties.

While the opening scenes of the movie in Africa were heart-rending, the men’s arrival in the U.S. showed in stark contrast the differences in daily life between impoverished Africa and the U.S. The men had never before used electricity. They did not know what a shower was. They had to be shown how to turn on and off the light switches and how to use the toilet. The concept of pre-cooked, pre-packaged food had to be explained. Seeing how they reacted to their new surroundings reminded me of Doug Bruce, the title character in the documentary Unknown White Male about a man who experiences total amnesia, not only forgetting details of his personal history, but also forgetting things like the ocean and Star Wars. The Lost Boys’ sense of newness and wonder was profound and encouraging, especially when contrasted with the horror and depravation of their past.

The men followed by the filmmaker soon got jobs and began sending everything they could not only back to their families, for those who had managed to locate them, but also to their “families” back at the refugee camp, their brothers in suffering. One Lost Boy was about to enroll in a community college but then got word for the first time in 15 years that his family was alive. He dropped his plans and started working three jobs in order to support his family.

The Lost Boys experienced loneliness and alienation from their new society. One, speaking of his “brothers” left behind in Kenya, asked “why me and not them?” Why had he been so fortunate while they continued to suffer? He spoke of how he’d been thrust into a position of responsibility at age 13, leading others and burying the dead.

The Lost Boys began organizing to help each other and network. Some began advocating for action to stop the killing in Sudan. In Syracuse, NY, they staged a march symbolizing their trek across the desert to raise awareness of the conflict in Sudan. One Lost Boy spoke at a packed church and asked for help for his compatriots back home.

Director Christopher Quinn, George Biddle of the International Rescue Committee, and one of the Lost Boys (whose name escapes me) were present after the screening to answer questions. Quinn said he’d been inspired to make the film after learning about the genocide in Rwanda and how no one did anything to stop it. A man from Sierra Leone in the audience asked about the causes of the conflict. I asked them what kind of impact the advocacy efforts of the Lost Boys in the U.S. had on the involvement of the U.S. government in the peace settlement nearly two years ago. Biddle said that U.S. participation in the negotiations was primarily attributable to pressure on the administration from U.S. churches. He said that the government had sent good people like John Danforth to the talks, and that it had been helpful to have a human face close to home to represent the issue to the public. He worried that the peace in Sudan could be lost again due to neglect from the international community, and described the delicate line his organization walked in drawing attention to the crisis in Darfur without jeopardizing gains elsewhere in Sudan. I think it’s fascinating that an unintended consequence of bringing the Lost Boys to the U.S. may have been to help end the conflict there (if somewhat incompletely). One thing is clear about our political system: nothing puts a foreign policy issue on the government’s radar like a domestic constituency making a stink about it.

Now that I think about it, the men I saw at the Day for Darfur rally in Central Park (bottom photo) were probably Lost Boys.

When the Lost Boy at the screening told the audience he had received his U.S. citizenship last year, the crowd broke into applause. This bothered me a bit for reasons that are complicated, but it’s true that U.S. citizenship in his case is a golden ticket, likely meaning financial stability and the ability to bring his family here, if he can find them.

This movie shook me on a core level. Knowing about extreme suffering on an intellectual level is not the same as seeing it unfold and watching how lives are shattered by needless conflict and blinding poverty. It’s like the pictures of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib; there’ve been much worse abuses documented—including torture and murder—but they have not registered in the national consciousness because there weren’t any pictures. I hope this movie gives the conflict in Sudan visibility it would not have otherwise had, and opens up people’s minds to the idea that we should be more involved in bringing peace to the region.

newsflash: lawyers represent unpopular clients

In the NY Times tonight: (link generator doesn’t seem to be working again)

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

. . .

In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the American Bar Association, said: “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”

Memo to Stimson: it’s not 2003 anymore. It’s not in the political interests of the administration to shed any more light on what is happening in Guantanamo, as the government continues to hold hundreds of people without charges and continues to release detainees with no charges filed. This new publicity may rile up the GOP base, but it will alienate others—including lawyers in the DOJ and the military who will be carrying forward these prosecutions after Bush leaves office. In addition, attacking the bar in this way will not endear the executive branch to the judges who will be ruling on the constitutionality of the trials of detainees moving forward.

In fact, it sounds like Stimson was acting alone on this:

In an interview on Friday, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said he had no problem with the current system of representation. “Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases,” he said.

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had any official comment, but officials sought to distance themselves from Mr. Stimson’s view. His comments “do not represent the views of the Defense Department or the thinking of its leadership,” a senior Pentagon official said.

. . .

The role of major law firms agreeing to take on the cases of Guantánamo prisoners challenging their detentions in federal courts has hardly been a secret and has been the subject of many news articles that have generally cast their efforts in a favorable light.

The idea that these law firms are somehow being “exposed” through this FOIA request is ludicrous. Pro bono efforts undertaken by law firms are primarily calculated to do two things: keep overworked associates happy and get good p.r. for the firm. Corporate law firms are extremely lucrative businesses, and nothing is done without an eye on the bottom line. Every hour a mid-level associate spends on something other than a paying client, the firm loses hundreds of dollars. If firms did not think pro bono representation of Guantanamo detainees would be good for them, they would not do it.

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

That is simply one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard and doesn’t even merit a response.

This game that administration officials like to play, hand in glove with the conservative noise machine, is getting very tired. I am looking forward to the day in January 2009 when executive agencies can get back to the business of governing instead of playing political games that cheapen the government they represent.

containment, the sequel

Zvika Krieger points us to Ian Shapiro’s recent suggestion of a better way to proceed in the Middle East:

America needs a post-occupation strategy for Iraq and the Middle East, one grounded in a viable national security strategy for the twenty-first century. That strategy is containment.

. . .

Containment’s goal was to prevent Soviet expansion without saddling the US with unsustainable military obligations. So long as the USSR did not stage a military attack, containment’s reliance on economic sticks and carrots, competition within the world communist movement, intelligence and diplomacy, and promoting the vitality of the capitalist democracies would guarantee security. Kennan was right: the dysfunctional features of Soviet system, and its over-extension internationally, would lead to its demise.

Shapiro argues that a similar strategy has already worked with Libya, and could work if applied to the Middle East more broadly.

Krieger sums up:

So there are two lessons from the Cold War: We only hurt ourselves by intervening, and that we will only have the confidence not to intervene when we acknowledge that there is little direct threat to American security. We can't use the abstract threat of "terrorism" to justify hasty and aggressive action in the Middle East anymore. We have to recapture that Cold War confidence that authoritarian states will collapse as a result of their own dysfunction, and that "the best way to spread democracy is to demonstrate its superiority" rather than "ramming [it] down people’s throats."

While this certainly would be a better foreign policy framework than the thuggish, incoherent approach favored thus far by the administration, I’m not sure how applicable it is today. Shapiro is much more an expert on containment than I am, but I’m not convinced his interpretation of containment would be accepted by conservatives (or even liberal hawks) now. One narrative of the Cold War goes like this: we or our proxies fought the communists in Vietnam, Angola, Guatemala, South America, and elsewhere so that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, Mexico, or the U.S. Only by keeping a series of small, “hot” wars going to put pressure on the USSR were we able to stem its expansionist tendencies, ramp up its military expenditures, and eventually force it to implode. Just sitting around waiting for the USSR to collapse on its own wouldn’t work—we had to actively fight at the periphery while taking care not to provoke the center too much.

Someone who subscribes to this retelling of the Cold War is not going to be persuaded by Shapiro’s argument that in order to reprise our success against the Soviet Union with our enemies today, we need to withdraw from Iraq and forge a solution in Israel/Palestine. Even if Shapiro’s version of containment is closer to Kennan’s original vision than what our Cold War policy later became.

But the story of containment is a compelling one, and Americans know that it basically worked. If the doctrine can be resurrected for use and retooled for our circumstances today, it could be a useful way of framing what in essence would be a new foreign policy of “don’t go around blowing shit up for no good reason.”

Iraq surge reaction round-up

Iraq, circa 1970, from the inimitable General JC Christian.

Matt Yglesias sums up:

So to sum up, neither the American military nor the American congress nor the American people nor the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi public wants an American military escalation. Naturally, we're getting one.

Via Andrew Sullivan, John Derbyshire points to a tiny flaw in the President's otherwise airtight plan:

So-o-o-o:

—-We can't leave Iraq without a victory.

—-Unless Maliki & Co. get their act together, we can't achieve victory.

—-If Maliki & Co. don't get their act together, we'll leave.

It's been a while since I studied classical logic, but it seems to me that this syllogism leaks like a sieve.

Next comes news this morning that we have attacked the Iranian consulate in Northern Iraq and taken the employees prisoner. WTF?

And now we’re in the process of getting embroiled in a fight with a third insurgency and creating yet another refugee crisis in Somalia? Is this really happening?

Meanwhile, Steve Clemons takes note of some ominous rumors:

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

Steve also quotes possible Republican presidential candidate Senator Hagel’s thoughts on the President’s speech:

I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out. I will resist it -- (interrupted by applause.)

As others have said better than I, indeed.

And finally, from Brad DeLong, does George Bush have the mental and emotional maturity of a 14 year old or of a 3 year old? The adolescent vs. toddler debate rages on.

hard-core liberal

Well, this should come as no surprise, but according to this test (via Andrew Sullivan), I'm a hard-core liberal.

Some of the definitions in this test seemed suspect. For instance, the authors say you are a populist if you “believe that your standards of morality & safety should be enforced by government.”

But if I were a populist under that definition then I would want things like government subsidies for zero-emission cars, higher gas taxes, more gun control, and government-funded universal health care. To me, these are issues of morality and safety. And I do, in fact, want these standards of morality and safety to be enforced by the government. So how am I not a populist? I think the authors of this test use a political shorthand that is convenient but not particularly accurate in many instances.

Also, in what universe do hard-core conservatives strongly support the right of illegal citizens to earn citizenship?

That said, I will agree that in the end they tagged me right.

fear of death

Jay Dixit raises some interesting issues in this Psychology Today article [via Andrew Sullivan], but I’m not sure I’m fully on board.

[on p. 3 of the online article:]

Psychologists Mark Landau of the University of Arizona and Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore sought to explain how President Bush's approval rating went from around 51 percent before 9/11 to 90 percent immediately afterward. In one study, they exposed some participants to the letters WTC or the numbers 9/11 in an image flashed too quickly to register at the conscious level. They exposed other participants to familiar but random combinations of letters and numbers, such as area codes. Then they gave them words like coff__, sk_ll, and gr_ve, and asked them to fill in the blanks. People who'd seen random combinations were more likely to fill in coffee, skill, and grove. But people exposed to subliminal terrorism primes more often filled in coffin, skull, and grave. "The mere mention of September 11 or WTC is the same as reminding Americans of death," explains Solomon.

As a follow-up, Solomon primed one group of subjects to think about death, a state of mind called "mortality salience." A second group was primed to think about 9/11. And a third was induced to think about pain—something unpleasant but non-deadly. When people were in a benign state of mind, they tended to oppose Bush and his policies in Iraq. But after thinking about either death or 9/11, they tended to favor him. Such findings were further corroborated by Cornell sociologist Robert Willer, who found that whenever the color-coded terror alert level was raised, support for Bush increased significantly, not only on domestic security but also in unrelated domains, such as the economy.

. . .

Cinnamon Stillwell and others in the 911 Neocons didn't become more liberal. Like so many other Democrats after 9/11, they made a hard right turn. The reason thoughts of death make people more conservative, Jost says, is that they awaken a deep desire to see the world as fair and just, to believe that people get what they deserve, and to accept the existing social order as valid, rather than in need of change. When these natural desires are primed by thoughts of death and a barrage of mortal fear, people gravitate toward conservatism because it's more certain about the answers it provides—right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, us vs. them—and because conservative leaders are more likely to advocate a return to traditional values, allowing people to stick with what's familiar and known. "Conservatism is a more black and white ideology than liberalism," explains Jost. "It emphasizes tradition and authority, which are reassuring during periods of threat."

. . .

[on p. 5:]

Following 9/11, most lifelong liberals did not go through outright conversion or shift their preferred candidate. Yet many liberals who didn't become all-out conservatives found themselves nonetheless sympathizing more with conservative positions, craving the comfort of a strong leader, or feeling the need to punish or avenge. Many in the political center moved to the right, too. In aggregate, over an electorate of millions—a large proportion of whom were swing voters waiting to be swayed one way or the other—even a subtle shift was enough to tip the balance of the Presidential election, and the direction the country took for years. "Without 9/11 we would have a different president," says Solomon. "I would even say that the Osama bin Laden tape that was released the Thursday before the election was sufficient to swing the election. It was basically a giant mortality salience induction."

I don’t know if I buy the generally negative characterizations of conservatives summarized in this article, which just happen to be teased out by academic psychologists, a group that represents the convergence of two of the most reliably liberal groups in the country. In particular, I don’t understand the reasoning behind the following assertion:

The reason thoughts of death make people more conservative, Jost says, is that they awaken a deep desire to see the world as fair and just, to believe that people get what they deserve, and to accept the existing social order as valid, rather than in need of change.

Thoughts of death don’t make me more conservative—they generally affirm my existing liberal beliefs. Also, what does “conservative” really mean in this context? Is someone who wants to preserve the natural environment in order to maintain social and economic stability conservative or liberal? If we are fortunate enough to pass through our current fascination with terrorism without significant and lasting damage to our society, and fear of terrorists (which translates to fear of fear, really) is left behind as readily as fear of anarchists was 80 or 90 years ago, there are other problems that could inspire possibly much more credible fear of death than terrorism, which people in Western countries thus far have a very low probability of falling victim to. I’m thinking, in particular, of a global pandemic, global warming, or the consequences of a worldwide societal breakdown due to some combination of the two. Or even nuclear devastation due to good, old-fashioned interstate conflict.

These reasons to fear death are familiar to liberals, but I don’t think they necessarily cause liberals to sympathize more with conservative positions, crave the comfort of a strong leader, or feel the need to punish or avenge. Neither, by and large, do these fears “awaken a deep desire to see the world as fair and just, to believe that people get what they deserve, and to accept the existing social order as valid, rather than in need of change.” I think this theory needs a little more work.

bad movies of 2006

My brother and I are not the only ones who thought the new Superman movie really sucked. John Cole agreed:

Tried to watch Superman Returns last night, and despite really looking forward to seeing it, I couldn’t even finish it.

It sucked in more ways than I thought possible. If this movie were a war, it would be Iraq. If this movie were a religious leader, it would be Ted Haggard. If it were a blogger, it would be Dan Riehl.

That is how bad I thought it was.

[More specifically targeted railing against the movie follows.]

Rather than giving this movie two thumbs down, I instead choose to give it the finger. This movie was clearly made to make the Hulk remake revival look good by comparison. Don’t buy it. Don’t rent it. Don’t watch it. And if anyone tells you it was good, remember their names and ignore their movie advice in the future.

I’m not in a position to offer much criticism of the movie myself since I walked out after about 40 minutes. This was longer than I watched the abomination called Brick, which I will not refrain from defaming in detail even though I (thankfully) only gained a passing acquaintance with its annoying characters and so-called plot.

Matt Yglesias, whose opinions I respect on matters of foreign policy but no longer on film, named it as one of his favorites of 2006. I railed against it briefly in comments and was met with slightly bewildered dismissal from other commenters:

[T]o whomever called Brick "viscerally offensive" after walking out 30 minutes into it: the first reel of that movie is intentionally confusing for a few reasons--most having to do with the unique neo-noir dialogue of the film [note: having experienced it myself, I can only interpret the phrase “unique neo-noir dialogue” in the context of Brick to mean “the fakest, least coherent, least plausible, most irritating cracked-out pretentious pseudo-urban wanky dribblings ever wanked into existence by a pimply high-school sophomore], but also as a result of simply being dropped into the middle of a mystery which requires the rest of the movie to solve. After you get used to the language/world of Brick, it becomes rather compelling, maybe even impressive. To me, at least. I bet if you gave it a shot on DVD, you'd change your opinion.

And

Yeah, how can you possible develop an accurate opinion of Brick after 30 minutes? I mean I don't think you'd have even seen The Pin yet.

To which I replied:

As for Brick, I understood what they were saying, I just didn't like it. If I'd stayed longer than 30 minutes, I'm afraid I would have had to gouge my eyes out and run down Houston Street into oncoming traffic until my skull was mercifully crushed by the grill of a Mack truck. Every minute that passed as I sat in that theater, I could feel more of my soul seeping out through my pores. So no, I don't think seeing more of the movie would change my opinion. But I guess I'll never know for sure.

The only way I could see myself enjoying the movie is if everyone in it died horrible deaths at minute 31:00 and the film ended early, its awful work accomplished, having exhausted in a mere half hour all the ways in which a movie can torture and exasperate its viewers, and then my enjoyment would only have been derived from relief at not having to endure the remaining time typically allotted to a film. But no, I see that the film ran a standard 110 minutes. Given that I left when I did, I think I enjoyed it as much as I possibly could have.

That said, I’ve certainly enjoyed not enjoying it!

On a brighter note, my favorite 10 films of 2006 were, in no particular order: Inside Man, Casino Royale, Strangers With Candy, Inconvenient Truth, Borat, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Jackass 2, Volver, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Departed.

Since I didn’t see Pan’s Labyrinth until this year, I won’t include it in this list, but if I did, it would be at the top of the list.

wages of war

A NY Times article today follows up the families of the children killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad in July 2005. U.S. soldiers had been distributing candy to the children when the bomber struck, killing 34 of them.

In the seconds after the explosion, the world narrowed to one child for Sattar Hashim, a 39-year-old security guard whose son had gone out to see the American patrol. Mr. Hashim moved frantically through the wreckage, just outside his front gate, a scene now burned into his memory. He found his son unconscious, his body torn by shrapnel.

“I pray to God that no one in this world will ever have to face such a scene,” he said, remembering the scene as he sat in his sparely furnished living room with the curtains drawn. “As if they had been scattered on the ground. Legs. Arms. Heads. Bodies still burning.”

His son died in a hospital operating room several hours after the explosion.

Suicide bombings often stop clocks nearby, throwing the delicate mechanisms out of balance. The minute hand freezes the moment that the bomber detonates, and cleanup crews find clocks hanging crookedly on walls hours later, with the moment of loss fixed forever on the clocks’ faces.

For the parents in Naariya, the clocks are frozen at a quarter after 10. The deaths that morning tore a hole in the life of the block, and more than a year later, many people have been unable to put their lives back together. Some have drifted away from their spouses. Others changed jobs or stopped going to work altogether. Reminders of the loss were everywhere: Class sizes were smaller. Soccer tournaments for 12-year-olds stopped. Bug collecting was no longer a hobby.

The pain caused strange things to happen. Mr. Yaseen lost his knack for numbers and found himself fumbling in front of customers at the hardware store where he had worked for years. Eventually, he quit. Reading and writing became difficult for Zahra Hussein, the mother of 11-year-old Hamza. She had lost her ability to concentrate and some of her eyesight.

. . .

A constant theme of the war for Iraqis has been their complete lack of control over chaotic, life-changing events. Like victims of a car wreck on an empty highway, they sit in pain and hope that help will come along.

Mr. Yaseen is haunted by the helplessness he felt that morning when he found his younger son, Ali, still alive. He was badly burned and missing his feet.

“I said to myself — two feet, it is nothing,” he said. But within several hours the child was dead.

“I did not have the ability to do anything for him,” Mr. Yaseen said. “To save him.”

. . .

“I’m like a dead man,” said Mr. Yaseen, crying into his hands. “I have no ambitions. I have no goals in life. I have lost everything.”

His wife and daughter have moved out, and he has retreated into his apartment, a 12-foot by 14-foot room. He stopped shaving. The room is now piled with baskets of laundry, old children’s toys and a metal bassinet.

“I live in this room,” he said. “I sleep in this room. I eat in this room. This is my whole life. As if I’m in prison.”

This is the face of the war we have brought to Iraq. Whatever we in the U.S. end up doing next there, however and whenever we decide to leave, and however we end up telling ourselves the story of Iraq, it has been and will be overwhelmingly Iraqis who suffer the consequences of our invasion.

savages

Andrew Sullivan makes a good point:

A classic from Dean Barnett at the Hewitt blog:

There is a deep undercurrent of savagery in the Iraqi culture that will not just inhibit the growth of a peaceful democracy there, but probably prohibit it. The only answer, as it always has been, is to stamp out that savagery ferociously and totally.

That is, simply put, retarded. Sullivan's response:

I'm struck by how many on the hard right believe that more violence, and more brutal violence, is what is needed in Iraq. According to their logic, we defeat savagery with savagery and torture with torture. At home, we defend the rule of law by suspending the rule of law and we protect freedom by suspending freedom. And at the end of this cycle of revenge and violence?

prehistoric sci-fi

Via Brad DeLong, Robert Seeberger speculates on what Sci-Fi would be for an early hunter/gatherer:

"As you know, Throgette," said Throg son of Throg son of Throg, "these new flint deposits allow us to make 147% more hand-axes from each flint core. That will be a great help in butchering the mastadon carcasses and preparing for the winter. If only we could build fires on a large enough scale to make the cold of the winter less deep."

"Build enough fires to warm the whole world? There will never be enough people to build enough fires to warm the world by even 1/212 of the difference between the coldness of ice and the hotness of the cloud that comes when you forget and leave the water-pot on the fire too long!"

Or:

"But we can dream dreams. Someday, in the far future, there will be not hundreds of people but hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of hundreds!"

"No."

"And they will acknowledge the leadership of one man--a man from the hot country of the Permian Basin."

"That's just not credible. There's so little water there. Anyone who voluntarily lived there would automatically disqualify himself from leadership by virtue of obvious stupidiy."

"And he will believe that changes in the kinds of plants and animals come about not because of mutation, resulting variation, and natural selection but because they are impelled to do so by the guidance of a Great Spirit!"

"Now you've gone too far--over into complete fantasy."

sadly, i am not the Walrus

Via Jim Henley and Patrick Lang, the mysterious Walrus has some predictions for our adventure in Iraq:

So anyway they are now confronted with a mess - and as the Kagan powerpoint presentation points out, failure will be cataclysmic.

Of course what they really mean is that failure will be cataclysmic for them and their backers.

If America backs out of the middle east leaving Iran intact, the following will happen:

1. Iran is now the recognised regional power in the Middle East and will have a very large say in dictating what happens to the remains of Iraq.

2. Israel will be faced with the need to make some form of accomodation with the Islamic powers in the region.

3. Successive Congresses will bind the President and the military industrial complex hand and foot to prevent a repeat of this folly.

4. Right wing thinktanks and their associated pundits will be discredited.

5. Congress will have to reform taxation to pay for the war (remember when Iraqi Oil revenue was supposed to cover the cost of all this?)

6. A decade of soul searching and reform about the electoral system, the media, campaign finance, lobbying and similar issues will occur - sharply reducing the powers of the current ruling class to manipulate Americans so easily.

In other words, for Bush and his friends, defeat really is "unthinkable", just as it was to Kaiser Wilhelm when Wilson proposed a "victorless Peace" to Germany in 1917. Unless there is victory, the entire NeoCon world gets swept away, as do the Likudniks.

For that reason, expect a savage campaign to clear Baghdad of insurgents - which will fail with the loss of a great deal of American and Iraqi blood, followed by an all out bombing attack on Iran.

For the NeoCons, there is no other choice available to them, that is the tragedy.

Henley nitpicks that the conservative establishment shouldn’t get off so easily:

[A] handful of mostly Jewish and Catholic east coast writers and professors were never going to make the Republican Party do anything it didn’t want to do. The tune was always going to be high military spending, control of oil production and exaggerating foreign threats for domestic political advantage. The neocons just provided some lyrics.

I agree. Also, I’d say that 1 and 4 on the Walrus’ list have happened already, even if the administration and its supporters haven’t realized it yet. 3, 5, and 6 are more touch and go. I’d like to believe those things would happen, but if they didn’t demonstrably happen after Vietnam, why now? Compared to Vietnam, Iraq has been a masterpiece of targeted diplomacy and precise, restrained force. Also, so far in Iraq 1/20 the number of U.S. troops have died that did in Vietnam.

I agree with the basic premise, though, which is that defeat in Iraq (or, more sensibly phrased, “ending the carnage”) will be very bad for the conservative establishment. But it also should be obvious by now that digging in further will only make things worse for them in the end. So why press forward when ever-decreasing returns and increasing costs seem inevitable?

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’d say it’s because the costs of continuing the war—as perceived by the administration and its ever-dwindling supporters—have not yet become greater than the costs of ending the war. In reality, as for LBJ and the Democratic establishment in 1967-68, the war has already cost the administration more than it realizes. So far, it has cost the party control of Congress. Next the White House. At least in the public eye, the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war is pretty thoroughly discredited, as is a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy more generally. On the domestic front, many of the gains of the Republican Revolution of the ‘90s are now at risk.

But Bush plows ahead anyway, seemingly unaware of the consequences. Matt Yglesias cites Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon’s recent Foreign Policy article to help explain why:

Imagine, for example, the choice between:

Option A: A sure loss of $890

Option B: A 90 percent chance to lose $1,000 and a 10 percent chance to lose nothing.

In this situation, a large majority of decision makers will prefer the gamble in Option B, even though the other choice is statistically superior. People prefer to avoid a certain loss in favor of a potential loss, even if they risk losing significantly more. When things are going badly in a conflict, the aversion to cutting one’s losses, often compounded by wishful thinking, is likely to dominate the calculus of the losing side. This brew of psychological factors tends to cause conflicts to endure long beyond the point where a reasonable observer would see the outcome as a near certainty.

I hope that the administration will realize how much the conservative movement stands to lose before it decides to escalate the conflict, and instead decides to back down. But the evidence so far points the other way, and Bush is really only focused on shoring up his cherished legacy in the next two years until he retires—he either doesn’t understand the political consequences for the GOP or doesn’t really care. I don’t think Bush will bomb Iran because then he would probably be impeached. Since he personally stands to lose if he starts another war for no good reason, I don’t think he’ll do it.

A simpler way to put it is we have a man-child in charge who is hopelessly out of his depth and no one is able to stop him from making things worse.

immigration follies

The WaPo reports on the continuing mess that constitutes our immigration system:

As the White House and Congress prepare to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, U.S. officials have concluded that they lack the technology and resources to handle the millions of applications for legal residency that could result from the changes and that several efforts to modernize computers have gone astray.

Immigration officials have said for years that it is critical to update an antiquated, paper-based application process before the government grants a new path to citizenship for as many as 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States or creates a temporary-worker program, as senators and the Bush administration propose.

But in recent months, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials have determined that the troubled, $2-billion-a-year agency is unable to effectively manage its existing work, much less a flood of new applications.

The immigration system works well for neither citizens nor immigrants. This much has been clear since the student visas of two 9/11 hijackers were approved by the INS in March 2002. It is becoming clear that the reforms that were supposed to fix the system have instead fallen victim to the general atmosphere of failure.

Many legal immigrants already face years-long waits when they apply for green cards, often a first step toward obtaining citizenship. Another 100,000 names submitted to the FBI for background checks have been on hold for a year or more. Congressional auditors recently reported that 14 immigration offices had lost track of 111,000 files as of July.

Well, technically, it is not true that legal immigrants apply for green cards, since a person is not a legal immigrant until they actually receive a green card. A green card is evidence of a person’s legal permanent resident, or legal immigrant, status. But it is true that there are routine waits of 10 years or more for a green card in some immigrant categories. Getting information about a pending case from USCIS is a daunting challenge even for experienced immigration attorneys, much less people who are new to the country and have limited resources. USCIS generally has two modes of operation: sheer incompetence (i.e. losing files constantly, approving visas for dead terrorists, upgrading the website in such a way as to make any Google search on most topics useless) and more calculated abuses of power (i.e. claiming that fees which were paid have not been paid, 45 minute waits on the phone to talk to know-nothing contract employees).

As far as background checks, basically if you are from a Middle Eastern country and apply for a green card, you have a good chance of being thrown into limbo while the FBI conducts a background check. They don’t have to tell you why you are waiting, what they are checking, or when to expect an answer. They don’t have to tell you anything because as a noncitizen, you are a nonperson in the eyes of the law. And as someone from the Middle East, you are presumed to be a threat unless proven otherwise. I don’t deny that the 9/11 hijackers should have been denied student visas. But there’s got to be a more sensible, rational way to screen for security threats than the current method, one that doesn't keep out thousands of ambitious students who want to come to learn and potentially work in the U.S.

I won’t hold my breath for any meaningful reform of DHS and USCIS until there’s somebody new in the White House. Even then, the issue is so controversial and our national level of cognitive dissonance on immigration so high that I wonder if the system will ever run smoothly in my lifetime.

will it blend?

Barbies? Golf club? Cell phones? Light bulbs?

The answer is yes, it will blend. The answer is always yes.

street fighter

New Jersey has a reputation for some of the most notoriously dirty politics in the country, and I found out a little more about why watching the documentary Street Fight last night about the 2002 Newark mayoral race between Sharpe James and Cory Booker. Booker’s bid that year was unsuccessful, but he won by a landslide in 2006 after James dropped out of the race. James is now the focus of some ethics inquiries for traveling to Brazil on city funds and cutting supporters shady real estate deals.

During the course of the campaign, both candidates essentially bribed voters by sponsoring free meals and handing out expensive gift bags. Both candidates spent an inordinate amount of time schmoozing to pay for the costly campaign—that seems to be unavoidable in modern elections. But James was a thug—there were several instances of jawdropping corruption documented in the film.

James used city police officers to intimidate the filmmaker and members of the press, threaten local businesses and individuals with legal consequences if they supported Booker, and tear down Booker ads throughout the city. He called Booker a Jewish white Republican who had accepted money from the KKK. Hruh? That doesn’t make any sense. Booker is an African-American lifelong Democrat whose parents fought in the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. When a Booker aide was reported to have attended a strip club, he said he would fire anyone on his staff who had attended a “house of ill repute.” The owner of the strip club later revealed that James had visited the club himself. James yelled at a reporter who had asked him questions about some of Booker’s allegations to “show some respect” and asked if he knew who he was talking to. He had to be physically restrained at a campaign debate from attacking Booker supporters. It seemed that James couldn’t open his mouth without either lying or threatening somebody. He was completely and utterly insane. Thirty-two years of unrestrained power had clearly gone to his head.

I also got the distinct feeling that Booker was often campaigning in spite of his campaign consultants. During a prep session for a campaign debate, his press advisor kept telling him to keep it short and simple, and asserted that the substance of what he said wouldn’t matter at all because the audience wasn’t going to hear it anyway. Booker expressed a desire to talk about facts and explain why his substantive positions were better than James’; the adviser told him argument and persuasion didn’t matter. Booker’s pollsters told him at one point to start running negative ads; Booker said he wanted to campaign hard and “punch James in the nose” but retain some dignity and not stoop to the level of the James campaign. The pollsters didn’t seem particularly interested in listening to Booker’s input. Booker ran a tough campaign, but in the end lost to the James machine.

Kos and Jerome Armstrong talk about the corruption and incompetence of Democratic establishment consultants in Crashing the Gate. The basic idea is that the consultants, who are often foisted on candidates by the national party, get their cut whether or not their candidate wins. Their compensation is usually based on a commission structure, which means that consultants often push for expensive ad buys when other ways of campaigning might work better. Republican consultants pay a flat fee, which is why the Bush campaign ended up paying several million dollars less to its consultants in 2004 than did the Kerry campaign. The outside consultants weren’t featured enough in Street Fight for me to get a good idea of their background and tactics, but the advice they did give didn’t seem to suit Booker’s “direct to the people” campaign style.

It was disturbing to see how uninformed the voting population was, and how slimy and outright illegal James’ tactics were. In a city with the some of the highest rates of violent crime and poverty in the country, graduating 40% of its high school students, the incumbent should not be in office for 36 years. If this is how democracy works in America, then we badly need to change the way things are done.

new year’s resolutions

1. Lose the remaining portion of my hair that keeps me from considering myself officially “balding.”
2. Speculate idly about when the period goes inside of or outside of quotation marks. Wonder about the other rules of grammar which (that?) have stymied me since I first failed to learn them in Mrs. Reynolds’ fifth grade English class.
3. Blog consistently once a week, sometimes once every two weeks if there are any new episodes of South Park or the Colbert Report that make it past the youtube censors and require urgent viewing, thereby maintaining my faithful readership of (a) my mom and (b) assorted random crazy passers by [and (c) my cat, apparently. She is smart for someone who has a brain the size of a walnut].
4. Maintain a body weight at least 10 pounds over what will allow me to fit into a pair of Levi’s 511 Skinny “crumpled blue” jeans with the smallest shred of dignity.
5. Read the first 50 pages of Kissinger’s Diplomacy and then set it on top of my dresser for three months before reshelving it in the living room to join the partially read Discipline and Punish and A Peace to End All Peace.
6. Fume impotently against the Bush administration.

I’m feeling a sense of confidence about these resolutions that has been missing in years past.