Modern Bank Robbery

I agree with Simon Johnson that this line of thinking is atrocious and unacceptable:

One main stumbling block to the purchasing of troubled assets has been pricing, specifically how does the government price a diverse set of assets in a way that does not put the taxpayer on the hook. However, this should not be the standard by which we judge the efficacy of the plan, because a more prolonged deterioration in the economy will result in a higher terminal unemployment rate and a greater deterioration of the tax base. As such, the decline in tax revenues will crimp many of the essential services provided by the government. Ultimately, the taxpayer will pay one way or another, either through greatly diminished job prospects and/or significantly higher taxes down the line to pay for the massive debt issuance required to fund current and prospective fiscal spending initiatives. We think the government should do the following: estimate the highest price it can pay for the various toxic assets residing on financial institution balance sheets which would still return the principal to taxpayers.

If the goal is to wrap up the crisis as quickly as possible, then let's stop talking about buying junk assets from banks and start talking nationalization. If the key to recovery is to avoid "prolonged deterioration", we can end the role of those junk assets in this mess just as quickly by estimating the lowest price we can pay for "the various toxic assets residing on financial institution balance sheets".

Making Teachers Less Like... Windows Vista?

I'll give Bill Gates credit for directing a huge amount of money, through his foundation, at education reform. And I very much appreciate his effort to try to determine what works instead of resorting to fads or politics. But when he writes,

The private high school I attended, Lakeside in Seattle, made a huge difference in my life. The teachers fueled my interests and encouraged me to read and learn as much as I could. Without those teachers I never would have gotten on the path of getting deeply engaged in math and software. . . .

How many kids don't get the same chance to achieve their full potential?

I know he's not proposing that public schools be brought up to the standard of his private high school, currently costing well over $25,000 per year in tuition and fees. But his findings in relation to the most successful public schools, supported by Gates Foundation grants, are interesting.

But a few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations and high results. These schools are not selective in whom they admit, and they are overwhelmingly serving kids in poor areas, most of whose parents did not go to college. Almost all of these schools are charter schools that have significantly longer school days than other schools.

Gates observes, "We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school" - I suspect that plays a role in why charter schools were more likely to be successful. They have the opportunity to start fresh with administrators who were better positioned to try something new, and perhaps also much more interested in doing so.

Honestly, I've seen school administrators in public school systems enact policies that seem designed to stifle innovation, and make the extraordinary more ordinary, either because they don't understand alternative models to education or (in my cynical view) because it's more work. Also, while charter schools don't discriminate in who they admit, there's going to be some self-selection both in terms of the parents and kids who are willing to tolerate extra rules or requirements, or even to overcome the lethargy that keeps them in the default neighborhood school. They also get to recruit teachers whose philosophies align with their own.

Consistent with the Washington Posts editorial stance, Gates argues that this means we need more charter schools.

Many states have limits on charter schools, including giving them less funding than other schools. Educational innovation and overall improvement will go a lot faster if the charter school limits and funding rules are changed.

Yet let's be honest here. School funding levels are only part of the picture. I suspect it's a "donut hole" phenomenon, and schools like Lakeside or Sidwell Friends establish that extremely high funding can bring additional benefits to their students, but there's a basic level of funding beyond which additional dollars don't seem to have much impact on student performance. The fact that charter schools on the whole aren't outperforming, or are underperforming, public schools has less to do with funding and more to do with the fact that the people who set them up don't always share Gates' zeal for quality and performance, or don't have the requisite skill set to turn that interest into reality.

When the idea of charter schools was first raised, I found it very intriguing. I saw real potential for experimentation and improvement. But the reality is, building and running a school is hard work. The amount of institutional lethargy behind institutions of higher learning (particularly schools with large teaching colleges) was perhaps not surprising, but was disappointing - I haven't seen any real leadership from that direction. Some charter school entrepreneurs seemed (and seem) more interested in providing an alternative culture (e.g., charter schools that follow a particular religious model) than a better educational model. Some appear to be driven almost entirely by profit. There are true believers out there, but there don't seem to be as many as Bill Gates appears to believe.

Also, unless charter schools have equal responsibility - no indirect subsidy by letting their students use sports facilities or play on sports teams at nearby public schools, equal responsibility for special education students, etc. - they shouldn't get equal funding. I'm not arguing that some states or school districts don't underfund charter schools, as that appears to happen with some regularity, but mere inequality of funding does not of itself mean that charter schools aren't equitably funded.

Gates speaks of improving teachers:

One of the key things these schools have done is help their teachers be more effective in the classroom.

It's no surprise that the best schools, public and private, support their teachers and help them achieve, maintain and build on their classroom effectiveness.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school.

I hate "research shows" lines tossed out like that, with no indication of what the research actually means. If you compare an AP math class to a remedial math class, you're going to see a huge difference in performance between the two classrooms. But for all we know, they may be taught by the same teacher. And if they're not, it's not an indictment of the teacher who's working to bring the unprepared kids up to speed, but results from the fact that they're in a classroom full of kids whose math skills were far below grade level from day one.

The teacher in the remedial classroom may in fact be the better teacher. The worst math teacher I ever had taught honors math at my high school - I was stuck in her class for 11th and 12th grades. Our class performed despite her, not because of her, yet we still significantly outperformed the school's other math classes on standardized tests.

Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but they need better tools so they can measure their progress and keep improving.

So teachers are like Windows Vista, but want to be more like Windows 7? I joke, but I agree with this:

So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up.

I just hope they also spend some time looking at administrators.

I applaud the notion of having 90-100% of high school students graduate ready to enter college. However, I think it's more important to our nation that we help a young potential Bill Gates graduate from a public high school, as ready as Bill himself was to... drop out of college and co-found a cutting edge tech company. These goals don't have to be mutually exclusive, but I don't see any way to pretend otherwise: with enough time, energy and resources you may be able to get 90% of the kids in any given high school ready for college, but unless you're assuming that the smartest and most capable will "take care of themselves", you can't afford to lose them in the shuffle as you focus on raising the common denominator.*
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* Thomas Friedman argues in favor of an open door policy, bringing in more entrepreneurial immigrants. I'm all for trying to attract students and innovators from around the world, to study and set up shop in the United States. No doubt, even if we forget the role of education, particularly sciences, maths, and other difficult disciplines not directly associated with Wall Street riches, and the importance of nurturing the next generation of leaders in scientific disciplines, other nations will not.

I Haven't Been To One In Years, But....

I still found this faux Trader Joe's ad amusing.

via lies.com.

This Is Acceptable?

Robert Reich comments,

In other words, Geithner and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke continue to do pretty much what Hank Paulson and Bernanke did: They hide much of the true costs and risks to taxpayers of repairing the banking system. Those risks and costs should be put on the people who made risky bets on the banks in the first place - namely bank shareholders and creditors. Shareholders of the most troubled banks should be wiped out entirely. Bank creditors- except depositors - should take major hits. And top executives who were responsible should be canned. But Geithner and Bernanke don't want to take these steps for fear of spooking the Street. They think it's safer to put the costs and risks on taxpayers -- especially in ways they can't see.

Remind me again why "nationalization" is such an awful word? Not in the context of healthy organizations, or even those that are struggling to recover, but in the context of bankrupt financial institutions that seem to lack the will, desire, and ability to get themselves out of the mess they created? "It spooks the street" just isn't convincing enough for me.

The New Bailout - I Don't Get It...

Okay, I'm not an economist. Not even close. My calculus is so rusty, I probably couldn't struggle through the first exam in a Calculus 101 class. (Or is it 201? See, I can't even remember that much calculus.) So no, I'm no expert - don't pretend to be. So maybe this shouldn't be a surprise, but...

I just don't get it.

I appreciate that we've moved away from the "bad bank" model, something that seems primarily to be "bad for taxpayers". But I just don't see how providing capital for private investors to buy toxic assets is going to help clear up this mess. Let's say I'm an investor, and I'm not inclined to borrow money to invest in those assets at a present, near zero interest rate. That could be because I see them as too risky, as offering an inadequate rate of return, or because the seller doesn't want to admit their fair market price. Unless somebody gets subsidized how does federal money change that equation?

If I'm a bank that does not want to admit actual value for its assets because I'm bankrupt, having more potential buyers won't change that. Maybe that where Geithner's idea of auditing banks before giving them additional bailout funds comes in, assuming that plan has teeth. Their "97 cents on the dollar" entry is reduced to 38 cents, they qualify for federal aid (or a takeover), and the investor uses a federal loan to pick up the securities at their market value. But how is that superior to simply bailing out the bank and having it hold its own asset at its actual value?

Is the idea here that the money is only available to buy toxic securities, so that the private partners may decide, "Well, I wouldn't put my money on the line for a possible 0.1% rate of return, but I'll happily put free federal money on the line." What guarantees are we offering to the private partners? That we'll cover any losses if the securities drop in value - subsidizing the investors instead of the banks? How is that better than directly overpaying for junk securities through something like TARP - such a guarantee would seem to be yet another layer of lemon socialism, as with TARP the taxpayer would at least get the benefit of any increase in value. If we're not offering any guarantees, why should we expect investors to pick up the worst of the worst securities, the ones that are the biggest drags on the financial industry?

Granted, I'm working off of a public statement, pretty much devoid of details. I guess I'll wait to see what the experts have to say.... (Although the operative word so far seems to be BARF.)
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Update: What are Nobel Prize-winning economists for, if not to explain these things to us, and Paul Krugman has stepped in to help me understand the Geithner plan!

So what is the plan? I really don’t know, at least based on what we’ve seen today.

Wow.... I feel... so much better....

State Secrets Litigation

Glenn Greenwald is up in arms about the Obama Administration's advancing the same, extreme interpretation of State Secrets Privilege as the Bush Administration:

It's really remarkable what happened. One of the judges on the three-judge panel explicitly asked the DOJ lawyer, Doug Letter, whether the change in administrations had any bearing on the Government's position in this case. Letter emphatically said it did not. Instead, he told the court, the new administration -- the new DOJ -- had actively reviewed this case and vetted the Bush positions and decisively opted to embrace the same positions.

It's a double-edged sword, though, isn't it? By pushing the Bush Administration's interpretation, the Obama Administration ensures that there will be an appellate court ruling on that interpretation, likely followed by a Supreme Court ruling on that interpretation. Either the courts will reject the Bush/Obama Administration arguments, or they will find them constitutional.

Perhaps that's the worst case scenario for opponents of State Secrets Privilege - that the Supreme Court will give the Bush Administration's extreme views its seal of approval. But if the issue isn't litigated, the issue remains open. Even if Obama backs down, a future administration will reassert the extreme interpretation presently before the courts. Is it truly better "not to know"?

Justifications

With all of the reasons tossed out for why a stimulus bill needs to be conservative, at least in comparison to the amounts many said would be necessary for an effective stimulus, what's the future of the bank bailout? I may not be thrilled about taking a huge money gamble to fix an economic mess largely created by the idiots who run our nation's banks, but I'm even less thrilled by spending hundreds of billions more to help save their jobs and prop up their bankrupt companies.

And in terms of that bailout....

Summers suggested the bank rescue plan may offer incentives for private investors to buy mortgage-related assets that have lost value because of the collapsed U.S. housing market.

"It can't all be private capital," Summers said on "Fox News Sunday."

It only takes enough private capital for securities not already guaranteed by the government to establish their market price; then the government can buy the rest at market value? Yeah, right.

"But with the right kinds of government guarantees, with the right kinds of financing ... with the right strategic approaches, Secretary Geithner believes that we can bring in substantial private capital," Summers said.

Why do I suspect that with Summers' version of "the right kinds of government guarantees", whether it's public money or private that "buys" the security, the taxpayer bears all the risk.

At Least He's Honest

Caught up in what you would thing would be an obvious scam, a lawyer admits,

"I'm a capital 'D' Dumbass."

I don't say that to be hard on the man, but to emphasize this: When you're offered huge amounts of money for doing virtually nothing, odds are you're being scammed.

I don't want to review the entire history of international financial scams - it's long, and predates the Internet. Yes, those promises of wealth from foreign lotteries you haven't entered, deaths of foreign relatives you didn't know existed, or desperate millionaires who can only get their money out of a developing nation if you let them wire it to you? There was a time that they came by mail or fax. Now they come primarily by email, and although they evolve the central theme remains the same:

1. You are selected at random, for no apparent reason;

2. You are offered a great deal of money to do virtually no work; and

3. If you go along with the scam, you'll end up losing a great deal of money.

A relatively recent version of this scam is a "work at home" scam, where you supposedly process payments for a company, forwarding them their balance when the checks clear. You retain a percentage, say 10 - 20%, as your fee. Now it should be pretty obvious that there's something fishy here - why would a company direct its clients to send you their checks (more probably, money orders), and pay you to process them, when it would be cheaper and easier to receive the payments directly?

I received a phone call the other day, inspired by an article I wrote a few years ago on this type of money order fraud. It was a story I expect to hear repeated quite often in the current economic climate - a woman, facing financial hardship, answers an ad offering home-based employment. She signs up, starts receiving and processing money orders, and "clears" a couple of money orders through her bank before they are revealed to be fraudulent. She's already forwarded the money, less her "share", to an international address. Her bank wants its money back from her. The money orders in that case looked very real because they were real - all except for the dollar figures. The scammers had managed to steal some blank money orders.

But that woman is "small fry" compared to the lawyers who have been targeted. It's exactly the same deal, except the scam comes from somebody claiming to represent an international corporation trying to collect on an unpaid account - tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They offer the lawyer a sizable percentage of the money recovered. Ironically, this percentage vastly exceeds the 10 - 20% offered in the "work at home" version of the scam, because ordinary people would probably be incredulous that they could get 30 - 40% of the payment merely for processing a check. The lawyer-victims, not so much.... They sign up, call the debtor, are told, "No problem - I'll mail that right out," get a check within days, and it never occurs to them to wonder, "If the debtor was that eager to pay, why didn't the creditor simply call and ask for payment and why would they offer, let alone agree to, this fee?"

Here's my proposed solution - banks should prepare brochures outlining the most common version of this scam, and have them available at their counters. When a customer comes in to deposit a money order, their tellers should be instructed to ask, "Do you personally know the person who sent you that money order? Have you seen our brochure on money order fraud?" Even at the ATM machine, banks could give a general warning about money orders to customers making deposits - display the full warning one time, and offer a "press here to learn about money order scams" option for future deposits.

Because I suspect that 90% of the people suckered into this type of scam, once made aware of how the scam works, would figure out whether or not they should be depositing the money order. Banks lose money on these scams, as well. Wouldn't this simple step be less costly for everybody?

Online Communities Gone Wrong

If you've been involved with online communities long enough, you've seen them turn mean. If you're an outsider you can look at a lot of the drama and have no idea why people are so worked up. This seems to be a good description of the phenomenon:

Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

The examples provided in that article,

Harris’ Law took effect last year when Abraham Biggs killed himself in front of a live webcam audience on life-streaming service JustinTV. The audience’s role? They encouraged him to do it.

Harris’ law took effect in October of 2006, when Lori Drew, a grown woman, created a fake alias on MySpace (”Josh Evans”) in order to psychologically torture 14-year-old Megan Meier. Drew started a online love affair with Megan as “Evans” before pulling the rug out and viciously turning on her victim. This “cyber-bullying,” as the press likes to call it, resulted in Megan killing herself.

Harris’ Law took effect in October of last year when Choi Jin-sil killed herself, reportedly over the fallout from Internet rumors. The bullying in Korea has become so intense that you’re now required to use your Social Security Number to sign up for a social network.

Yet anonymity isn't crucial to online bullying. In fact, sometimes it's the opposite - Lori Drew may have been anonymous, but the harm was inflicted through a profile that was believed to be real.

Unpleasantness in virtual communities is often at the hands of people whose real identities are known, or who have an established virtual identity that vests them with significant authority despite their nominal anonymity. Online cliques form and... well, when Heathers rule the world you don't want to be "Martha Dumptruck". But there's a twist: in some ways its easier to be a Heather in an online world, but also it's easier to refuse to leave a virtual world in response to the Heathers. If you're in a physical living room, and your host and her friends start acting obnoxious, odds are you're going to leave. If it's the online equivalent, you're more likely to dig your heels in and insist, "I have every bit as much right to be here as you do." So on it goes. In one of my forums, I have reminded people that they can put other members they don't like on their "ignore" lists, but it seems that most prefer to read the offending remarks, take great umbrage, and perpetuate the war.

Meanwhile, in the virtual world known as "4chan", the beat goes on. A twitchy teenager named "Boxxy" inspired astonishing acrimony:

What kind of a teenager so divides the fifth-largest Web community that the entire mechanism grinds to a halt? Probably not the kind you expect. She holds no strong opinions, does not deal in sex or violence, and wasn't even looking for fame when she sparked a civil war on a popular website called 4chan.

"Neither a presidential election nor troubles in the Middle East provoked people as much in the 4chan community" - The resulting civil war literally crashed 4chan's servers and, ultimately, Boxxy disappeared.

Somebody Knows What Those Assets Are Worth....

Following up on the obvious fact that there is a way to get an actual valuation for the toxic securities held by financial institutions, commenting on a New York Times article on some of the dubious assets, Rep. Brad Miller writes,

The financial institution [holding the bond] values the bond at 97 cents on the dollar. Standard & Poor’s values the bond at 87 cents at the current default rate, but estimates the bond’s value could go down to 53 cents if the default rate doubles. But someone actually bought one of the bonds recently. The purchase price was 38 cents.

According to the article, financial industry critics “say that the banks’ accounting for those assets cannot be trusted because they have an incentive to use optimistic assumptions.”

“Optimistic”? Whoever paid 38 cents on the dollar for one of those bonds is a giddy optimist. The financial institution’s valuation of 97 cents on the dollar is pretty clearly fraudulent.

Absolutely.

How Do Mere Mortals React To "Politics as Soap Opera"

I mean, when it's not quite as literally soap opera as it was during the Ken Starr / Monical Lewinski era.

In terms of those who aren't addicted to politics.... Do they particularly care if Obama gets his stimulus package passed within 2-1/2 weeks of taking office instead of 1-1/2? Is anybody appalled that he included provisions demanded by Republicans? Or is this drama that political junkies dream up and project upon the rest of America?

It amazes me that people who should know better seem to think Obama was going to walk into Congress with his own pure-as-snow stimulus bill, be received like Moses coming down Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, and somehow avoid the whole ugly mess that is Congress. The factory that actually produces legislation. Sure, it would have been nice had members his own party not tucked in their bibs as soon as they heard the numbers involved, but it's the nature of the beast.

Stupid Tax Breaks

Oh, joy.... The Senate wants to reinflate the housing bubble.

The Senate on Wednesday voted to expand the economic stimulus package with a tax credit for homebuyers of up to $15,000, a provision championed by Republicans as addressing a root cause of the recession.

The downside is, it has to be used to buy your primary residence. The upside is, maybe I can sell "my" house to my wife - I purchased it before we married - and get $15,000 in free money. I'll have to read the fine print.

This one should be fun, as well:

On Tuesday, the Senate approved a tax incentive for car buyers, sponsored by Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, that would allow the deduction of sales tax and loan interest on purchases made this year.

Would this work: I sell you a car at 25% interest. At the end of the year if you've made all your payments on time, I give you 15% of your interest as a credit toward your remaining principal balance and adjust your future interest to market rates. I end up with a great rate of return on the loan, you end up with a 15% discount on your car, and the government picks up the entire tab!

What other genius ideas are coming down the pike?

Bipartisanship is Marketing

To those who believe that Obama's attempts at bipartisanship demonstrate abandonment of political advantage (as if the stimulus bill would sail through if not for Obama's outreach to Republicans?) or misguided (in the manner of David Broder's apparent belief that a solution reached through compromise is always better, even when one side to an argument is clearly wrong), I say the following: When a politician refers to "bipartisanship", the politician should be seen as either admitting that he doesn't have the political clout to carry an issue without help from the minority party, or because he feels that the public wants him to appear bipartisan.

The difficulty for Obama is that he's dealing with a minority party that has decided (probably correctly) that its power lies in obstructionism, and the media is packed with people like Broder who can't or won't admit that you don't need to compromise in the face of obstructionism. Granted, had Obama not played up to the public belief that bipartisanship is a good thing and that he would be a bipartisan leader, he would be better positioned to say, "This isn't the time for bipartisanship." But had he done that, he probably wouldn't be President.

Falling Down on the Job

Although nothing's set in stone yet, I'm not particularly impressed with the lack of progress on a stimulus bill, or with what looks like a pretty atrocious approach to bailing out the nation's financial institutions.

I Can Almost Imagine The Conversation

Thomas Friedman talking to his taxi driver in Jenin:

Tom: What do you think of my ideas on how to achieve a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Driver: I think you're an idiot. Are you going to quote me in your column?

Tom: Not this time.

And yet somehow it's hard to avoid the simple wisdom of a taxi driver.

Friedman is one of those who has, in essence, argued for decades that "everybody knows" how the Israel-Palestine conflict will end up. The Israelis will return most of the occupied territories to the Palestinians, making some land swaps along the border in the interest of security and to annex its larger settlements, and the Palestinians will give up their claims of a "right of return" to villages within Israel. This remains the basic premise of his seven percent five (er, six) state solution. The only problem is that while Friedman has been content to yammer on about what "everybody knows", and assume that his take on conventional wisdom will somehow magically turn into reality, he's pretty much ignored everything in the real world.

So now he finds himself in a café in Jenin, sipping coffee served by a waiter whose opinion is also not likely to end up in his column, and writing stuff like this:

The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.

Admit it - if you were the waiter, wouldn't you be tempted to slap him upside the head and remind him that you have to fly out of Jordan, because you're not even allowed into Jerusalem? To point out to him that if forty years of "suck on this" policy directed at the Palestinians didn't work, you would have to be close to senile to think it was an approach to take with the larger Arab world? Because somebody who is an "expert" on the Middle East, as Friedman is supposed to be, should be aware of the forty-year effort to create "facts on the ground" that prevent the return of the occupied territories and resources to Palestinian control - a conscious and deliberate policy to prevent the "conventional wisdom" from ever becoming reality. Friedman acts as if this all occurred beneath his notice ("How did this conflict get so fragmented?"), but I think we know better than that.

Friedman presents an exceptionally silly statement,

Another reason [this conflict got so fragmented] is that every idea has been tried and has failed.

Really? So if I call up Uri Avnery and ask, "When you were a member of the Knesset right after the 1967 war, and you called for immediate withdrawal from Palestinian lands and forecast great misery for Israel if it tried to annex those territories, did Israel try that?" Or did they follow the model preferred by Ariel Sharon:

Standing with the cabinet ministers on a high hill, I pointed out exactly what I thought was needed. If in the future we wanted in any way to control this area, I told them, we would need to establish a Jewish presence now. Otherwise we would have no motivation to be there during difficult times later on.

A model Sharon continued to advance as Prime Minister, only a few years ago.

So... maybe Friedman means that we've tried every possible solution to end the conflict and occupation other than ending the occupation. Or even proposing to end the occupation. Even Friedman's new preferred "solution" promises no end to occupation - he simply wants to change the occupying power and stick Saudi Arabia with the tab. You know what? People don't like to be occupied by foreign military powers. The "best" outcomes seem to come when the occupying power does its best to make clear that it doesn't want to be there, and gets out of town at the earliest possible date. As Israel can attest through its experience with Hezbollah, although the Shia of Lebanon initially greeted its forces as liberators when it invaded Lebanon in 1982, the consequences can be grave if you overstay your welcome. There's also the Chinese model - claim the entire territory for your nation, bring in tens of thousands of your nationals and settle them in the occupied land. This works best, of course, if you're not a democracy and are willing to tolerate a generation or two of unrest, violence, and occasional terrorism as growing pains.

Except there's another solution we haven't tried. Arbitration under international law. (Are you laughing yet?) Each side picks its own arbitrator, and the two arbitrators pick a neutral from a list acceptable to both sides. They then apply the principles of international law to the conflict, and decide each issue by majority vote. Both sides have to abide by the outcome. If you held a plebiscite in the Palestinian territories, you would likely get 90+% approval for such a proposal. But, you know, ain't gonna happen.

If we're going to be serious for a minute, we can stick with Friedman's "conventional wisdom" and the idea of a plebiscite. Have both Israel and the Palestinians hold a vote, asking their populations to instruct their leaders to negotiate a resolution consistent with Friedman's conventional wisdom.

This would not be something instantly implemented - it would be the destination for a new road map, fully implemented only when Israel could be reasonably certain that its border with the Palestinian territories would be acceptably policed, monitored and peaceful. But it would bring an end to any claim of legitimacy to either side's claim to be held hostage to its extremists. It should give Palestinian leadership the backbone it's been sorely lacking on the "right of return" issue, and open the door to the resolution of the refugee camps in which some Palestinian families have been living for sixty years - not so bad, perhaps, for those refugees living in Jordan, but pretty awful in Lebanon or Gaza. Under a road map with a destination, the Palestinians would have nobody to blame but their leaders and themselves for any delay in their getting a state.

If Tzipi Livni becomes Israel's next Prime Minister, perhaps such a vote could be held. If it's Netanyahu... ain't gonna happen. It will be interesting to see if Netanyahu the retread is smaller, more corrupt and less competent than he was the first time around; it wouldn't surprise me, given the recent pattern. Friedman alludes to the sort of chest-thumping bravado that passes for "courage" among Israel's political "leaders":

The other day, Labor Party leader, Ehud Barak, was quoted in the newspaper Haaretz as criticizing Lieberman as a lamb in hawk’s clothing, asking: “When has he ever shot anyone?”

As the last Prime Minister to actually show moral courage on these issues could attest, Israel needs leaders who have the courage to risk taking a bullet. Barak revealed himself in an unguarded moment, when he admitted that if born Palestinian "I would join a terror organization." That's the courage of Yassin, not the courage of Rabin.

The Dregs of Society....

My sentiment toward the stimulus bill has been what I might call optimistically credulous. That is, I'm pretending that the goal here is to actually stimulate the economy. Thus, my reaction to the inclusion (or removal) of sensible public policy proposals has been to ask, "How well does this fit with the purpose of a stimulus bill?" Sure, this involves overlooking some of the compromise that has already been made to put together a bill that's expected to pass. Sure, if you look closely at the bill, you can find other similar provisions that arguably should be eliminated on the same grounds, but don't happen to be controversial. Because thanks to the nature of our political system, with any sort of spending bill (massive or minor), you're not likely to get more than 2/3 of the way to ideological purity. But shouldn't you try?

Not according to Richard Cohen. To Cohen, it is a great sin to put forth a stimulus bill that doesn't attempt to reform... things. The idea that a stimulus bill should focus on short-term spending, "shovel-ready" projects, and programs that don't require sustained, increased government spending? The idea that this should be a bill that passes quickly rather than getting bogged down in endless debate and controversies? Lost on him. But okay... there are lots of issues that need reform. Perhaps you're thinking, "Cohen wants to restore funding for birth control." Or "Cohen wants to use the stimulus bill to lay a foundation for further reforms, such as a national health care program, a cleaner environment, sustainable energy...." nope. Cohen wants to tackle education reform.

The funny part, if you want to call it that: Cohen doesn't know anything about education reform. Thus, instead of concrete proposals, we get platitudinous statements like this:

But if the money is going to be offered, why not couple it with demands for reform? After all, without the extra cash, the likelihood is that teachers across the country will be laid off. That gives the president some leverage: Take my money, take my reforms. Maybe a deal could not be done. We won't know. We do know, though, that the teachers unions have an understandable aversion to some reforms. We also know that the unions supported Obama in his campaign.

You see? The most obvious reason that a federal stimulus bill doesn't micromanage education, something traditionally though of as a state issue, is that "unions supported Obama." It must be nice to live in a world that... simple.

Do your reading on education and you will find an emerging consensus. Abolish tenure.

That's right... stretching from the WSJ editorial page to its op/ed page, the emerging consensus is right there for you to see. I've spoken about this before, but I guess it bears repeating: If tenure were the real issue, the problems attributed to tenure would be seen in every school district. Getting legislatures to act against tenure wouldn't be an issue, because everybody with kids in public schools would be screaming for reform. The problem in schools like DC's is that between an unpleasant work environment and incompetent administrators, classrooms were filled with available applicants, steps weren't taken to weed out bad teachers before they got tenure, and the environment for teacher burnout is exceptional. As a consequence, no doubt, you have a lot of kids being taught by teachers who should never have obtained tenure or who are counting the days until they can retire. That happens in other school districts as well, but at nowhere near the same levels. Also, the good teachers from a district like DC? They can seek jobs in other districts where they will again get tenure - but without the controversy.

There are other ways to ensure that teachers are fairly treated without guaranteeing the jobs of the inept. (Cops don't have tenure, and neither do columnists.)

That's almost funny. Columnists don't have tenure, meaning they could be fired at will? No, as Cohen knows, name brand columnists work under contract. Now I'll grant, they don't have a CBA that will get them their job back if they're wrongfully terminated, but they will seek full compensation under their contracts.

Police officers? Come now, Richard. Tenure is a form of job protection that follows your probationary period. It doesn't mean "we can't fire you", and it certainly doesn't mean "we can't fire you for cause". It means that once you complete your probationary period you can (normally) only be fired for cause, and you may have to offer an employee improvement plan or follow an incremental disciplinary process. It could be said that any union employee past the probationary period has "tenure". And yes, that includes officers in unionized police departments (which is to say, most of them). Believe it or not, there's nothing talismanic about the term - you can find state legislation describing police officer tenure, and police disciplinary hearings may be described as "tenure hearings".

Let's look at Cohen's version of a "solution" - how do we "ensure that teachers are fairly treated without guaranteeing the jobs of the inept"?

Ensure that the best teachers teach at the most challenging schools and ensure also that they get paid lavishly for doing so.

It's one of the problems with the simple-minded union busting mantra, that somehow unions are to blame for everything that's wrong in the schools. Even giving due respect to Michelle Rhee's apparently unsustainable plan to provide teacher raises, the fact is that there's no popular will to give teachers more money. Cohen just got through telling us that things are so bad that states are looking at laying off needed teachers. Either Cohen's looking at the stimulus bill as the magic federal money tree - a gift that keeps on giving - or he's not considered that if you increase teacher pay, once funding levels return to normal you have to lay off even more needed teachers. Actually, it's probably both.

If Cohen were to venture out of his office and stop by some inner city private schools and religious schools, he would likely find that there are good teachers in many of those schools who have chosen to make less money in order to teach in a school environment that they find to be more secure, stable, and supported. That's an issue Rhee likes to sidestep, and people like Cohen don't even seem to know exists - there's more to a job than money. The focus of making individual classroom teachers responsible for the failures of parents, schools and school administrators kind of misses the point. Or perhaps it is the point - by placing the focus there, Rhee creates instant insulation against the failures of her own, substantive reforms (or lack thereof). Rhee, for example, favors mainstreaming - something that saves the school district money and... it's the teachers' fault if they can't deal with high numbers of emotionally disturbed or learning disabled kids mainstreamed into their classrooms, right?

Cohen likes solutions that "sound good" (to him), even if he has no concept of what they would mean:

How about extending the school day, maybe for an hour or so? How about extending the school year? How about tinkering with the No Child Left Behind law but insisting that testing - accountability - be maintained?

Because it's free to keep schools open for extra hours or days, we'll have already busted the teachers unions so they won't be able to object to an increased work day or year, and surely more classroom hours will automatically translate into more learning, right? That's why when you go to college you spend more time in classrooms than ever before. Personally, I do think that we should revisit the school year, the paring away of school days to save money, the structure of the school year around an agricultural calendar, etc. But I don't see it as a magic cure, as something that should be imposed on school districts as part of a stimulus bill, or as a legislative priority for preempting teachers' collective bargaining rights.

You want specifics, Cohen's got them - he's thought long and hard about "No Child Left Behind" and came up with the insightful solution that it can be improved by "tinkering". Um... Thanks. But it gets better:

How about doing something about the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be? Now that women and minorities have more opportunities in almost every field, the best of them have abandoned teaching.

Ah, the good old days when women and minorities didn't have good job opportunities other than teaching. Now everybody with a brain has moved on to better professions, and those that are left.... (Is it just me, or is Cohen's statement oh... just a wee bit sexist and racist? What does he have to say about white men who teach?) Mix that sentiment with the idea that the best way to keep the best of the remaining dregs happy is to force them to work in inner city schools, increase their workday and work year, and take away their job protections and... what more needs to be said?

One of these days, somebody will need to explain to Cohen that you can have a teacher who works wonders with suburban fifth grade students, but who would be stretched to (or beyond) the limits of her capacity trying to maintain order in an inner city fifth grade classroom. A teacher who is able to handle the most difficult classrooms is likely to be able to handle an easier classroom, but the opposite isn't always true. But to Cohen, teachers are apparently all dregs who can't get real jobs, so perhaps he sees 'em all as fungible.

Speaking in Code

Lest I be "speared", I have no wish to disrespect Huorini / Waodoni culture.

The Huaorani believe that when someone dies, the soul starts a journey towards heaven. On the way, in the middle of the path, a big anaconda is obstructing the way. Only brave souls can jump the boa and reach heaven. Whoever fails, returns to earth as a termite, and leads a miserable existence.

However, if your first exposure to the term is the discussion in a pretty, but clumsily made movie (The End of the Spear), glorifying missionary work, over when particular characters "jumped the great boa"... similar expressions come to mind. I thus propose "Jumped the Boa" as a term to describe when Christian-themed entertainment goes way off mark.

The "S" Word?

That's right, folks. When you run your business into the ground and the government rushes in to give you billions of dollars, allowing you to stay out of bankruptcy, keep the lights on, and pay your employees, anybody who criticizes the fact that you use government money to give oversized bonuses to the people who ran your company into the ground is... a socialist.

Well, better that type of "socialism" than lemon socialism, right?

It's Pity Party Time

Break out the violins for Wall Street.

While Wall Street investment banks and other financial firms make headlines for the millions paid out to certain executives, more modest bonuses go to workers from human resources representatives to secretaries as well as employees who actually made money for their companies last year.

There's an implied sneer in that, at "workers from human resources representatives to secretaries" as people who don't make money for their companies. But let's turn it around... Let's say, "Even in the financial industry it's okay to give bonuses to the employees who made money for their companies last year... but do we need more than one hand to count them?"

Jason Weisberg, vice president of the Wall Street brokerage Seaport Securities, said bank employees count on performance bonuses like salesmen count on commissions.

"What are you supposed to pay them?" Weisberg asked. "Or are you not supposed to pay them?

Salesmen count on commissions from their sales. If they don't make sales, believe it or not, they don't get commissions. Similarly, if we're going to refer to "performance bonuses", they perhaps should be somehow related to... performance?

And if you don't pay them, how do you expect that employee to stay employed at that company?"

Well, if they're not performing... do you really care? And with financial industry employer's shedding employees like leaves, odds are that only those employees who actually performed will be marketable - and their performance bonuses are defensible.

"The reality is good people will always be able to get a job someplace else if they are unhappy," Hall said. "So do you want to own stock in a company that is filled with people who can't get a job anywhere else?"

You mean, the "good people" who lost hundreds of billions of dollars, and caused the value of my stock to plummet to the point that the only reason it has any value is... not even the bailout money it has already received, as that hasn't fixed things, but the expectation that hundreds of billions in additional taxpayer dollars are on the way? No, I don't want stock in that company, but it's not because I'm concerned that the "good people" might leave.... Stock in the company that's doing well enough to poach them, on the other hand....

This is funny - a Wall Street veteran states the obvious:

"You could absolutely make an argument that we shouldn't be getting any bonuses this year," said the worker, who also requested anonymity because of his company's restrictions on talking to the media.

"If you are going to have a pay-for-performance system, you have to take the lows with the highs," he said. "This just happened to be a really low year."

It's only the guy who speaks out against bonuses, it seems, who "can't" use his name.

Regional Expressions

Oops?

The producers of “Idol” apologized Thursday on behalf of its judges, who apparently misinterpreted what a contestant in Louisville, Ky., said after a failed audition.

On his way out, Mark Mudd said: “Take care and be careful.”

Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell took that as a threat.

Abdul scolded Mudd, telling him: “You don't say that to people, ‘Be careful.' That's just not a normal thing to say.”

It turns out “Be careful” is a regional parting expression.

But really, it seems fair to ask, why didn't he say something that theater people couldn't possibly take as a threat - like "Break a leg"?

"Nobody Knows What These Assets Are Worth"

You've heard that one, right? That banks are sitting on trillions of dollars of securities, state on their books that those securities have a specific value, but that "nobody knows" what they're actually worth? Even though, not so long ago, those same securities were traded on the market and everybody "knew" what they were worth?

Let's be honest for a moment: It's easy to figure out what the securities are worth. Put them up for sale. The price somebody is willing to pay for them? That's what they're worth. The protest, "But once financial markets settle down and the economy becomes more normal, they could be worth a lot more"? Sure. But the person who is buying the securities in the current market is considering that when setting a price. Gasoline may be back up to $4/gallon next fall; but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy gas at a station that wants to charge me $4/gallon today. (If I believe gas is going to go up to $4/gallon, I might buy futures, but I'm not going to buy them at $4/gallon.)

We're caught between financial institutions that claim, "We don't know what these securities are worth" because they don't want to establish a market price that would render them insolvent, and a government hoping to rescue those same financial institutions from insolvency without creating a massive public uproar that they're paying tens or hundreds of billions of dollars over market for some extraordinarily risky securities. And we're supposed play along because the consequence of establishing a market price could make everything a lot worse.

A Lunatic Investigation....

Hey, I have an idea. You know how people always complain about "letting the lunatics run the asylum"? Well, what proof do you have that it would actually be all that bad? We're making rash assumptions based upon logic, common sense, law... but is that fair to lunatics? So here's what we do:

We create a commission, but we don't let psychiatrists, legal experts, or sane people lead the commission. If we did that, the lunatics might denounce it as a witch hunt. Instead we find and appoint prominent lunatics to head the commission. We can appoint some of the sane people and experts also, but as window dressing. We wouldn't want to demonstrate bias by letting them run the show or influence the panel's findings.

Sure, some sane people will complain about the heavy presence of lunatics on such a panel. But the alternative is no panel at all. Why? Because I said so. I mean, in fact, sane people, legislators, psychiatric experts could hold such a panel any time they wanted to, but shut up - I'm pontificating here. So when I say "surely any panel is better than where we’re headed: which is no investigation at all", don't question me.

And I'm confident that when the panel concludes its investigation it will issue a stinging repudiation of letting inmates run asylums that no one could lightly dismiss. And we can use that consensus in the future - because laws, the constitution, sound public policy... if the lunatics take over, they could all go out the window. If we form a consensus on these issues, and by that I mean letting the lunatics decide what we should do, we'll be better off when the lunatics once again rule! And the rest of the world will once again respect us!

Making the "Bad Bank" Not Quite As Bad

If we must have a 'bad bank'... Dean Baker proposes a provision that will keep taxpayers from being completely soaked when they buy up toxic securities from our nations bankrupt banks:

We can just attach a clawback provision, under which the bank will be forced to make up any money that the bad bank loses on their junk, plus a penalty. For example, if Citibank sells $100 billion in junk, and the bad bank ends up selling it for $70 billion, then Citibank has to cover this $30 billion loss, plus a 20 percent penalty ($6 billion). This structure will both ensure that Citibank doesn't run off with our money and also discourage banks from trying to mislead the bad bank about the true value of their junk. (Senator Dodd proposed a similar measure in the debate over the TARP.)

Under the Bush-Paulson plan, we gave away a ton of free cash, no strings attached, and we were rewarded with... Yeah. Enough of that.

Note, though, that an honest valuation won't make the banks solvent.

They're Not Actually Smoking Crack, You Know....

When people like John Bolton start suggesting that Gaza be placed under Egyptian occupation control, your initial reaction may be, "What's he smoking? Why would Israel ever allow Egyptian troops on the streets of Gaza? Why would the Palestinians go along with such a thing?" But that would be missing the point. People like Bolton don't put stuff like this on the editorial page of the Washington Post because they're pulling wacky ideas out of thin air - they are attempting to prepare the public for an outcome that is acceptable to a particular political faction - one that disfavors ever allowing a genuine Palestinian state, but wants to remove the burdens of occupation from Israel.

Thanks to Carter, a president Bolton no doubt loves to malign, Israel and Egypt have several decades of stable peace. They're both highly dependent upon U.S. aid, and Egypt would certainly love to get more. Egypt has experience oppressing controlling its own Islamic factions, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt may not have much concern about Israeli politicians blaming every rocket that flies out of Gaza on Hamas, but as an occupier they would not want every rocket that flies out of Gaza to be blamed on them. So Israel gets more peace, Egypt gets more money, the Palestinians get more oppression, and everybody... everybody who matters to Bolton... is happy. If he can get Jordan to take over managing and controlling the Palestinian population on those remnants of the West Bank Israel chooses not to keep, all's the better. He concedes,

This idea would be decidedly unpopular in Egypt and Jordan, which have long sought to wash their hands of the Palestinian problem.

That's more than a bit dishonest. Jordan has a very large Palestinian population. In the past, this led to an ugly and violent confrontation between Jordanian forces and the PLO (September 1970, or "Black September"). It's difficult to conceive of a Jordanian occupation of the West Bank that would not ultimately precipitate similar conflict. (But what does Bolton care?)

Bolton refers to this as a "Three State solution", but it's patent that he doesn't actually give two figs about the Palestinians, and that it's actually a "one state solution with different occupying powers for the Palestinians."

One place to avoid problems is dispensing with intricate discussions over the exact legal status of Gaza and the West Bank.

Or as I suspect he puts it in less polite company, "Palestinians? F--- 'em". People more honest than Bolton who adore this "solution" are more accurate in their description - see, e.g., Daniel Pipes:

The National Post cleverly dubs my plan (in its title to this article) the "back-to-the-future option," but I like best the name bestowed on it by blogger Mary P. Madigan: "the no-state solution." Perfect.

Although analysis like this is typical of the garbage that passes for "scholarship" at the American Enterprise Institute, that's not the same as saying Bolton has no valid points. It does make sense to tie Gaza into Egypt's economy, particularly given how Israel has frozen it out of the Israeli economy - it's only other neighboring country. The same holds true for the West Bank and Jordan - although there are some real structural difficulties in separating the West Bank from Israel, worsened if Israel doesn't remove most of it settlements (and, believe me, removal of settlements is not part of Bolton's plan - he doesn't even mention them.) If we ignore religious and ethnic issues, it would make far more sense to fully incorporate the West Bank and Gaza into Israel; but that's not going to happen. Even with a tunnel connecting the two territories, it's hard to imagine the West Bank and Gaza forming a viable economy as an independent state.

Today, along comes Thomas Friedman with what he no doubt thinks is a clever twist on things - The 5-State Solution. In the column, Friedman pretends that he's King Abdullah II, proposing how the conflict can end... without a Palestinian state. This is a "five state solution" to Friedman as it involves Israel, Egypt (to occupy Gaza), Jordan (to occupy the West Bank), Saudi Arabia (to bankroll the occupations), "Palestine" (the nation not created, because it would continue to be under foreign occupation; but Friedman leaves open the possibility that there might be a Palestinian state at some point in the future, perhaps revisiting the issue after five years), and Israel. Oops - he forgot to consider this caveat: "The U.S. would be the sole arbiter of whether the metrics have been met by both sides" - I guess it's a "six state solution"? That'll go over well, on the day Saudi Arabia says, "We're done here, and now we should create a Palestinian State", and the U.S. says "no".

What of democracy, you ask? Well, I'm not sure that Friedman has ever cared about democracy. Palestinian human rights? Well... same answer. What's important to Friedman is that "This would be an Arab solution" that happens to resolve the conflict in a way 100% consistent with Friedman's own prejudices and desires, and that's good enough for him. The only question remaining is, does he know he's doing a slow dance with John Bolton and Daniel Pipes? I suspect so.

The Games Politicians Play

I don't know if Obama should scold the person who stuck the birth control provision into the stimulus bill, or thank them. The scolding should follow from the fact that this was supposed to be a pork-free, non-political bill that could pass with broad bipartisan approval. The birth control provision gave right-wing Republicans a talking point - they could point to it and say "What does birth control have to do with stimulation."

And that brings us to the possible "Thank you." Other than being fodder for an easy one-liner, Republican opposition has been unprincipled and dishonest. The fact is, the provision is good public policy and is consistent with the Medicare policies of a number of Republican governors. It would have saved those governors a ton of money and unnecessary hassle in obtaining waivers so that they could offer birth control benefits through Medicaid. And when the provision was dropped, the Republican answer was still "no" - giving Obama the opportunity to... do this:

“We’re not going to get 100 percent agreement, and we might not even get 50 percent agreement, but I do think people appreciate me walking them through my thought process,” the president said, as he left a meeting with GOP senators just off the Senate floor.

“I hope I communicated a sincere desire to get good ideas from everybody,” he added. “My attitude is this the first major piece of legislation we’ve worked on, and that, over time, some of these habits of consultation and mutual respect will take over, but old habits die hard.”

The shoe is on the other foot. The Republicans were ignoring public policy in favor of a talking point, leaving Democrats to explain why the birth control provision belongs in a stimulus package and makes good sense. Now the talking point is gone and the Republicans are left to sputter things like "We need more tax cuts" or "It's unfocused... not that we have any better ideas".

Obama was placed in an awkward position by the legislators who stuck the birth control provision into the stimulus bill. That measure was inconsistent with his stated goals for the bill. But to ask for its removal opened him up to attacks from the left, accusations that he's selling out women's health. While it's standard Washington fare to stick appropriations like this into "must pass" legislation, this really wasn't the time. I hope that Democratic party leaders have a bit of a sit-down after this, to discuss how they might avoid shooting the President and themselves in the foot over the next two years. Meanwhile, they should work to get a similar appropriation passed through, perhaps, a bill directing some aid or assistance to the states or updating Medicaid rules.

Torture and Morality

Typical of his way of thinking, which is to say... poorly, Richard Cohen today argues that we can't prosecute Bush Administration officials for torture because we're all guilty.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Back then, a Post poll gave George W. Bush an approval rating of 92 percent, which meant that almost no one thought he was on the wrong course.

This shouldn't have to be explained, but then... it's Richard. No, the high approval rating for a President immediately after a moment of national crisis does not translate into equivalent approval for his policies, let alone each and every one of his policies. Nor could it. How smart do you have to be to recognize that Bush hadn't even stated his policies on torture on 9/11. He hadn't declared an intention to invade Iraq. It was Bush's bad policy choices (and their consequences) that caused his popularity to plummet.

What Cohen really means here is that after 9/11 he got climbed onto a "Bush can do no wrong to avenge this" bandwagon, and he saw nothing wrong with the use of torture to achieve Bush's objectives, stated and unstated. That's fine - he can put himself on the dock next to G.W. for his stupid, credulous, thoughtless acceptance of everything Bush did as being right. But please - leave the rest of us out of it.

At the same time, questions about the viability of torture were very much in the air. Alan Dershowitz was suggesting the creation of torture warrants -- permission from a court to, in effect, break some bones.

Dershowitz, mind you, was not in favor of torture but argued that if torture was going to be done, it was best that it be done legally.

Actually, I think the better argument is that Dershowitz is very much in favor of torture, but chooses to dance around the subject rather than approaching it honestly.

In a similar vein, the thoughtful Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter mulled the legality, the morality and the efficacy of torture. In the end, Alter ruled it out -- although not sodium pentothal (truth serum) or offshoring terrorism suspects "to our less squeamish allies." In fact, the government was already sending suspects abroad to be interrogated.

So... an intellectually dishonest law school professor favored torture and a Newsweek columnist ended up endorsing extraordinary rendition... and this proves what, exactly? That when confronted with extraordinary circumstances, people like Dershowitz increase the volume of their calls for us to abandon our values, and people like Alter wonder if they're right? (While sheep like Cohen go, "Baaaaaah"?)

Around the same time, historian Jay Winik wrote about the usefulness of torture, how Philippine agents in 1995 got a certain Abdul Hakim Murad to reveal a plot to blow up 11 American airliners over the Pacific and send yet another plane, this one loaded with nerve gas, into CIA headquarters in Langley. After being beaten nearly to death, Murad was finally broken by the hollow threat to turn him over to Israel's Mossad.

The moral of this story being what? That the Mossad would have finished beating Murad to death, as opposed to beating him almost to death, and that fear caused him to reveal additional information? That the Bush Administration was correct to insist that nobody could possibly have conceived of a plan to crash airplanes into buildings? That if you torture somebody until they reveal a horrible terrorist plot, no matter how ludicrous, you will eventually get them to "confess" such a plot? Really... other than as an idea in Murad's mind, this notion of crashing a plane loaded with nerve gas into the CIA headquarters is supported by... what? There was a ton of documentary and physical evidence that Murad was planning to hijack and blow up airlines. Was there any to support this special new plot, or that any other person even knew of this supposed plot, learned of through the tactics Cohen approves?

According to journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria, authors of the book Under the Crescent Moon, agents hit him with a chair and long piece of wood when Murad did not talk. They forced water into his mouth, and crushed out lit cigarettes on his genitals. Murad's ribs were completely cracked. Agents were surprised that he survived.

To be clear, is Cohen in the Dershowitz, "Get a warrant before putting out your cigarettes on a prisoner's genitals" camp, or is he in the Alter "Send the prisoner to a foreign nation where somebody else's steel toed boots can get dirty while kicking in his rib cage" camp? If we're going to pretend Murad was a "ticking time bomb", what actionable evidence was obtained through his torture that prevented the fanciful "CIA nerve gas attack" from being carried out? And if we're not pretending that he was a "ticking time bomb", such that his torture did not provide us any information or evidence useful in preventing a future attack, let alone an imminent attack on Langley, what's Cohen's point?

Cohen continues with his insipid analysis:

The Philippine example was widely mentioned at the time, even by those who opposed the use of torture. The conventional wisdom that torture never works - so counterintuitive as to be an absurdity - was not yet doctrine.

No, Richard. The argument isn't that "torture never works". The argument is that evidence obtained through torture is not reliable. For example, I take Cohen prisoner, and he denies his association with al-Qaeda. After a few rounds of torture, he finally admits his affiliation. So now I ask him to identify his contacts. He denies having any contacts, or claims not to know their names. A few rounds of torture later, I have names. But none of that information is reliable.

Frankly, as a torturer, I probably don't care. If I let Richard Cohen live, return him to the streets hobbled, covered with cigarette burns, he serves first as a message of my ruthlessness - this is what I do do people who challenge state power. If Cohen's lucky it ends there. If not, he's treated as an informant - he wouldn't have been released, after all, had he not talked. Maybe I even put out the word that he talked, and my agents watch to see who takes revenge - that's actionable intelligence. Or I can whisper to the next person I pick up, "If you give me the information I want, right now, I can let you go and nobody will ever have to know you were in custody. (Or you can end up like Cohen.)" That could be true. It's more likely a lie, but it may scare some information out of the guy before the torture sessions begin.

Whatever information I get, I can act on it. I can pick up the friends Cohen named and start round two with them. Their confessions, with or without torture, will either confirm or refute Cohen's. It doesn't matter. Then round three, round four.... After I torture enough people, I'll have enough confirming information to have a pretty good idea of whether Cohen gave me real names. If he didn't and he's still alive, whether he's in custody or has to be picked up yet again, I can torture Cohen to find out why he lied. By that time I may think that Cohen was wrongly accused in the first place but, no matter. He lied during an official investigation, and that's a crime in and of itself. Besides, we're back to sending a message - and what message would an apology send?

Torture is very intimidating to dissidents - perhaps Cohen is too obtuse to have noticed that particular use of torture by oppressive regimes, but I'm sure they'll confirm that it "works". Also, if you're intent on getting information at any cost and are willing to act on the information you obtain no matter how dubious it may be, torture gets you lots of information you can act upon, usually faster and in much greater volume than would interrogation. Who's arguing that would be ineffective? The debate is over the measure you use for "effectiveness", and... silly things like American values and morality.

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives - and maybe were - and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs - not time-stampers who take no chances.

When we had the finest people in those jobs, we didn't need or use torture. When we had immoral, stupid, sociopathic people in those jobs, we got Abu Ghraib. There's a term that I've heard used for people who claim, "I was only following orders," when their on-the-job atrocities are challenged. Do you know that term, Richard?

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went right and to report not only to Congress but to us.

"If anything"? Richard doesn't see any tension between his implication that nothing went right under Bush, and his blind endorsement of everything Bush did post-9/11?

We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe.

It's quite reasonable for the citizens of a nation to ask that their government protect them from foreign enemies. That's part of the government's job. It's quite another for the government, or hacks like Richard Cohen, to read into that, "At all costs." Unlike Cohen, some of us were never ready to surrender our core values. But then, perhaps Cohen never had any.

Purely Coincidental, I Tells Ya!

Of course it is.

Marvelous Malia and Sweet Sasha are the names of the dolls manufactured by Ty - the company that made billions from the Beanie Babies.

* * *

Ty spokeswoman Tania Lundeen told a Chicago newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times Wednesday the dolls were inspired by the first family's daughters.

Later, she told the Associated Press the names of the $10, brown-skinned dolls were chosen because "they are beautiful names," and not because of any resemblance to the Obama children.

Sure. And when I launch my line of plush CEO toys, my "Haughty H. Ty" doll will be so named merely because "H. Ty" is a beautiful name. No other connection is even conceivable.

Perspective....

The town of Mount Charleston, Nevada, appears to be split between people who are mostly solidly middle class and people who are wealthy. But with a population of 240, there aren't many kids in town so the Clark County school district was considering closing the elementary school. The nine students attending the school would have then been bused an appalling 75 minutes each way (along with middle school and high school kids) to the closest public elementary school. (I'm not sure why that's acceptable for the older kids; but perhaps it's because they never had a local middle school or high school in town.) For now, the school will remain open.

Lundy's per-pupil cost is estimated at more than three times the district average. The district expects that closing Lundy would save about $240,000 a year.

Let's hear a parent's perspective:

Marino, who runs an air duct cleaning company, recalled growing up in a tightknit Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood. He wants his boys, Gavin and Sebastian, to experience a similar sense of kinship. The Marinos long owned a vacation home in Mount Charleston. They knocked it down and spent four years building a 7,000-square-foot replacement after visiting the school.

Er... and he wants how much of a taxpayer subsidy for his millionaire's lifestyle? And, surprise, he's threatening to sue if he doesn't get to keep that taxpayer subsidy? Hard to feel much sympathy there. Let's try a different parent.

"The school far exceeds what you get unless you pay $1,000 a month for private school," said Rose Getler, its Parent Teacher Organization president.

Well, you know, at a cost of about $2,700 per month, per pupil (assuming ten months per year of tuition), you would hope you at least approach the value of a $1,000/month private school. Hey - if a $1,000/month private school is an available local option, how about having the kids go there, Clark County picks up the tab, and everybody walks away a winner?

Seriously, though, for all of its decades of experience operating the tiny school, it sounds like Clark County has no conception of how it might operate a one-room schoolhouse on a reasonable budget. They're spending over $110,000 per year on "instruction" - is that two full-time teachers, or a full-time teacher and a full-time principal, for nine kids? If it's the latter, does the principal have any classroom duties? They spend about $85,000 per year on "operations" - is that because the school also needs a full-time caretaker/groundskeeper? How much money could they save if they had a principal supervise the school remotely, leased the school's space from a local landlord that was responsible for maintaining the grounds, and contracted out cleaning to a local janitorial service? That approach may not be feasible given Clark County's operating procedures and contractual obligations, but... maybe it should be.

But It's Even Worse, Isn't It?

If you wait long enough, somebody's probably going to articulate what you are thinking, and probably say it better. Case in point: I haven't had much time to type out my thoughts on the nation's fear of "nationalization", but Robert Reich does a pretty good job of describing something that's been bothering me:

The federal government -- that is, you and I and every other taxpayer -- has taken ownership of giant home mortgagors Fannie and Freddie, which are by now basket cases. We've also put hundreds of millions into Wall Street banks, which are still flowing red ink and seem everyday to be in worse shape. We've bailed out the giant insurer AIG, which is failing. We've given GM and Chrysler the first installments of what are likely to turn into big bailouts. It's hard to find anyone who will place a big bet on the future of these two.

In terms of the companies lining up for bailouts,

If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of these losers should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second -- before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill -- I would like to hear it.

I completely agree. But there's something Reich doesn't mention that concerns me: Our current bailouts aren't working. That is, it may cost us more to continue bailing out loser companies while declining to nationalize them than it would if we nationalized them, ate their bad debt and, as quickly as possible, restored them to private ownership. (Part of the reason, of course, is the appalling greed of incompetent managers.)

I can also tell you this, not far off from one of Reich's points - Chrysler is a black hole. If it weren't, Cerberus would be bailing it out itself. They shouldn't be invited back for more "loans" or bailout funds, save perhaps a bridge loan to help them seal a takeover deal with a viable company.
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Addendum: "Moral haz... whuttard?" David Ignatius flat-out calls for subsidy:

How will the managers of the Bad Bank coax the gremlins out of hiding? With money, of course -- buying up an estimated $1 trillion to $2 trillion in toxic paper. Will the government overpay? Of course it will, especially at first, as it discovers fair prices for securitized debt for which there isn't now a functioning market.

Anybody even casually conversant with this crisis knows that the government will overpay because to do otherwise won't help the banks. We can buy them for the pretend value the banks presently use, knowing we're paying probably two, three, four times their actual value, removing a huge liability from the banks' shoulders, then hope that with actual assets back in their coffers banks will return to "business as usual". Or we can try to come up with something approximating market value, force banks to report multi-billion dollar losses on those assets, and... then most of them have to admit insolvency.

At least people seem to be through arguing that if the taxpayer ends up owning these toxic assets, there's a chance of "turning a profit". Does Larry Kudlow blush when he reads crap like this, or does he shrug, smile at the corporate interests he serves and say, "It was worth a shot."

I Get It Now....

What else could it be? Gerson, Frum and Thiessen are in some sort of contest, to see who can say the dumbest things in public yet still be taken seriously as a political commentator. The goal is to be the editorial page equivalent of Chauncey Gardener. And Marc Thiessen goes for the lead:

It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Less than a week out of his White House job and, by all appearances, all he needs is a syndicate to pick him up and he'll have stolen Gerson's hard-won title.

I joke, but that sort of stuff is par for the course among Bush's media adherents.

Am I Too Hard on Gerson

Oh my....

Attacking Michael Hirsh, and accusing him of being "'even happier' about the advance of liberal arrogance than he is about the advance of racial justice", Michael Gerson writes,

Most of us have witnessed this attitude, usually in college. The kids who employed contempt instead of argument, who shouted down speakers they didn't agree with, who thought anyone who contradicted them had a lower IQ, who talked of "reason" while exhibiting little of it. They were often not the brightest of bulbs. Most people recover from this childish affliction. Some do not.

Pot... kettle... black? No wait, that's unfair to Hirsh, who obviously didn't say what Gerson chooses to pretend. Not that I can't understand why Gerson chose to personalize Hirsh's comments.

Save Us From the Speechwriters

First it was David Frum, not a stupid man but one predisposed to fatuous assertions; next Michael Gerson, the nation's dumbest syndicated columnist. Now erupting, from deep within the bowels of the White House... Marc A. Thiessen.

When President Bush left office on Tuesday, America marked 2,688 days without a terrorist attack on its soil.

Except for anthrax. And the Beltway sniper (close enough to terrorism to test "homeland security", even if without a political objective). And, although certainly not a terrorist attack, the colossal screw-up after Katrina that let the nation know that, for years after 9/11, Bush and his administration were completely incompetent to handle any large-scale disaster on U.S. soil. And if we're counting days, the amount of time between the first attack on the World Trade Center and the end of Clinton's term was even greater, with no subsequent anthrax attacks to conveniently overlook.

Thiessen's goal here seems to be to defend Bush's record of torture, disregard of the Constitution, and indefinite confinement of suspects without charges or recourse to the courts. It's one of those arguments where Bush's adherents wish to be taken on faith. Khalid Sheik Mohammed refused to talk until he was tortured, and the information gathered was so valuable that only Bush and those with top security clearances, like... his speechwriters have been trusted with the intimate details. But it allowed the government to claim to have prevented terrorist attacks that may have been planned for U.S. soil, and a few of those directed at overseas targets, so, you know, shred the Constitution and all hail Bush. And shame on Obama for describing torture for what it is.

It's astonishing that Bush's defenders are so quick to defend the use of torture, but so scared of the word itself. Have they no courage in their convictions? No, that qualification isn't needed. Have they no courage?

President Obama has inherited a set of tools that successfully protected the country for 2,688 days - and he cannot dismantle those tools without risking catastrophic consequences.

You know, it's like potato chips. You hold a guy without charges or access to the courts, torture him, make sensational claims about what you supposedly learned through torture (but refuse to substantiate them)... and how can you possibly stop at just one? C'mon Obama - taste the forbidden fruit. You'll like it....

On Tuesday, George W. Bush told a cheering crowd in Midland, Tex., that his administration had left office without another terrorist attack. When Barack Obama returns to Chicago at the end of his time in office, will he be able to say the same?

Again, that's a claim Clinton could have made - more honestly. But that's not the point, is it. Thiessen wants to set a stage where any further attack on the U.S. vindicates Bush and redeems his miserable record. From his tone, it almost sounds like Thiessen is hoping for an attack, just so he can snivel, "I told you so." Even though it would vindicate nothing in his argument and, quite possibly, reflect and result from the failure of the Bush Administration's policies.

In 2007, President Bush revealed intelligence that Osama bin Laden had told al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq to form a cell to conduct attacks inside the United States - then the surge drove them from their havens and set back those plans.

In 2004, President Bush (via Condoleezza Rice) revealed that in 2001 they sat on intelligence that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack targets within the United States. I wish he'd taken that, you know, 1% as seriously as the notion that a planned terrorist cell ostensibly to be based in U.S. occupied Iraq had similar intentions.

It's Been Almost a Day....

Why isn't everything fixed yet?

Update: The low expectations continue.

You May Not Like Me Now....

But they'll sign songs about me and throw parties in my honor... after I'm dead!

Seriously, I'm used to the litany of articles at the end of a Presidency, reminding us that a president's legacy can change over time - for the better or for the worse.

But is there any precedent for the defense offered of Bush by his faithful followers - that when all the living witnesses are dead, there's a good chance he'll be beloved?