Minor Site Updates

Blogging has been light today as I try to fiddle the margins and finally update my link list, at least partially. More changes to come, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Fafblog funny

This is a scream. Check it out.

Now imagine John Kerry there with Hitler. John Kerry with his dour, pessimist face and his dour, pessimist opinions. "Oh, Hitler's leading us into a quagmire," he'd say. "Oh, Hitler's killing innocent men, women and children by the millions," he'd go on. What a cosmic buzzkill! The Third Reich would never get anywhere if it was made of John Kerrys! Which only leads Giblets to conclude that on pessimism grounds, John Kerry is WORSE THAN HITLER!

Hee hee.

Dahlia Lithwick on Hamdi and Padilla

You can find the piece here.

Long story short: I don't feel like I was unnecessarily overwrought about the worst possible outcome of these cases. Lithwick:

I think today mostly stands for an enormous victory in the efforts to balance tyranny with reason. As a practical matter, I can't imagine how all these future terror trials can possibly work. But as someone largely terrified that today might have ended with a blank check for the chief executive, I think the court got it more right than not. (emphasis mine)

I would have preferred the court came down more on the Scalia/Stevens dissent, since I prefer not to build the executive's war powers on the bricks of individual rights. Nevertheless, this is far preferable to a despotic executive disappearing American citizens.

Bob Herbert on Health Care

Check it out:

"The fact is that the U.S. population does not have anywhere near the best health in the world," she wrote. "Of 13 countries in a recent comparison, the United States ranks an average of 12th (second from the bottom) for 16 available health indicators."

She said the U.S. came in 13th, dead last, in terms of low birth weight percentages; 13th for neonatal mortality and infant mortality over all; 13th for years of potential life lost (excluding external causes); 11th for life expectancy at the age of 1 for females and 12th for males; and 10th for life expectancy at the age of 15 for females and 12th for males.

Personal Observation

I take myself too seriously sometimes.

Okay, most of the time.

UPDATE:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.


So Nyah.

Good News from the U.S. Supreme Court

Friends,

I am moved nearly to tears this morning by the Court's decisions in Hamdi and Rasul (The Guantanamo Detainee case). I have thought for a number of weeks that the outcome of these cases was, to a certain extent, obvious, although in my mind Hamdi (and Padilla, not yet decided), are much more obvious than Rasul. Nevertheless, I am very relieved and proud of the vibrancy of our system when I see how it stands up to a Constitutional challenge that, in my opinion, threatened to undercut the separation of powers. That separation is not so fragile as I had feared.

Perhaps I am being too dramatic.

(Read more about USSC cases)

A Clinton Interview that doesn't Rehash Lewinsky

Salon.com has posted an interview they did with President Clinton that talks, among other things, about Rwanda, Iraq, North Korea, the federal government's move to the right since 1994, and the 2000 election.

Some highlights:

On Iraq:

[T]hey morphed the attack by al-Qaida into the war on Iraq, which is something they wanted to do beforehand. Paul Wolfowitz tried to get me to depose Saddam ...

On Rwanda:

And I think even though there were a lot of indications that Rwanda was going to be quite bad, I'm not sure anybody focused on the fact that 10 percent of a country, 700,000 or 800,000 people, could be killed in 90 days with machetes ...

If we'd moved right away, we might have been able to save a couple of hundred thousand people.

On the 2000 election:

I believe Al lost Arkansas because of the National Rifle Association ... and maybe Missouri, and maybe Tennessee, and maybe New Hampshire (in addition to the Nader vote) ... I don't think the NRA got near as much credit as they deserve for Bush's election. They hurt us bad.

There is a lot more good stuff there. As I read the interview, it strikes me as odd that I would look back on Bill Clinton and pine for an honest president. Based on President Bush's (mostly forgotten now) decision to block the release of records from his father's administration, I don't expect the same degree of post-administration candor. Yes, President Clinton is vain and concerned about his legacy, but he is open and vain and concerned about his legacy.

The Administration that Raised the Tone in Washington

From Reuters, via Fark:

Cheney, who is president of the Senate, then ripped into Leahy for the Democratic senator's criticism this week of alleged war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, the oil services company that Cheney once ran.

...

During their exchange, Leahy noted that Republicans had accused Democrats of being anti-Catholic because they are opposed to some of President George W. Bush's anti-abortion judges, the aides said.

That's when Cheney unloaded with the "F-bomb," aides said.

Cheney better be careful about unloading the "F-bomb" because under his own doctrine, we must preemptively invade to prevent him from using such a horrifying weapon.

AUGH!

John Judis, guest-blogging on TPM, notes:

[Jay Bybee], who advocated that the United States ignore international law--and some might say, commit war crimes--now holds a lifetime appointment on the federal bench.

Goody goody.

Google Advertising

For those of you worried about Google advertising being the harbinger of the New World Order, I invite you to notice that the ads commonly displayed on my blog are for the "Conservative Book Club" and to "Join the Right Wing Conspiracy."

Destroy the FDA?

I was reading Bob Welch's Senate campaign website, and among his health care proposals, he says this:

The average new medicine takes approximately 14 years and $800 million to move from the research phase to the shelves of local pharmacies. America has the safest drug supply on earth, and it would be foolish to sacrifice patients’ safety and confidence under the guise of shaving a small fraction off the price of medicine. But the system can be run more efficiently. Other countries have certified independent, private firms to test for compliance with quality and safety standards. This has cut the time needed for regulatory approval without sacrificing patient safety or the effectiveness of medicines. Innovative thinking is needed to identify other ways that regulatory red tape can be cut while at the same time ensuring that all new medicines meet our high standards.

After further research, there seem to be some Cato and Heritage studies about privatizing oversight of drug research.

Quick, flip response: Yes, and let's also privatize the USDA and let meat packers self regulate. (remember me?)

And, of course, the industry argues that tort liability will encourage private regulators to be more stringent than government regulators are anyway.

We all know how everyone likes tort liability. Do you think they would wait until the first big judgment against a negligent regulator before they started arguing that tort liability raises the cost of everyone's drugs, and should be limited?

Post Script: I realize that full privatization is not what Mr. Welch is proposing, but so shocked was I by the notion of eliminating government oversight of drug research that it compelled me to look a little deeper.

Wow

Jen(nifer) placed Object Permanence in a list of blogs about "Fancy Subjects" among such company as Crescat Sententia, Talking Points Memo, and Wonkette.

Jen, you flatter me.

Developing a New Progressive Message

Legal Fiction has been writing an excellent series of posts in an attempt to articulate a new progressive message to counter the tide of conservative messages that crested during the Reagan administration.

His post on using Economic Self-Interest is particularly good, but I perceive a small problem with it, which may be a result of his desire for Third Way centrism versus my old-school liberalism.

Some Progressive messages, unlike almost all Conservative messages, have to marry self-interest to a basic sense of community or fairness to be acceptable. While I agree that over time, messages about targeted tax cuts or spending that actually saves the taxpayer money could be effective, you still have to counter a perception problem that attends programs like National Health Care. To wit: even though 44 million Americans lack health insurance, that number means little to many who have health insurance. Although it is tempting to only try to counter Conservative rhetoric with that of financial self-interest, that strategy ignores several other aspects of conservative rhetoric that are quite powerful: small government (typified by less intrusion), privatization, and bootstrap individualism ("I have health care, and those people can get it too if they just work for it.").

I don't deny that Economic Self-Interest is the most powerful message on both sides of the aisle, but Progressives need a set of easy to grasp ideas to augment the Economic narrative if they want to break the Reagan idea-hegemony of public discourse. Among these should be notions of Community, Justice, and Fairness (which flow nicely from publius' broad progressive "empathy").

As Paul Wellstone said, "We all do better when we all do better."

Personal Reasons Retirement Watch, Day 8

Funny item from Wonkette.

His justification for the technique does seem a little thin, boiling down essentially to "I could take it."

Cheney of Command

Sorry about the title of this post.

Last week, I heard on NPR that Dick Cheney had circumvented the chain of command on 9/11 by ordering that an airliner be shot down. The report seemed to question whether Cheney had cut Rumsfeld out of the chain of command, but I was left silently wondering: was there any evidence that he didn't also cut out President Bush?

Now, here is an article from Newsweek asking the same question. I am relieved to feel alone no longer.

If true, of course, there will not be much effect. It's not like Cheney cheated on his wife and then lied about it in response to an irrelevant question in a civil deposition.

Father's Day

In case anyone was wondering, my kids got me the first season of The West Wing on DVD. Now I don't have to slavishly watch Bravo every night.

Conservatives and Judicial Activism

There has been much hay made in the press about the Supreme Court upholding the pledge on a technicality rather than reaching the constitutional merits. (The Chicago Tribune called it a punt; this writer says the court failed miserably when they didn't make a definitive statement about the establishment clause).

There is the old expression about having and eating cake.

It's fine to invoke the spirit of Justice Marshall ("it is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is"), so long as you recognize that a Supreme Court who says what the law is even when the appropriate case is not before it is, by definition, activist. If you don't like judicial activism, then you can't criticize a court that dismisses a case because the right litigants are not before it; a non-activist court restrains itself to deciding the case at bar, not hypothetical cases. It is not their province to make a "definitive statement" about broad social or cultural controversies. That is within the purview of the legislature or the executive, not the judicial.

Which, of course, just shows that judicial activism for most critics is code for "judges who articulate a version of the law that I don't like."

New Rumsfeld Revelation

From this article on MSNBC:

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held “off the books” — hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else — in possible violation of international law.

I predict that it is going to get harder and harder to keep Rumsfeld on at DOD as more of these types of revelations come out.

I hereby anoint the Rumsfeld "Personal Reasons" Retirement Watch. June 16th, 2004, is day 1.

Free Gmail Accounts Available

If you want a free gmail account (with 1000 mb of storage!) feel free to e-mail me. I have some invites available.

I'll be damned...

No lengthy commentary, but, damn! Fahrenheit 9/11 gets a good review from FOX NEWS? DAMN!

(link via Fark).

Debunking Conservative Myths, Update 2

Here is an estimate that says that the share of government spending on Health Care is much higher in the U.S., nearly 60%. The 45% figure previously cited doesn't take into account the role of health care related tax subsidies or expenditures for the insurance of public employees.

The additional 15% erases the difference between Canadian and U.S. government expenditures, per capita.

Let's review. Our government already pays the same amount per capita as Canada, but somewhere around 44 million people (2002) are without insurance. Additionally, we spend about $2000 per capita privately (employers and employees, mainly), yet we trail Canadian overall health incomes (according to the WHO Health Report 2000).

Conservative Myths about Single Payer

At townhall.com, Paul Jacob makes the conservative case against single payer health care. There are a couple points where his numbers or his reasoning are just plain wrong.

First, he says:

In Canada, on the other hand, it's pretty much government through and through. Though "free medicine" sounds great, its implementation has led to more than a few problems. For something "free," it comes with a high price tag: Canadians pay for the service in extremely high taxes.

Really brief numbers for you. U.S. per capita health spending in 2001 was $4,887. In Canada it was $2,792. (Stats here, courtesy of OECD). According to Mr. Jacob's own citation, 45% of U.S. health care spending is by government (I realize that the percentage is a 2002 figure, but let's assume, arguendo, that there was not a substantial change in one year). With my trusty calculator, I see that 45% of $4,887 is $2,199.

In other words, the U.S. federal and state governments spend about $600 less per person than Canada does. However, every Canadian is insured. In 2001, we had about 41 million uninsured people. Add to that the fact that we are privately paying an additional $2600 per person on average and you see that we are paying drastically more per person and still not insuring everyone.

Next, he argues:

Calling something "free" and paying for it with taxes doesn't take away the need to make hard choices. Demand for medical services is almost limitless, especially when you make the "demand" little more than a request. So some means of rationing has to be put in place. And in Canada, doctors and administrators naturally choose the easiest method: delay.

Like socialist systems elsewhere, Canada's health care system rations by procrastination.

We'll call this the rationing argument. The problem with the rationing argument is not that it is not correct, as far as it goes. It misstates the problem. The U.S. health care system rations care, too, but we do it on the basis of wealth, rather than on the basis of a wait. If you are poor in this country, you often don't get any medical care at all until it becomes an emergency, and then you receive poorer care.

The evidence of this is primarily anecdotal, but anyone who has had to obtain care from an urgent care center of an HMO or from a hospital ER will tell you that very often you don't even see a doctor, but a Physician's Assistant. When you complain of any sort of illness symptoms, these PA's are likely to throw antibiotics at the problem rather than engage in any sort of protracted diagnostics.

Furthermore, if we were to fund a single payer system at our current per capita spending, we could cover the cost of the uninsured portion of our population and still have significantly less delay than Canada. The average privately spent insurance dollar in our country yields only 70 cents of medical care, with 30 cents going to administration and shareholder profit. Medicare, on the other hand, runs at about a 3% overhead. When we eliminate profit for the insurance company and simplify the administration to leverage Medicare efficiencies, we can apply an additional 27 cents on each private dollar to patient care. I'm sure that Mr. Jacob would agree that additional capital outlays could alleviate the shortages that Canada faces.

The rest of Mr. Jacob's cricisms are confined to faults with the Canadian system, such as the long waits leading to preferential treatment for the wealthy (who can bypass the waits by being connected). To some extent this will happen in any universal system, but it can be reduced with shorter waits (as we would have in a similarly funded U.S. system), and, at any rate, is not really a strong enough criticism to derail the vision of universal health care.

UPDATE: One last point. Another crucial factor in holding down costs in any health care system is education, and any redefinition of health care (or, for that matter, maintenance of the status quo) will demand that we devote at least some resources to administratively simplifying the process of obtaining care. Single payer again triumphs in this arena.

No Kerry-McCain ticket

According to Associated Press.

Kerry has asked McCain as recently as late last month to consider becoming his running mate, but the Arizona senator said he's not interested, said a Democratic official who spoke on condition of anonymity because Kerry has insisted that his deliberations be kept private. A second official familiar with the conversations confirmed the account, and said the Arizona senator made it clear he won't change his mind.


Both officials said Kerry stopped short of offering McCain the job, sparing himself an outright rejection that would make his eventual running mate look like a second choice.

It's too bad, because that would have been a hell of a ticket.

New Poll Shows that Pollsters can Confuse People about Health Care

AHIP (America's Health Insurance Plans) decided to launch an ad campaign based on poll results that said, among other things:

* Believe the medical liability system favors trial lawyers at the expense
of patients.
* Want to encourage the adoption of evidence-based medicine.
* Support disclosure of medical safety and quality information.
* Favor tax-free health care accounts.
* Support private-sector choices for seniors under Medicare.

Of course, it might not be reliable to poll by asking the question "Do you believe that trial lawyers are getting rich off medical malpractice at the expense of patients?" I can easily imagine asking, "Should doctors who kill or severely injure their patients due to their own gross negligence have to compensate their patients?" getting a much different result.

As for tax-free health accounts, they are great. At least, they're great if you're rich and need another kind of account to shelter some of your gross income. For the rest of health care consumers, they pull the rich and healthy out of group plans, which cause the premiums of the poor and the sick to increase even more. You see, to qualify for the health savings accounts, you have to have a privately-purchased health plan (NOT through your employer) with a high deductible (over $1000 for individuals and $2000 for families). Since the individual health care market is largely unregulated, insurance companies won't cover any preexisting conditions, which means that the only people who will opt into these plans will be the healthy. With declining numbers of healthy people in group plans, the plans start to suffer a slow spiral of adverse selection, where more and more healthy people opt out of the plans as the premiums go up and up. As the pool of people becomes, on average, sicker and poorer, the insurance company will continue to raise the premium to accurately reflect the risk of the pool. This drives more healthy people into private coverage.

Eventually, this will actually price more people out of health insurance, rather than expanding coverage of the uninsured.

Finally, the private sector probably wants nothing to do with Medicare, since Medicare's reimbursement rates are much lower than privately managed insurance plans. What's more, it's time that we recognize that the profit motive has no place in this system; it encourages providers to deny coverage and care in order to maximize profit, when our goal should be to expand coverage and care in order to maximize health.

We owe that to each other.

(You can see the story here, via Yahoo).

Workplace Religious Freedom Act

Rick Santorum is trying to rush a bill through the U.S. Senate that would protect workers who seek to refuse to carry out job duties on religious grounds. (See an ACLU action alert here, on the ACLU web site.)

I've always thought this was bogus. There is no logical stopping point if we protect, for example, pharmacists that refuse to dispense birth control.

What about Christian Scientist emergency room doctors? Do I have to die on the table while they refuse to do anything but pray over me?

What about conservative Catholic secretaries working at family planning clinics? Do we have to make sure they get to keep their job even though they refuse to schedule a whole category of appointments?

What about members of the ministry who lose their faith? Should the government force church congregations to pay nouveau-atheists who refuse to preach?

Back of the Envelope II, Smackdown

I posted a critique of Steven Landsburg's article, "Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms: The economic logic of executing computer hackers" here.

Mr. Landsburg was kind enough to comment on my post by e-mail, and I am reprinting our correspondence with his permission. I think it is instructive.

The highlight would be that he provides an excellent link that references a full spectrum of econometric studies on the deterrent effect of the death penalty. You can find it here.

His first e-mail is here, followed by my response. He responds to my response here. My thanks to Mr. Landsburg for his comments.

Steven Landsburg e-mail #2

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. A few remarks:

1) There is reasonably good evidence that enacting a capital
punishment law has no effect on murder rates, and very good
evidence that increasing the number of executions has a very
strong effect on murder rates.

I know of only one careful study that finds otherwise regarding
executions, and that's the work of Steve Levitt and coauthors.

There's also a very interesting paper by Ed Leamer where he
tries the experiment of first biasing his methods as strongly
as possible in favor of finding a deterrent effect and then as
strongly as possible in the opposite direction. In the first
case he finds that each execution prevents 13 murders; inthe
second case he finds that each execution *causes* 3 murders.
But nearly every unbiased study gets numbers in the 8-10 range.
Again, Ehrlich is the big name in the field and it is worth
noting that he is very opposed to capital punishment.

2) If the bulk of the evidence pointed to no deterrent
effect, I would certainly oppose capital punishment, with great
passion.

E-mail response to Steven Landsburg

I responded to Mr. Landsburg's first e-mail:

Mr. Landsburg:

Thank you for reading and responding to my blog. With a total readership of four, I am needless to say quite surprised that you saw my comments at all.

Let me take your points in something approaching reverse order.

> > If Mr. Landsburg were to accept that capital punishment
> > deters no one, do you think he would change his stance?
>
>I'm not sure what stance you mean. My stance in the
>column was that *if* executing vermiscripters has a
>sufficiently large deterrent effect compared to executing
>murderers, then executing vermiscripters is better
>policy than executing murderers. Obviously if capital
>punishment deters nobody (including vermiscripters)
>then neither policy is of any value.
>
>I did say quite unambiguously in the column that
>deterrence is, to my mind, the only possible justification
>for capital punishment. If you're asking whether I
>meant that, the answer is: Of course. Why else would
>I have said it?

I wasn’t happy with the way I phrased that question even when I wrote it. I didn’t mean it to be an ad hominem attack in any way. Inelegantly, I was attempting to point to your statement that the deterrent effect is the only rationale for capital punishment, and then ask what would happen if you were to discount a deterrent effect of capital punishment on homicide.

> > My beef? He bases the value of executing murderers
> > on a "consensus" figure that estimates that executing
> > a murderer deters ten murders. The problem is, it has
> > not, to my knowledge, been empirically shown that the
> > death penalty deters murders at all.
>
>You seem to have completely missed the point here, which
>is that I was trying to *over*estimate the deterrence
>effect on murderers in order to bias things *against*
>my desired conclusion. If the deterrent effect on
>murderers is less than I said it was, then the argument
>for preferring a vermiscripter-execution to a
>murderer-execution gets stronger, not weaker.
>
>In addition to being wrong on the logic, you're wrong
>on the facts. The econometric literature on the
>death penalty overwhelmingly supports numbers in the
>vicinity of those I quoted. The biggest name in this
>field is Isaac Ehrlich (a passionate *opponent* of
>capital punishment, by the way) who, in 30 years of
>working on this subject, consistently gets numbers
>between 8 and 20 for the number of murders deterred
>by an execution. For a balanced overview of the
>literature, you might want to look at
>
>http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPDeterrence.htm
>
>The article by Levitt, et.al. finds very little
>deterrent effect and should not be ignored, but it
>also has to be weighed against literally hundreds
>of other articles, almost all of which get numbers
>in the Ehrlich range.


I looked at some of the articles on the overview you sent, although some of them were only abstracted (including the Ehrlich piece). I will attempt a few critiques without the benefit of an education in econometrics or statistical analysis.

First, the writers identify a general correlation between homicide and punishment to which they impute a deterrent effect. I won’t dispute that punishment has a deterrent effect on crime generally, or on homicide in particular. However, I don’t see any examination over the different deterrent effects of a prison sentence versus capital punishment. I suspect that any would-be murderer who is exercising enough discretion to consider punishment at all isn’t going to rate the possibility of life in prison much more harshly than death. That is to say, a “reasonable” would be murderer will consider either penalty so harsh that they would be deterred equally, or nearly so.

Second, logic defies the math in some of these cases. I have read previously, and see here (as in the Sorenson article), that studies of contiguous death penalty and non-death penalty states fail to show increased deterrence within the death penalty jurisdiction. More broadly, the homicide rate seems to increase or decrease roughly proportionally in death and non-death states without reference to capital punishment. Logically, if the death penalty had a much greater deterrent effect than life in prison, we would see a much lower homicide rate in jurisdictions that execute murderers.

That said, my original post was really only tangential to your article, which I found to be quite funny. Your analysis brings to mind why I enjoy reading the pragmatic and well-reasoned appellate opinions of Judge Richard Posner.

Steven Landsburg e-mail #1

You write:


> My beef? He bases the value of executing murderers
> on a "consensus" figure that estimates that executing
> a murderer deters ten murders. The problem is, it has
> not, to my knowledge, been empirically shown that the
> death penalty deters murders at all.

You seem to have completely missed the point here, which
is that I was trying to *over*estimate the deterrence
effect on murderers in order to bias things *against*
my desired conclusion. If the deterrent effect on
murderers is less than I said it was, then the argument
for preferring a vermiscripter-execution to a
murderer-execution gets stronger, not weaker.

In addition to being wrong on the logic, you're wrong
on the facts. The econometric literature on the
death penalty overwhelmingly supports numbers in the
vicinity of those I quoted. The biggest name in this
field is Isaac Ehrlich (a passionate *opponent* of
capital punishment, by the way) who, in 30 years of
working on this subject, consistently gets numbers
between 8 and 20 for the number of murders deterred
by an execution. For a balanced overview of the
literature, you might want to look at

http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPDeterrence.htm

The article by Levitt, et.al. finds very little
deterrent effect and should not be ignored, but it
also has to be weighed against literally hundreds
of other articles, almost all of which get numbers
in the Ehrlich range.

Then you ask:

> If Mr. Landburg were to accept that capital punishment
> deters no one, do you think he would change his stance?

I'm not sure what stance you mean. My stance in the
column was that *if* executing vermiscripters has a
sufficiently large deterrent effect compared to executing
murderers, then executing vermiscripters is better
policy than executing murderers. Obviously if capital
punishment deters nobody (including vermiscripters)
then neither policy is of any value.

I did say quite unambiguously in the column that
deterrence is, to my mind, the only possible justification
for capital punishment. If you're asking whether I
meant that, the answer is: Of course. Why else would
I have said it?

Steven E. Landsburg

Tell your friends about Object Permanence

...so that I can go to the Democratic Convention with press credentials.

Check it out. Pretty cool, no? (Link via Fark).

Tenet resignation update

Fred Kaplan writes this excellent article about the possible fallout from the Tenet resignation. He also neatly summarizes the status of other various administration scandals. It frightens me how many there actually are.

It begins...

Look at this.

Any bets on who is next?