Sunday Morning

The thing about McCain and computers is not just about age. It's also about privilege. He has people to print out his email and highlight the important stuff. Here's a stupid illustration of the same principle.

Fear Inflation

The War on Terra narrative is starting to break down.

In the beginning, it was only security experts trying to calm people down, and recognize that WTC attack was unique, not replicable, and that al qaeda did not have the resources to pose a serious threat. Bruce Scheier, for example, was one of the voices of calm, as James Fallows pointed out earlier this week (after, ahem, I reminded him about Bruce's work. Aha. I also see he read the same article in the Times I read yesterday.)

When I say the narrative is breaking down, I mean that legacy media people like Fareed Zakaria are writing (and getting stories past their editors) about the excess of fear has been driven by the US government brazenly exaggerating the terrorist threat. In this case, the Bush administration has done so by counting civilian deaths in Iraq as victims of terroism:

[T]here is a reason you're scared. The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups—and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START—it was almost never described as such." To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan (as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in 1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia actions.

If you subtract out the war victims in Iraq, terrorist incidents are down.

But Bush is still flogging the War on Terror meme, still insisting that Iraq is the front in the a war directed at the United States by a few thousand stateless, resourceless people hiding in caves.

So is McCain. Obama is going to have to confront this directly.

Fear and Fantasy

Yesterday's New York Times had an article describing conflict between state governments and the Department of Homeland Security. States, like Massachusetts, want to use DHS grants to enhance citizens' safety from actual threats. DHS insists they spend a quarter of their grant money on, wait for it.....

defense against Improvised Explosive Devices:

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s.

“I.E.D.’s? As in Iraq I.E.D.’s?” Ms. Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. “There was no new intelligence about this,” she said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities.

“I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the importance of keeping this nation safe,” said Col. Dean Esserman, the police chief in Providence, R.I. “But I also live every day as a police chief in an American city where violence every day is not foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the neighborhoods.”

It gets harder and harder to figure out whether these people are venal, idiotic or both. Is the need to hype a Terra Threat so deeply seated that it drives all public policy? Or do people like Chertoff actually believe that the good citizens of Amhearst or Brockton need to worry about Iraqis will sneak past the terrorist watchlist and attack them here using the methods they use to attack us there?

Speaking Clearly

In Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, he recounts a television address on the eve of the 1970 midterms, given by Ed Muskie, who was expected to be the frontrunner for the nomination in 1972:

Calmly, he said the charge Democrats appeased thugs was "a lie, and the American people know it is a lie"--a lie about the party "which led us out of depression and to victory over international barbarism ; the party of John Kennedy, who was slain in the service of the country he inspired; the party of Lyndon Johnson, wh0 withstood the fury of countless demonstrations in order to pursue a course he believed in; the party of Robert Kennedy, murdered on the eve of his greatest triumph. How dare they tell us that this party is less devoted or less courageous in maintaining American principles and values than they are themselves?"...

His tone turned rueful: "This attack is not simply the oversealousness of a few local leaders. It has been led, inspired and guided from the highest offices in the land."

"Let me try to bring some clarity to this deliberate confusion."... The Republicans? "They oppose your interests" and really believe that they can make you afraid enough or angry enough, you can be tricked into voting against yourself. It is all part of the same contempt, and tomorrow you can show them the mistake they have made."... [The debate is between] the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men."

There's quite bit here. First, of course, the song remains the same, nearly forty years later. Then the bogeymen were the dirty hippies and the commies. Now it's scary brown people wearing turbans. But the deal the Republicans proffer hasn't changed. Just the cover story has changed. It wasn't true then. It's not true now. Still the same deal. And still the same calumnies directed at the patriotism of Democrats.

Second, what has happened to our party's leadership? I challenge you to find a speech by Pelosi or Reid that calls out the president for his "lies," or for the contempt for voters that is inherent in their tactics of thuggish threats. Why can't our leaders speak out with this kind of directness and clarity?

The administration's favorability rating and the right track/wrong track numbers make it clear that Americans are ready to hear a direct attack on the Republican party, the President and McCain's plans to continue the contemptuous disregard for the democratic process and voters themselves that has characterized this administration.

Paging Howard Dean.

HIllary

The problem with what Clinton has been doing is not just that she is tilting at windmills. 

She's making bad arguments while doing so.  Silly arguments.

Saying that 1968 and 1992 prove that it is common for the process to continue into June is ridiculous. In 1992, Tsongas had suspended his campaign in March, leaving Clinton well ahead of Jerry Brown.  In 1968, the nomination process did not much reflect primaries--the eventual nominee entered no primaries.  The convention really did make the candidate selection, with a large number of uncommitted delegates, with power-wielding delegation chairs.  This method of insulating the nominating process from rank and file democrats led to some unpleasantness at the '68 convention, which is what led to the reforms implemented in 1972.  The 1972 primary-driven process is still the basic template we user today.

But none of that really is all that important, because in '68 the incumbent president withdrew his candidacy after losing a primary to an insurgent. There's no way that wasn't going to be a messy process of selection, or that it would not go to the convention.

So this is a bad argument.

But she has a good one to make.  The race is very close. It's closer than any nomination process since the primary system was put into place.  Carter had a 600 delegate lead over Kennedy in 1980.  And the superdelegates make no sense if they are not meant to arbitrate a close race.  

Her case is a simple one. Her candidacy is as popular with the rank and file as Obama's is, certainly within the margin error of the arcane process involved. So, she can say, leave it up to them.

At the very least, she deserves to have her delegates at the convention, she can say. The convention is not just about choosing a presidential candidate. It is about, among other things, reviewing the nominating process.

If she had kept her focus on the delegates, she would not sound so, frankly, desperate and illogical as she tries to weave tales of electability and which states count.

Obama's religious preference

Simple answers to simple questions

NYC Public Transit

Atrios talks about getting from  A to B as missing the point when discussing/designing mass transit. The system in Manhattan, as he says, works because you can get from anywhere to anywhere. It's an interlocking network of bus lines and subway lines that has no center.

This is in contrast to Philadelphia, where everything goes through Center City. There's no easy way to get from one part of the system to another if they are not on the same line.    It really is "commuter rail" while the NYC system serves everybody, not just commuters.

This is partly because (or has caused it be) that there is no "downtown" in NYC, no Centrum, as they call it on the European highway systems.  "Downtown" means "South" not a destination. Instead there is a collection of geographical centroids, neighborhoods, that are fully equipped with all services for businesses and residences.  I am not exaggerating the fully equipped part. It's not surprising, I suppose, that I'm a block away from half a dozen dry cleaners or places that will make me a pizza. But I'm also only a few (4) blocks away from a lumberyard and a place that sells marble and granite, and one block away from the most fully stocked plumbing supply store you'll ever see.

Not to mention the place where I get my shoes resoled. 

So travel is between these neighborhoods, all mixed residential and commercial, with some neighborhoods, like mine, more residential than not, while others more commercial than residential, like the financial district.  This can only work, or can only have come about, if you can get anywhere from anywhere.

Out in the Boondocks

It was fun hosting at Eschaton, but now it's time to return to this drafty place.

Boondocks, by the way, is derived from the Tagalog bundok,  referring to remote and inaccessible areas in what we now call the Philippine Islands.  The Philip part in the name refers to Philip the Second.

Allawi thinks this is the appropriate occupation that will help you understand what the US is doing in Iraq:

I sat with Allawi for two hours, sharing coffee and chocolate pastries. It was a deeply depressing experience. Allawi tried as hard as any Iraqi to make a go of the new Iraq, and he is thoroughly disillusioned. He says he is resigned to the likelihood that Iraq will end up a sort of protectorate of the United States for the next several decades, not unlike the Philippines was for much of the 20th century — dependent, violent, crippled. “The history of the Philippines,” he noted, “is not a happy one.”

So I'll clean up the digs, add some blogroll, and post daily.  

Fer shure. Next coupla days.  

 

  

Al Qaeda Declares Victory in Iraq

NPR is reporting (podcast) that al Zawahiri, the Egyptian strategist from al qaeda has released a new recording, claiming victory in Iraq. Five years have passed, the recording, still unsubstantiated by US intelligence, says, and the US is still bogged down. He mocks Bush as a failure, remaining in Iraq only because he does not want to be the one who has to withdraw.

Now you may recall that one of the reasons we are given by president, and now John McCain, is that if the US withdraws, it will be tremendous propaganda victory for al qaeda. It looks like remaining in an indefinite quagmire is also a tremendous propaganda victory for al qaeda.

This is deeply ironic. It's, of course, ironic because the pretext for remaining turns out to come about as a result of the policy. But it's also ironic because it is just what happened in Afghanistan when the Soviets were defeated. As in Iraq, al qaeda played a trivial role in the defeat of the Soviet Army. US and Saudi supplies of Stinger missiles to other, more effective native rebel forces. Al qaeda played little to no role in the victory of the Afghan opposition. Bin Laden greatly exaggerated the role of al qaeda in that war, propagandizing his role, while ingratiating himself with the Taliban, which is discussed in detail in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars.

In Iraq, US policy has actually enhanced the reputation of al qaeda by relentlessly exaggerating the role of al qaeda in the opposition to the occupation, and its role in inter-faction fighting. There not only aren't that many of them:

"They'll just say al-Qaida," Venzke said of the U.S. command, "and the media frequently simplify it to that level because they think nobody thinks there are other groups."

Terrorism analyst Lydia Khalil, of Washington's Jamestown Foundation research group, said something more complex may also be going on.

"I talked to a lot of guys over there (U.S. officials in Iraq) and they are aware that the majority of fighters are not al-Qaida," said this former U.S. political adviser in Baghdad.

Bush's warning about al-Qaida and Iraq "serves mostly to buttress the administration's claim that Iraq's problems are the work of outsiders, and not the result of the administration's mismanagement of the occupation and internal Iraqi factionalism," said Steven Simon, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But they are also not closely affiliated with bin Laden's group:

The University of Michigan's Juan Cole questions how strong the links are between international al-Qaida and the local Iraqi variety, which he describes as Salafists — fundamentalist Sunnis — "who style themselves al-Qaida."

Just as bin Laden found it in his interests to endorse Bush before the 2004 election, Bush has found it in his interest to inflate the risk that al qaeda represents, both in Iraq and in the rest of the world.

Now that particular collection of lies and distortions has, as so many other failed policies have, backfired on the Bush administration.

Secure ID

Identification card issues have come to my attention lately. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to bludgeon states into committing to implementation of Real ID, a yet to be defined system to be implement sometime in the middle of the next decade, at state expense. State governments in the libertarian mountain West and in the cranky Yankee Northeast have passed legislation rejecting participation in the program. DHS has been scrambling to save face by declaring these rejections to be equivalent of apply for an extension in committing to the program. Wyoming Governor Brian Schweitzer dismisses the DHS Sturm and Drang, in particular the threat to declare driver licenses from non-compliant states invalid for getting on a commercial aircraft, as bureaucratic bluffing. I have a DK diary up about Schweitzer's stand.

At the same time, I received email from someone who wanted to know whether he should participate in a new private sector ID card, called FlyClear. The idea is that you get a secure ID, complete with embedded biometric information that is pre-cleared. At the airport, a proprietary device transmit you ID to the current TSA watchlist, confirming that you are not on it. The question from the person sending me the email reminded me that most people don’t understand, at all, how a well designed biometrically driven ID system would work.

A good ID card would be unique and universal. It would contain biometric information encoded, and encrypted, on the card and nowhere else. It should not be stored on a central, (or distributed) database. A digital fingerprint or iris scan should never be transmitted anywhere. The whole ID of a biometric identification mechanism is that it is always with you, and never anywhere else.

The way it would work is you’d swipe your card through a reader, and then put your thumb in the reader. If the thumbprint matches the digital thumbprint that is on the card, then a green light goes on (“The person holding this card is the person whose thumbprint is on the card.”) If anything further needed to be done, like a lookup of your presence on the TSA watchlist, or your card’s available balance checked, then a unique ID assigned to you is transmitted to the entity doing the lookup. The key is that the authentication should always be entirely local, between the card, the reader and physical biometric input.

Storing or transmitting the digitized biometric ID means a copy of your thumbprint exists. But the whole point of using your thumb is that it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Storing or transmitting the digital image creates the possibility that someone else may obtain the digital print, becoming you in the process. Transmission is clearly the greater risk because transmission is necessarily less secure than storage for capturing the digital rendition. Much more important, though, is that with a transmission system, you can no longer be certain that the source of the digital rendition is in fact the physical, analog object being rendered. If you permit a digital image of your thumb to be transmitted, then that transmission can be simulated without your thumb.

How well do the two ID systems I mentioned above implement these design rules? There’s no way to know for sure how the Real ID system will work, because the system isn’t designed yet. However, as Schweitzer points out in an NPR interview that’s linked in the DK diary above, the reliability of the Real ID will only be as good as the identification documents that are used to obtain it. He notes that half a dozen teenagers in a Kinkos can do a reasonable job of forging the birth certificate that is a primary source for the planned Real ID. A more important indication of the quality to expect from a Real ID program (if it is ever implemented, which I strongly doubt) is the way the program is proceeding. Good security tools, like encryption methods, are created with a great deal of public scrutiny. Bureaucratic authoritarians do not use such systems; they tend to prefer what is called security by obscurity working in secret. Security by obscurity is the design philosophy that led to a SONY CD music encryption technology that was cracked by using a magic marker on a disk.

There is a host of other reasons to believe that 50 individual state implementation of “standards” set in Washington will fail.

The FlyClear system is actually pretty good. The biometric information is indeed stored on the card. The authentication process at the airport does indeed consist of local authentication against a digital biometric signature on the card, and then sending of an identification number to a database updated with TSA information. The digital thumbprint is not transmitted, only the ID is. The only problem is that they do store the biometric information in a “secure” database. There is, of course, no such thing. It’s possible to conceive of a series of security measures that one would have to take to be sure that the information is in fact secure, involving complicated measures for protection from everything from disgruntled employees to off-site backups.

They do it this way because it makes creating the end product easier; they have to do a bunch of pre-processing with the TSA before they issue the card. It’s easier if they have the biographical and biometric data in the database, and then create the card, than to create the card first, and then modify it. This also makes it easier to recreate a lost card. (Note that a lost card is of no value to anyone else, and that making a false replacement card request doesn’t do a bad guy any good, because the card is only useful to somebody with the user’s thumbprint.)

I haven’t said a word about DNA here. DNA would indeed play a role in a well-defined identification system, but it won’t work as a biometric authentication method on an ID card, because, unlike your thumb, you leave lots of copies of your DNA everywhere you go. I’ll write something up about how you’d work DNA into a national identification system later on. In the meantime, the one sentence takeaway is “If someone offers you a biometric ID card that does not do its authentication locally, back away slowly.”

If you have any further interest in this topic, and you should, because the numbskulls running DHS have no understanding of good security practice, a good source is Bruce Schneier, who wrote a very good book Secrets and Lies and maintains an excellent web site (http://www.schneier.com) where you can signup for a monthly e-newsletter.

On the Democrats' Nomination Process

There's been a lot of tooth-gnashing over the Democratic nominating process. There are complaints that there are too many caucuses, the caucuses are unrepresentative because of low turnout, delegate allocation rules are arcane, the process lasts too long, and on and on. But you have to realize that the nomination process is not about just one objective. If the objective were to pick the most popular candidate among Democrats at a single moment in time, then it would be easy. If the objective were to pick the candidate the party elders thought had the best chance of winning, it would also be easy. The trouble is that those are both objectives, and they are in conflict. The nomination process is replete with conflicting objectives like this. So if you want to talk about what reform should look like next time (and believe me, there will be changes made), you need to keep in mind that the nomination process is not just a method for picking a presidential nominee from a pool of candidates.

You need a process that, among other things:

1) Picks a candidate who reasonably represents the party rank and file

2) Provides an opportunity for low name recognition/low initial money candidates to compete

3) Picks a candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning the general election

4) Provides enough time to assess the relative strengths of candidates, to engage in on-the-job national campaign training and for dirty laundry to be aired.

5) Picks a candidate the party can embrace as a whole, including party leaders and key voting blocs

6) Has reasonably balanced regional appeal

7) Picks a clear winner

8) Grows and strengthen the party

9) Provides an unambiguous nominee

These objectives conflict. 1 and 6 are met by a national primary decided by popular vote, but directly conflicts with 2, 4 and 8, for example. If you think about other systemic change, I think you will see that no method satisfies all these objectives. That’s why the process is constantly being modified, because one or the other objective is not met in most competitive nominating cycles. This year, “picking a clear winner,” which is almost certainly the first and most important objective, is at risk, which is both divisive and upsetting. However, over-reacting to that potential failure is a risk. The last time the party over-reacted, in 1968, it gave Gary Hart’s McGovern campaign an inside track, picking a candidate who was probably not the best choice. In particular, railing about the undemocratic nature of the current process misses the point. It is not just about picking the most popular candidate among the rank and file at a particular moment in time.

For what it's worth, if I were made Democratic Flying Spaghetti Monster for the day I'd drop IA, keep NH, add a primary in a low population state west of the Mississippi shortly after NH. Let those primaries be open. Then I’d divide the rest of the country into quarters by state, randomly, and have closed primaries on the same day, 3-4 weeks apart, winner take all in each state. Delegate allocation identical to the electoral college. Non-state voters, like PR and DC, are assigned delegates proportional to population, and vote in the last superprimary. In the event of no clear winner, a closed national run-off of the top two in delegate count, straight popular vote.

Such a reform would weaken the state parties considerably, which would have to be addressed in other ways. The caucuses create interest, and provide a public and meaningful role for state conventions, especially in low population states. The national convention becomes officially meaningless in the presidential selection process defined here. Any kind of reform will have negative side effects, as thisone does, which reformers need to acknowledge, and deal with, if they are to be taken seriously.

Debbie We Hardly Knew Ye

Back in the day, early 2006, when the liberal netroots were trying to get themselves organized, there were some actions organized by different blogs. One of my favorites was the Republican Rubberstamp action, where an enterprising FireDogLaker set up an account at a rubber stamp manufacturer, commissioning a stamp that said "Rubberstamp Republicans."

This was great symbology. In fact, it's become a permanent part of the lexicon, as witness today, when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Reyes called out Crazy US Rep Michelle Bachman for lying about the House version of the FISA legislation in Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The congresswoman suggests that Democrats should simply pass the bill the Senate approved. But the people have elected us not simply to rubber-stamp the actions of the Senate, but to exercise our judgment and pass bills that are in the best interests of the American people.

One of the netroots' favorite Members also picked up on the symbology. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz gave a great, very funny speech about the stamps, including my favorite bit:

Mr. Meeks has a much bigger rubber stamp.... I feel privileged to hold it, but I don't want to hold it too long, because it will rub off.....The people on the other side of the aisle come into this room, they're checking I don't know their brains, opinions, their convictions at the door."

And now, as a Co-Chair of the Red to Blue Program, Rep Wasserman Schulz seems to have forgotten those rubberstamp days. It seems that, after all, it did rub off.

Two years is about a decade ago in Internet years, but it's just one Congress ago in political years. How can she have forgotten, so quickly, how the members of her delegation refused to stand with her on issue after issue. Instead, they rubberstamped the dictates of the Republican leadership, putting their constituents behind party loyalty on their list of priorities. We have challengers who will represent their constituents. If there are votes, or issues, where they, and Representative Wasserman Schulz feels the need to vote the economic interests of her district, or her region, in opposition to the Democratic leadership, that is something we all can understand.

But to refuse to support Democrats for these seats is to forget those days of the brainless, arm-twisting, deeply corrupt Rubberstamp Congress.

McCain on al qaeda deconstructed

It's taken me a while to figure it out, but last night, during an interview with mcjoan for my Virtually Speaking program, I finally understood what's going on with McCain wrt to Iraq, al qaeda and Iran. What's going on is he is having trouble getting on message. The messaging on Iraq is very tricky, because what the message is supposed to convey is something false, but you're not supposed to actually lie while delivering the message.

So when Bush uttered the 16 words about yellowcake acquired by Iraq, he didn't say that Iraq had acquired yellowcake. He said that British intelligence had reported that Iraq may have acquired yellowcake. This way, the audience took away the yellowcake acquistion, but he could still say that he hadn't lied. Likewise, he didn't say that Iraq had a nuclear weapon, he said that we didn't the first proof to be a mushroom cloud.

When talking about Iraq, al qaeda and Iran, you're supposed to say something like this:

"Waving the white flag of surrender would leave Iraq in a perilous position, with an operational, aggressive enemy of America, al qaeda growing in strength. Likewise, we must remain in place to stop Iran from training extremists in their country, and then sending them across the border to kill American troops. Al qaeda is an existential threat the we must defeat, and we will defeat. This is not the time to give up."

His problem is he keeps forgetting that he's not supposed to put "Iran" and "al qaeda" in the same sentence. It's important to convey, especially to media superstars like Kyra Phillips, that al qaeda and Iran are linked. The Sunni al qaeda is much too fundamentalist to make common cause with the heretic Shi-ites. And Iran, despite its membership in the the "axis of evil" club, doesn't pose any threat to the US. The country does threaten Israel, but given Israel's nuclear capability, even that threat is hyperbolically overstated.

None of the reality of any threat enters into this political manipulation of language. The idea is simple: Say al qaeda, Iran, al qaeda in consecutive sentences. Lieberman understands it; he stepped up during the press conference in Jerusalem and audibly gave him the "extremist" talking point. (Leave aside as well the idea that any Iraqi fighting against an occupying force is an "extremist.")

McCain is either too dumb, or too unused to robotically repeating talking points, to keep straight this very simple strategy of misleading the media, and the voters into believing that Iran, too, in its support of al qaeda, was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Employees Good, Contractors Bad

There has been a concerted effort by the Bush administration to replace civil service worker with contract employees. I've been hearing about it around the extended family dinner table for years. I have a relative who works for a Federal regulatory agency who has said this has been policy from day 1.

There are good reasons for this, from a Bush perspective, especially wrt regulatory agencies:

1) Directing Federal funds to cronies, as the agency providing the contractor takes its cut. This is obviously a real potential boost to fund-raising.

2) Providing a channel to influence how people working at civil service rather than politically appointed jobs. Contractors have two bosses, the one at the agency, and the one at the office.

3) Weakening institutional memory and stability. By using short-term contractors, the administration makes it more difficult to use agency experience with past events to more wisely deal with current issues.

4) Making it easier to shrink the agency. It's hard to fire civil servants. It's easy no to renew a contract.

5) Making it easier to influence civil servants to break work rules. One of the reasons rules controlling access to, say, passport records, have teeth is that if you do break the rules, and are fired, you stop contributing to your pension, stop accumulating service time toward retirement and are booted out of a great health care plan. If your contract is terminated, all that happens is your employer sends you to some other assignment.

The Obama passport snooping incident is made more suspicious because the perps were contractors. The sanctions that applied to them are weaker than those applied to civil service staff, they could well have more loyalty to the interests of the agency that put them into the job.

Of course, the use of contractors creates the possibility of dirty tricksters penetrating the agency intentionally. It's a lot harder to turn a civil service employee than it is to introduce a mole.

Clinton Bets Her Stake

As we watch Clinton try to keep her hopes alive in the minds of the press and the superdelegates, you have both admire her persistence, and shake your head about the train wreck to come.

She had to win on March 4th, take both Texas and Ohio in the primary, and win one of them reasonably big. March 4 was do or die day. She could not afford to think strategically, at all. She had to find a way to take Obama down no matter what it took, and so she adopted the kitchen sink approach. This meant hauling out tactics that would win the OH and TX contests, without regard to what that would mean on March 21. The worst of her positions, the ones that would not stand scrutiny over time, were pulled out on the weekend before the primary.

So, just before the primaries, she pulled out the NAFTA card, with a boost from the Conservative Canadian cabinet. She doubled down on the 35 years experience business, making specific claims about foreign policy initiatives she claimed to have been involved with. Also, if you were in comments sections that weekend you saw what looked like proponents with talking points that included a claim that she was Bill's real Vice President, referring to a metaphor Gail Sheehy used in a Vanity Fair article.

Taken individually, these are all weak arguments. To attack NAFTA was to attack the Clinton administration that she claims as her virtual incumbency. The foreign policy claim was ridiculous; she was not even cleared to read secure cables coming in from embassies around. The nearly VP claim was absurd,especially given the unprecedented role Gore played in the Clinton administration.

One by one, they arguments all kinda suck But taken together, these things were even worse, because she had to claim to be inconsequential on NAFTA, while terribly consequential on Kosovo and that Gore spent his time in office on the equivalent of playing golf with Dan Quayle.

The campaign recognized these were bad arguments, and they dropped them immediately, switching to "ZOMG he's BLACK" and therefore can't win, pitching to the press and to the superdelegates that his race made Obama fundamentally flawed. This was done using surrogates, and does not in the least bit imply that Clinton, or her most prominent surrogate, Geraldine Ferraro, is racist. Clinton was prefiguring the coming race, getting a boost from the cable television constant looping of the Wright content. (Chris Bowers confirms that Clinton is pushing the Wright story.)

Obama's Unity speech ended that attack, at least for now, and answered questions superdelegates had about Obama's capability under fire. However, polling indicates that she has raised doubts among key demographic groups in PA. Obama may not be able to repeat his past performances of closing an initial polling gap to either win, or lose narrowly.

We are in danger what several commentators have called the worst case scenario, a candidate selected in a less than transparent way, or a candidate with lagging, even negative momentum. A lot depends on how Obama's big speeches this week play out in the media over the next week.

Don't...Read....Edward....Rothstein

There are things you know you shouldn't do. You've done them before, and nothing good came of it. You tell yourself never to do it again. I'm not talking about mind-altering substances, or ill-thought out liaisons that don't look so good just before sunup. I'm talking about reading stuff that makes your brain hurt.

Edward Rothstein, who writes about culture is someone I really try not to read. And when I do forget, and read him, I mentally kick myself and swear never to do it again.

But today I saw the headline, and I had to read it. Mistake, but this time my brain didn't hurt as much as I got angry.

On the death of Arthur C. Clark

He starts out very nicely, actually:

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90.

This is, of course, not easy to do. It's very difficult to keep religion out of death. Death's avoidance is at the heart of religious belief, whether it is through personal immortality or immortality through your offspring. So it's a challenge to fend it off.

So what does Rothstein do? He writes about he religious elements of Clarke's work, declaring, at the end:

For all his acclaimed forecasting ability, though, it is unclear whether Mr. Clarke knew precisely what he saw in that future. There is something cold in his vision, particularly when he imagines the evolutionary transformation of humanity. He leaves behind all the things that we recognize and know, and he doesn’t provide much guidance for how to live within the world we recognize and know. In that sense his work has little to do with religion.

But overall religion is unavoidable. Mr. Clarke famously — and accurately — said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.

The body of the article is about some of the stories Clarke wrote that had religion in them, like the famous short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" where two computer technicians help an Eastern sect print out all God's names, thereby ending the universe.

Along the way he peddles this tripe:

Mr. Clarke’s writings were the most biblical, the most prepared to amplify reason with mystical conviction, the most religious in the largest sense of religion: speculating about beginnings and endings, and how we get from one to the other.

The fact that Clarke noticed that other people believed in this stuff, and that there was fodder for irony and pathos doesn't make him mystical or religious. Another story he might have mentioned, "The Star," is about a Jesuit astronomer who discovers that the nova that Magi followed destroyed a thriving civilization. (I happen to think this story inspired George RR Martin's "The Way of Cross and Dragon," which is about another Jesuit who has challenges to his faith).

But the fact that Clarke was a keen observer of what motivates people, had the strong sense of irony that makes for a great short story writer--the best of the Golden Age authors at that length--doesn't in anyway make him religious, any more than Larry Niven creating a compelling alien makes him a Pearson's Puppeteer.

It's an insult to Clarke's memory to put his work in this frame, and Edward Rothstein should be ashamed.

Of course, if he knew shame, he wouldn't keep writing.

Revival

I enjoy give and take in comments. I'm not real big on pronouncements from above. So my blog attempts have always been abortive. But, lately, I find I have more to say, at greater length, than fits into blog posts. So I'm gonna take another crack here.

Kurtz in Circles

So Howie ends his criticism of Ken Silverstein's undercover story on lobbyists by saying:

The reason is that, no matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.

And he proceeds to his next subject:

Why do journalists keep making political contributions?

which has this fascinating coda:

The news outlets that don't ban donations seem to regard them as a matter of personal preference, like joining the PTA. But they seriously underestimate the public distrust of journalists, which is only fueled by such practices. Those who work for opinion magazines or are employed as commentators have a stronger case that their views are no secret. But there is still an important distinction between rhetorically supporting a candidate and helping bankroll one.

The scorecard -- 125 of 144 donations to Democrats -- provides fresh ammunition to those who say the press has a liberal tilt. It's hard to argue you don't favor one party when you've just coughed up cash for that party.

So, working undercover to get an accurate news story raises questions. And it's imperative that reporters keep their political positions a secret--that they lie to their readers, by omission, about their political views.

In both cases, not in order to get the readership more information, but to get them less information, all in order to preserve people like Howie in their positions of august authority and cocktail weenie consumption.

Occupational Reality

For at least three years, I have been calling attention in comments, and in emails to people who do not have comment sections, that the US is, and has been from the outset, engaged in a policy of permanent occupation in Iraq. This has been clear since the decision was made to build "enduring bases" in Iraq.

As time has past, all the other pretexts have been stripped away by events, and we are left, at this point with nothing more nor less than permanent occupation in support of a puppet government. I have despaired of anybody, in the MSM or in the blogosphere writing clearly about this--or about the severe difficulty involved in ending the US involvement in the occupation because of Iraq's status as a failed state with no national defense capability, surrounded by four states that have reason to have designs on its territory, and who are, in some ways natural enemies.

This is complicated further by the fact that one of those states, Turkey, is a member of NATO, and has legitimate concerns over border security. The positions taken by democratic candidates--the wiggle room in their detailed statements about their plans for Iraq--make it clear that they understand these difficulties, but fear saying so out loud, because of the enormous unpopularity of this catastrophic occupation.

The blathering from the beltway pundits, spouting the FU justification of the week also impedes serious discussion of what is to be done, and is frequently characterized by arm waving that presumes that the US is both sovereign and if not omnipotent, effectively able to impose conditions, like a tripartite division, or the dissolution of the current government or alliance with "good" ex-Baathists. But there is very little written that discusses the reality of the strategic situation.

Last night, over at FDL, swopa outlined these issues in the context of parsing democratic presidential candidates' statements. He describes why these issues pose difficulties for those who want to end the occupation, and what realistically we have to worry about. The US will not be able to withdraw substantial forces without facing these issues, and making clear decisions about what the least horrific outcome is, and how it can be pursued.

This is a debate that is long overdue. I urge people to read that post.

It's not just the blogosphere

So everybody reacted to Richard Cohen's ill-reasoned column with derision yesterday. Literally a thousand comments taking him to task for demanding a get out of jail free card for Scooter Libby because, well, because he's part of Sally Quinn's salon. Sure, atrios gave him the WotD award, and Glenn applied his writing scalpel, but it was the hoi polloi in the comments section that tells you just how completely out of touch those Beltway pundits have become.

In a less widely publicized instance, Chris Matthews endured catcalls at the AFSCME event yesterday, when he decided that one of the most pressing issues of the day was Senator Clinton's view on the question of pardoning Libby.

Those dirty effin' hippies are everywhere. And they keep making noise.