Mark A. R. Kleiman

I hope this passage reflects over-optimism:

Republican officials said they were confident that the firestorm would blow over relatively quickly.

"The general view inside the White House among senior staff is that this is going to create a few rocky political days, that it's mainly the Democrats pushing it and that if all the Republicans stay on board, the story goes away," a Republican worker with close ties to the White House said.

That's a big "if." Keeping all the Republicans on board may not be so easy. But that depends on public reaction.

The big advantage for Bush is that the inexcusable media silence during the long cover-up period means that most voters are hearing about the story first in terms of Bush's co-operation. And of course any explanation about how long the stone wall had stayed in place would make the reporters look bad, as well as the White House. In reputational terms, they're all in this together.

Time for letters to your Senators.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:43 PM | |

If the Justice Department decided to start a full criminal invesigation of the Plame affair on Friday, as John Ashcroft told the New York Times, then why did it take until Tuesday to get a letter with specific demands to the White House? [*] Why wasn't that letter ready at the same time as the formal notification, which went out Monday evening?

Note also that the investigation is going to be handled by the inspections division, which reports directly to Mueller, rather than the Washington Field Office. Anything that brings the action closer to the political appointees should be considerered bad news until proven benign.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:42 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Howard Kurtz finally asks a reasonable question:

One lingering question: Where was the press in the weeks after the July 14 Novak column? Other than a few news stories and outraged columns by David Corn and Paul Krugman, the media were napping on this story until the CIA kicked it over to Justice.

But here's the obvious follow-up: Where was media critic Howard Kurtz when the press was napping? I'm not the only blogger who tried to get him interested in the story and didn't even get a response.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:10 PM | |

PBS Newshour found a CIA veteran named Larry Johnson who trained with Valerie Plame and who says "she has been undercover for three decades." [Update With the Washington Post reporting her age as 40, that must surely have been a slip for "over three decades": i.e., the 80s, the 90s, and the current decade.]

I hope that means we've heard the last of Novak's spin on the topic. And I hope that all the people who have been inventing fanciful theories and reasons for doubt, or arguing that more evidence was needed before coming to a conclusion, will now confront the facts as they are: that two top officials of the Bush White House revealed to at least seven reporters the name of a covert CIA officer, apparently as an act of revenge on her husband.

Johnson, who says he was a Bush contributor, adds "I tell you, it sickens me as a Republican to see this." Transcript here.

This sort of reaction is why I've thought from the beginning that this scandal could do more damage to Bush politically than anything else I've heard of. People who naturally like Bush will naturally hate what was done here.

Update One of Kevin Drum's commenters posts this lovely tidbit from Hardball (unlinked, and I can't find it on line):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Don't you think it's more serious than Watergate, when you think about it?

RNC CHAIRMAN ED GILLESPIE: I think if the allegation is true, to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative -- it's abhorrent, and it should be a crime, and it is a crime.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: It'd be worse than Watergate, wouldn't it?

GILLESPIE: It's -- Yeah, I suppose in terms of the real world implications of it. It's not just politics.

Second update Now John LeBoutillier is off the reservation. On NewsMax, no less.

Who in this disciplined, top-down, well oiled White House would read Wilson's op-ed and slam his fist down on the desk and proclaim, "That bastard is going to pay! What do we have on him? Let's get it out there!" ... Whoever authorized the Plame leak could possibly go to jail for this willful act of lawbreaking. And those who actually called the six reporters could also go to jail - unless they cop a plea and rat out others. ... Preliminary reports are that there is a great dissension inside the White House staff over this leak. Many are described as 'disgusted' at the outing of Ms. Plame. ... There is still the question of whether or not the Ashcroft Justice Department will honestly investigate the Bush White House.... if the Clinton White House had sold out an active-duty CIA agent as 'payback' for some whistle-blowing article, we would be outraged. This crime is no less serious because it was done in a Republican White House.

I know I didn't write that stuff for the Boot. Must have been Atrios.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:07 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

I wonder what all the right-bloggers who voted Margaret Thatcher in a tie with Albert Einstein as the third-greatest figure of the 20th Century [*] think of this?

I, on the other hand, am happy to keep my record of never having agreed with the lady on anything intact.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:50 PM | |

Of all the silly excuses for not taking the Plame scandal seriously, the prize for the silliest goes (against some mighty stiff competition) to the idea [*] that because some cocktail-party chatterer in Washington claims to have known for years that Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie worked at Langley, no harm was done by publishing a connection between the name "Valerie Plame" and the initials "CIA," first Robert Novak's column then in Time magazine.

The orchestral version of this silly symphony adds what is supposed to be the crushing detail: Wilson's on-line bio mentions that "he is married to the former Valerie Plame." [*] (Donald Luskin likes this one, too. ) In a slightly different version, Wilson's acceptance of the mission to Niger was enough all by itself to "burn" his wife's cover, so whatever damage was done was really his fault. [*]

Now I don't have any information whatever about any of this except what's been in print or on the Web. But the whole thing seems a lot less confusing to me than it does to people who perhaps would prefer staying confused to facing up to the villainy done by people close to the President they admire and support.

Why might Valerie Plame Wilson have worked abroad undercover under her true name, rather than a workname? Perhaps because her cover (reportedly as an energy consultant) was bolstered by facts (such as advanced degrees or work experience) that were true about Valerie Plame and couldn't easily be transferred to another identity. (That doesn't imply that she never used a different workname, only that sometimes she was "Valerie Plame" in the field.)

[It's not unusual for CIA folks to have overt and covert names, both used professionally: I remember my intense puzzlement during my days at the Justice Department when someone I knew as a Langley analyst working on drug-related money-laundering let me read one of his work products (published in a limited, numbered edition of 40 copies) and the name on the title page wasn't the name I knew him by. I assumed that his boss had stolen credit for his work, and found it hard to understand why he wasn't peeved. Then he smiled a little bit, and I caught on.]

So: Now energy consultant Valerie Plame marries Ambassador Joseph Wilson. That probably rates an entry on the New York Times social page. It certainly rates a line in his Who's Who entry and his c.v., and it would be very odd indeed -- undesirably attention-catching -- to exclude the bride's maiden name from the newspaper announcement, the Who's Who, or the bio. "Mr. Wilson is married to a woman named Valerie, whose maiden name is available only on a need-to-know basis." And of course the people who knew Valerie Plame before her marriage had to know that she was now Ms. Wilson, and would be very puzzled to see a reference to Amb. Wilson's marriage to "the former Valerie Chojnowski." There simply wouldn't have been any alternative to the truth.

(It appears that she has taken her husband's name, professionally as well as socially, for domestic consumption; from the fact that the leaked story metioned "Valerie Plame," we can guess that she still uses that as a workname, which doesn't say anything about whether she still travels for the firm.)

That an energy consultant is married to a diplomat doesn't, in general, imply that she is actually a spy. So her marrying Wilson, and having "Valerie Plame" appear in Wilson's bio, wouldn't excite any particular interest about Valerie Plame's true role in places where such interest would be unhealthy for her and her assets. Any attempt at concealment, by contrast, would have stuck out like a sore thumb. Master Kung said, "Nothing is more evident than that which is hidden."

And neither would there be anything to excite suspicion in the fact that the diplomat, a former charge d'affaires in Baghdad, ambassador to a French West African country, and Assistant NSC Director for Africa, was sent on an overt information-gathering mission involving dealings between Iraq and a country in French West Africa. He was a natural for the job. So the claim that Wilson's mission blew Plame's cover is pure gibberish.

Now if you assume, as the people who organized this sliming raid wanted you -- and still want you -- to assume, that someone with Wilson's resume was obviously unqualified for the mission, then a very alert foreign counterintelligence service might say, "Hmmm...who does this nobody know at the CIA that he gets chosen for a mission so clearly above his pay grade?" But there is absolutely no basis for that assumption other than the wish of Bush's defenders to discredit what Wilson found, or rather did not find, in Niger.

So, as of the day before the Novak story broke, there was nada, zippo, zilch on the publicly available record linking Valerie Plame Wilson, wife of the retired ambassador, or Valerie Plame, energy consultant, to the CIA. And that's what the CIA reported to Justice: absent the leak, the media could not have guessed her identify. Which is why this story just moved to the front page.

Once her name was mentioned as the name of a CIA official, though, it would immediately occur to the counterintelligence bureaus of countries where Plame had traveled that any of their nationals with information about WMD acquisition who had spent time talking to "energy consultant" Valerie Plame, or to anyone working for the same "energy consulting firm," ought to be brought in and asked some questions, perhaps with a little physical encouragement to be responsive if such encouragement proved necessary.

The significance of using the name "Valerie Plame" in the leak wasn't that it did extra damage; the damage was done simply by identifying Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA employee. The significance of using "Valerie Plame" is that it would have been used by only two sorts of people: her old friends and acquaintances from before her marriage, and people who had heard of her in the context of the covert side of her work. (Again, I'm accepting here the report that she didn't use the name "Plame" in her ordinary office work at Langley.)

That makes it less likely that the leak was a semi-innocent one, and more likely that whoever revealed it to the press, and especially whoever revealed it to the person who revealed it to the press, knew full well that it wasn't supposed to get out.

I'm sorry to have wasted your time (and mine) on a matter you probably regarded from the beginning as transparently obvious. But the Spin Machine is good at setting these cockamamie theories up, and then bragging that no one has been able to knock them down.

Update: Atrios has more, with links.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:30 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Oh, my!

Julian Borger of the Guardian reports:
Several of the journalists are saying privately, "Yes, it was Karl Rove whom I talked to."

I was willing to bet against this yesterday, because I couldn't see McClellan digging the White House in behind Rove unless he was at least technically in the clear. Now I'll take either end of the wager. I don't know how credible Borger is; the Guardian is certainly anti-Bush. But if he's making it up, all of his colleagues will know he's making it up. And what happens if Borger is dragged in front of a grand jury?

Thanks to Atrios for the pointer.

Update And now that Rove is definitely back in the mix, ponder with me if you will the problem this makes for John Ashcroft, who used Rove's services as a campaign consultant over a fifteen-year period,l and whose selection as Attorney General resulted in part from Rove's assurances to Bush that he was "solid." (ABC's The Note notes this Time Magazine story, and Kriselda Jarnsaxa of Different Strings noticed it for me.

I'm no expert on the legal ethics rules surrounding recusal, but if Ashcroft doesn't take himself out of the loop somehow he's never going to hear the end of it.

Andrew Sullivan is now officially off the reservation. Sullivan is not my favorite right-wing blogger, but his position is an interesting straw in the wind.

Much more important, Eugene Volokh, who likes nothing better than mixing it up with Bush's critics when he thinks he can catch them criticizing inaccurately or unfairly (he's been conducting a gentle war with Slate's Bushisms for months now) has decided to lay off this one, admitting that he'd rather write about things were it's the other team committing the fouls. [*] If Eugene had found the evidence here unconvincing, my respect for him would have slowed me down considerably.

Now that ignoring this isn't really an option, I think we're going to find that Bush has very, very few defenders of any respectability.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:34 PM | |

After eleven weeks of stonewalling, the White House announces that the President "wants to get to the bottom of this." (Read: "Wants desperately to get out from under this.") A few hours later, we learn why: Earlier in the day, the Justice Department had formally told the White House that it was opening a criminal investigation, though it appears that the questioning will start at the CIA as opposed to the more aggressive stance of getting every one of the possible leakers on the record up front about all media contacts during July.

The story from AP, as printed in the NY Times:

The Justice Department launched a full-blown criminal investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA officer, and President Bush directed his White House staff on Tuesday to cooperate fully.

The department notified the counsel's office about 8:30 p.m. Monday that it was launching an investigation but said the White House could wait until the next morning to notify staff and direct them to preserve relevant material, McClellan said.

(Nothing like tipping off the suspects well in advance. Wouldn't be sporting to surprise them, you know.)

Most of the rightbloggers are in full, frantic denial. Glenn Reynolds thinks that hiring someone politically unreliable for a secret mission is a more serious problem than deliberately outing an operational covert officer:

Forget Valerie Plame, the big scandal is why anyone in the Bush Administration would ever have tasked a guy with Wilson's views with an important mission. (Glenn also seems to think that Wilson was "hired" for something, and might thus fall under the nepotism laws, when it's undisputed fact that he went on the mission gratis, unless you count an expenses-paid trip to glorious Niamey, capital of exciting Niger, as some sort of benefit.)

Others on the right (the Poorman has a summary) are still inventing all sorts of alternative universes in which Valerie Plame wasn't an operational covert officer. In primary reality, however, she was. CNN has it, confirming the WaPo and MSNBC:

CIA sources told CNN National Security Correspondent David Ensor that Plame is a CIA operative ... [snip]...Ensor reported that sources at the CIA said Plame is an employee of the operations side of the agency. "This is a person who did run agents," Ensor said. "This is a person who was out there in the world collecting information."

"This is a serious leak," former CIA Director James Woolsey said. "You can endanger intelligence and people's lives by revealing the identities of CIA case officers, so it's a serious matter."

Woolsey, though he worked for Clinton, is now (or has been until now) an extremely strong Bush supporter and advocate of "World War IV."

The AP has memo from the White House Counsel informing the staff of the impending investigation:

We were informed last evening by the Department of Justice that it has opened an investigation into possible unauthorized disclosures concerning the identity of an undercover CIA employee (emphasis added)

Daniel Drezner, who is still properly urging caution in assigning criminal culpability to individuals, sums it up:

Let me repeat -- this is a serious allegation, and I want to see the President address it directly and publicly. [But we don't really know if Plame was an operative, and we don't really know whether Bush administration officials leaked the story in the way that the Post alleges.--ed.] Oh yes we do. Kevin Drum provides a solid rundown of the evidence.

(That editorial note is Drezner's, not mine.)

Tom Spencer unerringly spots the "nut graf" in Kevin Drum's post:

The bottom line remains pretty much the same: A couple of top Bush administration officials blabbed about a clandestine CIA operative to the press in order to try to discredit her husband, and now they're covering it up. Either you think that's OK or you don't. I don't.

The latest ploy from the people who don't want to see Bush taken down over this is the plea for civility. Here's Roger Simon

The viciousness of the Clinton years, the unremitting scandals of Whitewater, the impeachment, blown out of all proportion to reality by Clinton’s enemies, may have been mere foreplay compared to what we are about to go through in the Plame/Wilson Affair.
David Brooks doesn't mention Plame, no doubt had it in mind, in authoring this warning.

In fact, most people in the last two administrations were well-intentioned patriots doing the best they could. The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves.

Well, civility is always a value, though it does seem just a little strange to write as if all of the incivility is coming from the Bush-bashers as opposed to the Bushites. (Has anyone in the Administration said anything bad about Ann Coulter's Treason? If so, I must have missed it.) But it's hard to politely accuse people of serious crimes, and serious crimes are sometimes committed, even in the White House. Logically, one cannot derive from the premise "Clinton's enemies accused him and his aides of many crimes they didn't commit" the conclusion "Bush and his aides are innocent of any crime of which they are accused."

If in fact two top White House officials deliberately outed a covert CIA officer in an act of political revenge on her husband, and if in fact the President was happy to let them get away with it until the heat got to be too much for him to take, then at least some of "the core threat to democracy" does come from the White House.

I'm happy to debate that proposition, civilly, with anyone who wants to take the other side, but unless and until someone shows me it's wrong, I'm not willing to stop saying it.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:29 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

It now seems virtually certain that Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to finish first in Round II of the recall. That means that anyone who doesn't want to see the state in the grip of the Wilson and Quackenbush crews had better hold his nose and vote "No." It will take another noseclip to vote for Bustamante in Round II, but I will do it anyway unless I decide that things are really hopeless and cast a protest vote. Schwarzenegger's campaign has been as skilfully cynical as the Bush 2000 affair, and the press has pushed him on stuff that no one cares about and given him a pass on the stuff that really could have hurt him. Bustamante didn't deserve the sliming he took over a group he belonged to as a college student, but he has managed to look both sleazy and incompetent.

There's more to say, especially about the Democratic mistakes that got us here, but just thinking about it makes me want to cry.

Update Charlie Cook's column today suggests things may not be as hopeless as I'd thought:

While the Gallup Poll is normally reliable, strategists in both parties
are scoffing at a Gallup Poll in California that showed the 'yes'
position on the recall of Gov. Gray Davis registering a whopping 63
percent. Private polling by both Democratic and Republican pollsters
shows something quite different. In those polls, 'yes' runs between 51
percent and 53 percent and, on the replacement ballot question,
Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is usually ahead of Democratic
Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante by three to four points. The Gallup Poll, taken
for CNN and USA Today, gave Schwarzenegger 40 percent of the vote among
likely voters, while Bustamante had 25 percent. In short, the 'yes' side
and Schwarzenegger have the edge, but not nearly by the margins that
Gallup reports in its survey of 787 registered voters last Thursday
through Saturday.

A big piece of the problem here: No one has a good turnout model for an election such as this one.

Second update

A reader is puzzled by the "Round 2" reference. That's become the conventional way of referring to the part of the ballot where we vote on who is to replace Davis, if the recall itself (Round 1) passes. "Round 2" is a straight plurality contest, with no runoff. So the likely result is that more people will vote to keep Davis than vote to elect Schwarzenegger, but Schwarzenegger becomes governor.

A conservative Republican friend writes that, as a partisan Democrat, I should be delighted that a Republican will have to take the heat for making the painful decisions. Yes, but I actually have to live here, and Schwarzenegger is committed to making things much more painful than they need to be.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:24 AM | |
Thread: California Recall

No major news, [*], but increasing levels of surrealism, with jouralists interviewing journalists who agree to talk only on background.

.... AND SOME EXTRA-SHARP ANALYSIS FROM BRAD DeLONG...

....who thinks the CIA wouldn't have started a war it didn't expect to win. [*] (Well worth reading, even though I'm late linking to it.)

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:03 AM | |

...covering yesterday's craziness, is up at Open Source Politics. Like its predecessors of yesterday and a month ago, it skips the inter-blog skirmishing and tries instead to tell a coherent story.

If you're just coming in to the Valerie Plame affair, I suggest starting there rather than here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:20 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

As predicted, the virtual wall of silence in Right Blogistan about the Plame affair has cracked. Jacob Levy, a Volokh Conspirator, is just about as dismayed as Daniel Drezner was:

Indeed, no one seems to be engaged in any denial or defense here other than saying "We don't know and we don't want to know so we're not going to try to find out so that we can continue to say with a straight face that we don't know." This is ugly [snip] ... this is really, really not good

Glenn Reynolds, on the other hand, links to Pejman Yousefzadeh, who seems completely clueless and desperate.

Update Reynolds points out that the link mentioned above was not his first reference to the story. He had what turned into a very long post the previous day. In the previous ten weeks since the story first broke, he had two extremely brief and non-commital references, this one with a link to Tom Maguire, this one to this space. In other words, up until the story broke in the mass media, one could have been a very faithful reader of Instapundit and never have guessed that anything of much significance was going on. And that made Reynolds, after the estimable Tom Maguire and the execrable NRO, the third most active right-blog site on this issue. I repeat: a wall of silence, from a group of bloggers who purport to be defenders of national security and scourges of media misconduct.

On the issue of whether Plame's role was really covert, for example, Yousefzadeh takes Robert Novak's obviously self-serving account as gospel, ignoring Mike Allen's very specific reporting in today's Post ( She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction. Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents. It also ignores as Novak's printed description of Plame as an "operative."

Yousefzadeh quotes the relevant statute (as if it hadn't been thorougly parsed six weeks ago) and adds, "All of this covers the disclosure of the identity of a covert agent. If Novak is right in saying that 'Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives, then the law was not broken."

Right. But then what did the CIA just ask the Justice Department to investigate? Today's MSNBC story, reported independently of the Post's, has additional facts:

CIA lawyers sent the Justice Department an informal notice of the alleged leak in July, two senior officials told NBC News on Monday. Although that letter, which was not signed by CIA Director George Tenet, was not a formal request for an investigation, the Justice Department could have opened one at that point, lawyers said. It remained unclear whether it did so. CIA lawyers followed up the notification this month by answering 11 questions from the Justice Department, affirming that the woman’s identity was classified, that whoever released it was not authorized to do so and that the news media would not have been able to guess her identity without the leak, the senior officials said. The CIA response to the questions, which is itself classified, said there were grounds for a criminal investigation, the sources said.

Yousefzadeh also leaps from the fact that one correspondent for CBS wasn't aware of any of his colleages' having been called to the conclusion that no network reporter was called, and then to the further conclusion that there couldn't have been a concerted effort to damage Plame that didn't involve calling a network. Again, that igores Mike Allen's Monday story:

Wilson said in a telephone interview that four reporters from three television networks called him in July and told him that White House officials had contacted them to encourage stories that would include his wife's identity.

As noted below, I'm taking anything Wilson says with large amounts of salt from here on out, but I see no particular reason to doubt this. (Note: If true, this means that the FBI won't have any problem finding at least four of the relevant reporters.)

But Yousefzadeh also ignores the MSNBC story, to which Andrea Mitchell is listed as a contributor, which reports that Mitchell was called by White House officials peddling the story, though not until after the Novak column had run.

Clifford May at NRO simply tries to change the subject, questioning why Wilson was sent on the mission in the first place, and adding that some ex-government official had told him about Plame's identity before he read about it Novak's column, as if that had anything to do with the criminality of making her identity part of the public record. Again, the CIA conclusion reported by MSNBC seems to dispose of the question May tries to raise.

Daniel Drezner, having spoken out in the strongest terms over the weekend, is much more guarded today; he takes May's question seriously (and doesn't compare it with the Mike Allen story, though he does cite the MSNBC account) He also follows Josh Marshall in putting more emphasis than I would on change in phrasing from Allen's Sunday story, which mentioned "two top White House officials," to Monday's story, mentioning "two White House officials." (Note that the source, a "senior Administration official," has also been demoted to "an Administration official." I suspect that either Allen or his editor simply decided to dispense with some adjectives.)

If Allen is backing off about the rank of the people involved, that would indeed cast the whole story in a completely different light. But, for that very reason, I can't see how Allen can back off simply by repeating the assertion and leaving out the word "top." If "top" is wrong, it calls for a full correction and retraction. Absent that, I'm assuming the change was merely a verbal one without substantive significance.

All in all, then, I think Drezner was right earlier [*] in saying that this is almost certainly a major scandal and that commentators on the right will ill serve themselves by denying that fact. He's also right in saying that it's too early to conclude that Karl Rove has committed a crime, though I would say "no evidence" is too sweeping a statement. (Once we know that someone in the Bush White House carried out a vindictive political move involving a leak to Robert Novak, it's only reasonable to suspect the chief political operative, who was fired from the 1992 Bush campaign for leaking a story to Robert Novak.)

Be that as it may, it's not too early to say with confidence that serious crimes against the national security were committed by at least two people (and, I'm still convinced, "top" people) at the White House, and that the President of the United States and his top aides, aware of that, decided that finding out who those criminals were was none of their affair.

Really, that's plenty bad enough. (Josh Marshall is eloquent on the subject.) And it's time, I would say, for the doyens of warblogging, Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds, to get off the fence and say so.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:35 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Howard Kurtz has a bizarre column in Monday's Post which he considers the journalistic ethics of reporting Plame's name, but not the journalistic ethics of sitting on the story about the felonious behavior of top officials for two months until the lid was blown off by an official referral for criminal investigation. He notes as fact that the story "barely caused a ripple," but offers neither a criticism nor a defense of the papers that ignored it (and ignores Newsday and the St. Petersburg Times, which didn't). And he has not a word to say about the position in which the six reporters who were offered the leak but didn't go with it, and their editors, and the outlets they work, for, now find themselves: reporting on a story of which they are part, and about which they know the central fact.

Kurtz seems curiously hopeful that the villains will never be unmasked, or that, if unmasked, they won't actually go to prison:

If recent history is any guide, federal investigators are unlikely to discover who the leakers are. In 1999, a federal appeals court ruled that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and his staff did not have to face contempt proceedings for allegedly leaking damaging information about President Bill Clinton because no grand jury secrets were disclosed. The next year, a former Starr spokesman, Charles G. Bakaly III, was acquitted of making false statements about his role in providing information to the New York Times.

In 1992, Senate investigators said they could not determine who leaked confidential information to National Public Radio and Newsday about Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation. In 1989, then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh launched an unsuccessful $224,000 investigation of a leak to CBS of an inquiry into then-Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.).

Kurtz also edits the "two top White House officials" identified as the leakers by his colleague Mike Allen to "two top government officials."

Is Kurtz on Bush's payroll? And doesn't the Post do any fact-checking, even against its own stories? If Allen's Sunday story was wrong on that essential detail, it calls for a direct retraction and correction. If it was right, then Kurtz is just confusing his readers.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:29 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Joseph Wilson, speaking on NPR, has backed way back from his earlier statement virtually accusing Karl Rove of having been the source of the Valerie Plame leak. Wilson admits to "an excess of exuberance," which is certainly one way to describe accusing someone in a public forum of an aggravated felony without having any actual evidence.

Wilson continues to insist, plausibly, that Rove must have condoned the activity afterwards even if he didn't order it or execute it himself. But this certainly makes Tom Maguire's hesitancy about taking Wilson at his word look justified.

Fortunately, at this point nothing in this story depends on crediting Wilson's accuracy. He was a useful, and perhaps essential, catalyst in starting the investigation, but it now has a life of its own.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:25 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

A reader reports spotting an AP story about a gorilla who escaped from a Boston zoo and was spotted two hours later sitting on the bench at a bus stop. He offers three interpretations:

1. Public transportation is getting worse and worse. Two hours and no bus.
2. The gorilla's escape plan was thwarted by not having exact change.
3. He missed the bus because he was mugged.

Update: Oooops!

A reader closer to the site of the escape reports what neither my source nor I knew: the gorilla attacked two people, a teenager and a two-year-old. Not, he points out, a joking matter. Sorry.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:50 AM | |

... up now. It tries to make sense of the long media silence.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:42 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Mike Allen has another big story in Monday's Post, jam-packed with bad news for anyone hoping that Bush would come out of this wearing at least a decent fig leaf. (Tom Maguire, for example, or Josh Chafetz)

First, Allen has confirmed Plame's job description, and it's about as bad as it could be for whoever leaked her name:

She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction. Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents.

Worse, the White House apparently has decided to continue to stonewall rather than coming clean:

White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq.

Asked about the possibility of an internal White House investigation, McClellan said, "I'm not aware of any information that has come to our attention beyond the anonymous media sources to suggest there's anything to White House involvement."

Right. The White House is maintaining the position that the question of whether top people there committed an aggravated felony concerning national security is nothing anyone in the White House needs to worry about.

Bush isn't even going to ask the people who work most closely with him whether they outed a covert CIA officer. Astonishingly, this is being reported by CNN as the White House denying the allegations. Refusing to look isn't really denial, except in the clinical sense. (Note also how the "two senior administration officials" in the body of the story shrink to "a government official" in the lead.)

At least Team Bush is consistent. From the very beginning, the White House hasn't even tried to make it look as if anyone there cared about an activity the elder Bush, in another context, likened to treason.

The longer this goes on, the harder it will be for Bush personally to avoid responsibility. (It may be too late already.) What conceivable excuse can he offer for not being curious enough to ask the people who work directly for him whether or not they did it? He may not have known about the leak in advance, but his inaction is surely condoning it now. Tom Spencer is right: Is there anyone other than Rove for whom the Bush team would absorb this kind of heat?

The question is no longer whether Ashcroft is going to start a formal investigation by the DoJ, but whether he can hold off demands for the appointment of a special counsel. Trial next summer, anyone?

Update I had missed this until an alert OSP reader brought it to my attention: according to AP, the White House has issued a real denial, specifically covering Karl Rove:

Wilson has publicly blamed Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, for the leak, although Wilson did say Monday he did not know whether Rove personally was the source of Novak's information, only that he thought Rove had "condoned it."

"He wasn't involved," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said of Rove. "The president knows he wasn't involved. ... It's simply not true."

The AP reporter doesn't seem to have asked the obvious follow-up: how does the President know? Whom did he ask? Has someone reviewed the phone logs? I hope that other reporters, senators, and Presidential candidates will be asking those questions, loudly and insistently.

Still this shifts the balance of probabilities in my mind, at least as to Rove's having made the phone calls himself. Even though Bush maintains deniability by using a spokesman, rather than fully committing himself by making a statement personally, and even though he can always say later that Rove had decieved him, this gets him much more deeply committed to Rove's innocence than he ought to want be unless he's pretty sure. Of course, he couldn't really know that it wasn't Rove unless he knew who it actually was.

That's always a possibility, of course. But then why is he keeping those people on his staff?

Second update Dan Drezner is not a happy camper. He deserves a lot of credit for being willing to call a foul on his own team. Other right-bloggers, please copy.

Drezner links to Pejman Yousefzadeh's defense of Bush's refusal to investigate: "The culpable do not break down and confess their sins merely as the result of close questioning. And the Administration likely knows this, which is why they aren't going to waste time calling in the many aides who work at the White House in order to find out who has been leaking the story."

That's plausible as a general proposition, but false in this case. (See Dwight Meredith's analysis bringing down the list of suspects to eight, of whom we're looking for two.) Anyway, if they wanted to know, they wouldn't bother asking; they'd just review the phone logs, as they did in one of their recent lame attempts to discredit Wesley Clark.

Josh Marshall has a long quote from today's press briefing. The transcript isn't up yet, but here's a link to the video file. It seems I was wrong: some reporters did ask the natural follow-ups, though without getting any answers:

McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.

QUESTION: What, is he clairvoyant? How does he know?

There's another eerie passage:

QUESTION: -- why doesn't he use everything in his power to smoke them out?

McCLELLAN: Well, do you have any information to bring to our attention, Paula? Do you have any information to bring to our attention? If you have any information, that should be reported to the Department of Justice, and they need to pursue this to the fullest.

Sounds to me as if McClellan is reminding some of the people in the room that they know who made the phone calls, because they received them.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:37 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Phil Carter doesn't think much of the "flypaper" strategy. [*] Of course, it never was a strategy; just a post hoc rationalization to make a bad result look good.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:24 AM | |

Dwight Meredith, alas, is no longer writing P.L.A. But he hasn't stopped writing, or thinking hard. The following is quoted with his permission from an email. As usual, it's acute.

Here's Dwight:

Who burned Valerie Plame? Novak sourced the information to "senior administration officials." The Post quotes a senior administration official as saying that two "top White House officials" spoke to six journalists and provided the information that Plame was a CIA operative.

The identity of the six journalists may soon be known. We know from the efforts to smear Wes Clark that phone records are kept at least for incoming calls to the White House. It does not seem hard to match those calls up with the small circle of suspects. Agatha Christie would reject the mystery as too easy.

So there we have it. I'm hoping Dwight will keep his emails coming. If so, you'll know.

Update: Tom Spencer adds what seems to me a strong argument: the White House is paying a predictably heavy political price for protecting whoever did the dirty deed. Rove is probably the most worth protecting, from Bush's viewpoint. That makes the identification of Rove as one of the culprits more plausible.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:53 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

He's going to make the Republicans in the Senate vote against paying for the reconstruction of Iraq by deferring some of the tax cut to (not "the rich" but) people whose incomes are over $360,000 per year. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:58 AM | |

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has a nominee for the most mixed (up) metaphor of the young season. [*] This one is going to be hard to top.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:52 AM | |

Josh Marshall reports a truly surreal story [*]: Jeb Bush just had the Florida public employees pension fund buy all the stock in the Edison Project, Chris Whittle's disastrous foray into privatized education. [St. Petersburg Times story here.] In the immortal words of Doonesbury's Uncle Duke, "But the pension fund was just sitting there!"

Can some lawyer among my readers tell me whether the fund's beneficiaries have standing to sue?

Update A reader notes that the investment company is formally independent of the pension plan, of which it is the sole client, and that the pension plan manager and the governor both deny that they had any role in deciding about the Edison investment. You can believe those denials, if you like. That means assuming that it just happened that a company with strong right-wing political ties and a mission strongly approved of by the right wing, including the Governor of Florida and his brother, got bailed out by a pension fund of which the governor is one of three trustees, just by coincidence.

Second update and retraction The reader points out that the investment advisor has been working for Florida since the Chiles Administration. Given that fact, and absent any direct evidence of hanky-panky, I have to conclude that I here committed a truly remarkable feat: I accused Jeb Bush of a malfeasance of which he was not demonstrably guilty. My apologies to him, and to you, and my (grudging) thanks to the reader who kept pounding on me until I could see my error.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:35 PM | |

The Washington Post doesn't do things by halves. Having studiously ignored the Valerie Plame affair [*] for two months, it now comes in with both feet -- a twenty-five-paragraph Page 1 story. [*].

It also comes in with a major newsbeat: a "senior Administration official" who confirms that two "top White House officials" called at least six journalists to tell them the name of an undercover CIA officer, and that they did so "purely and simply for revenge" on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for his role in revealing the Yellowcake Road fiasco.

I suppose this could be worse for the Administration, but it's hard to see how.

First, there seems to be no doubt that the leak occurred, that some of Bush's top people were responsible, and that Plame was undercover. That means that at least two people close to the President are facing potential ten-year prison sentences.

Second, the source for this story (a "senior Administration official" but not a "top White House official," which probably means either from the CIA or from the Justice Department, more likely the former) refused to identify the two leakers "for the record," which clearly implies that he did identify them off the record. Since the story mentions Joseph Wilson's use of Karl Rove's name, it would be natural for the reporter to have hinted that Rove was not in fact one of the guilty parties, had that been the case. But there is no such hint. Of all the people in the White House, Rove is probably the one Bush can least afford to lose, and the one who gives Bush the least deniability.

Third, the source is clearly prominent enough that any FBI investigation would have to include him. Having told the truth to a reporter, he's not going to lie to the FBI, which itself would be a crime. That means that the leakers are likely to find themselves, in fairly short order, confronting first the FBI and then a grand jury. (Any thought Ashcroft might have had of stifling this just vanished.)

Fourth, the leakers peddled the story to six other journalists, none of whom took the bait, and any of whom might confirm the identity of the leakers.

Tom Maguire suggested earlier today [*] that the White House simply appoint a fall guy to admit an "innocent mistake" and exit. That isn't going to do the job now. Not only do they need at least two fall guys; the White House has been on notice about this for two months now, and taken no action to investigate it. If the President was never told about the problem, he's even more cocooned than I thought. If he was told, and failed to ask direct questions of the small number of people who might have been responsible, then he has to share the culpability.

When this story first broke, I mostly didn't believe it [*], because outing a covert CIA officer would have been such an intolerable violation of everything this Administration claims to stand for: not just "honor and integrity," which were obviously mere prolefeed, but putting the national security first and keeping secrets secret.

When the country finds out about this, Bush is going to take a big hit. A year ago, he was a hero, and this might have bounced off. Not now.

If I were Wesley Clark, and eager to relieve any doubts about my partisan loyalties among Democrats, I'd regard this as a golden moment.

[Oooops! Clark has let Howard Dean, who jumped on this story back in July, beat him to the punch. [*] Dean points out that he'd called for resignations months ago, and adds: "No one has been held accountable for this serious action, or for the other instances in which senior officials in this Administration have misled the public and the world about their justifications for war with Iraq. Instead, we see a continuing pattern of deceptive statements. I urge accountability now."] [This AP story in Monday's New York Times has a snippet from Clark:
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said a Justice Department probe would be inadequate. "This is too much for (Attorney General) John Ashcroft,'' he said. "It strikes right at the heart of our ability to gather intelligence.'']

Update: Kevin Drum, who had the story first among bloggers (David Corn at The Nation did the original reporting), concurs. [*] He's a tad less rabidly anti-Bush than I am, so I find that reassuring.

Second update (of many to come, no doubt): CBS had the story, rather timidly reported. [*] But it's a lot better than nothing. Atrios had the link.

Atrios comments: "Pass the effing popcorn." I agree: this is going to be worth watching. Atrios also makes a highly useful suggestion, which I admit I'd never thought of: MSNBC has a reader rating system for its stories. So if you go here, scroll to the bottom, and click "7," you can in effect vote to keep them working on this. When you do, you will find that the story has almost 5000 votes, with an average rating of 6.1, putting it second only to a story about how to steal on E-bay but ahead of the woman being spared from stoning in Nigeria.

Third update, Sunday p.m. Body and Soul has a good wrap-up. Some regional papers are reprinting the WaPo story. The New York Times still has nothing in print, but comes in, late and lame, on line. Correction It is in print, below the fold on p. 21, under the jump of the story about coffins for obese people.

The Associated Press finally carries a story [*], featuring Condi Rice's soothing spin. I predict that Rice will come to regret her repeated descriptions of this incident as "routine." [Here, from today's Fox News Sunday, about halfway down.] Yes, this is now a matter for criminal investigation. But how does that relieve the White House of its responsibilities to find the two senior people there who did the dastardly deed and fire them?

The original leak could have been pinned on whoever did it, leaving Bush guilty of nothing worse than bad judgment in the choice of subordinates and failing to maintain a moral atmosphere where such skulduggerly would be unthinkable. (Remember "restoring honor and integrity to the White House"?) But the failure to follow up over more than two months makes everyone from Bush down complicit. (Josh Marshall makes this point.)

And Atrios credits Dwight Meredith for pointing out that knowing and not acting could constitute make people who were not themselves the leakers guilty of misprision of a felony. (For those of you too young to remember Watergate, that's prounounced "mis-PRIZH-un.")

Here's the Rice transcript (emphasis added):

HUME: Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was asked to inquire in Africa about what Saddam Hussein might have been doing there in terms of acquiring nuclear materials, ended up with his wife's name in the paper as a CIA person. There are now suggestions that the name and her identity and her CIA work had been revealed by the White House. What do you know about that?

RICE: Tony, I don't remember any such conversation. But I will say this: The Justice Department gets these things as a matter of routine. They will determine the facts. They will determine what happened, they will determine if anything happened. And they'll take appropriate action.

Fourth update

I've been waiting for someone in the right blogosphere other than Tom Maguire to start paying attention to this. Well, it's been worth the wait. Daniel Drezner is apoplectic:

What could cause me to switch parties

What was done here was thuggish, malevolent, illegal, and immoral. Whoever pedaled this story to Novak and others, in outing Plame, violated the law and put the lives of Plame's overseas contacts at risk. Compared to this, all of Clinton's peccadilloes look like an mildly diverting scene from an Oscar Wilde production. If Rove or other high-ranking White House officials did what's alleged, then they've earned the wrath of God. Or, since God is probably busy, the media firestorm that will undoubtedly erupt.

Let me make this as plain as possible -- I was an unpaid advisor for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, and I know and respect some high-ranking people in the administration. And none of that changes the following: if George W. Bush knew about or condoned this kind of White House activity, I wouldn't just vote against him in 2004 -- I'd want to see him impeached. Straight away.

Tacitus, one of the more judicious right-bloggers, concurs.
Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds and Roger Simon continue to find this just too complicated to understand. It is, if you start with the hypothesis that Bush and the people around him are incapable of stupidly thuggish behavior. Otherwise, it's really rather simple.

One of the reasons Bush is a much more powerful and effective President than Clinton is that people know that crossing Bush means finding your horse's head in your bed. Rove is the designated hitter. If in this instance he got carried away, why should we be so surprised? And Drezner makes another point worth pondering: Now that we know what the Bushites are capable of even on "piddling stuff," all those crazy conspiracy theories seem less far-fetched. Kevin Drum agrees.

Fifth update, Sunday evening Mike Allen in Monday's Post has more, and it's astonishing: the White House is maintaining the position that the question of whether top people there committed an aggravated felony concerning national security is nothing the White House needs to worry about:

White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq.

[snip]

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the Justice Department has requested no information so far. "Of course, we would always cooperate with the Department of Justice in a matter like this," he said.

Asked about the possibility of an internal White House investigation, McClellan said, "I'm not aware of any information that has come to our attention beyond the anonymous media sources to suggest there's anything to White House involvement."

You read that right: Bush isn't even going to ask the people who work most closely with him whether they outed a covert CIA officer. Astonishingly, this is being reported as the White House denying the allegations. It's not denying; it's stonewalling.

From the very beginning, the White House hasn't even tried to make it look as if anyone there cared about an activity the senior Bush, in another context, likened to treason.

The longer this goes on, the harder it will be for Bush personally to deny responsibility. (It may be too late already.) Tom Spencer is right: Is there anyone other than Rove for whom the Bush team would absorb this kind of heat?

The Post has more detail on Plame's official role, confirming everything David Corn had asserted and Joseph Wilson had hinted at:

She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction. Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents.

Which suggests a question: Did the long delay between the Novak story and the formal referral to DoJ reflect a decision by the CIA to do as much damage control as possible before the story hit every front page in the world?

The Post story also mentions calls for a special counsel to investigate. It's going to be very, very hard for Ashcroft to say "no" to that one, I think.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:15 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

There's nothing more boring than the game of pin-the-lie-on-the-liar, but Spinsanity does a good job on a couple of stray slanders against Wesley Clark. Don't understimate the importance of this stuff: if the public can be convinced that Clark is somehow untrustworthy, that will put a big hole in his ability to make the "character" issue against Bush.

Remember the punchline of Lyndon Johnson's story: you don't have to prove your opponent has sex with pigs, you just have to make him deny it. It worked against Al Gore.

So far, it doesn't seem to be working against Clark, at least among Democrats; Clark's favorable/unfavorable among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters stands at 49/11 in the latest Newsweek poll. [*] But the Bush forces and their media allies are clearly more scared of Clark than of any other candidate, so expect the slanders to keep coming.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:21 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Eugene Volokh [*] analyzes the analogy between buffer zones around abortion providers and buffer zones around Presidential speeches and finds them, as the lawyers say, "on all fours." Sounds right to me, and the analogy, if applied, would either loosen the rules the Secret Service has been applying to anti-Bush demonstrators or tighten the restrictions on the right-to-lifers.

Two differences difference Eugene doesn't mention: (1) Anti-abortion demonstrators frequently act in ways that deliberately intimidate and harass staff and clients, to the point where some facilities recruit teams of volunteers to protect women from being jostled, screamed at and having bloody fetuses waved in their faces. (2) The long history of property destruction and personal violence amed at the clinics and their employees turns every demonstration into a potential threat. Neither of those holds for Presidential speeches.

Still, Eugene's parity proposal seems fair enough to me. Better than what we have now, anyway.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:43 AM | |

Iraq may be costing you and me a bundle, but for the President's buddies it's a bonanza: they're setting up companies to peddle access. Josh Marshall has the details about Haley Barbour here, about Joe Albaugh here, and about Doug Feith's law partner and Ahmed Chalabi's nephew (honestly, could I make this up?) here.

Good to know that some things never go out of style. War profiteering, for example.

Did you notice [*] that the first OPEC meeting with a representative of the Iraqi provisional government present voted to cut production and thus raise oil prices? If they can ever get any oil flowing, that will increase the amount of the loot. The billions that price increase will cost American consumers won't be factored into the cost of the war, of course.

Query: Was this a diplomatic defeat for the US -- which would raise questions about the claims that as the conquerors of Iraq we will be listened to more closely in the Middle East -- or did the White House privately give this move the thumbs-up? At a more basic level: Was this a surprise, or did the U.S. Government at least know about it in advance?

Update E-vote reposts an old AP story. [*]Turns out Mr. Bush as a candidate thought that the President ought to say something, or even do something, when OPEC raises the price of oil. Of course that was then. This is now.

Second update The Boston Globe confirms that the Iraqi delegate to OPEC voted to cut production quotas.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:14 AM | |

And now, the moment all you Valerie Plame fans have been waiting for: the CIA has made a formal referral to the Justice Department. [*]

Summary of the affair here.

Thread starts here.

All of the previous speculation, in this space and others, about whether Ms. Plame was or was not covert is now obsolete: she must have been, or there would be no offense for the Justice Department to investigate. And thus all the chatter about Joseph Wilson's character and motives is also irrelevant.

(Which doesn't make this interview between Wilson and Josh Marshall any less interesting. I look forward to the day when journalists routinely publish transcripts of their interviews.)

The eerie wall of silence from the right side of the blogosphere is starting to crack: Drudge, of all sites, is leading with this story. (I'm now willing to bet that the equally eerie silence from the major dailies will also end.) Update Time has it, and reports that DoJ has started a preliminary inquiry.

And I think we can count on Howard Dean, who has already broached the issue, and Wesley Clark and Bob Graham to keep this issue boiling.

Some of Atrios's commentators [*] make cynical remarks about the "Ashcroft Justice Department." It's not that simple.

Formally, as Josh Marshall notes [*], Ashcroft has to make a decision whether to refer the matter to the FBI for investigation. But if he tries to refuse, he will face a firestorm, internally as well as externally. Six months or a year ago, with Bush riding high, Ashcroft might have been able to get away with it. But not now.

[Update As Tom Maguire points out [*], David Corn of The Nation, who broke the story in the first place, predicted a month ago [*] that George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, would kill the investigation out of loyalty to Bush. That he didn't could be the result of (1) personal outrage at what was done, (2) institutional loyalty to a wronged subordinate and to the need to keep covert things covert; (3) fear of what his career employees would think, say, and do if he tried to bury the matter; (4) self-interest in his reputation as a straight shooter; or (5) a simple desire to do his job according to the law. Of those, all but #2 will operate, to a greater or lesser extent, on Ashcroft. It's important to remember that not everyone who works for the Bush Administration is a melodrama villain, curling his moustaches as he snickers over the evil he is about to do. Most of these folks think of themselves, and want others to think of them, as patriots and decent human beings, and what seems to have been done to Valerie Plame is an affront both to decency and to patriotism.]

Once Ashcroft asks for an investigation, it gets carried out by career people in the FBI, people with reputations to protect. Someone will ask Rove the straight-up question whether he ever talked to Novak or anyone else about Plame, and whether he knows of anyone else having done so. When Rove answers those questions, he will know that lying to the Bureau is itself a federal crime. He will also know that the press shield laws may not apply in this case, and that reporters who refused the bait may not feel as bound to protect their sources as Novak does.

Wilson's stated ambition to "see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs" no longer seems out of reach.

CIA seeks probe of White House
Agency asks Justice to investigate leak of employee’s identity

EXCLUSIVE
MSNBC AND NBC NEWS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — The CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the White House broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees in retaliation against the woman’s husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized President Bush’s since-discredited claim that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa, NBC News has learned.

THE FORMER ENVOY, Joseph Wilson, who was acting ambassador to Iraq before the first Gulf War, was dispatched to Niger in 2002 to investigate a British intelligence report that Iraq sought to buy uranium there. Although Wilson discredited the report, Bush cited it in his State of the Union address in January among the evidence he said justified military action in Iraq.

The administration has since had to repudiate the claim. CIA Director George Tenet said the 16-word sentence should not have been included in Bush’s Jan. 28 speech and publicly accepted responsibility for allowing it to remain in the president’s text.

Wilson published an article in July alleging, however, that the White House recklessly made the charge knowing it was false.

“We spend billions of dollars on intelligence,” Wilson wrote. “But we end up putting something in the State of the Union address, something we got from another intelligence agency, something we cannot independently verify, in an area of Africa where the British have no on-the-ground presence.”

WHITE HOUSE DENIALS

The next week, columnist Robert Novak published an article in which he revealed that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction. “Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate,” Novak wrote.

The White House has denied being Novak’s source, whom he has refused to identify. But Wilson has said other reporters have told him White House officials leaked Plame’s identity.

NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell reported Friday night that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether White House officials blew Plame’s cover in retaliation against Wilson. Revealing the identities of covert officials is a violation of two laws, the National Agents’ Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act.

ATTEMPTS TO REMOVE CLAIM

When the Niger claim first arose, in February 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to
Africa to investigate. He reported finding no credible evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.

The CIA’s doubts about the uranium claim were reported through routine intelligence traffic throughout the government, U.S. intelligence officials said. Those doubts were also reported to the British.

The Niger report included a notation that it was unconfirmed when it was published in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the classified summary of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs.

The CIA had the Niger claim removed from at least two speeches before they were given: Bush’s October address on the Iraqi threat, and a speech by U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte.

As the State of the Union address was being written, CIA officials protested over how the alleged uranium connection was being portrayed, so the administration changed it to attribute it to the British, who had made the assertion in a Sept. 24 dossier.

By MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:50 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Eugene Volokh [*] can't see anything wrong with a President who regards his staff as a more "objective" source of information than the mass media. Can you say "cocooning"? I was sure you could.

It's not that I have any brief for the mass media: I shot my television set in 1976 and have probably averaged an hour a month of watching since. Since I started blogging, I'm even reading less of the daily newspapers, trusting my blogroll to alert me to anything important I might otherwise miss. But I read blogs, and newspapers, with different viewpoints: different from one another, and, more importantly, different from mine.

Relying on your own staff (or, as Machiavelli calls them, "flatterers") as your exclusive source of information is virtually guaranteed to make sure you never see trouble until it hits you behind the ear with a sock full of wet sand. Now I don't mind if Bush gets so whacked; might knock some sense into him. But to have the guy who's supposed to be running the country insulate himself from anything his staff decides he'd rather not know scares me silly.

As Karl Deutsch says in The Nerves of Government: (I'm paraphrasing from memory here: Learning means adapting your opinions to the world, while power is the capacity to adapt the world to your opinions. Therefore, power is the ability not to have to learn anything.

No wonder Bush is so in love with power; it protects his ignorance. He probably still believes that things are going well in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:39 PM | |

A non-Democratic friend told me to day that he expected the Drudge videotape of Wesley Clark saying nice things about Bush and his crew at a Lincoln Day dinner two years and change ago would hurt him among what he called "red-meat Democrats." Well, I like mine pretty rare, but it doesn't bother me at all.

If I were Clark, I'd say, "Right. And I'm not the only one Bush has sorely disappointed. As the song says, 'Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.' "

With swing voters in a general election, it can't hurt him at all. They like non-partisanship, remember?

Update Politus has more. It turns out that Clark addressed a similar Democratic gathering a week after his Lincoln Day dinner speech. I guess a victorious four-star general who is also a local boy must count as some sort of celebrity in Arkansas.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:28 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Paul Johnson, who shares the impairments in both logic and good taste so common among extreme Francophobes, seems to think (1) that heat waves have something to do with utopianism and dirigisme and (2) that crowing over dead bodies is a respectable activity. [*] Glenn Reynolds links, approvingly.

Here's Johnson, showing his uncanny ability to see through unremarkable surface facts to the evil cheese-eating that lurks beneath:

One thing history teaches, over and over again, is that there are no shortcuts. Human societies advance the hard way; there is no alternative. Communism promised Utopia on Earth. After three-quarters of a century of unparalleled sufferings, the Soviet Union collapsed in privation and misery, leaving massive Russia with an economy no bigger than tiny Holland's. We are now watching the spectacle of another experiment in hedonism, the European Union, as it learns the grim facts of life.

The EU is built on a fantasy--that men and women can do less and less work, have longer and longer holidays and retire at an earlier age, while having their income, in real terms, and their standard of living increase. And this miracle is to be brought about by the enlightened bureaucratic regulation of every aspect of life.

[snip]

France received a shock this summer, when more than 10,000 of its elderly citizens died in distress during a heat wave--some while supposedly under medical care in hospitals. Thanks to the 35-hour workweek and the long August holiday, these institutions were short-staffed. The families of those who died were on holiday, too. [*]

How's that again? This summer, Europe was hit by an unprecedented heat wave. Temperatures in Paris got to 104. (Aren't you glad global warming is purely mythical? Think how hot it would have been had global warming been real.) Since air conditioning has not historically been necessary in Paris, very few homes, and not all public places, have it. As a result, many people died. To simple-minded people like me, that seems regrettable but thoroughly unsurprising.

Johnson's spin on all this suggests either that his thought is more subtle than mine or that he has become detached from reality. On my planet, Frenchpeople were taking August off before anyone ever heard of the EU. And the idea that we can work fewer hours and enjoy higher material standards of living is a "fantasy" only in Johnson's Puritanical fantasy life: in the real world, it's called "economic progress" and has been going on since approximately the seventeenth century.

As to the EU, do Johnson, Reynolds, and the rest of what calls itself the "Anglosphere" have some sort of nostalgia for the days when the French and the Germans slaughtered each other about twice a century, with the English helping slaughter whichever side seemed stronger at the moment? That's a quick summary of European history from the time of Frederick the Great until the time of Jean Monnet.

As a result of the EU, any country in the European region that aspires to prosperity must keep its military paws off its neighbors, and must also aspire to republican government, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.

Really and truly, there are worse things than niggling regulations imposed by Eurocrats. The Battle of the Somme, for example. Or Auschwitz.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:35 PM | |

Phil Carter [*] accuses Rush Limbaugh of "getting liberal with the facts." Well, I suppose if you're the Dittohead-in-Chief, you have to take your liberalism where you find it.

Phil isn't too pleased with Gen. Shelton's ethics, either.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:54 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Kevin Drum quotes some thoughts from Wesley Clark about how and where to fight Islamic terrorism.

And what about the real sources of terrorists—U.S. allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia? Wasn't it the repressive policies of the first, and the corruption and poverty of the second, that were generating many of the angry young men who became terrorists? And what of the radical ideology and direct funding spewing from Saudi Arabia? Wasn’t that what was holding the radical Islamic movement together? What about our NATO allies, whose cities were being used as staging bases and planning headquarters? Why weren't we putting greater effort into broader preventive measures?

I knew that Clark was well positioned to make the Saudi issue against Bush, but I wasn't sure he was prepared to do it. Seems as if he is. I might just enjoy the next thirteen months.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:12 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Of course Jay Leno has no sense of shame, but even so ... this is really beyond the pale.

Substantively, I don't like the result of the two court decisions [*] putting the "Do not call" list on hold. People ought to be able to protect themselves against unwanted intruders into their homes.

Legally, I'm not sure whether either of the two judges who have now ruled against the law was right.

The ruling that the FTC needed Congressional authorization seems at least plausible (and said authorization was forthcoming forthwith). The Constitutional argument seems a far fetch: I suppose there might be something in the notion that allowing charitable pitches but not commercial pitches is "content-based discrimination" and thus a First Amendment violation, but it seems to me that the law selects categories of speech rather contents. Surely making a distinction between a charitable solicitation and an attempt to sell something isn't the same as permitting Republican candidates but not Democratic ones to do telephone banking, which is, I take it, the sort of situation the content neutrality doctrine was designed to prevent. And how the court could find that the law served no privacy-protection function is beyond me.

But for Leno to suggest that harrassing phone calls be made to the judge's home -- and of course enough knuckleheads were listening so the judge had to take the phone off the hook -- expresses a kind of contempt for the rule of law that is really quite troubling. Making calls designed to harrass or annoy, as opposed to making telemarketing calls that harrass and annoy as a predictable side-effect, is already against the law.

NBC needs to curb its dog.

I'd like to suggest that Leno leave the militia crap alone and stick to comedy, but of course he hasn't actually said anything funny since sometime in the first Bush Administration.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:54 PM | |

Franklin Foer at TNR reviews Clark's famous flip-flop on voting for the use of force resolution. [Subscription required.]

He's more impressed with Clark than with his journalistic tormentors or his campaign rivals:

When President Bush presented the resolution to Congress, he didn't sell it as a blank check for force. He sold it as a mechanism for convincing the United Nations of American resolve. "If you want to keep the peace, you've got to have the authorization to use force," he told reporters in September 2002. With hindsight, it appears that the president made this argument disingenuously. At the time, however, there was a clear logic to his position. If the American Congress dragged its feet, France and Russia would have dragged their feet and stopped inspectors from returning to Iraq. And even most doves could then see the need for having inspectors check up on Saddam's compliance with U.N. resolutions.

Of course, last week, Clark was presented with a very tempting opportunity. When asked these questions about the resolution, he could have easily declared his opposition. This would have made for easy pot shots against his congressional rivals and might have instantly swiped a portion of the antiwar left from Howard Dean. Instead, he frankly stated a position that gives him no short-term political advantage. And over the next few months, if he's lucky, this straight-forwardness might make a compelling contrast to the demagoguery of certain candidates from small New England states who are too easily "shocked."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:34 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

The fuss over the retracted Ricaurte et al. papers on MDMA (Ecstasy) neurotoxicity continues. [Earlier post here.]

Nature, a British scientific journal comparable in prestige to Science, has a stiff news account [*]and a harsh editorial [*]; the latter points the finger at both the National Institute on Drug abuse.

"... there remains a bad smell that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes Science, and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), which funded the research, have done little to clear up."

[SNIP]

Another remarkable aspect of this episode is the public endorsement of the study, at the time of its publication, by Alan Leshner, chief executive of the AAAS and former director of NIDA. It isn't clear why an officer of the AAAS should be involved at all in publicly promoting a particular result published in its journal, least of all one whose outcome was questioned at the outset by several experts. The AAAS issued the retraction late in the afternoon on Friday 5 September, resulting in low-key media coverage, which contrasts sharply with the hype surrounding the initial paper.

Some observers have in the past questioned NIDA's ability to maintain its independence in the face of the immense pressures brought to bear by those who stand behind America's interminable 'war on drugs'. Now that Leshner is at the AAAS, he needs to safeguard its independence, rather than pander to the Bush administration's jihad against recreational drug use. It falls to the new director of NIDA, Nora Volkow, to bolster NIDA's reputation. She might start with a thorough public review of the circumstances and participants' roles in one of the more bizarre episodes in the history of drug research.

But Nature looks almost gentle when compared to The Scientist, which reports [*] the unusual demand of two senior U.K. researchers that Science publish its referees' reports on the now-retracted study.

The retraction last week of a highly controversial paper published in Science September 2002, which purported to show that the recreational drug Ecstasy (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA) caused severe damage to dopaminergic neurons, predisposing takers to Parkinson disease, has prompted two leading British scientists to call for the journal to publish the referees' reports.

The article goes on to detail what seems like the rather strange behavior of the publicity department of the AAAS, which issued a press release claiming that the study had found that neurons had been "destroyed" when the paper only referred to neurons being "damaged." A follow-up story [*] quotes extensively from letters to Kennedy from Blakemore and Iverson.

There seem to be four key sets of issues here:

1. How reliable is the previous, as yet unretracted, work by Ricaurte's group, suggesting high levels of serotonergic neurotoxicity?

2. In light of the retraction, and whatever answer one gives to #1, what policies should apply to studies that involve administering MDMA to human subjects?

3. How much influence does political pressure on, and within, the National Institute of Drug Abuse have on research funding and the presentation of research findings? When NIDA became aware -- long before the retraction -- of problems with Ricaurte's work, how much of that awareness was communicated to decision-makers elsewhere in the government, including the Congress and the Sentencing Commission, which had based decisions partly on that work?

4. How did the paper in question make it past the refereeing process at Science, and what if any new procedures need to be put in place? Was the apparent decision by the AAAS publicity staff to trumpet, and even exaggerate, the original research, and to "bury" the retraction with a Friday afternoon press release, mere organizatinal self-promotion and self-protection, or was there a political agenda as well?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:25 PM | |

I've been hoping George Bush and his political goon squad would live to regret what they did to Max Cleland. Here's a start, anyway: an op-ed Patrick Nielsen Hayden accurately describes as "incandescent": [*]. "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Too bad you didn't go when you had the chance."

Which reminds me: Glenn Reynolds and the rest of the warbloggers keep telling us how well things are going in Iraq, and what scoundrels the reporters are for saying otherwise. But even Tom DeLay admits that the Congress is experiencing "sticker shock" over the $87 billion down payment on occupying and rebuilding the place.

So here's my question: Did the President and his advisers expect to have to spend so much? If so, was it wise or forthright not to mention that before committing the country? If not, then what unpleasant surprise has happened since?

Note that unlike most of my fellow citizens, and unlike the Congressional Democrats, I'm not especially bothered by the money. If we spent 1% of our GDP per year for a couple of years and got a free, prosperous, and friendly Iraq out of it, that might well be money well spent, though I can imagine other places where the same money might be spent with even better results. But the fact that everyone professes to be surprised by the bill suggests that the administration either miscalculated or deceived, and I'd like to know -- or at least have some reporters ask -- which it is.

And of course it would be deliciously ironic if the "starve-the-beast" strategy -- passing huge tax cuts in order to create deficits in order to create political pressures in order to make large government spending programs politicall impossible -- claimed as its first casualty the one area in which Mr. Bush regards profligate spending as a virtue.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:10 AM | |

I know we're all supposed to be reading Quicksilver right now, and I certainly look forward to it, but with the term just starting the last thing I need right now is a twenty-hour reading binge, which is what Cryptonomicon triggered in me.

So I'm re-reading Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency instead. Like its companion volume The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, it's really quite superb: both funny and moving, not really at all reminiscent of the Hitchhiker books, which repay, I think, at most one reading.

If you found the Hitchhiker series too juvenile, and are curious what an Umberto Eco story would sound like as told by Mark Twain with an Oxbridge inflection, I urge you to try the Dirk Gently books. You'll need to keep your wits about you; an anthology with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan would also be useful.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:51 AM | |

A friend is considering printing up some unofficial Wesely Clark bumper stickers. Please click to vote for the design you prefer.

DESIGN #1

DESIGN #2

My friend expects to be selling them by mail at 10 for $10, including postage. If you like, please indicate along with your vote how many, if any, packages you'd be interested in and he'll be in touch when they're ready. (Of course, your email address won't go any futher.)

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:17 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Opposition to gay marriage is only 55-37, closer than I would have expected. But "civil unions" do only sightly better, down 51-40. [*] So the overwhelming majority of people who don't want to let gays get married also don't want to recognize their committed relationships in any other way.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:09 PM | |

Remember how Clinton refused to accept an offer from the Sudanese Government to arrest Osama bin Laden?

Apparently it never happened. [*] Thanks to Scoobie Davis for the pointer.

Update Here's Miniter's response.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:08 PM | |

Michael Maltz of the University of Illinois is a statistician with an impressive record as a student of crime and crime control. In an email to me, reprinted in full below with his permission, he offers some reflections on the John Lott affair. Right now, Lott seems to have few defenders left, which isn't surprising. But he does still have his job at the American Enterprise Institute, and apparently is going on a speaking tour financed by the Federalist Society [*]. Friends of those organizations, and of intellectual integrity, should consider speaking out.

Here's Michael Maltz:

To me, the measure of a person's integrity is not whether the person makes mistakes (and I've made some beauts), but how s/he deals with the mistakes s/he made. Based on this standard, I have lost any respect that I originally had for John Lott.

On top of this, he lied about recoding and remodeling his data, and tried to slither away from other charges as well. It's no wonder that few believe that he actually completed the survey that supposedly got lost.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:32 PM | |
Thread: John Lott

Maybe someone who knows more about options trading than I do can correct me, but I find it extremely hard to swallow the FBI's apparent conclusion [*] that the massive pre-9-11 put-buying in UAL and American Airlines stock (and in the stocks of some aerospace firms and big reinsurers)[*] didn't reflect someone's pre-knowledge of what was to come. Nor does what I remember from my Justice Department days of the FBI's sophistication in matters financial reassure me. The cultural homogeneity of the FBI is an asset in creating internal cohesion, but a problem when it needs to reach out for strange skill-sets, such as foreign languages and financial savvy.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:58 AM | |

Fred Kaplan finds Bush's speech to the UN "bafflingly impertinent." [*] New Democrats Online is similary unimpressed: "The president seems to mistrust flexibility, nuance, and sympathetic persuasion as though they were moral failings."

Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker explains his dirty air policies in detail. [*]

And a friend proposes one of a series of campaign bumper stickers:

BUSH-CHENEY '04:
Because the Truth
Just isn't Good Enough

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:13 PM | |

I've pointed out before [*] that one effect of laws such as No Child Left Behind is to encourage schools to fake results. But Kevin Drum points out [*] that NCLB in particular sets standards that can't be met without faking. He wonders whether the long-term game plan of NCLB's authors was to portray all public schools as failures in order to create a "crisis" of which school privatization would be the solution. Seems plausible to me. But he wonders what Ted Kennedy's name was doing on the bill. So do I.

All of this is really too bad, because our schools do need fixing that can't be accomplished by money alone, and assembling an assessment system to both tell us how we're doing and create the right incentives for teachers, principals, central administrations, and school boards is an essential part of the solution. The stupid assessment systems now being put in place are likely to discredit not only the schools but assessment itself, leaving us to the tender mercies of "professionalism": i.e., allowing teachers, no matter how incompetent, to do whatever they damn well please.

Update This turns out to be not quite right. The NCLB standards aren't mathematically impossible to meet, because school systems can used "criterion-referenced" rather than "norm-refernece" tests: i.e., tests whose definition of "average" doesn't change even as the actual average rises. More here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:43 AM | |

Kevin Drum has a nice little vignette of how the Republican smear machine works. [*] The Weekly Standard's eagerness to portray an ironic comment as a lie is not so surprising, but the willingness of the White House to review its own phone logs to supply a tiny piece ofanti-Clark ammunition is extraordinary, and suggests which Democratic candidate the White House is most afraid of.

Kevin adds a zinger that I hope some mainstream reporters will follow up on seriously: Now that the White House has been able to confirm that Karl Rove received no phone call from Wesley Clark in the period just after 9-11, how about checking on whether Karl Rove received or made any phone calls to Robert Novak just before the appearance of the infamous column outing a CIA undercover operative? [*] Or is sliming the one Democrat most likely to clean Bush's clock more important than investigating the apparent commission of an aggravated felony?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:06 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

It looks as if Clark's timing was pretty good. Less than a week into his announced campaign, he's grabbed a big lead among Democrats (22 to Dean's 13) and has a three-point edge on Bush. 49-46, [*] , which is marginally the best among the Democrats. Pretty impressive in a poll where 26% say they never heard of him and 22% have no opinion (of the remainder, 39% have a favorable opinion and only 13% an unfavorable one).

The timing was good because he's getting in at a moment when the country is increasingly dissatisfied with Bush, as the tightening horse-race numbers against the other candidates shows. That makes people want to think there's a good alternative, which makes them want to like what they hear about Clark. And that first impression is likely to create a lasting benefit.

He's also picking up some surprising support. Charles Rangel is behind him [*], apparently having talked things over with the junior senator from New York, who owes him her seat. [*].

Even David Hackworth, having taken a hard shot at him some time ago, seems to have been won over. [*]

The Spin Machine has already started what will be a year-long effort to slime him [*]; my bet is that if he just keeps smiling it will all bounce off. If the worst thing anyone can say about Clark is that (1) he stood up to the Russians [*] and (2) some less talented peers resented him, then the voters will probably just ignore attempts to construe his nuanced answers as "flip-flops." [*] [More on that one here.]

And of course looking like a winner is just what Clark needs to jump-start his campaign machine. That soft swishing sound you're hearing in the background is the sound of big-money checkbooks opening up.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:35 AM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Those of you who read my rather short post about the Bush Administration attempt to use "jobs" as an argument for weakening environmental regulation may be surprised to see the monster it's grown into over the course of three exchanges with Juan non-Volokh. Glenn Reynolds likens it to "smackdown wrestling." Get your ringside seat here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:58 AM | |

Sydney Schanberg at the Village Voice has the details on the Texas Education Miracle scam. Thanks to History News Network for the pointer.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:01 AM | |

Thanks to a pointer from CalPundit, here's [*] a law professor's account of lunch with a bunch of other law professors and Wesley Clark. For those curious about the General's domestic policies, there's a little bit to chew on here. He knows there's no actual "lockbox" and thinks that raising the Social Security earnings cap is a good place to start. He also agrees with me about the symmetry between the Bushies and the French in terms of an excessively narrow and selfish view of national interest.

My friend Stuart Levine read the interview more carefully than I did, and concludes that I missed a bet. He writes:

"I think that you missed the most impressive comment reported there. It was as follows:

On whether the Chinese government should be forced to revalue the Yuan (unit of currency), he agreed that it would need to be done in the long run, but thinks it can't be done right now because there are too many underperforming loans in the Chinese economic system. Essentially, the Chinese economy needs to be fixed before revaluation can be done.

"Do you want to make a side bet on whether Bush can even name the Chinese unit of currency, much less whether he has any insight into the issues facing the Chinese economy? Clark may not have long standing experience with all domestic issues he would have to address as candidate and president (but then again, neither did either Bush or Clinton at this stage in their '00 and '92 campaigns, respectively), but he has the willingness to delve into the complexities of these issues. That is a characteristic that Bush will never have."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:47 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

The Newsweek poll [*] has Clark out front among the Democrats, though they're tightly bunched: Clark 14, Dean 12, Lieberman 12, Kerry 10, Gephardt 8. Newsweek also has Clark within four points of Bush, 47-43 with 10% undecided. Kerry trails by five, which on a sample this small is virtually an identical result, but Dean is still down by fourteen, 52-38.

Pollingreport gives some numbers from the same poll not in the Newsweek story: Al Gore actually does slightly better than Clark, trailing only 48-45. [*] Given Gore's relentlessly negative press, that strikes me as an astonishing result, and not a healthy sign for Bush if Clark proves to be a credible candidate. When asked, "In general, would you like to see George W. Bush reelected to another term as president, or not?" the noes had it 50-44.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:41 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Eugene Volokh [*] seems to think that John Lott's responses to his critics are worth reading. I can't imagine why, except for those interested in abnormal psychology. He has been detected in so many different lies [*], some of them utterly pointless [*], that his words have approximately the net information content of the sound coming from your window fan.

But I'm grateful to Eugene for pointing me to the Michelle Malkin column to which Lott makes such a lame series of responses. It looks as if Lott's career as a serial prevaricator is finally catching up to him, even among supporters of gun ownership. (Julian Sanchez is also waving good-bye.)

To believe Lott's claim to have conducted a survey on defensive gun uses in 1997 that produced an estimate that 98% of DGU's didn't involve actually firing the gun, you need to look past his changing stories of where the 98% figure came from, its curious coincidence with a widely-misunderstood assertion in a Gary Kleck paper, and the implausibility that a survey of the claimed size could have produced a valid estimate so near unity. More than that, you need to believe that none of the students he claims conducted the poll has heard about the controversy and come forward to say so. That he continues to be employed and quoted as if he were a reputable scholar testifies only to the very low standards emplyed in the world of the ideological think tank.

I will cheerfully admit that Lott taught me something about the next effect of shall-issue laws on crime. I would have guessed that the result would be a small increase. The actual effect seems to be not statistically distinguishable from zero. [*] If that's right, then allowing law-abiding people to carry concealed guns does roughly no net harm, and it obviously makes them happy. That seems to me a good enough reason not to oppose "shall-issue" laws, though if I had the power I'd try to bargain about getting a crackdown on scofflaw gun dealers and a national database of test-fires as part of a political deal.

Insofar, then, as Lott's work raised the issue, he did a public service. But that doesn't excuse his misconduct.

The scientific enterprise is a fragile one, and it can survive only if those who commit research fraud are excluded from the community. That's a tough rule, but I can't think of a workable alternative.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:35 PM | |
Thread: John Lott

If you're in the LA area, the kickoff Clark event is Saturday from 2-5 pm, in beautiful downtown Burbank.

Details here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:32 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Tom Edsall argues in The American Prospect [*] that campaign finance reform usually just reinforces the dominance of whichever groups are dominant at the moment. I hope he's wrong, but he's usually right about this sort of thing.

Campaign finance reform resembles gun control: I have no doubt that the country would be better off with fewer guns and with a politics less dominated by money. The big problem, as I see it, isn't so much the raw dollar advantage Republicans have once the campaign starts, but the disgusting special-interest pandering the Democrats have to do to raise the money they do raise. (We can't easily make the corporate accounting scandals an issue against the Republicans because Democrats voted for the provision that forbade the SEC from requiring that auditing and consulting be split, for example.)

But noting that people with bullet holes in them and corrupt politics are problems is much easier than figuring out actual policies to control guns or political money that will make things better rather than worse.

With any luck, internet fund-raising will make it sufficiently easy to raise big money in small chunks to somewhat reduce the capacity of well-organized interests to buy the political process. That may be the best we can hope for.

Speaking of which, my Clark pledge campaign is now up to 19 commitments, of which 7 are commitments to find ten more people and three volunteered the information they're contributing $100 rather than $10. One of the 7 was Michael Drake, who posted a link [*] on his Strange Doctrines weblog. Not too shabby for a few minutes' work; it suggests both that Clark has some appeal and that the web makes a difference.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:57 PM | |

... and Eric Alterman finds that George W. Bush has a bad one, [*] at least for the events of 9/11. The contrast between the press coverage, or non-coverage, of Bush's mendacity about having seen the airplane hit the first tower on TV on the one hand and all the fuss about Gore's mother's dog's prescription and the difference between touring a disaster site with the Director of FEMA and the Deputy Director of FEMA on the other is pertty astonishing.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:38 AM | |

Tradesports quotes "the field" (i.e., not Dean (bid 30), Kerry (bid 15), Hillary Clinton (bid 12), Lieberman (6), Gephardt (6), Edwards (3), or McCain (?!) ) at 24 cents bid. Since Graham seems like a complete far fetch at this point, I'd read that as implying almost one chance in four that Clark takes it.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:29 AM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

For some reason, I have an unusal number of conservative friends for someone of my political views. Two of them, each with an Ivy League PhD, each of them substantially smarter than the average holder of an Ivy League PhD, and neither of whom has ever voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate, reacted in very different ways to my endorsement of Clark.

One gives what is probably a good preview of the RNC's attack talking points. The other is more than inclined to give him a try. Their unedited comments are below.

I'm almost tempted to contribute. Clark would be almost as juicy an
opponent for Bush as Dean. This is the guy who advocated and engineered the
phony air war against Serbia. Quotes from Clark during this period versus
on-ground reality will make amusing campaign reading. As will quotes from
other NATO commanders (British and others) who claim that if they had not
restrained Clark's attempted bullying of Russian commanders at the end of
this campaign Clark was well on the way to starting WW III. Then, of course,
there is party affiliation: Republican one year, independent the next, then
Democrat. Poor Wesley can't seem to make up his mind, except when it is
expedient to assist a grab at power.

It will be amusing to watch the media repudiate their original takes on
Clark during the Kosovo campaign if he becomes the Democrat candidate: Just
as it was amusing to watch the various spins on Dean play out in the media.
First, when they were trying to get a viable Democrat candidate elected,
Dean was portrayed as a wild-eyed left-wing radical, to whom any other
Democrat candidate should be preferred. Then, when it was so clear that
Dean had so energized the extreme left, attack-Bush-at-any-price wing of the
party, that it began to seem inevitable he would be the Democrat nominee,
the media suddenly began portraying Dean as a moderate populist. Now that
Clark provides the media with a potentially viable Democrat candidate, I'm
sure they'll start comparing him to some combination of the best of
Washington, Jackson, Polk, Grant, and Eisenhower. Of course, these generals
achieved victories and Clark failed miserably in his most famous campaign,
but what the hell.

The opposing view:

For a change we may end up supporting the same candidate.

My guess is that Clark comes closer to fitting this description than any
other candidate, including, of course, President Bush.

A third friend, comparable to the other two in brilliance and voting history, says of Clark, "My vote is his to lose, and I'm really hoping he shines."

Update Several readers have written to criticize one or the other of the views above. I didn't, and don't, think it appropriate to counterpunch in a forum I control.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:38 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

George W. Bush, having presided over an orgy of job destruction, now intends to use that as an excuse for fouling the air and water. [*]

One of the big advantages of the tight labor markets at the end of the Clinton Administration was that they made it easier politically to support tough environmental policies (and, for that matter, free trade) by depriving the advocates of more pollution of the excuse that letting them foul our nest was somehow good for "jobs."

Update Juan non-Volokh disagrees [*]. Worse, he finds the comment above "thoughtless." Juan points out that Bush specifically argued that jobs and the environment were compatible. But that is much too kind both to Bush's rhetoric and to his actual policies. He clearly meant that he intend to make them compatible by modifying environmental regulation in the interests of "jobs."

As to the assertion that gutting New Source Review won't lead to dirtier air, it doesn't pass the giggle test. Of course grandfathering is always bad; over time, old plants ought to be required to come up to the standards required of new plants regardless of whether other capital improvements are made or not. Having plant renovations trigger higher environmental standards does indeed discourage renovations, some of which would in fact reduce emissions.

But Bush's policies won't tighten up regulations on old plants; they will merely allow them to be renovated while still being grandfathered, so they can stay in business forever without meeting current standards. As it happened, he chose one of the nation's dirtier old cold-fired power plants, one which probably needs to be shut down entirely, to make his speech. His implicit message to the plant's workers was that he would protect their jobs, even at the expense of the health of the people downwind.

Second update Juan responds, suggesting that I either don't know what I'm talking about or don't care. He then quickly elides the distinction between changing the New Source Review rules, which is widely thought to be a good idea, and the specific changes made by the Bush team, which are widely thought to be a thoroughly bad idea. Juan says:

"The worst that can be said about the NSR reforms is that some facilities might not install new pollution control requirements as quickly as they might have absent the reforms."

Not quite. It's true, and in all conscience it's bad enough, but it's not quite the worst that can be (accurately) said. The worst that can be said is that some especially dirty plants -- for example, the power plant Bush selected for the announcement -- will be able to stay open, and stay dirty, under the new plan instead of being mothballed.

As Juan points out, the Clinton team was moving ahead with proposals to change NSR. It would have been possible to design new regs that would have led to speedier environmental cleanup as well as cost savings for some companies, while slowly closing down facilities too dirty to live. But that's not what the Bush team has done. They have chosen "jobs" over clean air. It's enough, quite literally, to make you sick.

Third update Juan responds again, reporting AEI press releases as if they represented scientific facts. But the facts aside, he seems to think that he can prove that Bush's policies are environmentally benign simply by noting that over time regulations continue, on balance, to tighten. That's true (so far).

But so what? According to Joel D. Schwartz and his colleagues in environtmental epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health (not to be confused with industry flack Joel Schwartz of AEI), particulate air pollution alone causes about 60,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S. That number will go down over time as a result of tightening regulations. The result of Clean Skies (Bush's Orwellian label for his polluter-friendly package of "reforms," of which gutting New Source Review is one element) will be to slow the rate of decrease.

The people who die due to looser regs implemented in the name of "jobs" will be just as dead as they would have been if the net trend had been in the wrong direction.

This is, we are often reminded, the richest country in the world. The richer people get, the more they are willing to pay to protect their health. So our environment ought to be getting cleaner. In general, liberals and Democrats like to speed up that process, and conservatives and Republicans like to slow it down. (Al Gore lost West Virginia in part because he was perceived, correctly, to be an enemy of coal-burning, and thus of coal mining.) It used to be the case that the official environmentalist line embraced by Democrats was against market-simulating regulations; that was too bad, and fortunately it's mostly no longer the case. It also used to be the case that the Republican party had a large pro-environmental wing; that was good, but unfortunately that isn't the case anymore either.

So right now, the political package that includes looser economic regulation, tort "reform," lower taxes on the rich, restrictions on abortion, opposition to equal treatment for homosexuals, and public finance for religion under various guises also includes dirtier air and water. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Fourth update (and enough, already!)

This thread seems to have spun out of control. Glenn Reynolds likens it to smackdown wresting, which it seems to me is only a partial truth: Juan non-Volokh seems eager to smack me down, but I don't have any comparable desire to prove him a fool or a scoundrel, as opposed to arguing against the position he takes.

Juan does engage in what seems to me a rather shabby rhetorical trick. He made an appeal to authority, citing Joel Schwartz of the American Enterprise Institute as the source of an assertion about the impact of changes in NSR rules. I pointed out, as a reason for rejecting that appeal to authority, that Schwartz functions more as a publicist for anti-regulatory positions on environmental matters than as a scholar. In response, Juan accuses me of engaging in ad hominem arguments. Presumably if someone were to cite the ravings of Jeremy Rifkin as facts, Juan would object that Rifkin is not, in fact, an authority. What's the difference?

Juan continues to point out that NSR isn't the only environmental rule in place as if that prove that weakening NSR couldn't possibly do any damage. Of course NSR isn't the only air quality regulation the Bush Administration wants to weaken, either. (Juan correctly calls me on referring to "Clean Skies" when I should have said "Clear Skies"; it’s hard to keep one's Bush Administration Orwellisms straight.)

And if Juan really believes that there is no health damage from any level of pollution below the standard arbitrarily set as “attainment” of clean air goals, he has greater faith in the legislative and administrative processes involved than I think warranted. If regulations were really set at levels so low that air pollution were causing no health damage, they would clearly be too strict. Sometimes there is no such level; that is, the damage function always has a positive value for any positive amount of pollution, with no “threshold.” That doesn't mean that regulations in those cases ought to be set at zero emissions. Nor are they.

It is therefore the case that weakening air quality regulations in ways that permit more pollution does damage to health, if the comparison is, as it should be, to not weakening regulations. Why Juan thinks that current levels of pollution serve as an appropriate baseline, and that any change in policy that slows down the rate of improvement rather than causing pollution levels to actually increase over time is therefore somehow benign, is beyond my comprehension.

Juan doesn’t bother to try to refute my assertion that, right now, Democrats tend to be friends of more rapid environmental cleanup and Republicans enemies of the same, except by making a fairly transparent debater’s point about the party identities of Presidents who signed various pieces of environmental legislation. That might suggest that he despairs of coming up with any facts or arguments against what seems to me a fairly obvious observation.

A reader rebukes me for putting the word "jobs" in quotation marks in accusing Bush of trying to run "jobs" against the environment. It's not that I think jobs an unimportant consideration. But there is no simple relationship between levels of employment or unemployment (which are almost entirely macroeconomic phenomena) and the stringency of environmental regulation. If tighter regulations eliminate jobs in coal mining or in the operation of coal-fired plants, the composition of employment will change, but not the overall number of jobs; someone is going to make a living producing electricity some other way, or, if the result is an increase in power prices leading to a decrease in power consumption, then someone is going to make a living selling whatever consumers are buying instead of electric power.

Pretending to solve macroeconomic problems through microeconomic strategies is a political trick used by Democrats as well as Republicans, but it is a pretense rather than a valid argument; therefore, I put "jobs" in scare quotes.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:55 PM | |

There's a pattern...within the Bush admin-istration....which should suggest that the administration itself has radical goals. But in each case the administration has reassured moderates by pretending otherwise — by offering rationales for its policy that don't seem all that radical. And in each case moderates have followed a strategy of appeasement....this is hard for journalists to deal with: they don't want to sound like crazy conspiracy theorists. But there's nothing crazy about ferreting out the real goals of the right wing; on the contrary, it's unrealistic to pretend that there isn't a sort of conspiracy here, albeit one whose organization and goals are pretty much out in the open....

[Worth reading.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:51 PM | |

This story from the Guardian seems to be a deliberate threat-by-leak from the Saudi royals: Make nice to us or we'll go nuclear. No response from the White House, as far as I can tell.

The timing couldn't be better if Wesley Clark wants to make the Saudi issue against Bush.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:34 PM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

But will this panacea be covered by health insurance?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:26 PM | |

Tim Noah on Slate [*] reports that White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked directly about Karl Rove's possible responsibility for the Plame affair and, once again, ducked the question. As Noah points out, McClellan's "if I could find out who anonymous people were I would" [*] line is complete gibberish now that a specific name has been named. If he, or the President, wants to find out whether Rove was involved in a felony, presumably they have Rove's phone number; they can ask him.

It's too bad that the White House transcipts don't give reporters' names; I'd love to know who keeps risking his or her favor at 1600 Pa. to keep asking these questions.

On the other hand, Noah reports that Wilson seems to be backing off Rove as a target. I'm a little disappointed that Wilson seems to confuse metonymy with synecdoche. But I'm more than a little disappointed by his backing and filling; if he doesn't have anything on Rove personally, then naming him was an irresponsible and discreditable act. If he does, then why be coy?

Update A reader informs me that the questioner was Russell Mokhiber. [*]

[Thread starts here.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:08 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Unless he has just executed one of the great head-fakes of all time, Wesley Clark will announce his candidacy for President tomorrow. I am convinced that he would be the strongest candidate against Bush, and have a weaker but still distinct belief that he might well make the best President as well.

His strength as a candidate comes partly from his resume and partly from his novelty as a politician and the attendant lack of baggage. Partly the resume issue is a pure quality one: Would you rather have, as President, someone who was first in his class at West Point and won a Rhodes Scholarship or one who earned gentleman's C's at Yale? A Silver Star holder or an AWOL? But partly it's his ability, based on his resume, to make the security issue, and the Saudi connection issue, against Bush.

In addition, the combination of being Southern and being military means that Clark will not naturally be seen as a cultural threat by Red-state voters. No non-Southerner has won the White House for the Democrats since JFK in 1960. Graham has the same advantage, but his campaign seems to be going nowhere. Edwards has it to a lesser extent; yes, he's Southern and grew up poor, but he's now a multimillionaire blow-dried Yuppie tort lawyer. Dean, and to an even greater extent Kerry, are going to be pure poison among voters who long for the 1950s; Kerry isn't just a liberal politically, he's a Grateful Dead fan. Well, so am I, but that's not going to sell in North Florida.

As to his potentially being the best President of the bunch, that's mostly a reflection on them. None has a real record of accomplishment in public office, and none has, to my ear, articulated a clear vision of where the country needs to move from here or how to move it. (Edwards comes closest.) Clark presents something close to a blank slate, and at the moment I'm writing my dreams on it. Perhaps the voters will do the same. (And perhaps we'll all be disappointed.) But at least I have no sense that someone who has paid his dues and is obviously worthy is being denied his shot at the big prize if we go for the outsider instead.

That being true, what are we going to do about it? Clark's late entry has some real advantages, but he now has to scramble to put together an organization and raise funds in the face of the web-based Dean juggernaut. Clark needs to hope that Mr. Feiler was right, and that things happen faster now due to the internet.

Here, then, is my modest contribution to that possibility. If you're willing to contribute $10 to the Clark campaign, assuming it happens, and to be on an email list, please send me an email at clark@markarkleiman.com, including, at the top, your name on one line and your email address on the next. (The button at the left will automatically address a message to that mailbox.)

If in addition you're willing to commit to recruiting ten more people willing to give $10 each, and to suggest to them that they continue the chain, please add X 10 as a third line. (Ask anyone you recruit to send me a similar note, but with your name and email included on two subsequent lines so the tree structure can be seen.)

There are lots of things one can do for one's candidate, and there will be time to do them. But a small contribution and a commitment to viral marketing of that activity are fairly minimal, and, in this case, rather urgent. The press and the pols will be making very rapid judgments about Clark's viability, and those judgments will tend to stick. If he has a six-figure contributor base by the end of October, everyone is going to have to take him seriously.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:47 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Right now, I'd be just as happy, in terms of expected outcomes, if the California recall election were cancelled. Bustamante's campaign so far has left me dubious that he'd be an improvement on Davis; given the risk of winding up with Schwarzenegger, I'd rather stick with what we've got.

There's another reason to stick with Davis from a Democrat's viewpoint: he's termed out, so if he survives we automatically get fresh blood in 2006. If Cruz wins, he probably can't be denied the nomination in 2006, when he could well be our weakest candidate. Moreover, it would be good for everyone concerned if the first Latino governor of a big state were conspicuous for good rather than bad performance, and Bustamante is not to governing as Jackie Robinson was to baserunning.

But that's not the same as being happy about the Ninth Circuit's decision to postpone the election to March, when the Presidential primary will bring out hordes of Democratic voters and thus give Davis a much better chance to survive.

Like it or not, the California constitution gives the people of California a process by which they can boot an underperforming official, including the Governor. That procedure has been lawfully invoked. For a Federal court to, in effect, repeal a provision of the state Constitution by requiring Californians to suffer under Gray Davis for another six months, and to push the election to a date more favorable to his survival, ought to require a pretty overwhelming reason, and I can't see such a reason in this instance.

The plaintiffs had two complaints about the voting procedures, one valid and one half-valid. The valid complaint was that the counties, in order to save money, had very substantially reduced the number of polling places, which is likely to confuse everyone and inconvenience especially those who rely on public transportation to get to the polls. (My new polling place is three miles, and a thousand vertical feet, from where I live.) But the right remedy, surely, would be for the court to order the state -- given that the state is the responsible entity under the Voting Rights Act -- to pay the counties to run a full election on the appointed day.

The half-valid complaint is about punch-card voting. There the remedy is even simpler: require, in addition to signs and instructions to tell voters to make sure their hole-punching is complete, a manual scan of any ballot not counted by machine to see if there is a distinct mark at the place associated with one of the candidates and, if there is exactly one such mark, counting that ballot for that candidate. Punch-card voting was never intended to be a contest in manual dexterity; the fact that machines can easily count 97% of the votes is no reason not to have human beings count the other 3%.

No doubt, there will be a trivial number of cases in which a voter, coming to the polls in a gubernatorial election (1) doesn't want to vote for governor and (2) accidentally makes a mark at precisely one spot on a punch-card, and miraculously does so at a point corresponding to a vote for one of the two leading candidates. In those cases, and in the (I think, purely imaginary) cases in which someone starts to vote for a candidate, makes a mark on the punch-card short of a complete punch, changes his mind, and doesn't then ask for a replacement ballot, an occasional careless voter will wind up having his vote counted for someone he didn't intend to vote for. Tough luck.

Compared to failing to count an intentional vote, counting a vote not intended (and presumably therefore randomly distributed) does no noticeable harm. It was only in the heated atmosphere of the successful attempt to steal Florida's electoral votes for the losing candidate that anyone imagined that the number of "pregnant" and "dimpled" chads not representing intentions to vote was of greater than epsilon measure, or that there was any harm done to the voter by counting each ballot for the candidate the voter appeared to intend to vote for.

Since, then, there were remedies short of postponing the election that would have satisfied all of the legitimate complaints of the plaintiffs, it seems wrong for the Ninth Circuit panel to have resorted to the unnecessarily drastic remedy of nullifying the state constitution. (As a non-lawyer, I don't know whether the remedies suggested above are in fact within the powers of the federal courts in Voting Rights Act cases; if not, perhaps they should be.)

If the state of California has failed to live up to its responsibilities under the Voting Rights Act and the consent decree issued pursuant to it, the ultimate responsibility rests with the Governor. A ruling that, as a result of that failure, the Governor gets a guarantee of an additional six months in office may be good law, but if so Mr. Bumble can claim another instance for his maxim.

If the Ninth Circuit either denies a rehearing en banc or grants a rehearing and affirms its panel, presumably the proponents of the recall will appeal to the Supreme Court. As Wayne Eastman points out [*], a decision by that court to allow the recall election to proceed in the face of unequal opportunities to vote could be reconciled with the result in Bush v. Gore, but it would take some doing. If the Ninth Circuit manages to create some uncomfortable moments for the Chief Injustice and his four Associate Injustices, yesterday's ruling won't be a total loss.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:44 AM | |
Thread: California Recall

It looks as if Gray Davis's basic political strategy -- making sure the voters never have a decent alternative -- may be paying off again. The LA Times poll shows the recall yes/no tightening, and Tradesports now has "recall fails" at about a 33% chance of winning (Schwarzenegger is a little better, Bustamante a little worse). I'm starting to lean toward voting "No" on the recall, partly because Bustamante isn't doing anything to make it seem more plausible that he would be even a minimally competent Governor.

I expect lots of I-told-you-sos from the out-of-state Democrats who have already seen this as a reprise of the Clinton impeachment. But they, and particularly the DNC, share the responsibility for not recruiting into the race a Democrat (my candidate, it will be recalled, was Leon Panetta, who would have been willing if asked) who could have walked away with the Round II vote and then actually done something to serve Democratic values as Governor.

The failure of Davis, the rest of the California Democratic establishement, and the national party (including the Presidential candidates) to come to Bustamante's defense against the absurd charges that he harbors some sort of ethnic prejudice will, I think, stand out as a huge lost opportunity to not only do the right thing but also to earn the gratitude of Latino voters across the country.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party formally endorsed Bustamante in Round II, while the Republican state convention, divided between Schwarzenegger and McClintock forces, failed to make an endorsement.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:43 PM | |
Thread: California Recall

Paul Krugman is at it again. [*] He explains slowly, calmly, and clearly the causes and likely consequences of the coming federal fiscal crisis, and the political calculation underlying the anti-tax crusade.

I'd like to hear someone from the conservative side explain with comparable calm and care where he or she thinks Krugman is wrong, without using the word "shrill."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:29 PM | |

The temporal relationship between the eradication of smallpox and the consequent end of smallpox vaccination on the one hand and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in Africa on the other has led some scientists to speculate that smallpox vaccine might have some protective benefit against HIV infection. A team at George Mason has just published a press release claiming in vitro evidence to support that speculation. [*]

If that were true, the case for population-wide innoculation would be even stronger than I already thought it was.[*]

One in vitro test on twenty samples isn't enough to make policy on. Right now, the right thing to do is more experiments. A major potential problem with a world-wide vaccination program is that smallpox vaccine shouldn't be given to those who are HIV-positive, which is a big problem in Africa where prevalence is hight and the cost of testing is significant.

However, finding out whether the George Mason team is right, and then doing the right thing about it if they are, is a lot more important to the defense of this country than 98% of what's now being done in the name of the war on terrorism.

I just wish I thought that the current administration was on top of this, and willing, if it proved out, to divert some money from either the occupation effort in Iraq or the bank accounts of dividend recipients to pay for a crash program of vaccine development and administration, not just here but worldwide.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:23 PM | |

David Plotz at Slate [*] has more about the revelations in Gerald Posner's new book, Why America Slept. The fact that most Americans still blame Iraq and not Saudi Arabia for 9-11 is one of the things that make it hard to maintain a decent amount of democratic piety.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:35 PM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

A reader concerned for my professional well-being points out that the use of "welsch" (meaning, roughly, renege) in a previous post incorporates an old ethnic slur -- which I knew -- and goes to note that the same thing is true of the verb "gyp," which I should have been able to figure out but hadn't. He suggests that I avoid the term. (The email's title line was "ixnay on the elchway.")

I'm prepared to go some distance to avoid the use of ethnically offensive terms, even when that means sounding pedantic by not using the most commonly accessible term: I always say "Roma" for "gypsy," for example, or "Aleut and Inuit" for "Eskimo," or "poor Appalachian white" for "hillbilly," even at some expense in comprehensibility.

Unlike some of those who affect contempt for what they call "politically correct language," I'm perfectly willing to adapt to the desires of the groups involved, or even to re-adapt. (I can remember when "black" was considered offensive and "African-American" archaic, but it doesn't seem to me that the cost to me of unlearning the term "Negro" was an unreasonable one. I'm told that "Aleut" is being abandoned in favor of specific tribal designations; if I ever have occasion to write or speak about those peoples, I will cheerfully call them whatever they've decided to call themselves at that moment.)

But the situation is different when a word has become de-capitalized and has changed parts of speech to become a verb. The average American, hearing "gyp" or "welsch," never thinks of Romany or Wales. "Jew" is also a verb, as in "to Jew someone down" (to successfully haggle inappropriately hard from the buyer's side), but it hasn't lost its capital letter or its fairly direct reference to a still-active (and not entirely inaccurate) stereotype. "Dutch courage" (bravery out of a bottle) has kept its capital letter, but not its point, since no one today associates the Dutch with drunken violence.

There's a cost to being sensitive in such cases. Its wealth of near-synonyms expressing slightly different nuances is among the glories of English. Look at that mouthful I had to use to translate "Jew him down." "Haggle him down" isn't English; "haggle" doesn't take "down." "Bargain him down" is English, but lacks the sense of over-aggressiveness. Similarly, "renege" is much more formal than "welsch," and isn't appropriate to the situation of failing to pay a bet. To be "gypped" is not just to be cheated, but to be cheated in a petty and sneaky fashion.

The tendency to "project," as the Freudians say, disapproved-of human tendencies onto out-groups must be nearly as old as human interaction, and the reflection of that projection in language not much younger. So it's not surprising that out-group names get used to express deprecated behaviors.

(The reverse happens as well. I'm told that many of the names first used by colonial officials, anthropologists, and other outsiders as neutral designations of ethnic groups turned out to be terms of opprobrium, due to reliance on informants form other groups. "Who lives on the other side of that river?" "Those scumsuckers? We mostly call them bottom-feeders." That exchange then shows up in an official report or old journal article as "Across the Uggabugga River live the Scumsuckers, or Bottomfeeders." That's apparently how we got "Eskimo," which I'm told translates approximately as "cannibal.")

On reflection, I think I will continue to use "welsch," but not "gyp," simply because the Roma ("Gypsies") are, and the Welch are not, the targets of active ethic prejudice in places where this weblog is read. Even in Britain, any residual feeling against the Welch is a pale imitation of anti-Roma prejudice, which remains a major factor in the lives of its victims. Remembering not to say "gyp" is a fairly cheap way of expressing sympathy for a severely ill-treated group of people.

Since my use of "welsch" doesn't reflect any prejudice I have or reinforce any stereotypes actually likely to be present in the minds of my readers, and since the Welch in America don't even constitute a recognizable ethnicity -- "Jones" and "Williams" are virtually interchangeable with "Smith" and "Robinson" -- I don't feel guilty about its use. (Again, I'd probably make a different choice if I were writing for a British audience.)

And if this gets me in Dutch with the Welsh, that's life.

Note: Any actual Welch person who reads this and is actually offended by it, as opposed to thinking that someone else might be offended by it, can probably change my mind with an email.

Footnote The American Heritage Dictionary spells it "welsh," and adds "[Origin obscure.]" Huh?

Update I'd forgotten an important special case, but fortunately when you've forgotten something completely disgusting the editors of the Wall Street Journal are always standing by to help.

John Fund's column on Monday about political contributions from California tribal casino interests was headlined ... I'm not making this up ..."Indian Givers". Here the term is an obvious slur directed at a still-disadvantaged group, but it's not being used in its idiomatic sense: that is, the tribes aren't being accused of taking back a gift, but rather of paying bribes ... er, exercising their First Amendment right to make political contributions.

So the headline (which, to be fair, Fund probably didn't write) is simply a piece of racial abuse, thinly disguised as a pun. The point is that money taken from Indians is especially dirty money: an echo of a distinction made by Arnold Schwartzenegger. (There's a reasonable argument that casino money is especially dirty, but then the headline would have been something liked "Stacked Deck," which might have left the Journal's readers shy of their Recommended Daily Allowance of racial abuse.)

It's as if an "environmental justice" publication edited by African-Americans published an essay about the way garbage flows from prosperous non-minority neighborhods to landfills in poor minority neighborhoods, and decided to head it "White Trash."

Second update

Lots of useful feedback on this one:

1. Apparently there is real doubt that "welsh" or "welsch" meaning "renege" is etymologically related to "Welsh" the people or language. [*] The OED (which gives "welch" but not the more Yiddish-sounding "welsch" as an alternative spelling) has no reference earlier than 1857, so if it's an ethnic insult it can't be a very old one. A reader notes that the earliest spelling is "Welch," suggesting that it might be derived from a person's name: perhaps the original Mr. Welch was a bookie who failed to pay off.

2. The proper name "Welsh" is apparently one of those "people across the river" terms: it's related to Germanic words meaning roughly "foreigner."

3. A reader notes that, given the frequency with which Europeans in America made promises to Indians and then welsched on them, "Indian giver" is about as pure a case of projection as one could ask.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:34 AM | |

Having run just last year on a strict no-tax-increase platform, Alabama's Republican governor tried a "Nixon goes to China": he proposed a reform of the state's horrible tax system to make it more progressive, close the budget deficit, and fund a school system that Lower Slobovia wouldn't be ashamed of.

Yesterday, he got creamed; the voters rejected the proposal by 2 to 1. Various self-described libertarians were chortling in advance, and no doubt will be rejoicing today, that Alabama's poor people will continue to pay more than their share of the burdens of government and that Alabama's children will remain mired in Red-state ignorance. That's what libertarianism too often turns out to mean: the assertion of the sacred right of the prosperous not to support programs that help the non-prosperous. I suppose comfortably-off people are as entitled to be selfish as any other political group; I just wish they wouldn't wrap it up in all that horsehockey about "liberty."

And it's impossible to ignore the racial subtext here: part of the reason the poor white people of Alabama, who would materially have been winners from the plan, voted against it was their disinclination to have the state do anything for Alabama's poor blacks. They're willing to remain poor and ignorant if that's what it takes to keep blacks even poorer and more ignorant. (A quarrel between the black leadership and the governor, plus what is by now the usual round of deceptive ads paid for by conservatives purporting to warn blacks of evil white plots against them, cost the program black votes as well.)

There's a broader lesson to be drawn: A party or factional leader can lead his troops to compromise on side-issues, but not on the basics. Nixon could go to China as a strategic move in the Cold War; he couldn't "go to Russia" in the same way, because anti-Communism was what his core really believed in. Clinton could support welfare reform, but not any rollback of the civil rights laws or reproductive choice. Anti-tax theology is so deep among Republican voters and party organizers that a Republican can't compromise on it.

That matters to Californians thinking about how to vote next month. As pointed out before in this space [*], Schwarzenegger's budget numbers don't add: if he keeps his promises, the state will go bankrupt. So the only reasonable hope for Schwarzenegger voters was that Schwarzenegger would break his promises, and that his status as a newly-elected Republican governor would secure the necessary votes to get a tax-increase package through the legislature.

The Alabama instance shows how tough that would be. In particular, Governor Schwarzenegger would have to deal with Senator Tom McClintock, who is a genuine, clinically-diagnosable taxophobe.

So voting for a candidate who advocates insolvency in the hope of getting solvency instead on the Chinese Visit Principle is very unlikely to work. And since no Republican is allowed to advocate solvency, those who regard welsching on one's debts as dishonorable have no choice but to vote against the recall, for Bustamante, or both.

No, I don't like it either. But that's life in the big city.

Update Several readers disagree with the analysis of the Alabama disaster above -- in particular with its emphasis on the role of race -- and they have some good points. Still, while acknowledging the complexities, I want to hang on to my basic theme.

It is certainly true that the anti-tax side's explicit appeal was to Alabamians' distrust in government rather than to their racial prejudices. But let's not forget that the anti-government hatred -- no less charged word will do -- that characterizes Southern politics today is largely the produce of the role of governments, especially but not exclusively at the federal level, in overturning Jim Crow.

Poor blacks, as well as poor whites, distrust Alabama state government. No surprise there: that government treats them better than it did in the past, but not as well as it ought to treat them or as well as it treats whites, and it is dominated by people who win political power by promising, tacitly if not explicitly, not to use it in ways excessively favorable to black interests. (The technical term for that position in Southern politics is now, as it was in Jim Crow days, "conservative," while the opposite stance is called "liberal.")

In this case, that distrust was exacerbated by the quarrel over re-enfranchisement between some black legislators and the governor, and exploited by ads run on black-oriented radio stations featuring voices with recognizably black speech patterns warning that "they" wanted to raise "our" property taxes "up to 400 percent." [*]

It is regrettable, but not really surprising, that such appeals worked, just as it is regrettable, but not really surprising, that poor whites were willing to vote against their clear material interests. A political scientist friend points out that badly-performing government is a social trap: voter disgust with poor performance helps prevent the addition of resources that might enable better performance.

It's also true that higher-income voters were less unfavorable to the proposition than lower-income voters, which at first blush seems a bad fit with the rather populist account I gave of the rich bamboozling the poor. But "higher-income," dear reader, means people like you and me, not the owners of the banks and the timber companies. If we had voting figures for the upper tenth of one percent of the Alabamian income distribution, and the mangers of Alabama's large companies, no doubt they would look very different.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:53 AM | |
Thread: California Recall

Slate thinks that fronting for Tawana Brawley's false accusation of rape was "the worst thing you'll ever hear about Al Sharpton." [*]

I understand that Seattle is a long way from New York, but haven't William Saletan, Ben Jacobs, and Avi Zenilman ever heard of Crown Heights? Sharpton's anti-Semitic rhetoric helped incite a race riot -- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "pogrom" -- in which Yankel Rosenbaum was killed. And since that foul murder he has done what he can to defend the murderer.

Or how about the Freddy's fire, preceded by more of Sharpton's speechifying about "white interlopers" and "diamond merchants," in which eight people died? [*]

Sharpton is easily the most despicable major figure in either of the two major parties, and yes I do include Trent Lott and Tom DeLay. The fact that no Democrat can run for President without appearing in the same room as Sharpton is the only good reason I can think of for voting Republican. It's not a good enough reason, but it's not chopped liver either.

Update The Democrats are indeed behaving badly, but the Republicans are behaving worse. It turns out that the Sharpton campaign is largely a Republican put-up job, with Roger Stone pulling the levers.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:33 PM | |
Thread: Al Sharpton

Tapped is having a good day today, with acute comments on Bush's character, his reconstruction policies, and his education policies. Take a peek.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:57 PM | |

Science has just retracted [*] a paper purporting to show that even one-time use of MDMA ("ecstasy") brings with it damage to the dopamine system that creates a risk of developing Parkinson's Disease later in life. [*] The paper, one of a series published by George Ricaurte of Hopkins Medical School and colleagues, was based on an experiment that intended to give MDMA to a group of primates.

It now turns out, according to the experimenters, that the animals were actually administered methamphetamine instead.

The authors of the study insist that their earlier results showing that MDMA is toxic to serotonergic neurons remain valid. That work, combined with the now-retracted paper, formed part of the basis for such laws as the Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act and the RAVE Act, and have also led to an almost-complete blackout on human experimentation with MDMA in the US.

The account in the retraction letter seems plausible at a first reading. The laboratory ordered 10 grams each of MDMA and methamphetamine from the same supplier, and received two vials, one labeled "MDMA" and one methamphetamine, in a single shipment. Apparently the two labels were switched; at least, the vial labeled "methamphetamine" turns out to contain only MDMA. (The other was used up and has been discarded.) Moreover, analysis of frozen sections of the brains of two animals that died during the experiment show methamphetamine and its metabolites but not MDMA or its metabolites.

Accidents happen, and it would be churlish to cast too much blame on the scientists involved for not analyzing a chemical received from a reputable supplier to verify that it was what the label said it was. But the retraction letter leaves out or elides some important facts, which it seems to me should have troubled both the researchers and Science's reviewers and editors.

The experiment was purportedly intended to represent in an animal model the consequences of human "recreational" MDMA use, and perhaps of therapeutic use of the drug were it ever approved for that purpose. In the experiment, two out of fifteen animals died. The death rate among human MDMA users is no more than one in a million.

Yet it appears that the researchers failed to investigate the causes of those deaths. Moreover, they went on to draw inferences about the effects of MDMA on humans from the observed damage to the brains of the remaining animals. That didn't seem to trouble the reviewers for Science or the administrators at the National Institute on Drug Abuse who trumpeted the findings as evidence of the dangers of MDMA. (Science is published by the AAAS, whose president, Alan Leshner, was the Director of NIDA when the grant in question was awarded; he made MDMA his particular crusade.)

It is hard to escape the thought that many of the people involved were less cautious than they might have been because the results seemed to support their already strongly-held beliefs.

The now-retracted study was not the first by Ricaurte to attract severe scholarly criticism. The earlier work claiming large and irreversible losses in the serotonin system has also been contradicted by other findings, and brain-scan images that seemed to show large inactive areas in the brains of MDMA users -- imagines heavily promoted by NIDA during the Leshner regime -- have now been withdrawn from the NIDA website, and NIDA refuses to make them available to journalists.

Even before the retraction, then, Ricaurte's work was under a cloud. One very senior figure in the field had said in an open scientific meeting "I will believe any result George Ricaurte comes up with as soon as it has been independently confirmed."

The other detail not mentioned in the retraction letter is that Peter Jennings had gotten wind of the controversy, and had a special highly critical of Ricaurte's work "in the can" and ready to show. (Ricaurte had refused to be interviewed.) That Ricaurte's group had failed to replicate the now-retracted work is no doubt true; but that the paper would have been retracted had ABC not been ready to make an issue of it is much less clear. (But see correction in "second update" below.)

Given all the circumstances, and especially given the huge policy superstructure that has been erected on the increasingly shaky foundation of MDMA neutotoxicity research, it seems to me that it's time for a complete review of the bidding, in the form probably of a National Academy review. The panel for such a review ought to be charged with evaluating the whole body of MDMA research, with a special eye on the neurotoxicity work, and ought to be asked to make a recommendation about whether human preclinical and clinical trials ought to be allowed to go forward.

If the panel were to find serious flaws not only in this paper but in other work by the Ricaurte group and other NIDA-funded work on MDMA, then more serious questions ought to be raised about how to protect the NIDA funding and evaluation process from being unduly influenced by the political necessities of the drug war. Moreover, if I were the editor of one of the relevant journals I would want to take a close look at whether there were subtle pressures making it easier to publish results consistent with the national crusade against illicit chemicals than results inconsistent with that crusade.

Only rarely does a first-rank scholarly journal has to retract a published research report because of flaws in the data or analysis. Most of us hope that means that the disincentives for either faking results or making crucial errors are so strong, and the journal editors and referees sufficiently alert, so that few papers actually need retraction.

A less cheerful view would be that the common interests of the authors and the journals in not retracting means that many papers that deserve retraction don't receive it. Probably the chances of retraction, among papers so flawed that they ought to be retracted, is higher when the results help one side or another in a political or policy controversy. The tempations to deviate from objectivity are also probably greater in those instances.

Update

A reader who has worked in research labs employing controlled substances makes the following observation. (Note that the Drug Enforcement Administration has regulatory authority over any place with a license to possess Schedule I drugs):

It is not clear to me WHEN or HOW the labels were switched.
The first thing that came to mind when this story was released was
that DEA inspectors of laboratories which use controlled
substances suggest that labels (of stock compounds in the safe as
well as working aliquots) be changed to mask the contents of the
drug. I've seen "WP" for "white powder" (actually morphine
sulfate) and single letter codes to distinguish between series of
compounds. I've heard stories of inspectors reacting
enthusiastically to sarcastic suggestions that the compounds be
falsely labeled radioactive (a spectacularly bad idea). These
things are supposed to decrease likelihood of diversion, a minor
concern except by people who would already have access and
knowledge of the coding.

Confusion caused by relabeling or diversion by a lab member
seem more likely than an error by the manufacturer.

Second update and correction

Someone in a position to know informs me that pressure from ABC News, if it played any role at all, was secondary to pressure from NIDA. Apparently Leshner's enthusiasm for Ricaurte's work was not shared by the career staff or by the subsequent Interim Director and Director. (For example, though NIDA had funded the research reported in Science, it put out no press release when the article appeared. As noted above the "hole-in-your brain" images disappeared from the NIDA website some time ago.) NIDA was pressing Ricaurte for details about how the work was done, and word that the results reported in Science could not be reproduced in subsequent oral-administration studies was beginning to leak from Ricaurte's lab.

Other questions are being raised: What happened to the rest of the 10 grams of methamphetamine purportedly mislabeled "MDMA"? What other studies might be compromised by the same error? Did Ricaurte continue to make public claims about the risk of Parkinsonism after his lab failed to confirm the earlier results?

One knowledgeable observer doubts that a National Academy panel is necessary. "All you need is a careful review of the lab notebooks." The question now is whether Hopkins will stick with its "accidents happen" stance.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:42 PM | |

The central theme of the "No Child Left Behind Act" is that the public schools can perform if given measurable goals and strong organizational incentives to meet those goals. Part of the evidence offered for that proposition was the "Texas miracle," and in particualr the improvement of the performance of the Houston schools under Superintendent Rod Paige, now Secretary of Education.

Now it turns out that the Houston schools were systematically cooking the books, with at least one large inner-city high school reporting zero dropouts. It turns out that an incentive to meet a target is also an incentive to pretend to meet that target.

In the wise words of W.C. Fields (whose birth certificate read William Claude Dukenfield): "Anything worth winning is worth cheating for."

More about this at Open Source Politics.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:52 PM | |

Tom Spencer is tired [*] of being bullshat.

Aren't you?

Update New Democrats On Line [*] reflects on the application of credit-card conservatism to foreign policy.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:41 AM | |

The three-judge panel of Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has, by a 2-to-1 vote, reinstated a preliminary injunction issued by Judge James Parker of the U.S. District Court for New Mexico, but stayed pending appeal, in favor of the American branch of Uniao do Vegetal. The UDV is a Brazilian syncretic church that uses ayahuasca, a mixture including the hallucinogen DMT and various harmala alkaloids, as a sacrament.

The ruling, unless either the Tenth Circuit en banc or the Supreme Court stays it yet again, at will allow the UDV to resume its rituals, which have been suspended for more than two years since a Federal seizure of a shipment of the church's ritual mixture.

The Tenth Circuit opinions are highly technical, turning largely on the question of what constitutes the status quo in determining whether a preliminary injunction is "mandatory" or "prohibitory" and thus the allocation of the burden of persuasion between the parties. But the result, if it stands, is pathbreaking: this is the first time that a court, acting under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has allowed the use of a controlled substance ritually outside the special case, long enshrined in regulation and now in statute, of peyote use in Native American rituals.

I testified as an expert witness for the UDV on the issue of the risks of diversion of the sacramental mixture to non-religious use. Since the case is ongoing (even if the preliminary injunction stands, the case-in-chief remains to be tried) I will refrain from comment on the decision, except to say that the District Court ruling and both the majority and dissenting opinions from the Circuit Court are excellent specimens of judicial prose, not at all painful for non-lawyers to read. In lieu of any substantive comment, I refer you to Eugene Volokh's reflections, and to his scholarly article (linked to on his site) on the general question of religious exemptions from facially neutral laws of general applicability.

Judge Parker's opinion is here.

The appellate decision and dissent are here:

10th cir opinion.pdf

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:46 PM | |

I have a note up [*] on Open Source Politics.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:44 PM | |

Polling Report [*] has three new Presidential polls up, all done this week, all showing Bush slipping badly.

Zogby shows 52% saying it's time for someone new as President, with only 40% saying that Bush deserves re-election. That twelve-point net negative is up from three in mid-August and one in mid-July; up to that point, Bush had been in positive territory.

Similary, 41% told Time/CNN that they would "definitely" vote against Bush, while only 29% were "definitely" for him. He still beats all of the Democrats in trial heats, but now by margins of only 3 (vs. Hillary) to 11 (vs. Gephardt). Lieberman and Kerry have gone from down 15-16 points in December to down 5-6 now.

Ipsos-Reid/Cook still has Bush in positive territory, 38-36, but the downtrend is the same: his +2 was +8 two weeks ago and +12 two weeks before that.

CBS News had Bush down 4 (33% "probably vote Bush" vs. 37% "probably vote Democratic") a week ago.

Tradesports still quotes Bush's re-election at 65 cents bid, 66 cents offered. I'm not ready to bet on a Democrat yet, but those are starting to look like tempting odds.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:46 PM | |

The appeal of the slogan "A pack, not a herd" puzzles me. Do we really admire wolves more than bison or elk or elephants? But it certainly sounds catchy, and that's half the point of a slogan in the first place.

So I'm glad Brad DeLong keeps reminding us[*]
of Noah Schachtman's equally brief capsule [*] of the case against bully-boy unilaterialism in foreign policy: "A posse, not cowboy."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:36 PM | |

Kevin Drum catches Lohn Lott in another pointless untruth. [*] Isn't there anyone in the management of the American Enterprise Institute with a modicum of institutional self-respect?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:19 PM | |

Good news for Heinlein fans [*]: his unpublished first novel (unpublished, apparently, because by the standards of 1939 it was unprintable) is due out this November. Apparently one of the characters is Nehemiah Scudder.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:15 PM | |

I have no opinion on the legal issues in Summerlin v. Stewart [*]. I would, however, like to know who owns the movie rights.

It's the strangest tale you will encounter this month. Note, in particular, the view of the defense lawyer in the case that her drunken sexual encounter with the prosecutor consituted a confict of interest for herself but not for him.

Having read the opinions, I find it hard to escape two reflections:

(1) The Arizona court system is seriously fouled up. Executing someone after such a farcical process doesn't pass the smell test.

(2) Putting Mr. Summerlin out of his misery doesn't sound like a bad idea at all, from his perspective or ours. It really isn't his fault that he's incapable of controlling his homicidal rage, but as long as he has the use of his hands he will pose a mortal threat to the people around him.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:45 PM | |

A couple of weeks ago, [*], in connection with the hyping of Charles Colson's recidivism-reduction program, I suggested that there was an essay to be written about the Bush Administration as the first post-modern Presidency. Josh Marshall has now written it. [*] (It's more than possible that I the idea from him in the first place.) I'm going to ignore Matt Yglesias's quite plausible suggestion [*]that there's an element of American Pragmatist will-to-believe in there as well, since I despise the post-modernists but think there's some good stuff in the Pragmatists, though my admiration is mostly for Pierce rather than James.

Tapped has a good riff [*], starting off from a piece in CJR by David Greenburg [*] on how the press's reluctance to call a lie a lie when it comes to policy-relevant facts, as opposed to biographical ones, advantages the Republicans. I'm even more concerned about the way it debases the overall quality of public discourse, but I think both claims are true.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:23 PM | |

According to this Time Magazine story [*], based on forthcoming book by Gerald Posner, the Bush Administration continued to insinuate that Iraq was somehow responsible for the 9-11 massacres long after a top al-Qaeda captive had named the names of top Saudi and Pakistani officials who knew about the attacks in advance.

I don't know how reliable Posner is, but the story, if true, calls for somebody in Washington to do some serious explaining.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:52 PM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

Essay up [*] at Open Source Politics, which seems to have had a very successful launch, with 4000 visits in its first 48 hours on line.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:47 AM | |

Virginia Postrel makes a reasonable case -- not necessarily a correct one, but certainly a reasonable one -- that the populist nonsense Cruz Bustamante is spouting about economics suggests that he might make a worse governor even than Gray Davis. [*]

But, accepting that claim as true for the purposes of argument, the practical conclusion she draws from it -- that Democrats should vote "No" on Round I and blank Round II -- doesn't follow. There may be a case for Democrats to vote "No" on Round I. But blanking Round II would be an act of utter irresponsibility, like a vote for Nader in 2000. The Round II vote is relevant only if, as still seems likely, Davis gets the boot in Round I. In that case, the question isn't Bustamante vs. Davis: it's Bustamante vs. Schwarzenegger.

If Virginia or anyone else can put together a coherent argument that Bustamante would be worse than Schwarzenegger, I'm all ears. But that case would need to address what we know about Schwarzenegger: the incoherence of his fiscal positions and the bankruptcy that would result if he were elected and kept his promises, his unwillingness to answer questions, his almost immediate breach of the promises he made forgo special-interest money and personal attacks, his utter ignorance of state government and contempt for those who do understand it, the profile in cowardice he showed on the Waldheim matter, his associations with the racists around Pete Wilson and the crooks around Chuck Quackenbush.

And, yes, his unspeakable vulgarity, as expressed in his movies, his Hummer, and his relationships with women (and, apparently, with girls).

I'm going to take some convincing.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:32 PM | |

Jane Galt [*] has some sobering thoughts on the economics of child care and how they interact with the career patterns of well-educated women.

My only thought about how to handle the problem (speaking, I must confess, as a bachelor, though I'm still hoping) is that it seems like a good candidate for a co-operative effort. If ten families with, let's say, an average of 1.5 two-to-nine-year-olds each, formed a co-op, with each family delivering one person-day of effort per week, and the group hired one full-time professional child-care provider, then you'd have three grown-ups (the pro plus two parents) each day to handle fifteen kids. That would be a long, tiring day, but it wouldn't be impossible. Most professional-class jobs can tolerate a workday off every two weeks, and the per-child financial cost would be manageable on two professional-class salaries.

Jane doesn't address how to handle the problem further down the SES ladder, but it's pretty obvious there's going to have to be some public-sector money involved. I, for one, see no conceivable objection to the idea that those of us who aren't contributing personally to carrying on the species and transmitting the culture to the next generation ought to contribute financially to those who are.

Update Readers with experience point out the complexities of the scheme sketched above: continuity in a one-employee firm, decision-making among parents perhaps disinclined to defer to one another, and licensing and liability. All fair enough. My point was merely that part of the answer to Jane's basic problem -- that highly-educated people don't, and shouldn't, want to delegate an important part of the upbringing of their children to less-highly-educated employees -- is to figure out ways to get more parental labor into the mix without trapping the women at home.

Kieran Healy, writing at Crooked Timber, points out the larger social context of work and gender roles in which these choices are made. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:49 PM | |

Ted Barlow, writing at Crooked Timber, does a skilful deconstruction of the "Bustamante-is-a-racist" story. [*] That hasn't kept Glenn Reynolds from continuing to push it.

Reynolds rags on Ted Barlow for a trivial spelling error, but doesn't seem to think he owes Bustamante an apology for trying to pin on him the rantings of a group called El Voz de Aztlan, to which Bustamante has never had any affiliation. (And which seems to have endorsed Glenn's preferred candidate, Arnold Schwarzenegger. [*] And he seems to think that his paranoid distrust of the "liberal media" justifies his believing, and spreading, any random rumor he likes involving any person or organization he thinks of as liberal.

[In my emails back and forth with Glenn, he seems genuinely puzzled by the anger sometimes directed at him. I think that part of what generates that anger is the utter unseriousness with which Glenn handles the power that blogging has given him to damage people's reputations. Not taking yourself too seriously is attractive; not taking seriously the harm you do to others isn't. A false accusation of bigotry calls for a prominent correction (not just an "update") and a frank apology.]

Mickey Kaus [*] points out that the now-notorious slogan ""Por La Raza todo. Fuera de la Raza Nada" doesn't mean "For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race nothing," but rather "By means of the Race, everything. Outside the Race, nothing" or "On behalf of the Race, everything. Outside the Race, nothing." But then Kaus continues to demand that Bustamante denounce the "For the race, everything," version.

[More on the subtleties of Spanish, and in particular the meaning of the word por, from San Diego Soliloquies. [*] Suggested translation: "United we stand. Divided we fall." Update And it turns out, according to a reader, that "race" is not the primary meaning of "raza" as given by standard Spanish-English dictionaries. "Raza" can mean "family" or "kin group" or "affinity group." My reader suggests that Kaus should be embarazada, except that embarazada actually means "pregnant" rather than "embarrassed" On the evidence, Mickey -- who is a much nicer and more serious guy in real life than the character he plays in his blog --is no more capable of embarrassment than he is of pregnancy.]

[Oddly, neither Kaus nor Reynolds is asking Schwarzenegger to renounce his support of a known Nazi war criminal for re-election as President of Austria [*], or his board membership in US English, which denounces efforts to teach emergency room personnel and paramedics in areas with large Spanish-speaking populations to speak enough Spanish to communicate with people who might otherwise die. [*] Nor does either of them point out how outrageous it is to compare MEChA's windy theorizing to the violence of the KKK, as Sen. McClintock has done.]

The whole thing is a case study in the right wing's mastery of the politics of smear. And don't think it isn't working: Bustamante, despite his long career, is virtually unknown, and this is among the first things the voters are hearing about him. In a five-week campaign, it's deadly, and almost impossible to counteract. As in the old Lyndon Johnson story, there's no need to prove that your opponent has sex with his pigs: it's good enough if you can get him to deny it. (That said, I wish Bustamante had shown more skill in his handling of this nonsense: If I'd been writing his speeches, I would have suggested that he say something like, "Anyone who thinks that California ought to go back to Mexican rule has been drinking the wrong brand of tequila. Next question?")

If one of the Democratic Presidential candidates is on the ball, he'll hop the next plane to California, put an arm around Bustamante, and denounce the whole nasty business for what it is: the right-wing spin machine in action. Whoever the nominee is had better expect the same sort of vicious attacks. But the ethnic tinge makes this particular character assassination especially nasty.

Yes, there are minority politicians, including Al Sharpton and some California Latinos, who make explicit appeals to the anti-majority prejudices of their followers. And it's necessary to keep such people from gaining power. But that makes the practice of crying wolf -- making accusations of reverse racism in the absence of any evidence -- so much the worse. MEChA is more or less a fraternity. Is anyone asking George W. Bush to denounce the desecration of an Indian corpse notoriously associated with Skull and Bones?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:08 PM | |

Phil Carter notes [*] the appearance of a book by Tom White, Bush's first Secretary of the Army, who was made to walk the plank last May.

Phil, reflecting on White's harsh criticism of the Pentagon's planning for post-war Iraq, thinks that Bush's arrogance and incompetence on matters military may come back to haunt him. Phil gently suggests that broadening the circle of decision-makers to include people who know which end of a gun is the business end would help.

All that's wrong with Phil's prescription is his the claim that it would fit naturally into Bush's acclaimed MBA-style decision processes. That stuff was just for the press releases; for one thing, being a real CEO demands hard work, never GWB's strong suit. The actual decision style around Bush owes much more to Don Corleone than it does to Jack Welch.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:03 PM | |

Allen Brill at Open Source Politics [*] tears Christopher Hitchens a new one, amid reflections on how to read, and how not to read, received sacred texts.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:51 PM | |

Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has a new study out showing that the genetic heritability of IQ is much smaller among very poor kids than it is among middle-class kids. [No on-line version available, as far as I can tell; its forthcoming in Psychological Science.] The obvious interpretation is that middle-class environments are similar enough so that most of the child-to-child differences are innate, while the evironments facing some poor kids are so deprived that their "natural" intelligence doesn't have a chance to show.

The more general point is that the "heritability" of a trait is not a constant across environments, and that the attempt to parse all differences into an environmental component and a genetic component whose coefficients sum to unity -- the basic project of The Bell Curve -- is incoherent.

The finding strengthens the case for public policies to enrich the environments faced by poor kids. (Among the best of these might be making their parents less poor.) It does not, of course, say anything about the merits of individual programs.

Kevin Drum, who spotted the study in the Washington Post [*] and from whom, in turn, Tapped picked it up, seems to think that the finding shows that the Bush plans to change Head Start are a bad idea. [*] I don't know the details of the Bush proposal, and I'm more than willing to believe that they're bad, but Kevin's conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence presented.

Head Start was a nice idea, but the execution was lousy and the measured results have been uniformly disappointing. The emphasis is social rather than cognitive, and staffing tends to be "community" members rather than the skilled teachers needed to to do the job of helping kids from poor families overcome the heavy handicaps they carry as they enter school.

Everyone knows about the Perry Preschool Project, which was proven to be successful in terms of improved high-school graduation rates and reduced criminal activity.[*] But that project, though it's often described as Head Start-like, was in fact much more intensively academic and much, much more expensive than Head Start itself: it cost about $4000 (in 1967 dollars) per kid, or about $20,000 per kid in today's money.

The reported results in terms of crime alone, if they were real, make spending that money look like a bargain. But that's not to say that Head Start as it stands is worth much of anything. Instead of defending Head Start, liberals should be proclaiming that it is inadequate and insisting on extensive and expensive fix.

Liberal conservatism -- the tendency to defend existing programs rather than clamoring for change -- is among the heaviest burdens we bear in attempting to displace the existing conservative hegemony.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:58 PM | |

Thanks to superhuman efforts by Kevin Hayden and his colleages, there's a new group blog up called Open Source Politics. (Actually, it's something closer to an on-line magazine.) I've been invited to participate, and have two posts in the first issue: a review of the Valerie Plame affair [*] and an essay [*] on how the classification system allows officials to stamp their blunders and outrages "Top Secret."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:28 AM | |

Paul Krugman, being interviewed by the Liberal Oasis. [*] Shrill and partisan, as usual:

The huge budget surpluses of the Clinton Administration had a lot to do with the stock market bubble. They were not really a lasting achievement. The gradual return to a balanced budget was a real achievement. But that move into surplus was the stock bubble.

If you ask, “who was it that bought into the illusions of the dot-com bubble?” It wasn’t Clinton. It was Bush.

I hadn't thought about it quite that way, but it's obviously right once you hear it.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:32 PM | |

When DNA identification became available for forensic use, the police and prosecutors loved it, while the defense bar kicked and struggled to keep it out of court as unreliable. I remember my disgust at the Luddism, or pretended Luddism in the interest of keeping guilty people on the street, of the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Update and (probable) correction A reader more expert in these matters than I recalls things differently. In his version of the story, which is presumably more accurate than mine, the defense bar's objections about validity were well-supported factually, and the result was to impose scientifically defensible standards both about how the evidence was to be gathered and analyzed and what testimony could be offered based on it. I've asked him for documentation, but my reader is someone I've known for years, and I've never known him to talk through his hat, so I offer a (provisional) apology to the ACLU and NACDL.

Fortunately, the prosecutors won and the defense bar lost, and the use of DNA evidence is now routine. Naturally, just as the civil-liberties types asserted at the time, some of what comes in to court as DNA forensics turns out to be garbage science offered by incompetent or unduly complaisant techicians, but on balance DNA evidence has been bad for the guilty and good for the innocent.

As a result, some of those innocents, who had previously been convicted, are now being sprung, though in almost all cases with no, or negligible, compensation for the wrong done them.

[The high rate of demonstrated innocence in some categories of cases, especially stranger rapes, ought to have led to more soul-searching than it has about the reliability of the eyewitness identifications and jailhouse-snitch testimony that almost invariably "proved" that someone was guilty whom we now know, more or less for certain, wasn't.

[It's my guess that about 2% of the people sent to prison actually didn't do the act they were convicted of having done. That's about 10,000 people a year. Now a 98% specificity rate in a process run by human beings isn't too shabby, but that's still a lot of ruined lives. There's always some sort of tradeoff between crime prevention and accuracy; the only way to never punish an innocent person is never to punish anyone at all. But we could keep the prisons full if we only imprisoned those actually known beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty, and in my view the crime-control losses incident on tightening up somewhat on the standard of proof would be slight.

[One way to think about it is that we can take some of the gains from new technology in the form of reduced risks of convicting the innocent, even as we take most of them in the form of improved chances of catching the guilty. In some instances, such as photo lineups, current practices are known to produce more identifications than alternatives, with the difference consisting almost entirely of false positives. [*] Where the police won't make the necessary changes, it's up to the prosecutors to pressure them by announcing in advance that after some date they won't offer evidence not gathered in the most reliable way.]

Now that the positions are reversed, it's the defense bar yelling for the right to reopen old cases on new evidence, and the prosecutors -- in most cases, prosecutors who offered inferior-quality biological forensics at trial and used them to help get convictions -- screaming "finality of verdict" and fighting as hard as they can to keep innocent people locked up. [*]

What most non-participants don't understand about the criminal law is that an appeal isn't supposed to be a fresh review of the evidence: it's almost exclusively about errors made at trial. As a matter of law, the fact that someone convicted in due form is factually innocent of the charge is not, in general, a reason to let him out of prison. (Justices Scalia and Thomas have argued [*] that the execution of a factually innocent person would not constitute a Constitutional violation.) So the ability of demonstrably innocent people behind bars to have their cases reopened depends on state law and state rules of criminal procedure, and the prosecutors have had considerable success in opposing such attempts both in the legislatures and in the courts. (Most horribly, some states explicitly allow police to destroy the evidence after some period; the proof of innocence in some case may be literally going down the drain as I write.)

While I thought the defense bar's earlier position outrageous, the prosecution's current position is incalculably worse. It should go without saying that keeping innocent people in prison is not a means of crime control. Of course, any organization hates to admit error, but this reflects something uglier: the degeneration of the traditional prosecutor's ethic, which held that "the government wins its case whenever justice is done," into a merely adversarial, notches-on-the-belt mentality. No doubt the rightward swing on criminal justice issues, combined with the fact that District Attorneys are elected, has something to do with it. But that doesn't make it one whit less disgraceful. No self-respecting prosecutor should ever tell a court, "We think it's not quite certain that this person is innocent, so we propose to keep him in prison." (What's really amazing is that the victims and their families as often as not want to keep the matter "closed," as if having the wrong person punished were a pretty good substitute for having the right person punished.)

In addition to being disgusting, prosecutorial stubbornness about freeing the wrongly convicted gives the rest of us a really bad message about the ethical standards prosecutors operate on in other domains. In the post-9-11 world, there is a genuine need -- not as big a need, perhaps, as John Ashcroft would have you believe, but a genuine need nonetheless -- to rethink some aspects of the criminal process in terrorist-related cases. Inevitably, that means giving prosecutors more power, and thus putting more trust in them. This is, therefore, an especially bad time for them to be acting in an untrustworthy fashion.

I'd like to hear some career prosecutors -- a group that includes some of the finest human beings I have ever met -- speak out more loudly on this topic.

Update: More here [*] from TalkLeft.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:26 PM | |
Thread: Crime Control