The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration practice of paying for the conflicts with so-called supplemental funds that are outside the normal Defense Department budget.
The financing would be on top of the $130 billion that Congress authorized for the wars just last month.
The military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not say how much additional money would be needed, but one figure in circulation within the Pentagon and among outside defense budget analysts is $50 billion.
Personally, I think it would be supremely irresponsible to act on this legislation without seeing the CBO score. I’m hoping Max Baucus and the blue dogs will get on that, because I’d like to know how this legislation will pay for itself. I suggest we put this off a few months to talk about the costs and how we are robbing future generations.
Via Kevin Drum, I have learned that current Senate version of the health reform bill would provide for insurance payments for Christian Science prayer treatments–and probably other “spiritual” treatments as well.
Reporting from Washington – Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”
Ugh. You know, it’s bad enough that insurance companies are already wasting money paying for quack treatments like chiropractic “adjustments” and acupuncture, but this isn’t just the camel’s nose under the tent–it’s the camel in the tent, spitting and defecating over everything.
If we’re going to be serious about controlling health care costs, we have to stop covering quack treatments just because they might make people “feel better.” Chiropractors, acupuncturists, homeopathists, faith healers, reflexologists and the rest of that pseudoscientific lot are committing fraud: they claim they can heal, but they cannot.
It’s bad enough that we allow them to practice at all. It’s terrible that some insurance companies are idiotic enough to pay for such treatments. It is a derogation of the governments’ duty to its citizens that some states license these trades. But evolving a national health care system that preserves this quackery in law and ensures they get taxpayer dollars is absolutely criminal.
One of the few roles of government that I think folks from every political stripe can agree on is that the government should protect citizens from fraud. It’s not supposed to help people perpetrate fraud.
Ford Motor Companies, the only major American automobile company to adequately prepare for a future where fewer cars are manufactured, and the only one not to receive signficant government handouts in the past year, posted a proft last quarter.
Ford Motor Co (NYSE:F – News) posted a quarterly profit on Monday, defying Wall Street forecasts for a loss as it cut costs and gained market share, leading it to raise its 2011 outlook to “solidly profitable” from break-even.
Ford’s shares surged over 9 percent as the surprising profit and increased outlook overshadowed an expected announcement later Monday that the United Auto Workers union has rejected a tentative cost-cutting deal with the automaker.
The results provided more evidence that Ford has distanced itself from U.S. rivals General Motors Co (GM.UL) and Chrysler, which have struggled to complete restructurings after emerging from government-funded bankruptcies earlier in 2009.
Ford seized North American market share from GM and Chrysler when they halted most production to prepare and execute their bankruptcy cases.
No doubt some of this profit was fueled by the time-shifted purchases produced by Cash For Clunkers. Nevertheless, I am happy to see this, as I was worried that government financial backing of GM and Chrysler might end up with the Feds giving them an advantage over Ford. I’m pleased to see that that hasn’t happened. (Frankly, government interference in the operations of GM and Chrysler to date has been surprisingly restrained, all things considered.)
Frankly, of the Big 3 automakers, Ford is the only company that I considered buying a car from in the past decade. They make good cars and they’re much better managed than the other two. I’m curious to see if they can sustain a profit into the first half of 2010, though.
All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.
And don’t forget that national security spending also contributes to our growing budget deficits. In Fiscal Year 2009, the United States spent approximately $383 billion on interest payments to service the debt (by way of comparison, that’s about 7.5 times NASA’s budget). As we continue to allow national security spending to go unchecked, those numbers are only going to get worse.
The amount of money being poured into national security spending is completely irresponsible and unsustainable. We can’t afford it. As we (hopefully) wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to take a real hard look at our foreign policy–particularly why we feel the need to spend more on defense than the rest of the world does combined. There’s no reason why we can’t adopt a more restrained policy and still keep the United States secure. I mean, let’s put this in perspective. We could cut DOD appropriations in half, today, and we’d be spending more on defense than all of the EU nations combined.
Update: Just to be clear, I wouldn’t advocate cutting the defense budget in half today. I merely wanted to illustrate that cutting DOD appropriatons in half from $680 billion to $340 billion would still result in the U.S. spending more than the EU on the military. I do think that a 50% cut from current levels is feasible, but it would have to be phased in long term–15 years or so–to be at all workable.
On his new policy blog at True/Slant, E.D. Kain provides a good defense of the Wyden-Bennett Act.
In Congress, however, we get bad compromises, not good ones, which is why we have the Baucus bill, which is neither as cost-effective, as close to universal coverage, or as fundamentally game-changing as Wyden-Bennett. Indeed, there is little to be enthusiastic about in the Baucus plan, which jealously protects the anti-competitive status-quo from any real changes, and thus – despite any analysis the CBO might put forth – does very little to challenge the fundamental problems which have led to such staggering health care cost increases in the United States.
There was, however, still a chance that the Baucus bill could be amended to bring more competition and cost-savings on board, and once again it’s the incorrigible Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, who introduced the Free Choice Act in the Senate Finance Committee. Basically Wyden’s proposal would open up the new health care exchanges to everybody no matter their employer’s coverage and no matter the size of their business.
Read the whole thing. Frankly, I’m baffled that the Republican Party hasn’t picked up Wyden-Bennett. It’s a much better reform proposal than the awful Baucus bill–which, awful as it is, still manages to be better than the status quo–and it’s also a more-market oriented reform. It’s not my ideal, but it’s a vast improvement. This would be a golden opportunity for the GOP to both steal the Democrats’ thunder and improve our hideous health care system. It’s win-win.
Instead, the Republican Party seems to be focused on simply opposing Obama, and the only significant “reform” being offered is the constant, anti-responsiblity drumbeat of “tort reform”: i.e. making physicians a special class of Americans who get to be protected from the consequences of their negligence.
In new guidelines announced today, the Obama Administration has decided that it will deferring to the states on enforcing marijuana laws when those states have laws allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes.
The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors today.
Two Justice Department officials described the policy to the Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.
The policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.
Fourteen states allow some use of marijuana for medical purposes: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
A small step in the right direction, but a step nonetheless.
One of the coolest things about the internet, in my opinion, is the way that it opens up markets for goods that might not be economically viable locally, but are economically viable when every business in the world has a global reach. This has opened us up to a vast array of goods and services that simply weren’t economically viable before.
That said, I think that even on the Internet, the market for this flag can’t be big enough to be economically viable:
Not only is the market for this small, I doubt that anybody buys this unironically.
Matthew Yglesias suggests that one thing that could aid the fight in Afghanistan would be to lower tariffs against Afghan goods and motivate our allies to do the same.
If I’m reading these slides right then textile products made in Afghanistan are not eligible for duty-free sale in the United States. Changing that rule might encourage some factory-building in Afghanistan. Similarly we see here that some of Afghanistan’s key trade partners have very high tariffs on Afghan agricultural products. Perhaps we could persuade Turkey and India that they don’t need to be charging 50+% taxes on imports of Afghan grapes. India is Afghanistan’s largest export market right now despite those high taxes; changing it would open some additional economic opportunities for people.
One of his commenters adds that the United States could probably benefit from lowering tariffs on textiles from Pakistan, as well (which are ridiculously high). I agree with this sentiment and I think that there is a lot of benefit from dropping our short-sighted agricultural tariffs and agricultural subsidies. The benefits would just be economic–they’d improve relations and security, too.
As part of their ongoing effort to cement George Orwell’s reputation by making him the most accurate prophet in history, the British Home Office is now investigating the possiblity of forcing every Pub in Britain to replace pint glasses with plastic pint cups:
The BBC reported recently that the British Home Office is seeking a new design for pint glasses that it hopes may reduce the number of incidents in which people attack each other with pint glasses. According to official statistics, 5,500 people are attacked with glasses and bottles every year in England and Wales. (Probably lots more in Scotland, though maybe they just use swords.) This public safety emergency has spurred the government into action, seeking a design that cannot be used as a weapon.
Designers say they are considering two basic approaches: (1) plastic, or (2) something else. First, glasses could be made from plastic, or could be coated with it so that the glass would not shatter into sharp pieces if broken. Second, “[w]e could do something more radical,” said one designer, “by looking at the whole shape and substance of the pint – we could come up with something that is completely different [from] glass.” Seems a lot like the first approach, and it wasn’t clear what he had in mind. But he continued: “Remember that years ago people used to drink out of pewter tankards. It could be quite a significant paradigm shift.” That’s a great idea – I’d much rather be clubbed to death with a pewter tankard.
Because, you know, most bar-brawlers are fundamentally upset at the pint, not the people around them, and if they can’t smash a pint sleeve, they will contain their anger and not use a chair, bottle, or imposing scarred forehead.
Wired reports that studies show that “enhanced interrogation”, far from being a reliable source of information, can actually make someone less of an intelligence asset because the stress involved changes the biochemistry of the brain:
“There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and humans,” writes Shane O’Mara, a stress researcher at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. “These techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting memory and executive function.”
[...]
A report published by the Intelligence Science Board in 2007 found that no research existed to support the use of enhanced interrogation. And O’Mara’s review, published Monday in Trends in Cognitive Science, describes a wealth of science that supports ending the practice.
O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval — are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.
What’s more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they’re lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors’ allegations into their own version of reality.
What’s frustrating about the torture debate to me is that all of the professionals who are experts in the field are routinely ignored by the pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the debate. Just so we’re clear, in addition to the biochemical evidence above, here’s a few posts and articles that we’ve seen over the past few months:
We’ve seen that an Air Force officer with counterterrorism experience and experience interrogating al-Qaeda members opposes enhanced interrogation on the grounds that it doesn’t gather effective intelligence.
We’ve had military psychologists who work on the SERE program, which trains soldiers to resist “enhanced interrogation,” claim that the use of same on detainees to be counterproductive.
We’ve seen an FBI counterintelligence agent who specialize in counterterrorism and also had experience interrogating al-Qaeda members find no evidence of the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation.”
We’ve seen another FBI counterintelligence agent explain that the use of “enhanced interrogation” makes it much harder to recruit reliable intelligence assets.
We’ve seen a Marine Corps interrogator point out the uselessness of such techniques even if there’s a “ticking time bomb” scenario.
Against this, we mostly have the claims of Dick Cheney who says that the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report demonstrates that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” enabled the United States to gain significant amounts of intelligence, particularly from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. The problem is, of course, is that this claim doesn’t survive scrutiny. Most of Cheney’s claims involve intelligence that was already known prior to KSMs capture, or organizational information that was obtained from KSM’s computer and paper files–not his actual interrogation. Indeed, most of what KSM said under “enhanced interrogation” was useless. It wasn’t until it stopped and the traditional American methods of interrogation employed instead that he actually provided anything of value.
The pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the house loves to throw out hypotheticals and vague claims that these techniques are valuable, but the evidence doesn’t bear this claim out. These techniques do not provide any signficant or usable intelligence; they make useless people who might be turned into valuable intelligence assets, as noted above; they provide a powerful rallying cry for the recruitment of people into our enemies’ cause; they make it less likely that our enemies will surrender to our troops, which exposes them to unnecessary risk of harm; they make it more likely that our soldiers, when captured, will be tortured; they make it harder to recruit counterintelligence assets; they force us to waste time and resources in following false leads and finally, they undermine the moral authority of the United States.
Regarding the TARP program, Matthew Yglesias makes a comment about conservatives that really isn’t fair:
But Romney aside, it’s striking to see the number of conservatives who’ve decided that an initiative proposed by George W. Bush and Hank Paulson and endorsed by the GOP congressional leadership was and is secretly some socialist plot. Similarly with the idea that Ben Bernanke, former Bush administration official, is running some sort of rogue left-wing operation at the Fed.
You know, October 2008 wasn’t that long ago and I remember that the biggest obstacles to TARP’s passage were the left-wing Democrats (Schumer and Dodd, particularly–I remember being absolutely stunned that Chuck Schumer met a government proposal that he didn’t like, and managed to ask pertinent questions of Paulson without grandstanding) and, of course, the most conservative GOP members of the House, who absolutely revolted over TARP. Sure, there weren’t huge protests against President Bush or anything, but TARP was pretty much always opposed by the mainstream conservative base.
I really do wish that Yglesias was back at The Atlantic–much of his content hasn’t changed since he moved over to ThinkProgress, but his analysis of the political facts on the ground (vs. policy discussion) has been lacking since his move.
Dave Schuler notes that the Senate has voted to “de-fund” ACORN and strip them of Federal Money. I think that this is an entirely appropriate action. There’s enough evidence that ACORN employees might have been willing to go along with and provide assistance with a sex-trafficking scheme that it’s worth cutting off their funds, at least while the matter is investigated.
That said, I am curious as to why the Federal government continues to fund Armor Group, North America, which has come under fire because the guards it provided to guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have apparently been illegally engaging in sex crimes as well:
[Former Armor Group manager James] Gordon said the company resisted “with outright hostility” his efforts as a manager to impose a no-brothel policy. And Gordon said he asked both the company and the State Department to investigate whether guards were personally involved in sex trafficking, and that to his knowledge nothing was done.
“United States law, known as the Trafficking in Victims Protection Act, prohibits contractors from procuring commercial sex while working on the contract,” Gordon said in a statement. “Many of the prostitutes in Kabul are young Chinese girls who were taken against their will to Kabul for sexual exploitation.”
Gordon said a trainee had boasted that he could purchase a girl for $20,000 and turn a profit after a month.
“I immediately notified both the State Department and AGNA’s president, and urged the company to thoroughly investigate whether sex trafficking was occurring among the guard force … To my knowledge neither AGNA nor the State Department conducted a follow-up investigation,” Gordon said.
ACORN, as far as I can tell, gets about $3 million from the Federal Government. Via E.D. Kain, AGNA’s contract is worth $187 milliion.
But that’s not all: the Federal govnerment provides billions of dollars to Halliburton, which is currently facing scrutiny because it tried to cover up the gang-rape of one of its employees.
Remember Jamie Leigh Jones, the Halliburton/KBR contractor who alleged she was gang raped by her co-workers in Iraq and then imprisoned in a shipping container after she reported the attack to the company? Well, it looks like she’s finally get to sue the company, in a real courthouse, over her ordeal.
Her legal saga started after Halliburton failed to take any action against her alleged attackers, and the Justice Department and military also failed to prosecute. Jones then tried to sue the company for failing to protect her.
This is not an attempt at a “they do it too!” deal. I seriously have zero problem with cutting off ACORN’s funds. I just hope that the Congress starts applying this principle across the board and prevents the Administration from contracting with companies that are involved in sex crimes–not just politically convenient targets. Defund ACORN, AGNA, and Halliburton all. Oh, and while we’re at it, could somebody please ask Halliburton to return to the Federal government the over one billion dollars that it can’t account for?
Via Steven Taylor, we note that neither Poland nor the Czech Republic feel “abandoned” by Obama’s decision to scrap missile defense replace an expensive, ineffective boondoggle “missile defense system” with a less expensive, mobile, effective land and sea-based SM-3 interceptor force. Here’s the Polish Prime Minister:
Tusk said that Obama’s “proposal of an alternative strategy should not affect the security of Poland” or of Europe.
“I would not describe what is going on today as a defeat for Poland,” Tusk told reporters, adding that he spoke to Obama on Thursday and the U.S. leader signaled to him that “Poland has a chance to win an exclusive position” in the new system.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus also brushed off any concerns about the decision’s impact on relations with the United States.
“This decision of the American government did not come as a surprise to those who closely followed the signals over recent months,” Klaus said in Prague.
“I’m 100 percent convinced that this decision of the American government does not signal a cooling of relations between the United States and the Czech Republic.”
It’s also worth mentioning, as Dr. Taylor notes, that the Czech government never actually approved the Bush Administration’s plan in the first place. President Klaus signed the treaty, but it has yet to be approved by the Czech Parliament.
So here’s the thing: if the Czech Republic and Poland aren’t opposed to Obama’s decision, why on earth should we be? For my own part, I’d rather that American tax dollars weren’t spend to defend Europe from what are currently hypothetical threats–I fail to see why Europe can’t shoulder the financial burden to defend itself. That said, if we are going to expend tax dollars in this way, the prudent course of action is to spend those tax dollars wisely on military technology that actually works, not boondoggles whose only purpose is to enrich the pockets of defense contractors and make us feel “tough.”
UPDATE (James Joyner): I agree that 1) there are solid technical arguments to be made in favor of the new plan vice the old one and 2) there is a divide in Eastern Europe on the issue. I did a rather comprehensive roundup this morning on just this: “Obama’s Missile Defense Decision: The View From Europe.” Not only has public opinion there been divided — with the Czechs generally opposed and the Poles lukewarm — but both countries voted out the center-right governments which negotiated the original deal and voted in center-left governments that were less enthusiastic. I do, however, take the official government statements since the announcement with a grain of salt: The decision was a fait accompli.
I disagree, of course, that the purpose of the Bush program was to serve as a sop to the defense industry and think the “boondoggle” descriptor wrong. And I’m a BMD skeptic. We’re not talking about SDI, which may well be impossible to create, but rather theater defense, with which we’ve had much more success. And, of course, sending a man to the moon was impossible until we actually committed the resources to solving the problem.
I normally don’t pay attention to Michelle Malkin because of my general policy of not paying attention to those uninterested in rational discussion (a policy that extends to, for example, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, etc.). However, I have to say that I admire the chutzpah of her recent blog post, in which she decries the “racial thuggery” of an assault that currently has no evidence of racial motivation.
Now, it may well turn out that there was a racial component to the assault. However, when one considers that Michelle Malkin wrote a book in which she defends the idea that it’s okay for the government to use force to round people up and detain them solely on the basis of their race, for her to condemn any action as “racial thuggery” without a sense of irony shows a cosmic lack of self-awareness that is, in a very literal sense, awesome.
The Obama administration is putting a new plan in place at Afghanistan’s Bagram air field detention facility to bring indefinite detentions there — a practice viewed as a replication of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility’s more noxious functions — to an end. What does it include? Assigning U.S. military officials, who aren’t lawyers, to represent detainees’ interests in administrative hearings, according to The Washington Post. And what does that sound like?
“They’re setting up what amounts to a CSRT,” said David Remes, the legal director of the non-profit Appeal for Justice law firm who represents 19 Guantanamo detainees. A CSRT is the acronym for a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the old mechanism at Guantanamo to adjudicate not a detainee’s guilt or innocence, but whether he constituted a threat to U.S. national security. Detainees were at the mercy of hearsay evidence and had the burden of proving that they weren’t a threat and the government’s case against them was erroneous. The Bush administration contended that CSRTs provided all the process rights to which Guantanamo detainees were entitled. But in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Boumediene case that detainees were entitled to habeas corpus protections.
There’s no point in closing down Gitmo if we’re just going to replace it with Bagram, is there? Whether its in Cuba or Afghanistan, the President is still breaking the law, not to mention acting unjustly. Habeas Corpus is one of the oldest rights in Anglo-Saxon law, and the fact that it’s been pretty much shredded over the past decade is nothing short of despicable.
