Spinning, spinning, spinning....

According to Bill Safire, the White House should not have distanced itself from its inclusion of the so-called "sixteen words" in the State of the Union Address ("The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa") because there is additional information which supposedly gives credence to the words. Although it seems obvious that, had the White House been aware of any credible information beyond the forged Niger documents, it never would have declared that "the sixteen words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address."

With all due respect to Safire's Nixonian philosophy that "Being Republican Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry", the "new" allegations from the Butler report Safire believes somehow rehabilitate the uranium charge are not inconsistent with the White House's statement. That is, it remains probable either the White House based its statement upon the fact that Britain hadn't advanced any information beyond the existence of the forged documents, or that it didn't deem the information from Britain to be sufficiently credible to support the "sixteen words". Either way, the White House would have been correct to issue its pseudo-retraction.

Donating Cars

Today, George Will takes on a subject he doesn't really understand - the business behind "charity car donations". He correctly points out that some charities take in a lot of money from car donations, and concludes that, as it might reduce the number of donations, the Senate is per se wrong to try to limit the amount of donor deductions to the actual value of the donated vehicle or control for fraud.

There are some charities of sufficient size and scope that they can collect donated cars throughout the nation. There are some local or regional charities which can also collect cars on their own. But most charities who accept donated cars do so through an intermediary - a commercial outfit which collects and auctions the cars, then takes an enormous cut of the proceeds as a handling fee, passing on perhaps 10 or 20 cents on the dollar.

The donors are encouraged by the representation that they can deduct the blue book value of the car, no matter what its actual condition, and can be quite confident that the government won't be able to prove that the actual value of the car, whatever the sale price at auction. As Will notes, it is only where the deduction claimed exceeds $5,000 that an independent appraisal is presently required. Some of the companies which act as intermediaries for charities seem to encourage, albeit through suggestion rather than instruction, donors to exaggerate the value of their cars. They promise a receipt which indicates the make and model of car you donate, but without any indication of its condition or value. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

As long as no independent appraisal is required below a particular threshold, fraud will occur at significant levels below that threshold. It may be that the suggested threshold of $250 is too low, but it is not unreasonable for Congress to be concerned that the present threshold of $5,000 is too high.

Cause for hope?

David Ignatius updates us on the fourth coalition effort to create a new Iraqi army, this time with increased reliance upon officers from the Hussein era military.

... Same as the old boss ....

If the U.S. was aware of these allegations about Allawi before accepting him as leader of the "interim government", and had any cause to believe the allegations true, I can only ask "What were they thinking?"

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.

***

Before the shootings, the 58-year-old Prime Minister is said to have told the policemen they must have courage in their work and that he would shield them from any repercussions if they killed insurgents in the course of their duty.

I am more than a bit concerned by those who grasp this story as a basis to undermine the "interim" government. And if the accusations are false, given the specificity of the accusations it shouldn't be particularly difficult to prove that the prisoners (all named) didn't exist, that some or all of them are alive, or that Allawi wasn't at the prison on the day they disappeared from the face of the earth. Further, Allawi is alleged to have had a U.S. security detail with him at the time, and those soldiers would be aware of the truth or falsity of this accusation. To date, though, beyond a bare denial there has been little or no effort to refute the charges, either by the U.S. or by Allawi. With all due respect to the possibility that the accusation is false, I would like some assurance that Allawi isn't, at best, "Hussein Lite".

And his point is....

Today, David Brooks yammers at some length about Kerry's references to "values" in his presidential campaign. For those of us a bit sick of that type of rhetoric, and who would rather see our presidential candidates focusing on issues, this argument is not without merit. But... since when was it Kerry who introduced "values" into mainstream politics, or insisted that discussion of "values" come before, say, discussion of important issues or even questions of basic competence? According to ABC Online (Australia):

In a story with echoes of that one, in the US Presidential campaign, the Bush/Cheney team is planning to focus attention on traditional values, especially the hot button issues of gay marriage and abortion. ... Forget Iraq. Forget the war on terrorism. Forget the economy. It's time to run on values and what better for firing up the conservative base than gay marriage.

Before lamenting the passage of the era in which rich people publicly flaunted their extreme wealth and were more concerned about "manners" than "values", Brooks announces,

When Kerry uses the word "values," it's meant to send a message: I am not who I am. I am not the blue-blooded prep-school kid who married two millionaires, dated a movie star and has a prenup and umpteen homes in tony locales; who has spent the past two decades as a moderately liberal senator from Massachusetts; and who likes to snowboard at Sun Valley and windsurf off Nantucket. I'm just your back-fence neighbor in Mayberry, out there in overalls, sidlin' over to the fence to chat: "Howdy neighbor! Would you like to come visit for a spell and hear about my values of faith, hope and opportunity?"

This campaign's version of middle-class values is like the Cracker Barrel restaurant version of a small town: a manufactured replica of a wholesome, down-home America that never existed. A realistic portrait of middle-class values would include tattoos, carb-counting and the purchase of voluminous amounts of lottery tickets by people who dream of escaping from the middle class.

Okay... so Kerry is subject to this rather scathing caricature, because he's a rich boy. Surely, given that Bush has been focusing on "values" from the day he entered national politics, Brooks gives equal time to his pampered, privileged upbringing? Think again:

Both John Forbes Kerry and George Walker Bush — who, let's face it, ain't exactly John-Boy Walton — are going to compete furiously over the next three months to see who is the most spiritually middle class.

Yup. There you have it. David Brooks gives us his version of "balanced coverage".

Those who live in glass houses....

For the "closet" exhibitionist?

Major Danyluk on Iraq

A friend of mine (USAF) once expressed that in his experience, the Marine Corps has some of the best officers in the military and some of the worst, with few falling in the middle. Today's Washington Post provides a perspective from one who appears to fall into the former category.

Mincing Words

The Washington Post today describes the probable torture of terrorism suspects by the CIA:

According to reports in The Post, pain medication for Abu Zubaida, who suffered from a gunshot wound in the groin, was manipulated to obtain his cooperation, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to "water boarding," which causes the sensation of drowning.

Just to be clear, this is a process whereby a suspect's nose and mouth are covered, and water is poured over him until he is sufficiently oxygen-deprived and has ingested enough water that if the waterboarding process isn't ended he will die.

It isn't that the suspect has the "sensation of drowning" - the suspect is drowning, or is at least suffocating, and if not extracted from the waterboard will die.

Whatever you think of the government's use of torture, why not be honest about what it involves?

McCain

When Kerry selected Edwards as his running mate, I heard a Republican campaign operative yammer about how Kerry had really wanted to pick John McCain. The guy even claimed Kerry had invited McCain to be his running mate three times (as if he could know). Similar rumors have been printed in various editorials. Granted, McCain was posed the question by the media, but I have yet to see any credible evidence that Kerry actually would have considered him as a running mate. (Got any?)

More recently, I have heard various Republican armchair advocates suggesting that Bush should dump Cheney - using health as an excuse - and pick a different running mate. They seem to get most excited over the idea of McCain running for Bush. As if that could ever happen. This is John McCain, the "paleoconservative", who still believes in such archaic values as small government, responsible spending, and personal liberties. On Bush's beloved anti-gay marriage amendment:

... Arizona Sen. John McCain put it, that to strip states of their traditional jurisdiction over marriage "strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans."

Even if it would not be embarrassing for Bush to dump Cheney, and even if such a move would diminish (rather than magnifying) the various scandals and administration failures in which Cheney has taken a leading role (and I think it would do the opposite), Bush would never pick McCain.

His "values" are all wrong.

Got Your Visa?

A British reporter recounts her treatment by U.S. immigration, when (despite Britain having a visa waiver program with the United States) she didn't apply for an "I Visa" before attempting to enter the country:

After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me. In the middle of this, my husband rang from London; he had somehow managed to locate my whereabouts, and I was allowed briefly to wipe the ink off my hands to take the call. Hearing his voice was a reminder of the real world I was beginning to feel cut off from.

Three female officers arrived to do a body search. As they slipped on rubber gloves, I blenched: what were they going to do, and could I resist? They were armed, they claimed to have the law on their side. I was an anonymous foreigner who had committed a felony, and "those were the rules". So I was groped, unpleasantly, though not as intimately as I had feared. Then came the next shock: two bulky, uniformed and armed security men handcuffed me, which they explained was the "rule when transporting detainees through the airport". I was marched between the two giants through an empty terminal to a detention room, where I sat in the company of two other detainees (we were not allowed to communicate) and eight sleepy guards, all men. I would have been happy to spend the night watching TV with them, as they agreed to switch the channel from local news (highlight: a bear was loose in an affluent LA neighbourhood) to sitcoms and soaps. Their job was indescribably boring, they were overstaffed with nothing to do, and so making sure I didn't extract a pen or my mobile phone from my luggage must have seemed a welcome break. I listened to their star-struck stories about actors they had recently seen at LAX. We laughed in the same places during Seinfeld, an eerie experience. I was beginning to think I could manage this: the trip was a write-off, of course, but I could easily survive a night and a day of this kind of discomfort before flying back. But then I was taken to the detention cell in downtown LA, where the discomfort became something worse.

Desperate, Pathetic Pandering

But that's just my opinion.

President Bush says legalizing gay marriage would redefine the most fundamental institution of civilization and that a constitutional amendment is needed to protect it.

What's yours?

Declining Customer Service

In today's Post, Howard Kurtz takes on lousy customer service, particularly atrocious telephone support. He provides a tale, which reminded me that this is not a particularly new phenomenon:

A while back I canceled a 30-day trial on a cell phone that had terrible reception and was told I had to wait for the company to send a mailing label so I could return the phone and get the promised refund. The label never came. I called back and was again told the label would be sent out. I'm still waiting. This came after I had called another cell phone company to cancel a contract that had expired after two years. The firm kept billing me. When I called to complain, an agent said there was no record of the cancellation call.

Many years ago, if you're old enough to recall, a certain monopoly company controlled our nation's telephone lines - and owned all of the telephones hooked up to those lines. After deregulation permitted consumers to buy their own telephones, this company benefited from the fact that many customers didn't pay much attention to their bills and continued to lease equipment. I was managing a small business and, when I inquired about the possibility of upgrading the phones, I was told that they were leased. I asked how much the business was paying - $150 per month ($50 per phone). I pointed out that for not much more than the monthly rental price we could get three far superior phones with no recurring fee. This struck the business owner as a good idea, so I called the monopoly to cancel the contract. I was told that somebody would come by to pick up the old phone system.

A month or two later, I received a call from my boss who, after thanking me for saving him thousands of dollars per month across his various locations (having now cancelled all of his leases) told me that he had been billed for the leased phones at my location. I called the monopoly and was told that the lease had never been cancelled. I protested that I had spoken to a representative, had cancelled the lease, and had been told that the cancellation was effective. The reply acknowledged that I had in fact done so, but "That person didn't have the authority to cancel your lease." (When I pointed out that the woman's actual authority had no relevance to a situation where she had exercised apparent authority, the monopoly relented. They knew the law - they were simply trying to give a long-term customer one last screwing.)

If you look at the aspects of a business which are most important to consumers, they boil down to price, quality, and customer service. If you encounter a business which is the best in its field for all three, you are most likely dealing with a monopoly. If the business is not a monopoly and the competition does not respond, it will likely grind its competitors into the dust. But in most fields, a business can only strive to be a leader in one or two of those areas. (For example, if a business chooses to surpass the competition in quality and customer service, it will almost inevitably also be more expensive.)

We can get better customer service - but we have to be willing to pay for it. Businesses have figured out that, for the most part, the quality of customer service is not critical to making the initial sale. Thus, they focus instead on price (and ideally also on quality), and customer service becomes an afterthought.

Gaming Democracy

Local news from a California paper....

Michigan Republicans are helping gather signatures to place independent Ralph Nader on the presidential ballot in the battleground state, irritating Democrats who accuse the GOP of trying to pull votes away from candidate John Kerry.

Do they really think their candidate is so pathetic, he needs Nader in the race to even have a chance?

Materialism

Today, George will provides this insipid claim:

It has come to this: The crux of the political left's complaint about Americans is that they are insufficiently materialistic.

He then claims that "the left has largely failed to enact its agenda for redistributing wealth". Um... dimwit... you might want to pay attention to your own argument. If you are middle class (or one of the so-called left-wing "elitists" pundits like Will like to yammer about) trying to redistribute wealth to the working poor and indigent, you are demonstrating what is known as "egalitarianism", not "materialism".

Will's essential quarrel is with an author who proposes that the working poor vote against their self-interest when they ally themselves with the Republican Party, ostensibly because the Democrats would offer them better social welfare benefits. Perhaps that could be described as an indirect appeal to materialism - that the working poor would benefit from voting with the party that would better serve their financial and economic interests. But if you actually speak with the working poor who vote for the Republican Party, you will hear a lot of people arguing that they don't want their money helping the less fortunate. The Republican promise, false though it may be, of letting them "keep more of their money" has a tremendous appeal. The notion of helping their fellow man, a great deal less. I have even heard this argument from a person who had a long history of receiving welfare benefits, and who continued to live in a subsidized housing development, and who had no problem at all signing his teenage daughter up for another generation of welfare benefits when she had a child - if he were smarter, he might be stunned by his own hypocrisy.

Will is essentially arguing that people who prefer not to share their money with the less fortuate are less materialistic than those on "the left" who would do so. Granted, Will's editorials have been pretty lousy for the past decade, but... c'mon. There's plenty to criticize about the "welfare state" without fictionalizing that the people who advocate a strong social safety net are doing so out of greed.

Congressional Dishonesty

Warren Buffett today takes on the subject of executive compensation, and the absurd legislation presently before Congress designed to permit companies to continue to hide the true amount they pay their top executives.

The only reason for making such an Alice-in-Wonderland assumption is to significantly understate the value of the few options that the House wants counted. This undervaluation, in turn, enables chief executives to lie about what they are truly being paid and to overstate the earnings of the companies they run.

(He ads a bit of derision for the "Enronesque accounting" demonstrated by Congress in its own budgets.)

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman takes on the Republican leadership, noting that while no scandal (real or imagined) was too small to justify investigation under Clinton, nothing the Bush Administration does (no matter how outrageous) is deemed worty of investigation.

Compare the following: Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.

Medical Malpractice "Reform"

The Washington Post today tells us of a crisis in insurance costs for OB/GYN's in Maryland. After endorsing a reduction of the "damages cap" for "pain and suffering" from $635,000 down to $500,000, the Post writes:

A somewhat tighter limit on awards for "pain and suffering" strikes us as reasonable but inadequate; it needs to be coupled with better provisions for protecting patients from negligent doctors and improving medical care. The goal, as we've said before, should be to protect victims of doctor error as well as victims of unfair lawsuits. That might mean tougher discipline for repeat-offender doctors, better disclosure of errors in care and closer scrutiny of hospitals to identify patterns of errors. Doctors might squirm at that, and trial lawyers might squirm at lower caps on "pain and suffering" awards. But without some compromises, Maryland's health care system may be heading for a fall.

Um... I doubt many lawyers will "squirm" over the difference between a $635,000 damages cap and a $500,000 cap, because any case worth litigating under one cap will remain worth litigating under the other. The person who "squirms" as a result of such a cap is the child who is told to accept $500,000 as compensation for the "pain and suffering" from a lifetime of disability. You never see so-called "tort reform" advocates putting a human face on the babies supposedly "overcompensated" for their very real injuries - a human face would interfere with the charade.

What the Post doesn't ask is whether part of the reason for high insurance costs comes from bad practices by the insurance companies themselves. Irresponsible financial practices which they are passing along to doctors in the form of higher premiums. The Post doesn't even stop to wonder if jury verdicts are increasing, or if there are so many verdicts at the level of the "cap" that a 21% decrease will have any significant impact on premiums. After all, even with "pain and suffering" capped at $500,000, for the most severe cases of malpractice the award for economic expenses - a lifetime of medical care, educational support, attendant care, medical equipment, and dependence - will be ten or twenty times that amount, perhaps more.

Yes, obviously there should be some attention paid to avoiding incidents of malpractice, to weeding out "bad doctors", and to otherwise protecting patients. But there are few groups which lobby on behalf of injured patients, and insurance companies have scores of full-time lobbyists working to limit their recoveries. So it might be reasonable for a legislature to consider patient-centered improvements, but it is more realistic to expect it to cater to the insurance industry.

While it is a competitor, perhaps the Post's unnamed editorialist would benefit from reading Bob Herbert's recent column, in which he took a peek behind the curtain of malpractice "reform"....

A little bit of history

In advance of its 60th Anniversary, The Guardian presents the memories of survivors of the Warsaw Uprising.

Saddam Hussein - Man, Myth, Both?

During the lead-up to the Iraq war, the war itself, Hussein's capture, and his recent public appearance, various public pictures have been painted of Hussein, often by the same people. He is an iron-fisted tyrant, actively building a WMD arsenal under the noses of the western world, and between whose purges and his cabal of close henchmen had tight control over the entire nation, obviating any chance of revolt by generals too cowed by his network of spies and secret police to ever dream of defying him. He is an out-of-touch dreamer, whose generals actively lied to him about the state of his nation and his paltry weapons arsenal, as he indulged in Viagra and penned romance novels, and has been unable to produce any useful intelligence information despite months of U.S. interrogation. He is a coward, begging for his life (in English) as he was captured by U.S. forces. He is a strong-willed man, in control of his faculties, denouncing his imprisonment as being the result of an illegal war.

I have long been of the impression that some of the pre-war information about "Saddam who cannot be toppled except by outside military intervention" was puffery meant to overstate the necessity of invasion. It is now well-known that the U.S. was in active negotiation with numerous Iraqi military leaders about the possibility of orchestrating a coup, or a prompt surrender in the event of invasion, and it appears that one such officer was Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh of the Republican Guard - the guy who we recently put in charge of Fallujah. At the same time, it would not be at all surprising if a leader such as Hussein took on some megalomaniacal features over time, and there is plenty of evidence of that in his statutes, paintings, Viagra stash, and romance fiction. The coward who tried to surrender while pleading in English? That reeks of manipulation - an (understandable) effort to diminish Hussein's standing in the eyes of the Arab world.

I heard that a recent opinion poll of Iraqis is split, to put it mildly, with about 40% of Iraqis wanting Hussein executed, and another 40% wanting him freed. If true, the trial (and presumably the subsequent execution) of Hussein could prove quite divisive inside Iraq, and could cement his status as a martyr against the west in parts of the Arab world. Whose myth will win?

I have heard it commented that the fact that Hussein will even stand for trial, as opposed to being summarily executed by the new regime, indicates how far Iraq has progressed. But there is a reason why the new regime is often quick to execute the leaders of the old - and it has nothing to do with its "crimes". A quick execution without trial prevents the old regime from using a public trial as a bully pulpit, and from denouncing those members of the "new" regime who are at least as culpable as those on trial from the "old" regime - but just happened to be on the right side of the successful coup.

One thing seems rather clear - the man who used to be Maj. Gen. Jassim Mohammed Saleh's boss, and who was photographed in an infamous handshake with Donald Rumsfeld, possesses a lot of information which could be embarrassing to a lot of Iraqis and western political leaders. Will this trial drag on, Milosevic-style, while all the world watches? Or will the new Iraq's justice be more focused on outcome than on due process? We shall see.

Progress on Darfur?

With the U.S. "Ambassador at Large" for war crimes acknowledging "indicators of genocide" (albeit indicators he pretends have not been confirmed) and Colin Powell scheduled to visit the region, is the Bush Administration finally going to put some diplomatic muscle (if not military might) behind an effort to stop mass starvation?

(The Washington Post provides background information.)

Hussein's Trial

Today's New York Times returns us to the question of whether Hussein should get a fair trial - before he's convicted