Random Thoughts

Or so says our beloved Jesse Jackson:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson became the latest public figure to offer an opinion on the future of Michael Vick. Jackson said he wondered whether there had been collusion among N.F.L. owners to keep Vick out of the league.

…

Jackson, born in 1941, has been a civil rights activist for most of his adult life. He said that in some ways, Vick’s attempt to re-enter the N.F.L. was similar to Jackie Robinson’s entering Major League Baseball.

Although their situations were drastically different, Jackson said, the challenge was the same: Which owner would have the courage to make a controversial signing?

What bothers me isn’t that Jackson is a moron — the world is full of morons — but that people still listen to him.  He is a caricature.  He warrants no more attention than the homeless man on telegraph avenue raving about aliens or the fool on Fox News insisting that Obama isn’t an American citizen.

It’s times like these that I wonder if free speech isn’t so great after all, but is only worth protecting because we can’t figure out a way to regulate speech that doesn’t involve or result in terrible abuses of power.

We all know that there are Americans out there who want health insurance, but simply can’t afford it.  How big is this problem?  From Daylight’s Mark via McArdle comes the argument that the problem is not as big as we think:

On the 47 million people without health insurance point, that too is a statistic where there is less than meets the eye. … Of that 47 million, 14 million are already eligible for existing programs (Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, SCHIP) yet have not enrolled, 9.7 million are not citizens, 9.1 million have household incomes over $75,000 and could but choose not to purchase insurance, and somewhere between 3 and 5 million are uninsured briefly(<2 months) between jobs. That leaves about 10 million Americans who are chronically without insurance. Needless to say, extending the blanket of coverage to this group should not cost $1.5 trillion and require a wholesale overhaul of all of medicine.

The post is worth reading in its entirity for his thoughtful approach to the entire healthcare question, especially the discussion of what is a right vs an earned priviledge and the fact that Americans do, overall, pay more for health care.

Richard Posner, a Reagan judicial appointee, writes:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

Among the various gyrations of the Republican party over the past couple of years, and the past election in particular, the populist, anti-elitism worries me the most.  The task of governing is a difficult one, one that requires a level of mental acuity that much of the Republican party seems to despite.  Unfortunately, the majority of unsolved problems are unsolved because they are difficult and do not easily lend themselves to simple solutions that can be explained in a 30 second rant on talk radio.

However, I do feel the need to copy Stephen Bainbridge here in noting that religious discourse is not inherently anti-intellectual.  Faith provides, for many of us, an underpinning of beliefs and ideals.  That does not necessary mean we are anti-intellectual.  I think Posner is simply seeking an easy target in explaining the right’s anti-intellectualism.  Certainly the anti-evolution movement has led to some residual distrust in conservatives of science in general, but it shouldn’t.  You should be able to say “I disagree with your conclusion in this matter, but the scientific method as a whole is sound.”  The more damaging anti-intellectualism has come from the conservative media populists, who in seeking to expand and amuse their viewership, have dumbed the debate down and sought to market outrage and anger as a form of entertainment.

… because they should.  Shown below are actual and projeted numbers for the annual federal budget deficit.  Eventually, we’re going to reach the point where we can no longer raise the money.

Annual Federal Budget Deficit

The New York Times details further fallout from the now defunct Pentagon public relations program that enlisted retired flag officers serving as analysts for major network as “message force multipliers”:

In a highly unusual reversal, the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office has withdrawn a report it issued in January exonerating a Pentagon public relations program that made extensive use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.

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The inspector general’s office began investigating the public relations program last year, in response to articles in The New York Times that exposed an extensive and largely hidden Pentagon campaign to transform network military analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration. The articles also showed how military analysts with ties to defense contractors sometimes used their special access to seek advantage in the competition for contracts related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

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The review found that the former senior Pentagon officials who devised and managed the program refused to speak with the inspector general’s investigators.

At the end of the day, who better to explain military culture, doctrine, and strategy to the public than a retired flag officer?  A journalist with a couple weeks in the field as an embed?  A “military strategist” from some college whose experience is drawn from the books he’s read?  And yet, here is another formerly non-partisan part of government politicised and tarnished by the Bush administration.  We’ll forever be suspicious of any retired flag on the major networks, and as a price for that suspicion we’ll know less about what’s going on.

Of course, in all of this, I do think the flag corps bears some blame.  When you put stars on your uniform, you have to be cognizant of the fact that especially in today’s highly political climate everyone wants you as their puppet or prop.

Given the opportunity to ask important policy questions of Dr. Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate who’s our new Energy Secretary, Rep. Joe Barton instead decided to ask some “tricky” questions in what appears to be an attempt to make a point about global warming.  Dr. Chu gave a fairly reasonable response, which apparently contained too many elementary science principles for Rep. Barton to understand resulting in Rep. Barton claiming to have “stumped” the Energy Secretary.

Rep. Barton, apparently lacking any staffers competent enough to recognize the representative’s mistake, then posted a video of the affair on his YouTube page under the headline “Energy Secretary puzzled by simple question.”  Here’s the video so that you can be the judge of who was puzzled:

Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey write in today’s Wall Street Journal:

The limits of the Army Field Manual are entirely appropriate for young soldiers, for the conditions in which they operate, for the detainees they routinely question, and for the kinds of tactically relevant information they pursue. Those limits are not appropriate, however, for more experienced people in controlled circumstances with high-value detainees. Indeed, the Army Field Manual was created with awareness that there was an alternative protocol for high-value detainees.

What people don’t seem to understand is that we should wantthe Army and the CIA to have different interrogation rules.  The Army’s rules should be highly restrictive in recognition of the fact that its core competency is warfighting, not intelligence gathering.  Indeed, soldiers often rotate in and out of assignments, in my many cases leaving them with insufficient time to learn how to become a skilled interrogator.  The CIA, on the other hand, is the prime agency for gathering human intelligence.  It should have a cadre of experienced career interrogators and a set of rules that conform to national and international law but that are closer to the limit of what’s legal than the Army’s rules.

The idea of subjecting the CIA to the Army Field Manual makes even less sense when you realize that the Army can revise the manual whenever it sees fit.  It would be like the FAA, instead of promulgating safety regulations, stating “All airlines shall follow whatever safety regulations United Airlines puts in place.”  That’s hardly the way to codify solid regulation.  In fact, the Army could easily modify the Field Manual to say “CIA interrogators may use whatever techniques they see fit.”

Finally, it’s worth noting that it’s called the Army Field Manual on Interrogation.  As the name implies, it’s a field manual designed for usage by troops in the field, not practiced interrogators operating in controlled environments.

The debate over the economic stimulus package has come and gone.  I remain on the fence, but this recent article reminded me of how long it takes for your average “shovel ready” project to begin.  Here’s the steps:

• Congress passes the law and the president signs it.
• The federal government distributes the money down to the organizational level where contracts are executed, or the money is distributed to the states.  Two weeks (at least).
• The executing agency prepared the work package and the solicitation.  Assume that the project is “shovel ready” meaning that the work is already identified and defined, and a specification was written up beforehand.  Two weeks.
• These are major projects, so you’re going to have to synopsize the work package for 15 days on FedBizOpps (if this is a federal procurement).  This informs potential offerers of the general scope of what you will be contracting out.  Following synopsis, you will issue the solicitation.  The bids are due prior to the bid opening, which will occur 30 days after the solicitation is issued.
• If this is a negotiated procurement — a request for proposal (RFP) instead of an invitation for bid (IFB) — then give at least two weeks for negotiations.  Most high dollar projects are RFPs.
• Once the agency decides who they want to award the contract to, give at least two weeks for legal review, congressional notification, and other administrative tasks.
• The agency awards the contract.  Two months after award, work begins (this gives the contractor time to plan their production schedule, hire workers, and purchase material).
• Two to four weeks after the start of performance, the contractor begins receiving progress payments.

In other words, about six months after the president signs the law the first check from the federal government gets mailed out (actually, payment is distributed via EFT).  This, of course, is for the most shovel ready projects.  Projects where the work scope isn’t entirely defined, where there are technical or political issues to be worked out, or that require an environmental impact survey, will all take much longer.  Your average recession from 1854-2001 lasted 17 months.

From the headline story on the New York Times website:

Questions about why Timothy F. Geithner did not know sooner about the A.I.G. bonuses and act to stop them could overwhelm his achievements and undermine the president’s overall economic agenda.

Really?  This largely media-made scandal about how some minuscule fraction of our taxpayer donation to AIG is being spent could derail the President’s overall economic agenda? Because what?  It’s consumed the past 24 hours of the news cycle, and you’re trying to stretch it out for another day or so?

When organizations that are insured against any challenge to their supremacy grow to a certain size, they start to care primarily about retaining their own power. An excellent example of this is the teachers’ union, which is primarily concerned with insuring its own grip on teachers and on the education system. While we should be having a national discussion on how to reward good teachers (this is actually isn’t all that easy to do and will require lots of discussion), the teachers union has us discussing whether or not performance should even be a factor in teacher compensation.

The union is also excellent at weeding out initiatives that could reduce its stranglehold on the workforce. As David Brooks explains in the NY Times:

Democrats in Congress just killed an experiment that gives 1,700 poor Washington kids school vouchers. They even refused to grandfather in the kids already in the program, so those children will be ripped away from their mentors and friends. The idea was to cause maximum suffering, and 58 Senators voted for it.

School vouchers allow students to go to charter and non-public schools, most of which aren’t unionized.  The only argument against allowing school vouchers is that it reduces the critical mass necessary to have a functioning education system.  There’s merit to that argument, but not enough merit to justify yanking 1700 students away from their friends and classmates.