Need to Get Us One of Those

Yes, Regnery Press is a home for right-wing hacks who probably wouldn't be able to get published anywhere else. Yes, it's a sad reflection on our country's literary values that Regnery has two books on the nonfiction bestseller lists. And yes, it's a travesty that Regnery published the most important book during last year's election, Unfit for Command, which flooded the zone with baseless lies about Kerry's Vietnam-era service.

But damn, hateful though it is, Regnery is amazingly effective in getting their message out and shaping the larger debate. The left could use a Regnery Press of its own (albeit one with higher publishing standards), a company which welcomed liberal writers and provided them a comfortable ideological space in which to work. A company which would put a higher value on a book's effective polemic than on its bottom line. So what do you say, Mr. Soros, want to chip in a few more dollars for the cause?

Bring It On

For the last week or so, there's been some speculation in the lefty blogosphere about Bush's real goal in pushing Social Security reform. As support for privatization seemed to collapse on the Hill, attention began to shift away from analyzing the mechanics of Bush's plan to worrying that Rove had duped the Democrats again, feigning to touch the third rail in order to lay the groundwork for something else entirely. Kevin Drum and Greg Saunders, for example, have some interesting ideas about what this "something else" will turn out to be.

Although nobody ever went broke overestimating Karl Rove, I've been reluctant to think that all the White House's talk about Social Security "reform" was just a scam. And while it's likely that a fallback position has already been identified in case the main push falters, today it looks like Social Security really is about Social Security.

Congressional Republicans, after three months of internal debate, this weekend launched a months-long campaign to try to convince constituents that rewriting the Social Security law would be cheaper and less risky than leaving it alone, as the White House opened a campaign to pressure several Senate Democrats to support the changes.

The Republicans left an annual retreat in the Allegheny Mountains with a 104-page playbook titled "Saving Social Security," a deliberate echo of the language President Bill Clinton used to argue that the retirement system's trust fund should be built up in anticipation of the baby boomers' retirement.

I can only imagine what Bush had to promise the Congressional Republicans to get them on board, and now the price of failure for both sides has risen considerably. With Republicans united behind the President, this is a whole different ball game now.

So be it. To Bush and the GOP, I just want to say, "Bring it on." If Democrats hang tough and resist the lure of a false bipartisanship, the Party will likely come away from this fight with an unexpected legislative victory and be stronger and more unified than it's been in a very long time. The Republicans, on the other hand, will come out of this with a very bloody nose and recriminations all around. Of course, the Democrats might fail to stop privatization. But if the GOP isn't given any bipartisan cover, the they will have total ownership of this "reform" forced upon them, and it will cost them electorally down the road as the true costs of privatization are realized.

It all comes down now to a bet on the ability of the Democrats to hold it together. If we do, we win; if we don't, they win. For the last four years, betting against the Democrats was a pretty safe gamble. Let's hope this time will be different.

Just a Coincidence

If you look hard enough, you might notice a pattern in Bush's top domestic policy initiatives.

When President Bush stands before Congress on Wednesday night to deliver his State of the Union address, it is a safe bet that he will not announce that one of his goals is the long-term enfeeblement of the Democratic Party.

But a recurring theme of many items on Bush's second-term domestic agenda is that if enacted, they would weaken political and financial pillars that have propped up Democrats for years, political strategists from both parties say.

Legislation putting caps on civil damage awards, for instance, would choke income to trial lawyers, among the most generous contributors to the Democratic Party.

GOP strategists, likewise, hope that the proposed changes to Social Security can transform a program that has long been identified with the Democrats, creating a generation of new investors who see their interests allied with the Republicans.

Actually, you don't have to look very hard at all — this unprecedented convergence of politics and policy is the worst-kept secret in Washington. Indeed, conservative power-brokers like Grover Norquist openly brag about it. Not much effort is spent spinning the strategy except to say that it's all just a happy coincidence.

Republicans note that limiting the growth of lawsuits and damage awards, as well as proposed investment accounts in Social Security, are ideas Bush and other conservatives have championed for years. The Bush agenda lies "at the wonderful intersection where good policy is good politics for Republicans and conservatives," said Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund, which is lobbying for the Social Security changes.

Good politics? Maybe. The outcome of the fight over Social Security will be the big test here, I think. But good policy? Hardly.

Friday Cat Blogging

Sometimes I like to play with my friend Robo-Kitty.

Jail Time for Jeffrey Parson

18 months ago, Jeffrey Parson was arrested for authoring the MSBlast worm, which infected about 120,000 Windows computers. Today he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He could have been put away for 10 years, so it could have been worse. I'm not sure he should feel comforted by the judge's reasoning, however.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said she was sentencing him at the low end of the agreed-upon range because although he was 18 at the time of the attack his maturity level was much younger than that.

Ouch. I'm sure he'll grow up fast in prison, though.

Chile's Problem

President Bush likes Chile's privatized state pension system:

Among the admirers of the privatized system here is Mr. Bush, who on a visit in November called Chile "a great example" for other countries. On other occasions, he has suggested that the United States could "take some lessons from Chile, particularly when it comes to how to run our pension plans."

But really, what is there to like? The first generation of workers who depend on the private system are getting ready to retire, and many of them are about to fall into poverty. There are lots of reasons why the program has failed, but here's the bottom line:

For those remaining in the government's original pay-as-you-go system, the maximum retirement benefit is now about $1,250 a month. The National Center for Alternative Development Studies, a research institute here, calculates that to get that same amount from a private pension fund, workers would have to contribute more than $250,000 over their careers, a target that has been reached by fewer than 500 of the private system's 7 million past and present contributors.

This leaves many Chileans in a situation that has led to the coining of a phrase: "pension damage." There is now even an Association of People With Pension Damage, 157,000 members and growing, that consists of Chileans, mostly former government employees, who find that their pensions, based on contributions to the private system, are significantly less than if they had remained in the old system.

"They come to us in desperation," said Yasmir Fariña, the group's president, "because those who stayed in the government system are often retiring with monthly pensions twice as large as everyone else's."

The case of Chile is yet another example of Bush's bad habit of ignoring the real-world effects of his pet theories — and yet another reason why we cannot trust this administration with any "reform" of Social Security.

Neither

President Bush today, commenting on his inaugural address:

As I said, it reflects the policy of the past, but it sets a bold new goal for the future. And I believe this country is best when it heads toward an ideal world, we are at our best.

There is nothing "bold" or "new" about wanting the United States to promote freedom and democracy, and Bush should stop pretending that he invented the idea. It is particularly galling for Bush to claim this idea as his legacy given his administration's rather abysmal record of coddling convenient dictators and turning a blind eye toward human rights violations. Bush is right to say that the US has the "work of generations" ahead of it, but that will involve rebuilding America's credibility and moral authority after four more years of his failed policies.

Wedge Politics

A few days ago, Rep. Bill Thomas made some waves by suggesting that Social Security benefits should be weighted by race and gender. A lot of people wondered what Thomas was up to — was this a real policy proposal, a poison pill to give Congressional Republicans a way to bail on the issue, or something else?

Yesterday, however, the White House seemed to be taking Thomas seriously. First, in the face of a rising tide of criticism, McClellan pointedly refused to condemn the idea of adjusting benefits in this way, saying only that "there are going to be a lot of views expressed during the course of this discussion." Then, during a meeting with African American leaders, Bush made the argument that Social Security is unfair to blacks:

Mr. Bush also encouraged the leaders to support his plan to add personal investment accounts to Social Security, which White House officials say could benefit blacks because they have a shorter average life span than whites and end up putting more money into the retirement system than they take out.

African-American men "have had a shorter life span than other sectors of America," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters. "And this will enable them to build a nest egg of their own and be able to pass that nest egg on to their survivors."

Of course, Bush is lying. In a recent article, William Spriggs demolishes the claim that a move to private accounts would benefit African Americans. You should read the whole thing. But Spriggs also tells us why privatization advocates are so intent on making this argument in the first place.

Privatizing the retirement program, and separating the integrated elements of Social Security, would split America. The divisions would be many: between those more likely to be disabled and those who are not; between those more likely to die before retirement and those more likely to retire; between children who get survivors’ benefits and the elderly who get retirement benefits; between those who retire with high-yield investments and those who fare poorly in retirement. The "horizontal equity" of the program (treating similar people in a similar way) would be lost, as volatile stock fluctuations and the timing of retirement could greatly affect individuals’ rates of return. The "vertical equity" of the program (its progressive nature, insuring a floor for benefits) would be placed in greater jeopardy with the shift from social to private benefits.

Social Security works because it is "social." It is America’s only universal federal program. The proposed changes would place Social Security in the same political space as the rest of America’s federal programs — and African Americans have seen time and again how those politics work.

I'm not sure whether Bush and Thomas are on the same page or not, but I'm not surprised to see the White House play the race card to try to siphon off a few Democratic votes for its privatization plan. And I'm not surprised that those appeals are based on lies. This is the worst kind of wedge politics, pure and simple.

Good News, But…

According to the New York Times, Bush is backing away from his initial Social Security phase-out plan.

The Bush administration, facing opposition from Democrats and unease among Republicans over its plan to overhaul Social Security, is looking at new ideas for cutting future benefits that would hit wealthy retirees harder than those in the middle or bottom ranks of wage-earners, people involved in the discussions say.

This is good news, but this hardly marks the end of this fight. The White House is retooling its policy rhetoric, but it isn't going to give up.

But despite signs of reluctance from Capitol Hill, the White House remains confident that it can find a consensus on legislation that President Bush can sign into law, administration officials and advisers to Mr. Bush said.

People who have been briefed on White House discussions said the administration was striving to retain as much flexibility as possible both on legislative tactics and policy details. Deliberations are under way within the White House and between the White House and Republican leaders in Congress over how to proceed, they said, but there is no sense of panic or even surprise within the administration.

The most important thing the Democrats can do now is to hang tough. The unity that Democrats have shown in the face of Bush's crisis talk has been critical in forcing the White House to go back to the drawing board. Since the Democrats didn't collapse the first time around, expect Bush to try to sweeten the pot just enough for him to capture a few Democratic votes and claim bipartisan support. But all Democrats should know by now how the Republican legislative machine operates, and they shouldn't believe the hype. As Josh Marshall notes, we've seen what Bush really wants, and that alone renders any cooperation irresponsible and self-defeating.

Torture on the March

The good news out of Iraq just keeps coming:

Twenty months after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled and its torture chambers unlocked, Iraqis are again being routinely beaten, hung by their wrists and shocked with electrical wires, according to a report by a human rights organization.

Iraqi police, jailers and intelligence agents, many of them holding the same jobs they had under Hussein, are "committing systematic torture and other abuses" of detainees, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be released Tuesday.

Legal safeguards are being ignored, political opponents are targeted for arrest, and the government of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi "appears to be actively taking part, or is at least complicit, in these grave violations of fundamental human rights," the report concludes.

The full report can be found here.

For Bush and Alberto Gonzales, it must be gratifying to learn that Allawi has been such a good student.

Religion, Politics and Honesty

In the "Opinion" section of today's Washington Post we find two interesting pieces which point to the dangers of mixing religion and politics. An editorial on the teaching of evolution in public schools concludes that the overtly religious language used by our political leaders might not be doing our children any favors:

…the breadth and extent of the anti-evolutionary movement that has spread almost unnoticed across the country should force American politicians to think twice about how their public expressions of religious belief are beginning to affect education and science. The deeply religious nature of the United States should not be allowed to stand in the way of the thirst for knowledge or the pursuit of science.

William Raspberry points to a recent survey that shows that public support for compromise on issues with a religious dimension has markedly declined in the last four years. He concludes:

There are people who sincerely believe that they are called upon by their faith to promote the Kingdom of God by every means at their disposal: If they are teachers, by teaching the Word; if legislators or government administrators, by promoting virtue and by punishing not just crime but also sin.

Many who believe that also believe that the reelection of George W. Bush gives them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hasten the Kingdom.

While I deeply disagree with the agenda of the creationists and the other public policy proselytizers, I certainly don't advocate shutting them out of the public discourse (even if some of them wouldn't be so charitable to me). But I do wish that those on the other side would be more upfront about their real goals.

The debate over evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, is a case in point. While members of the school board who voted to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" speak openly of their desire to put God back in the classroom, the members of the national anti-evolution movement know that such "honesty" will destroy their chances of surviving the inevitable court challenge. Instead, we get misleading rhetoric that goes to almost comical lengths to hide religious motivations and to claim instead that the real issues are sound science and academic freedom.

By all means, let's have a debate on these kinds of issues, but let's make sure it is open and honest. Oftentimes, however, the religious right is too interested in ends to give the morality of their means much thought.

Side-stepping the Law

Seymour Hersh got the story first, and like his scoop on Abu Ghraib, his piece on Pentagon efforts to set up its own covert ops unit looks like it will have legs. In today's Washington Post we get some more details on Rumsfeld's new intelligence apparatus, designed to circumvent both the CIA and Congressional oversight.

Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed. That assertion involves new interpretations of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which governs the armed services, and Title 50, which governs, among other things, foreign intelligence.

Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat.

Under Title 50, all departments of the executive branch are obliged to keep Congress "fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities." The law exempts "traditional . . . military activities" and their "routine support." Advisers said Rumsfeld, after requesting a fresh legal review by the Pentagon's general counsel, interprets "traditional" and "routine" more expansively than his predecessors.

"Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another," said a Republican member of Congress with a substantial role in national security oversight, declining to speak publicly against political allies. "It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"

We've seen this kind of legal side-stepping before, notably with Alberto Gonzales's efforts to find a way around those pesky laws prohibiting torture. And while it doesn't seem to me that that giving the Pentagon the authority to run its own covert operations is a good idea, I'll echo Kevin Drum here and suggest that such an important decision deserves to be debated in public, not implemented in secret. If anything, given the poor track records of those pushing for these additional capabilities, there deserves to be an extra amount of transparency now, not less.

Snow!

The snow started falling around noon, but the storm didn't quite live up to the hype. While some were calling for up to a foot, by 4pm the snow had stopped and we were left will maybe four inches on the ground. After the weather settled down, I went outside and took some pictures.

Empty Rhetoric

Lest anyone think that the President actually meant what he said on Thursday, the White House is offering the following correction:

White House officials said yesterday that President Bush's soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy but instead was meant as a crystallization and clarification of policies he is pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Nor, they say, will it lead to any quick shift in strategy for dealing with countries such as Russia, China, Egypt and Pakistan, allies in the fight against terrorism whose records on human rights and democracy fall well short of the values Bush said would become the basis of relations with all countries.

Bush advisers said the speech was the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president's deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies. But they said it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny.

This is hardly the first time that the President's "bold" words have been clarified as being essentially meaningless. One can understand how partisan hacks like William Safire and David Brooks could willfully confuse Bush's inaugural address with something that really mattered. But if the rest of the media could stop praising the President for words he admits he didn't mean, that would be great.

Republican Dictionary

Purportedly the work of Nation staffers, this email was making the rounds a couple of days ago. Steve Clemmons got his copy and has put it up on his site. My favorite entry:

ECONOMIC RECOVERY, n. When three out of five software engineers who lost their jobs to outsourcing are able to find part-time work at Wal-Mart.

As usual, nothing in my inbox — can someone please put me on their "A" list? Thanks…

Friday Cat Blogging

Sometimes I love to get hopped up on the nip!

Not This Critic

Supporters and critics of David Broder can agree that he isn't making any sense when he writes:

Supporters and critics can agree that the nation is fortunate that its leader is a man prepared to cope with radically changed circumstances, a person of fixed principles but not one wedded to policies of the past.

This critic doesn't feel fortunate at all. And I'm willing to bet that most of the 48% that voted against Bush in November don't feel particularly fortunate either.

But apart from the inanity of that statement, Broder's factual claim that Bush is good at coping with change is just plain wrong. Indeed, Bush might be the worst President in this regard since Hoover. None of the examples that Broder gives — phasing out Social Security, undoing environmental protections, and military engagement in the Middle East, etc. — originated with Bush. Many, in fact, have been the hallmarks of Bush's brand of conservatism for decades. Wedded to the past, indeed.

Once Bush begins to implement a particular policy, meaningful review and the requisite adjustments just don't happen. Bush only changes course when the political climate mandates it, not because of the need to react creatively to new circumstances. Unfortunately for all of us, critics and supporters alike, Bush sees the capacity for change as a weakness, not a strength. In today's world, that's not something to be thankful for.

Dumbest Headline Ever

On CNN: "Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider".

Forty-nine percent of 1,007 adult Americans said in phone interviews they believe Bush is a "uniter," according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday. Another 49 percent called him a "divider," and 2 percent had no opinion.

Perhaps the folks at CNN are just having a bit of fun here, but if the nation is evenly divided over Bush's status as a uniter or a divider, then he's a divider by definition, right?

Rewarding Dishonesty

During Rice's confirmation hearing yesterday, there was the following exchange:

BIDEN: …How many — and this is my last question. How many security forces do you think are trained that can shot straight, kill and stand their ground? I don't mean in a uniform. I mean real, live guys that our Marines. I was spent four hours in Fallujah. Our Marines are not real anxious to stand next to and count on a lot of Iraqi forces except the few that were trained as special forces. Now, how many do you really think are trained that Allawi can look to and say, I can rely on those forces?

BIDEN: What do you think that number is?

RICE: Senator, I have to rely on what I get from the field. And by the way, I think that the trips that you've made and the trips that the others have made have given us information that we can go back with. And I appreciate your doing that. We think the number right now is somewhere over 120,000….

BIDEN: Well, I thank you for your answer. I think you'll find, if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don't think there's more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces. I strongly urge you to pick up the phone or go see these folks.

Today we learn that Senator Biden voted to send Rice's confirmation to the full Senate. He had this to say:

"I'm going to vote for you, but I must tell you it's with a little bit of frustration and some reservation," Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, the committee's ranking Democrat, said today.

Mr. Biden said the administration had been less than candid about the problems in Iraq. "Time and again, this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000 fully trained, fully competent military police and personnel," the senator said. "And that is simply not true. You and I know that. We're months, probably years away from reaching our target goal."

With all due respect to the Senator from Delaware, what the hell was that? She lied. To your face. In her Senate confirmation hearing. Under oath. And you know that she lied. How on earth could he have voted in her favor?

Now, some might argue that since her confirmation was inevitable, Biden and other Democrats voted to confirm her out of a desire to set up a good working relationship with her when she becomes Secretary of State. But does anyone really believe that if she's willing to lie so brazenly now, she will somehow be willing to be straightforward with the Foreign Relations Committee later? Not bloody likely.

Bush & Co. don't like oversight. They don't like being held accountable for their mistakes. That's a huge problem, but it won't be one that will be solved if Democrats decide to go along with the charade. Me? I like Senator Boxer's response better:

Ms. Boxer assailed the administration anew this morning, asserting that President Bush and his top aides - including Ms. Rice, the national security adviser - had capitalized on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to justify the war in Iraq.

"I find it so troubling that the Bush administration used the fear of terror to make the war against Iraq appear to be part of the response to 9/11," Ms. Boxer said. "You were involved in that effort."

The senator said Ms. Rice had continued to imply a link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein, when in fact there was none. Her vote against Ms. Rice had nothing to do with her qualifications, the senator said.

"It's about candor," Ms. Boxer went on. "It's about telling the full story."

Exactly right.

Conference Committees

Atrios makes a good point today, almost as an aside, when he says:

I caution any Dems about getting suckered into a "bipartisan plan" to "reform" [Social Security] which will be magically switcherooed by DeLay's goons on the conference committee.

Congressional Republicans have made it quite clear that while they sometimes want bipartisan votes, they never want bipartisan bills. No matter how tempting a bill might look on the floor to a Democrat trying to move the progressive ball down the field, one can be assured that such a bill will never make it out of the conference committee and onto the President's desk. John Podesta, CEO of the Center for American Progress, outlines the procedure:

The conservative leadership in Congress now also routinely excludes members of the minority, and even moderates in their own party, from conference committees. For example the conference committee on the energy bill, to which 58 members of Congress were formally appointed, actually consisted of private negotiations between just four members: Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-La.), and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Representative Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) on the tax portions of the bill. When the Senate passed a version of the energy legislation that was not to the liking of Senator Domenici, he bluntly declared, “I will rewrite the bill.” While a couple of members of the minority party were permitted to participate in committee negotiations over the Medicare legislation, those who did not see eye to eye with conservative leaders – including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) – were excluded. The product of these secret conference negotiations – typically hundreds, if not thousands of pages long – is then sent to each chamber, often with 24-hours or less to review, for a straight up-or-down vote without prospect of amendments. Instead of providing meaningful time for amendments and debate on either bill, conservatives spent 40-hours demogaguing the issue of judicial confirmations – even though President Bush has had 98 percent of his nominees approved. The result has been not just the effective exclusion of the minority party (and the millions of citizens they represent) from any role in the legislation but also a series of poorly crafted, incoherent bills that are packed with provisions geared toward special interests at the expense of the public good.

Democrats really need to understand that they're not going to get anything legislatively out of the Republicans in this Congress. When it comes to the big, defining issues, we have to hang tough, and not be tempted by the illusions of bipartisanship that the GOP will put in front of us.

Vulgar

Tomorrow is Bush's inaugural, and because of the scale — $40 million plus spent on parties and parades — it has drawn a lot of criticism. But it would be wrong to frame the problem as a resource allocation issue. Yes, the public (and private) money used could be better spent, but that's not really the point. If we all had to weigh every spending decision against the needs of the tsunami victims, for example, then it is easy to argue that we should never spend any money except on tsunami relief. That's not, though, a reasonable standard.

The Bushies have a point — the inaugural, in principle, is important because of what it symbolizes. Dan Gillmor unpacks that assertion in the right way when he says:

An inauguration is an event that celebrates the best of America: the peaceful transfer of power when a new president takes office, and the continuation of the republic's stable form of government on all cases, including the one this week when the president gets another term. And no one begrudges an appropriate demonstration of joy by the victors.

What Bush and his allies are doing is just plain vulgar, particularly in wartime. They have no sense of proportion, as they've demonstrated so many times before. But this is over the top. Bush's press secretary says the object of this over-the-top scene is to "celebrate freedom." No, it's a mockery.

It's a mockery precisely because the inaugural uses our freedoms as window dressing to propagandize for a dangerous agenda that has divided the country in half. It's not a celebration of freedom so much as a celebration of a set of failed policies that have curtailed the liberties that we all share and made our world a more dangerous place.

So here's what Mary and I are going to be doing on January 20th: we're going to stay home, grill up some thick stakes, open a bottle of good wine, and watch Fahrenheit 911. And we'll think about what it would really mean to "celebrate freedom" if only we had honest and able people running the country.

Creative Accounting

Because of my recent travels, I'm a little late to this party, but if you haven't read Roger Lowenstein's article on Social Security in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, then you should read it now. It's a solid piece of reporting that makes an effort to explain why conservatives seem convinced that the program is in crisis, and concludes that "…looking at Social Security today, the crisis is yet to be found."

A number of other commentators have had some interesting things to say about the Lowenstein article (see, for example, Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum), but I want to point to one telling paragraph:

Cato, a libertarian policy center founded in the late 1970's, has been arguing for 25 years that Social Security is on the verge of crisis. In a recent position paper, Tanner wrote that Social Security faces a horrendous unfinanced liability of $26 trillion over 75 years. In a footnote, he cited the 2003 trustees' annual report. Actually, the trustees' intermediate projection is for a deficit, over 75 years, of $3.7 trillion. Though that is a lot of money, it could be covered by an immediate surcharge to the payroll tax of less than two percentage points, or by various combinations of tax hikes and benefit cuts, each of them quite manageable. But $26 trillion is too big a hole to fix. When I asked Tanner about the footnote, he admitted that the trustees didn't actually say $26 trillion; Tanner derived the figure by counting the cash-flow deficits that the trustees project from 2019 on out. In other words, he ignores the next 15 years or so, during which time Social Security will be running a surplus. And he assumes that the assets in the trust fund, which should be accruing interest into the 2040's, won't exist, either. Tanner counts only the bad years and only the bad numbers. Another doomsayer, former Republican Representative John Kasich, pegged the Social Security deficit at $120 trillion in a recent op-ed — some 32 times the agency's figure. (Kasich toted up annual deficits in nominal — not inflation-adjusted — dollars for every year through 2080, by which time a hamburger could cost $40.)

The intellectual dishonesty on display in these examples is absolutely astounding. Unfortunately, there is very little in the current effort by conservatives to end Social Security that isn't based on a lie.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today I turned 40. Wow. The downside is obvious. But the upside is that I no longer have to even pretend to care about what the younger generation has to say about anything. It's time to embrace my inner old fogey, and have some cake.

Messing with Texas

Mary and I are in Austin, Texas for a few days to visit her family. I'll be playing lots of golf, Mary will be playing lots with her nephew's baby, and we'll both be eating lots of good Tex-Mex and big steaks. I'll be on the lookout for any red-state thugs, and if I bump into Ronnie Earle at Chuy's, I'll be sure to buy him a drink.

Track Record

One thing that both proponents and opponents of Social Security privatization can agree on is that Bush will make a complete mess of it:

We've seen what Bush administration proposals turn into. We've seen it turn a surplus into a deficit. We've seen its idea of a farm bill. We've seen its steel tariff—bad economics, bad mercantilism, and bad politics. We've seen the recent corporate tax monstrosity. We've seen the Medicare drug benefit. We've heard from Paul O'Neill. We've heard from John DiIulio. The Bush administration is batting as close to a zero on economic policy as an administration can—and economic policy is the bright spot in this administration.

So one's assessment of what the Bush Social Security "reform" plan is going to be must be more-or-less like this: it may look cute and friendly now, but it won't stay cute and friendly for long. Somehow—we're not sure how—it's gonna get mean. It's going to get ugly. And it's going to get stupid. The chances that whatever the Bush administration proposes and the Republican Congressional leadership gets behind will be good for the country are indistinguishable from zero.

Serious people who really believe that privatization is good policy should fight tooth-and-nail against the administration's plan. Bush is all but guaranteed to screw this up, and when he does, any chance for responsible reform will be lost.

Tough Enough

Anne Applebaum asks a necessary question about torture:

Given the overwhelmingly negative evidence [on the effectiveness of torture], the really interesting question is not whether torture works but why so many people in our society want to believe that it works. At the moment, there is a myth in circulation, a fable that goes something like this: Radical terrorists will take advantage of our fussy legality, so we may have to suspend it to beat them. Radical terrorists mock our namby-pamby prisons, so we must make them tougher. Radical terrorists are nasty, so to defeat them we have to be nastier.

Perhaps it's reassuring to tell ourselves tales about the new forms of "toughness" we need, or to talk about the special rules we will create to defeat this special enemy. Unfortunately, that toughness is self-deceptive and self-destructive. Ultimately it will be self-defeating as well.

Bush is a true believer in — and one of the main perpetrators of — this myth. For instance, Bush sees Iraq as test of wills that we can "win" by being stronger and more resolute than our enemies. And from "bring 'em on" to Abu Ghraib to the "Salvador option", he has not hesitated to ratchet up our "resolve", which has only served to make a bad situation even worse. Toughness isn't a winning strategy; it's the last refuge of the incompetent.

The Long Run

Treasury Secretary John Snow is in New York, trying to sell the administration's Social Security phaseout plan to Wall Street:

Despite what some see as the potential boon to the stock market from allowing younger employees to invest part of their Social Security tax payments in personal accounts, many Wall Street economists are dubious about the costs. Administration officials acknowledge that their plan could require the government to borrow as much as $2 trillion over the next two decades, to pay for costs during a transition period when the government still has to pay full benefits to existing retirees.

In private meetings, Mr. Snow will confer with top executives from the biggest bond-trading firms on Wall Street and is expected to argue that such borrowing would more than pay for itself at the end of 75 years.

No doubt those skeptical Wall Street economists will be put at ease by those 75-year forecasts. Still, they might want to read today's Krugman before signing on to the program. Apart from the fact that the administration grossly underestimates the transition costs — the real figure will be closer to $15 trillion over 40 years — breaking even in 75 years doesn't mean much if the real crisis happens much sooner.

We already have a large budget deficit, the result of President Bush's insistence on cutting taxes while waging a war. And it will get worse: a rise in spending on entitlements - mainly because of Medicare, but with a smaller contribution from Medicaid and, in a minor supporting role, Social Security - looks set to sharply increase the deficit after 2010.

Add borrowing for privatization to the mix, and the budget deficit might well exceed 8 percent of G.D.P. at some time during the next decade. That's a deficit that would make Carlos Menem's Argentina look like a model of responsibility. It would be sure to cause a collapse of investor confidence, sending the dollar through the floor, interest rates through the roof and the economy into a tailspin.

And when investors started fleeing because they believed that America had turned into a banana republic, they wouldn't be reassured by claims that someday, in the distant future, privatization would do great things for the budget. Just ask the Argentines: their version of Social Security privatization was also supposed to save money in the long run, but all it did was move forward the date of their crisis.

A responsible administration would reverse course on tax cuts and the botched 2003 Medicare drug bill, both of which pose much greater threats to the government's solvency than the modest financial shortfall of the Social Security system. But Mr. Bush has declared his tax cuts inviolable, and he says that his drug bill will actually save money. (The Medicare trustees say it will cost $8 trillion.)

All else being even, Wall Street stands to make a fortune from managing those millions of new private accounts. But it's not even, and here's hoping that the stocks and bonds folks can look past their greed long enough to realize that.

Playing Games

Apparently, 9/11 didn't change everything:

D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects.

Is this another case where the administration refuses to take homeland security seriously? Or is this a little payback to the true-blue "state" of Washington, DC? Either way, this stupid political game that the White House insists on always playing is getting tiresome.

Moment of Candor

In today's New York Times, we get a rare glimpse of what the White House really thinks about Social Security "reform," courtesy of a leaked memo written a few days ago by Peter Wehner, Rove's deputy:

White House officials privately concede that the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's approach to Social Security — letting people invest some of their payroll taxes in private accounts — would do nothing in itself to eliminate the long-term [funding] gap.

The real savings would be realized by reducing future benefits, most likely by abandoning the practice of setting a person's initial benefit as a fixed percentage of preretirement earnings. Benefits would keep pace with inflation, but analysts estimate that benefits for a middle-income worker who retires in 2065 would be about 50 percent lower than the benefits promised under today's law.

"We simply cannot solve the Social Security problem with Personal Retirement Accounts alone," wrote Mr. Wehner, the White House political strategist, in his memorandum last week. "If the goal is permanent solvency and sustainability — as we believe it should be — then Personal Retirements Accounts, for all their virtues, are insufficient to that task."

Private accounts aren't really a part of the solution, and as I've said before, they will not be able to make up for the benefit cuts being proposed. But that's not a dealbreaker for most of the conservatives pushing the plan because the virtue of private retirement accounts isn't what they do for the retiree, it's what they do to the Democratic Party:

Norquist has had far less trouble uniting conservatives and corporations around his master plan for taking down the Democratic Party. By design, each of the prongs in that strategy is a win-win. Tort reform, for example, attracts millions in campaign lucre from corporate leaders while undermining trial lawyers, a major Democratic support base. School choice divides largely Democratic inner-city communities desperate for better education and undermines the authority of teachers' unions. Social Security privatization could one day provide a windfall to Wall Street brokers, who increasingly favor Republicans with campaign donations, while eliminating one of the most successful Democratic government programs in history. Tax cuts for rich investors give a Republican voting bloc even more money to send to campaigns. There is nothing accidental about this. "You want to make your team bigger and their team shorter," Norquist explains. "And the trial lawyers fund their team, labor unions fund their team, city tax collectors fund their team."

Leading conservatives like Norquist have been very open about their goals and how they will achieve them, so why is it so hard for most people to recognize what's going on when the White House follows that plan? The path this administration has been following has been clear from the beginning — Social Security "reform" is just another step.

Crying Wolf

An analysis piece in today's Washington Post by Jim VandeHei points out something I have said before: Bush is most effective in pushing his agenda when he can point to a crisis that must be addressed immediately. On the topic of Social Security, VandeHei provides a useful summary of that particular "crisis" and identifies the talking points we are likely to hear repeated as the issue heats up.

The crisis, as Bush explains, is this: A decade or so from now the Social Security system will begin paying out more in benefits than it takes in payroll taxes because there will be higher percentage of older Americans than there is today. From that point, the system, if unchanged, will create a $3.7 trillion shortfall by 2075, or $10.4 trillion if calculated over eternity, that future generations will be forced to pay for. The crisis, in effect, is not fixing the problem before it spreads out of control, according to Bush.

By focusing on the date when payouts first exceed revenues, Bush can say that the crisis point is a mere 13 years away, in 2018. This ignores the Social Security trust fund, however, which was created specifically to secure the system against the increase in payouts during the retirement of the Baby Boomers. The event we need to be on guard against is the exhaustion of the trust fund, something that won't happen until at least 2042, and then only if the very pessimistic economic growth predictions used by the Social Security Trustees come true. And in fact, that date keeps getting pushed back as the economy outperforms the Trustees' projections.

Bush also relies on the predicted $10 trillion shortfall, which we know is a made-up number. The $3.7 trillion figure is very likely an exaggeration, too, since it is derived from the same pessimistic growth numbers in the Trustee's model.

Of course, it is possible that Bush and the GOP will so wreck the economy that we will be in for a sustained period of low growth which will make trust fund insolvency a reality down the road. And this is the tricky part for Democrats: based on the data, there is no crisis now deserving of the name, but it's possible there will come a time when some corrective measures need to be taken to keep the program fully funded. How the Democrats tread that narrow line might determine whether the fight to save Social Security is won or lost.

Although I've resisted the idea, it might be that the Democrats will need to propose a plan to look sufficiently serious in this debate. If so, they might take a few planks from the plan Brad DeLong put out a couple of days ago: establish a board modeled after the Federal Reserve with the authority to make adjustments to the system to keep it solvent. In this way, Democrats can address the issue up front by putting in place a system to handle any later problems, but at the same time postpone any changes until the system actually needs them.

SQL Injection Attacks

A great article by Steve Friedl about SQL injection attacks is making the rounds, and I'm happy to pass it on. Not only does he do a good job of explaining exactly what these attacks are and how they work, he also identifies a series of counter-measures that can be taken to secure your web applications from these attacks.

What? You don't develop web applications? That's OK — skip the article and take a look at these cute pictures of my cat instead.

Getting Paid

I've always known that many talk radio hosts are just shills for the Republican party, but apparently some of them are paid shills:

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in."

First off, there has to be full disclosure of arrangements like this. If you set yourself up as an independent voice speaking truth to power, then you really should tell your audience if power is paying you to speak their truth instead. Second, if promoting NCLB was really something Williams "believed in", then the DOE wouldn't have had to cut him a check for a quarter of a million dollars to get him to do it. And he should have had the sense to refuse the money anyway, since now that the arrangement has been made public, it has further discredited everything he had said before about the issue.

To top it all off, the contract with Williams was most likely illegal. I'm sure the next Attorney General will be all over this, and heads will roll. In the meantime, this is yet another reason not to believe anything you hear on conservative talk radio.

Friday Cat Blogging

Sometimes I play a game I like to call "Bite the Daddy".

Empty Promise

What a relief to learn that the man nominated to be the next Attorney General believes in the rule of law:

In a prepared statement obtained by The Associated Press, Gonzales plans to promise the Senate Judiciary Committee to abide by all of the United States' treaty obligations if he is confirmed as the first Hispanic U.S. attorney general.

Bush already has made clear that the government will defend Americans from terrorists "in a manner consistent with our nation's values and applicable law, including our treaty obligations," Gonzales says in his prepared testimony. "I pledge that, if I am confirmed as attorney general, I will abide by those commitments."

Of course, the problem was not that Gonzales ignored the law, but that he was willing to interpret the law in any way necessary to implement whatever policy the administration wanted. Bush wants a "forward-leaning" torture policy? No problem, says Gonzales — the Geneva Conventions don't apply, and the President has the Constitutional authority to override them anyways. Thus, any promise by Gonzales to abide by "applicable law" can't be taken seriously if you look at how he operated as White House counsel. And I'm guessing that is precisely why he was nominated in the first place.

Again, With Pictures

Yesterday, writing about Social Security, I said: "the cost of doing nothing at all is less than the cost of Bush's plan." Now, thanks to Kevin Drum, we have some visual aids to help drive this point home.

Drum also looks at the original data from the CBO on the impact that private accounts will have on the bottom line for retirees, and concludes:

Private accounts still aren't as good as simply doing nothing. And this is despite the fact that this analysis stacks the deck in favor of private accounts by assuming stock market returns of 6.8% and total portfolio returns of 5.2%. That's pretty bullish.

These numbers illustrate the serious contradiction that privatization advocates face: they need to say that the economy will underperform over the next several decades in order to argue that the existing program is in "crisis", but they need to say that the economy will overperform over that same time period in order to claim that private accounts will have yields high enough to compensate for the benefit cuts they have proposed. They can't have it both ways, although expect to see the Administration try to over the next several months as the debate heats up.

No on Gonzales

I have no doubt that the Republican-controlled Senate will confirm Alberto Gonzales as the next Attorney General. For this reason, I haven't paid much attention to his nomination. Democrats have a busy schedule ahead, and I just didn't see the point in wasting ammunition on a sure loser of an issue.

After reading this story in the Washington Post this morning, I've changed my mind. Gonzales's role in making torture US policy is bad enough, and a number of people have argued that this alone should disqualify him from serving as AG. I agree. But the problem isn't just that he made bad decisions here or there; the real problem is that he is seems incapable of approaching his work with any degree of integrity.

Like so many others in this administration, Gonzales has surrounded himself with ideological clones, and goes out of his way to avoid hearing any challenging views. Looking at his record, he clearly sees the law as something to be worked around if necessary to legitimate administration policy, not as something that enforces limits on that policy. Sometimes the result of Gonzales's zeal to please his masters is just comical, like his abysmally bad vet of Bernard Kerik for Secretary of Homeland Security. Other times, as with his work in drafting the torture memos, the result is morally reprehensible.

It makes me angry that people like Gonzales, who have demonstrated time and again their unsuitability for doing serious work, are continually rewarded by a President who values loyalty above honesty and competence. And it makes me angry to think that any Democrat would be complicit in the process to make this man the next Attorney General. Four years ago, eight Democrats voted to confirm Ashcroft, a breakdown in party unity that hurt our credibility as a principled party willing to fight for its values. We don't have the votes to stop Gonzales, but all Senate Democrats should at least exhibit the will to do the right thing and vote against his confirmation.

Stallman Interview

I'm not sure where I come down on the free software vs. open source debate. Being the pragmatist I like to think I am, I guess I fall more into the open source camp, but after reading this interview with Richard Stallman, I'm having second thoughts. This part especially made me think:

A non-free program systematically denies the users the freedom to cooperate; it is the basis of an antisocial scheme to dominate people. The program is available lawfully only to those who will surrender their freedom. That's not a contribution to society, it's a social problem. It is better to develop no software than to develop non-free software.

I still don't grok some of the more subtle differences between "free software" and "open source"; I have more reading to do. But since the distro I'm running isn't 100% free, I think I'll just be quiet now.

Bush's Social Security Plan

After weeks of hemming and hawing, Bush is finally spelling out some of the details of his Social Security phaseout plan. The Washington Post has the details:

The Bush administration has signaled that it will propose changing the formula that sets initial Social Security benefit levels, cutting promised benefits by nearly a third in the coming decades, according to several Republicans close to the White House.

Under the proposal, the first-year benefits for retirees would be calculated using inflation rates rather than the rise in wages over a worker's lifetime. Because wages tend to rise considerably faster than inflation, the new formula would stunt the growth of benefits, slowly at first but more quickly by the middle of the century. The White House hopes that some, if not all, of those benefit cuts would be made up by gains in newly created personal investment accounts that would harness returns on stocks and bonds.

A graph of these proposed benefit cuts over time is here.

There are a few things to note here. First, while Bush is asserting that private accounts will make up for the slash in benefits, that's just not the case. Second, if the economy grows at such a high rate to make private accounts even remotely desirable, then Social Security will be just fine. The numbers predicting the a shortfall in 2042 or 2052 (take your pick) assume very pessimistic economic growth numbers. Higher growth over the long term means the trust fund insolvency date gets pushed back even further, and means that immediate action is even more unnecessary. Third, even if no action is taken and the trust fund does go bust in 2042 due to slow economic growth, the current system will still be able to pay out higher benefits than Bush's revised system.

To sum up: the system is not in crisis, and the cost of doing nothing at all is less than the cost of Bush's plan. This is what Democrats need to be saying.

The Real Oil for Food Scandal

I don't remember when I first started hearing about the oil for food scandal, but it was late enough in the game that I never managed to get a good understanding of what it was all about. Since I only saw it mentioned on Fox and Lou Dobbs, I assumed that it was just some run-of-the-mill wingnut-inspired bashing of the United Nations. But as the story lived on, and as the mainstream media started reporting on it, I began to wonder — was there any there there?

Thanks to Ian William's story in The Nation, however, I've learned again to trust my instincts. The oil for food "scandal" turns out to be just another example of the classic conservative media success story: an unsubstantiated claim incubates on talk radio and Fox News and eventually moves on to the mainstream media as the pressure for coverage grows. Read the whole thing, but don't expect debunking pieces like this one to flatten the trajectory of this story. As the Swift Boat vets proved last summer, sheer repetition will outlast the facts in the media every time.

Made-up Number

A $10 trillion dollar insolvency. If you've been paying attention to the debate on ending Social Security, you've probably heard conservatives use that number as the primary reason why we need to act now to begin dismantling the program. They argue that the current system is unsustainable and fatally flawed, and point to that huge shortfall as evidence. Unless we start phasing the program out now, they claim, future retirees will be left with nothing when the system inevitably goes bust.

The New York Times reminds us where that number comes from:

Well, the $10 trillion figure is the closest you can get to pulling a number out of the air. Make that the ether. Starting last year, as the groundwork was being set for the emerging debate, the Social Security trustees took the liberty of projecting the system's solvency over infinity, rather than sticking to the traditional 75-year time horizon. That world-without-end assumption generates the scary $10 trillion estimate, and with it, Mr. Bush's putative rationale for dismantling Social Security in favor of a system centered on private savings accounts. The American Academy of Actuaries, the profession's premier trade association, objected to the change. In a letter to the trustees, the actuaries wrote that infinite projections provide "little if any useful information about the program's long-range finances and indeed are likely to mislead any [nonexpert] into believing that the program is in far worse financial condition than is actually indicated."

Bad information used to foster an atmosphere of crisis and justify the administration's ideologically driven agenda? Now where have I heard that before?

On Rights

In his column in today's Washington Post, George Will suggests that Bush should lobby the public with the following words in preparation for the upcoming fight over his Supreme Court nominees:

"But when, with Roe, the court overturned all state abortion laws — 50 communities' judgments about this — the court truncated democratic deliberations that, in the five years prior to Roe, had liberalized abortion laws in 16 states that together make up 41 percent of the population. If the case for abortion rights is as strong as its proponents think, they should welcome the 50 debates. That — the vitality and integrity of American democracy and federalism, not abortion — should be the subject of our deliberations about judicial nominees."

Apart from the issue of whether this is good politics, Will is making a rather radical argument here, saying that the courts should not enforce the rights they identify in our founding legal documents if the majority does not support these rights. If this argument sounds familiar, it is — it was used ad nauseam last year during the debate on gay marriage.

It is also a completely ridiculous argument which manages to do away with the very notion of civil rights in an attempt to discredit a few specific implementations. Rights are a recognition that there are certain modes of conduct, such as speech and religion, that are so fundamental for a just society that their exercise should not be proscribed by an unsympathetic majority, no matter how well-intentioned. In our system, it is the courts that defend these rights against the legislature's presumed reflection of the popular will. It is easy enough to defend the enforcement of a specific right when you agree with it's exercise; it's harder, but no less necessary, to do so when you disagree.

Will thinks Roe v. Wade was a bad decision, inventing a right where none existed before. That's fine, and Will is well within his rights to call for it's reversal. But that's a far different matter than the criticism we have come to expect from many conservatives that rights should be derived from the will of the majority. That way lies tyranny.

Happy New Year

Two years and one day ago, Mary and I met for drinks at the Hotel Rouge in DC. Less than a year later we were married, and in remembrance of where it all began, we've gone back twice to the Hotel Rouge to ring in the New Year.

Yesterday, after checking in and grabbing a glass of wine at the hotel bar, we went for dinner at Galileo. Galileo always tops the list of the best DC restaurants, and now we know why — both Mary and I agreed that it was the best meal, start to finish, that we've ever had. As a bonus, our table had a view of the the chef's "Laboratorio", and it was a lot of fun to see the master and his assistants at work preparing a special dinner for a few lucky guests.

So goodbye 2004, hello 2005! May you be a better year than the one before.