At Last: National Electronic Ballot Reform

Daily KOS reports Senators Clinton and Boxer have proposed the Count Every vote Act of 2005, which requires paper ballots, and open source and object code for all electronic voting machines. The paper ballot is the official ballot for recounts.

Iran's Nuclear Program: Smoke and Fire? or Smoke and Mirrors?

Here we go again.

The slow drumbeat of "Invade Iran" has begun, and this is another beat on the tom-tom. "International investigators" say 18 years ago, Pakistan's seller of nuclear weaponry -- which still hasn't resulted in our putting Pakistan on the "against us" list, in Bush's "with us or against us" world -- offered a nuclear weapons program to Iran. Iran said, "No, Thanks."
They wanted nuclear power, not weapons, they say.

And yet, the slant of the article is to paint Iran has having a sustained effort to get nuclear weapons, spanning decades. Why?

"The offer is the strongest indication to date that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, but it doesn't prove it completely," said one Western diplomat who is familiar with the details of the offer and would comment on the investigation only on the condition of anonymity.

Completely? Since when does being offered something you don't want rise to being proof that you wanted it? If someone offers me drugs, and I say, "no thanks", the western diplomat would conclude I'm a drug addict.

We've seen this before. "Iraq. Terrorism. Terrorism. Iraq. Iraq Iraq Terrorism." went Bush's argument, and the American people concluded, "Gosh, Iraq and Terrorism are used in the same sentence frequently. They must be related." We are now hearing the same kind of argument: "Nuclear Weapons, Iran. Iran Nuclear Weapons Iran Iran. Nuclear Weapons."

This is going to be played up into so much smoke that, yet again, Americans will be tricked into thinking, "Where there's smoke, there's fire", instead of it being Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney's smoke and mirrors. Or so does Bush, Condi, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and others of that ilk, hope.

Modern Day NORTH BY NORTHWEST

[Bob Herbert, NYTimes] writes in his OpEd about this Canadian citizen who was also identified -- like me -- as a foreign national by the US. Unlike me, he actually is a Canadian citizen. And, also unlike me, he was put on a plane, flown to Jordon, driven to Syria, and tortured. "He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed." He's back in Canada now because --- big "Ooops" here --- turns out he's not a secret Al Qaeda agent.

The Dollar Tanks. How Thrilling!

[NYTimes Editorial] Apparently, the South Korean government, which holds 4 percent of US Treasury bills, made the suggestion that they are going to start investing more in other (non-dollar) vehicles.

Apparently, everyone freaked out, thinking "Whoah -- what if China and Japan follow suit?". Since they hold 90% of US T-Bills, if they stop sending George Bush the $2B/day in cash he neeeds to support his deficit spending, that will send interest rates through the roof (are you holding a floating interest rate home loan?) So the dollar fell.

So, what could happen? Everyone would sell their dollars, Bush couldn't get loans for his deficit except at high interest rates, which sends everyone's variable interest rate home mortgages through the roof; so everyone sells their homes, sending home prices down (I'll believe it when I see it, though), and suddenly, the US has a depressed economy.

How do we avoid this? Bush needs to stop borrowing $2B/day -- send the deficit to zero.

Good luck with that.

My Brush with the Syrian Secret Police

In these wicked times, being born in California is not sufficient to earn one American citizen status -- or, rather, it's not suffiicient to protect you from having that status stripped from you, summarily.

On my trip to Goddard Space Flight Center -- a NASA installation at Greenbelt Maryland, where I was scheduled to give a talk -- I was instructed by my hosts to tell the guards at the gate that I was a foreign national. It seems, because I accepted an appointment at a Montreal, Canada university, they can no longer treat me like the born-in-San-Leandro-educated-by-California-public-education guy that I am. Never mind my US Passport and US citizenship, and the fact that I don't have citizenship in any other country. Never mind that my father's father's father was born 50 miles from my childhood home. Never mind that I love hot dogs, apple pie (disclaimer: I own a Subaru -- but it appears that my model was made in the USA).

So, I did what any red-blooded American would do. I refused to state that I was a foreign national. I handed the guards my American Passport as identification. I've seen NORTH BY NORTHWEST. We all know how the story will go after you say you aren't an American: Syrian guards sweep in from stage right and left, toss you onto a Gulfstream, and next thing you know, somebody claiming to be from Egypt is holding a cattle prod above you, muttering angrily about the soles of your shoes being too dense. Try explaining it was a bureaucratic snafu, mistaken identity, and next thing you know, you're hanging from Jefferson's nose, being shot at by a crop duster in an Illinois cornfield.

So, now the guards have a problem: they have me down as a foreign national on their list, I refuse to go along. The resolution as enacted was simple: they hand me an ID badge to get me on-base which says that I'm a foreign national, and that's it. We all know I'm not, but, hey, it's procedure. I bristle. If you are an American living abroad, you are now going to be treated as if you were a foriegn national for security purposes.

Administration's Friends Target AARP

Here are the web ads that Administration buddy USA Next has been running on the American Spectator website - Josh Marshall has the original story and first follow-up over at TPM.

Yesterday's NYT has the skinny on USA Next. By sheer coincidence - Look Ma - no White House coordination! - they have mounted multimillion dollar radio and TV ad campaigns in support of the Administration's 2002 prescription drugs bill, the 2004 reelection of its favorite congresspersons, and now, the Social Security privatization initiative. They've hired some of the Swift Boat Veterans - Good work, fellas! - and hope to maintain a deniable distance for the upcoming Social Security AARP smear. As an anonymous USA Next official says in the NYT piece:

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the White House doesn't want anything to do with a group that is attacking the AARP. We are not going to drag them into this mess.

Whatever you say, buddy. Let's go to the tape:


This is the current ad. It's hard to know exactly what to make of it - I guess the AARP is in favor of abandoning our troops in Iraq for the sake of sponsoring gay marriage receptions here at home. Doesn't sound like my grandmother's agenda - perhaps yours?


Simple, succinct, to the point. I am guessing the common denominator is that all these boogeyfolk have spoken at meetings of the AARP, right?

Monday Starts Bad

I wake up, and even before I can run to the shower Hunter S. Thompson has killed himself with a shotgun.

"The Crackers"

Inevitably, Christo and Jean-Claude's The Gates have inspired the citizens of New York City to feats of daring artistry - for example, The Crackers.

There's an associated CafePress Store, natch. Mainly, though, you'll want to see the complete set of photos to appreciate the full genius of the project.

Link and thumbnail image courtesy BoingBoing.

The New York Times > Travel > Escapes > 36 Hours: In Mont-Tremblant, Quebec

This week's 36 Hours column in the NYTimes is 1 hour from where I live.

And what am I doing this weekend? Going to NYC.

Extraordinary Rendition

Bob Herbert [NyTimes] writes about this US policy today. "Rendition" occurs when someone is esentially abducted in a foreign country and brought to the US to stand trial. US Courts overlook the circumstances of the suspect being "rendered" to the US, but due process kicks in when they fall into US custody.

Extraordinary Rendition is a new US policy, where we kidnap people in the US, and send them to, say, Syria, (yes, the country whose ambassador we just recalled because we think they assassinated a Lebannese politician), where they are tortured. This happened 2 years ago to a Canadian citizen, Mahar Arar. Landing at JFK, the US sent him off to Syria (where he was originally from), where the Syrian government tortured him. But, apparently, he's not a terrorist. Oh. They released him a year later.

So, Exrtraordinary Rendition is Bush's policy of kidnapping people off of US streets, holding them without charge and without rights, shipping them to foreign soil with governments whose torture practices are unconstrained by those principles of liberty and democracy Bush is fond of dressing up in.

Who is Gannon's Patron In the White House? The Plame Affair Leaker

You'd think that having their reporters blocked from the White House press pool (see, for example, Maureen Dowd, who, after covering Presidents since 1986, and having her press pool application ignored for 2 years by Ari Fleischer, was told by Scott McClellan that she had to undergo an FBI security check which could take several months) while a gay hooker operating under an assumed name for a fake news organization was given *daily* passes spanning 2 years (both Fleischer, and McLellan) would be enough to get the news organizations out of phone-it-in mode. (Over at AmericaBlog, they thought for about 12 hours that a pass seen in a video of Gannon asking McLellan a question was a permanent pool pass; turns out, AmericaBlog soon found, it was not).

And why should they care? Not because gay-baiting is a national sport. Not because Gannon repeatedly asked Fleischer, McClellan, and even Bush partisan softballs which mock the fourth estate even more than having Armstrong Williams take $240K in payola to play Bush's tunes.

Gannon was one of ~six reporters (including Judith Miller of the New York Times; Tim Russert; Tim Matthews of Time Magazine; and Bob Novak) to whom the White House leaked the CIA cover of Valerie Plame for revenge on her and Joe Wilson during the Nigerian Yellowcake scandal. In the "one of these things is not like the others" game, Gannon is the odd-man-out in this group.

Whoever leaked to the reputable reporters leaked to Gannon, too, and not because he's a reputable reporter. Clearly, the leaker has a strong bond to Gannon. The leaker was probably responsible for Gannon getting his press access, too. Thus -- figure out who gave Gannon his press credential, and you've probably figured out who the leaker was in the Plame affair.

So, who was it? Nobody knows. On AmericaBlog , Ari Fleischer says he has no idea who approved Gannon's press passes while he was there (McClellan was on staff at the time, but no word from him on who's responsible).

Summers on Women in Science and Engineering

He's posted a full transcript of his remarks at the NBER conference to his website: Link.

Personally, I always find it edifying to hear wealthy balding white men in high-ranking appointed positions discourse on the reasons for the lack of diversity in same.

Slate Pipes In

Slate would like to provide input to some of our ongoing discussions here at 13D:

• Rehnquist isn't Deep Throat, by Timothy Noah aka Chatterbox;
• Why Bob Novak isn't going to prison, by Daniel Engber aka The Explainer.

I find the Rehnquist idea a bit of a stretch, myself (though fun to think about). The various theories put forward by Engber, on the other hand, cover the range of options so completely - Maybe he ratted out his source! Maybe he's the target of a separate criminal investigation! - as to be almost useless.

What we need on Novak is a Bill Safire column/apologia which cites the gossip of informed Washingtonians to whittle down the options to something worth dishing about. Too bad he's out selling stem cells.

Bush Names National Intelligence Director

At 10am today.

Apparently, it's someone named Jeff Gannon ? Bush said: "With a myriad of experience in operating clandestine operations, Jeff --- who Karl's known for years, and tells me he's a really great man -- enjoys outstanding and mutually pleasurable relations with 3 of the 4 military branches, the CIA, the FBI -- seems like everybody in government's had him." Bush pointed out that "the National Intelligence Director's salary of $265,000 just about covered Gannon's usual $1200/night rate." Among Gannon's first duties: give everyone in national intelligence operations "a good, red-cheeked spanking."

Iran: Bang! Oops...

An explosion today in Bushehr province in Iran, where Iran is building a nuclear power plant, could have been caused by a fuel tank falling from a plane.

No word from Iran if any of their planes are missing a fuel tank.

*cough* international incident *cough*

Valerie Plame -- Appeals Court: Testify, or go to prison. Jeff Gannon is Implicated.

[WaPost]

Judith Miller (NYTimes) and Matt Cooper (Time Magazine) may be compelled to testify in the Valerie Plame case, or they will go to prison, in a ruling by a 3 judge panel on a Federal Appeals court. NYTimes will seek a stay while appealing to the full court, and then likely to the Supreme Court.

No word on why Bob Novak isn't on this list. You'd think he would be, since he broke the story, and so clearly knows who the White House leak was. Also, no word why gay hooker and Republican shil Jeff Gannon , who was given a day-to-day press passes for months in the White House while he lobbed partisan softballs at Scott McClellan -- and even George Bush, during his pre-Iraq war press conference -- isn't on the list, now that it is known that he was one of only six reporters who the White House leak talked to. Gannon wasn't found out until some in the press corps started asking, "Who is this Shil?"

Many believe the White House Plame leak was Karl Rove -- a guy not known to hang out indiscriminitely with male prostitutes.

I mean, you've gotta wonder who it was in the White House who gave this shill daily press access -- meaning, every day for months they approved his access, and who the leak in the Plame case was who leaked to Gannon, Novak, Matthews and Miller. They're probably the same person. That means, the interesting question to ask Scott McClellan: "Who approved Jeff Gannon's daily press passes to the White House?" . That's probably the person who leaked the Plame memo to him.

Daily KOS did an extensive timeline analysis of questions and statements by Gannon, and concluded:


Jeff Gannon was planted by the administration to disseminate their talking points unfettered by any journalism ethics or investigation shortly after the Iraq war, when the failure to find WMDs was becoming apparent. He became incredibly useful in L'Affaire Plame to continue to push the dual stories that a) Plame's name was already common knowledge and therefore `outing' her was not a crime and b) to continue to help discredit the CIA and Wilson. Based on the evidence, I believe the 2002 CIA memo was leaked to Gannon when Novak became unusable and when the `mainstream' reporters with CIA contacts were not pushing the WH's preferred story line. They needed cover, and they got it. And as is evidenced by his remarkable access to Scott McClellan and President Bush in the White House press room, to this day, he was rewarded handsomely...

And it continues as business as usual... until today when he became expendable and `resigned' from Talon News.

A Better Than Average David Brooks Column

[NYTimes] David Brooks feigns outrage at being relegated to nowheresville in the Washington Nationals' Season Ticket Lottery --- and, by implication, in the Universe of Washington, DC -- as the owner explains, "Of course, V.I.P.'s were taken care of, as they are in any other circumstance."

A few humorous lines here, including the observation that if the "the characters from Edith Wharton novels could come to earth, they'd be so put off by our social stratifications they'd probably turn into Bolsheviks."

He devolves from a grain of being truly annoyed into bomastic self parody. I suppose that's what you write, when you start to write how you truly feel about a situation, but quickly realize how petty and indefensible the position is. Hey, might as well get a column out of it.

This will get much, much worse

North Korea states publicly that they have nukes, and the sole purpose they have them is to use them against the United States. Condi: "We knew that."

This is the kind of thing that George Tenet might have called "a slam dunk" case -- as contrasted, for example, to Hussein's repeated and insistent denials, saying they had no nukes, and no nuclear weapons program (which was true).

So, if "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud", and Condi is fond of saying, why do we already not have boots on the ground in North Korea? Why has the issue not even been raised on the UN Security Council? Why do we not have George Bush inveighing against the Sodom of Pyongyang?

Because, Bush lied when he said we were attacking Iraq to protect the US against terrorism, to protect us from a madman dictator baring nukes he would use against us, or give to others to use against us. Here we are, faced with a prima facie case of exactly that, and the administration's response: Condi says "Oh, we've always known they've had nukes" -- and yet they do nothing. Clearly, what Bush says he thinks is important is not actually what he thinks is important.

These are lies we are being fed -- and not lies about who blew who in the White House kitchen, but lies which lead to wars, taking over countries, rejecting historical allies; which lead to policies dressed in the bunting of our constitutional values of democracy and freedom, but have no more to do with democracy and freedom than the manipulation of presidential power within that system.

The fact is, the escapade in Iraq has extended our military such that we cannot pose a credible threat to a nuclear armed North Korea. Something you get when you throw both feet into stupid, short-sighted policies.

Gosh, $1.2Trillion? Really? I Guess We'll Have To Cut It...

The White House is owning up to the fact that the prescription drug benefit program will cost, not in the neighborhood of $300B as they put out during its debate; not over $500B, a number they fired an Admin official for putting out after the debate, but

$1.2Trillion dollars.

You can just faintly hear the Starve-The-Beast economists in the West Wing: Gosh, it's THAT expensive? I guess we'll just have to cut the program.

Dig that: get credit for starting a costly benefit program with the voters you need to re-elect you, but still get your ideology for cutting the program after you're re-elected -- not to mention for killing the drug program in medicare that the new program replaced.

Oh, and the elderly lose too.

Deep Throat close to death

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US's Hot Music Scene

According to the
NYTimes, the US's hottest new music scene is about 3 blocks from where I live.

That ought to get me out of the house.

Why Bush's Social Security Plan Sucks Donkey Balls.

Sure, Krugman today makes another well reasoned, quantitative argument as to why Bush's Social Security plan is a quack idea which won't accomplish what it set out to do. But there's a simpler argument, and it goes like this.

Social Security began as a plan to keep senior citizens from starving in the streets during the Depression, when the market failed. When another Depression hits, all those fancy-schmancy investment accounts Bush wants us to have so that he can dismantle the government social security program will be worth Zippo. Nada. The big Goose-egg. As much as W's oil companies.

Boom, we'll be back to our 80-year-old grandparents sifting through garbage to find tossed out iceberg lettuce taco salad to live on, starving in the streets.

So, folks: don't make Social Security dependent on the success of capitalism. The reason we have Social Security is that sometimes, the market fails, and we don't want our parents coverd in sores and dog feces, sleeping in gutters, in grimy clothes soaked in their own filth.

And that, as the saying goes, is why Bush's Social Security plan sucks donkey balls.

Which is a technical term, I think first due to John Kenneth Galbraith.

State of the Onion Rebuttals

Who bother rebutting the State of the Union address when the President rebutted so many of his arguments in the speech itself?

Excerpts and commentary by William Saletan at Slate.

'Fuzzy Math' and the Iraqi Election = $37,500 per vote

If the numbers are correct, US taxpayers spent $37,500 per vote in the recent Iraqi elections.

Bush says "Suck it up!"

Bad news for privatized retirement account holders

According to an associate editor at the Washington Post, most or all of the earnings from a privatized account will be paid back to the government as a "benefit offset".

Read here.

How can this proposition possibly be any better than what we have now? The President has obviously been smoking crack on Air Force One.

State of the Onion

A few points to remember about Social Security.

1. Just because a system exhausts its trust fund, and has annual liabilities in excess of its funding, doesn't mean it's bankrupt;
2. Projections that this will happen to Social Security in 2042 take a very pessimistic view of likely economic (and population!) growth between now and then;
3. Projections that private accounts will provide a reasonable substitute to Social Security, by contrast, depend on a very rosy view of the economy over that time period (to wit, Krugman);
4. These warring pessimistic and optimistic views of the economy cannot both be correct (the Law of the Excluded Middle strikes again!);
5. Social Security provides a defined-benefit annuity; it is insurance, not a retirement account;
6. As such, it provides an income for whatever remains of your life, once you retire; it is not a fixed pot of money;
7. As such, it is less risky than any retirement account could possibly be, since in spending down your own capital you must somehow contrive not to spend "too slowly" nor live "too long";
8. Part of the President's plan will therefore require people to purchase their own defined-benefit annuity on retirement, to make up for their lost Social Security benefits;
9. No such annuity (insurance) can possibly be as affordable, in an actuarial sense, as that provided by insuring the entire US workforce at once - as the Social Security system does;
10. Hence the problems faced by, for example, the Chileans, who typically make do with 1/2 the pension they used to have under the government plan, in spite of seeing an incredible 10% average return on their private retirement accounts;
11. No matter what you think of Social Security's finances, realize that the President's plan will immediately decrease its annual income by 1/3, greatly accelerating any reckoning unless these losses are made up;
12. All estimates of these losses, aka "transition costs," put out by the Administration to date are lies; the true cost is estimated to be $4.5 trillion over the first 20 years - which only gets us to 2031, not 2042;
13. Any proposal to reduce these costs - for instance, by means-testing benefits, reducing cost-of-living increases or the wage-indexing of benefits, raising the income cap for the payroll tax, or even simply borrowing money - can be more easily applied to the current Social Security system, to increase its solvency; taking away 1/3 of its income can, again, only make things worse;
14. This was precisely the reason Social Security payroll taxes were raised (regressively!) in 1983, for example.

Finally, always remember that the President could save many trillions of dollars if he just gave up on either (1) the Medicare prescription drug benefit ($8.1 trillion over 75 years); or (2) the tax cut he and his party passed in 2001, under the premise of never-ending budget surpluses, with built-in sunset provisions to allow them to expire should the country's budget fall back into the red ($11.6 trillion over 75 years). These numbers compare to a $3.7 trillion shortfall in Social Security over the same time period, under the pessimistic projections mentioned earlier.

The Cost of Free Information: $400K

A public interest group (People for the American Way Foundation) requested the *numbers* of immigrants who were rounded up by the federal government after the 9/11 attacks, under the Freedom of Information act.

The Justice department said, sure, it will cost you $400,000.

The law permits 2 hours of free searching, after which the government may bill the requester. However, the $400K number is entirely a guess, and smacks of obstructing the act by simply presenting an unpayable bill.