On Monday Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released a detailed report (pdf) on the Bush administration’s loss of millions of emails. They inherited a system called ARMS (Automatic Records Managements System) that met the requirements of the Presidential Records Act (PRA), but tried to move to a manual system. That alone seems like a willful violation of the PRA’s spirit. Anyone who manages a lot of files on a large hard drive or a big mailbox will sooner or later bump up against the concept of functionally lost: You know it’s in there somewhere but you either can’t find it or can’t get to it.

These are ordinary considerations for even relatively inexperienced IT professionals. So is the concept of testing, but the new system began being used without it. Standard practice is to set up a parallel environment, have a QA team try it out as a simple proof of concept, work out the kinks, have a handful of “real” users take it out for a spin, and manage the rollout in a way that no one starts using the production system until the test system has proved its reliability. This is elementary project management.

The post-ARMS system required manually backing up each user’s mailbox data, which Microsoft Outlook stores in what is called a PST file. The pitfalls of this are obvious: If Johnny backs up everyone’s PST files tonight they might go to one location, and if Jenny backs them up tomorrow another. One set of possibilities for each operator initiating the backup. That is just for one night’s backups, too.

Backups happen each night. As weeks and months go by workers leave for new jobs and new ones come on board. Pretty soon it is impossible to know where, say, Lewis Libby’s PST file from October 6, 2003 might be. It’s on ONE of these tapes, in ONE of these directories (functionally lost). At another point the administration stopped backing them up because of a legal ambiguity, so the files never got cleaned out and just kept getting larger. Eventually they were too big for the system to process and no one could read them. It’s in the file SOMEWHERE but it’s too big to restore and look through (functionally lost).

Managing the PST files turned into a circus. Trying to make sense of it allowed a menagerie of hapless contractors and ripoff artists to dive into the money pit and emerge with ever more complex and arcane non-solutions aimed only at further extending the Rube Goldberg contraption. The PST files were a kludge, and these opportunists were not trying to get onto a proper system but just offering kludge wrappers.

Familiar names in the defense industry like Booz Allen and Northrop Grumman got into the act, as did a whole host of IT vendors both small and large. By the time InfoReliance comes on the scene with its PST Inventory Verification and Investigation Tool it seemed like Washington contractors had figured out some modern version of hobo signs to let everyone know where a free lunch was available.

This is not just a reheated helping of the toxic stew of incompetence and criminality from the previous administration, either. If nothing else fidelity to the historical record ought to make finding and restoring as much data as possible a top priority. However, even for those in the “keep looking so resolutely forward we do not learn from the past” camp there are reasons to acknowledge it.

For example, Congress could extend the PRA to include standards for data and application migrations. Federal offices all the way through the White House should have automated record preservation systems in place, and should be enjoined from moving a new system into production until it has been satisfactorily demonstrated in a test environment.

Also, the Keystone Kops efforts to restore data would not have happened if proper disaster recovery procedures were in place. Twice a year (minimum) all high level IT departments should engage in a full offsite disaster recovery exercise. Assume a tornado went through the data center; how do you get everyone back up and running? Doing that would have identified the hazards of PST purgatory relatively early, and given them a chance to correct it.

Those are just two quick examples. The IT environment revealed in the CREW report was unworthy of a boiler room, much less the highest governmental offices in the country. Simply correcting the problems of the Bush administration is inadequate. New policies need to be drawn up and procedures implemented. The entire operation needs to be systematized and formalized. The alternative is to leave yet another part of the government shielded from sunlight.

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

It probably is not too great an idea to bomb our allies even if they assure us it’s totally fine with them and they really don’t mind at all.

Torturing soldiers causes PTSD. There isn’t a safe way to do it, there isn’t a controlled way to do it.

Raytheon’s pain ray was originally developed for use in Afghanistan, but since we can’t have troops in combat forever (presumably) the real money for a war profiteer is in getting it repurposed for domestic use. A few months ago there was some typically hysterical fretting on the left about just that. Guess what? It’s coming to Los Angeles County Jail for use on human guinea pigs. Hey, don’t run afoul of the law and you won’t have anything to worry about.

The same goes for the War On Terror. Sure, it’s profitable to sell thrilling new technology for use in our never-ending attempt to scare the hell out of the public with nightmarish, apocalyptic imagery (say, when do we begin the War On Dogs anyway?) but not handsomely profitable. For that you need local law enforcement or for that matter any random yokel queuing up to buy it. It’s not like it will erode Constitutional protections against unreasonable searches or inculcate a meek, obedient populace. Only less enlightened people like those primitive savages in China are susceptible to such influence.

I think it’s completely awesome that Fox News cites Bill Clinton to support their opinions now. When did they decide he was so great? I didn’t get that memo. Even better, they cite him as an objective voice defending prewar Iraq sanctions even though his legacy is wrapped up in presenting them with maximal bias. He’s hardly a dispassionate analyst.

Imam Fiesal Abdul Rauf: “You may remember that the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations.” said Rauf, who called himself a spokesman for Islam.

But diplomats and others, including former President Bill Clinton, have said that sentiment is wrong. Saddam Hussein’s regime corrupted then-U.N. sanctions and denied humanitarian aid to his own people. In a Nov. 8, 2000, interview on Pacifica Radio, Clinton said if any child is without food or medicine, then Saddam is to blame because the dictator is “lying to the world and claiming the mean, old United States is killing his children.”

[snip]

“But after 50 years of — in many cases — oppression, of U.S. support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?” Rauf asked, explaining, “I’m just providing you with the arguments that are happening intra-Islamically by those who feel the emotion of pain.”

At this point McClatchy and Carol Rosenberg are two of the most important names in news. If you can watch a ten minute video, see this. Oh, and Guantánamo detainees are being force fed at night during Ramadan. Hearts and minds.

Civilian control of the military is turning into a charade.

A Texas activist engineered a reverse sting on a police department and won. It might be tempting to dismiss it as a prank, but in an era of ever-expanding intrusiveness by authorities it’s encouraging to see someone making sure those with an aggrandized view of their powers get the occasional reality check.

Target gets in trouble for a hundred grand to a single candidate. How does this pass unnoticed?

Think Progress is credited with some of the reporting in the piece, but Mayer does a wonderful job synthesizing existing stories while adding new information as well. That’s why bloggers have a limited ability to make stories stick - individual data points accumulated over time don’t as easily persist in memory. It’s simpler to keep track of a narrative presented in whole. I remembered Graham and Kyl’s fraudulent alteration of the Congressional record in Hamdan when I read it in a book. I’d read it several times online but it never stuck.

Blackwater has its own agenda. If it doesn’t align with US interests so be it. I’m not quite sure if those in charge of making these decisions have thought the whole thing through.

Paul Krugman on the nonexistent threat of inflation:

I wonder how many of the people saying this know that Moody’s and S&P downgraded Japanese debt in 2002, with Moody’s actually putting it below Botswana and Estonia.

And 8 years later, Japan can still borrow at less than 1 percent.

A Wall Street Journal survey found that 89%, as close as you ever come to unanimity in most polls, saw the increase in commodity prices, including oil, as the result of fundamental forces. Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman argued the case forcefully in a series of The New York Times op-eds and blog posts with titles like “The Oil Non-Bubble,” “Fuel on the Hill,” and “Speculative Nonsense, Once Again.”

Krugman’s presence in this camp lent credibility to the “oil prices are warranted” view. The Princeton economist had been a Cassandra on the housing mania and had also correctly anticipated that the deregulation of energy prices in California could lead to manipulation. So Krugman, sensitive to the notion that speculation can distort prices, nevertheless fell in with the argument that oil prices were simply reflecting supply and demand.

Yet that belief was spectacularly incorrect. Oil peaked at $147 a barrel in July and fell even more dramatically than it had risen. By October, prices had fallen to $64 a barrel. Bloomberg columnist Caroline Baum described the world as “drowning in oil.” A report by the Commodities Futures Exchange Commission attributed the large swings in oil prices to speculation. CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said that earlier studies that found that the moves were the result of supply and demand relied on “deeply flawed data.”

Goldman Sachs has an absolutely toxic reputation. Their name is synonymous with fraud and crime. I suppose you can act with impunity if you’ve bought the right politicians, public outrage be damned. Still, it seems like there would be some kind of long term implication to this.

Regardless of what they think or what is in their hearts, federal officials in practice are hostile to ordinary citizens and would rather immiserate them than risk the slightest diminution of wealth for the richest. John Cole: “In my understanding of the free market, things are a win/win scenario, not a tilted table with a win/lose situation where the winner is predetermined by influence and power and connections and societal standing.”

Along the same lines, this. Via.

Hey Democrats: When John Boehner starts making sense and gets on the right side of an issue you are in serious trouble.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called Tuesday for the mass firing of the Obama administration’s economic team, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House adviser Larry Summers, arguing that November’s midterm elections are shaping up as a referendum on sustained unemployment across the nation and saying the “writing is on the wall.”

I absolutely love this headline.

I just finished Inside Out by Barry Eisler and really enjoyed a complimentary copy sent to me. In the acknowledgments he thanks the writers at this site, a jewel of the Internet era.

I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Sara Benincasa.

On last Sunday’s “Meet the Press” Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm discussed the economy, and did so with an unmistakable emphasis:

smartly, strategically, surgically intervening to invest with the private sector
[snip]
smartly intervening with the private sector to be able to do the breakthrough technologies that the private sector doesn’t have the funds to be able to do
[snip]
the government has to partner with the private sector to create jobs
[snip]
we have 16 companies now in Michigan just in the past year because we partnered with the private sector

Strategic investment with the private sector is what works in the 20th century.

That one of the more prominent Democratic officeholders in the nation took such pains to emphasize the need to partner with the private sector is very revealing. It goes way beyond, say, offering tax breaks to encourage outcomes that policymakers favor. In many cases (Granholm’s illustration included) it means providing glorified bribes to get entrenched industries to ostensibly support goals it is openly hostile to. If government is going to get involved so directly, wouldn’t it make more sense to identify promising new actors that have embraced those breakthrough technologies - and help them get across the valley of death?

Her comments are of a piece with the larger belief that government needs to have a warm and fuzzy relationship with large corporations. The reasoning for it usually goes something like this: If we cozy up to them and find out what they really want, they will be extra productive. They in turn will hire lots of new people, pay higher wages and return handsome profits to shareholders.

There never seems to be any consideration for what happens if instead they lay off people due to the productivity gains, drive their existing workforce harder, perhaps even endangering them, and funnel the profits into executive compensation. In a way it compares to trickle down economics: In both cases those at the lower end of the economic scale are supposed to be beneficiaries, and in both cases that end is achieved by showering the privileged with largesse and assuming they will share it.

The eager-to-please attitude extends to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where its site proudly proclaims it “is interested in partnering with the stakeholders to further its public health mission.” The latest revelations about the egg recall are just additional confirmation that the agency subordinates regulation to happy relations with an industry it is supposed to be monitoring.

These problems are not new, either. Perhaps the most egregious recent example came several years ago when then-Deputy Commissioner Lester Crawford testified: “Referring to the industry as a client or as a customer is sort of part of the new emphasis on stakeholder involvement.” Crawford then went on to a brief but revealing stint as FDA head. The conflicts and perverse incentives that characterized his tenure can be seen at state and local levels too, with similarly unpleasant results.

There is sometimes a sinister aspect to these kinds of “collaborations.” Even before 9/11 the government leaned on telecommunication companies to assist them in spying on citizens. Telecoms are free to hand their data over to the government - and the government does not need a search warrant. Clearly it is much more convenient for a private company to hand all its records over than to go in front of a judge and argue for the right to get a single individual’s data.

Now that it is clear that there will be retaliation if they do not play ball, phone companies are downright eager to provide authorities with terribly useful tools for digging in to people’s lives. The courts have pushed back in some cases, but the White House is aggressively moving to widen the pipeline of information flowing to the federal government. The continuity with the previous administration is unmistakable, and it suggests one of those dynamics that is not so much Democrat versus Republican but establishment versus outsider. After all, it makes life easier for everyone inside the Beltway if the lobbyists, regulators and politicians all get along splendidly.

Government should not have any kind of official position towards the private sector, and it certainly should not have the kind of solicitous stance it has so energetically cultivated in recent years. It should simply set up the rules, expect them to be followed, and regulate with all appropriate energy. Its stance should by default be neutral; for businesses and industries with a pattern of bad behavior it should become increasingly antagonistic. The risks of the friendlier approach are all too plain.

Julian Assange got an agreement with the Swedish Pirate Party (my second favorite political party in the whole world) to provide hosting for WikiLeaks, thus giving it a measure of protection. Which it clearly needs. Assange was accused of rape yesterday, and the case almost immediately fell apart (note that there is less than five hours between the first and second BBC stories).

Clearly there’s an effort to smear him (cf. Scott Ritter), and those opposed to him are all too ready to believe anything:

UPDATE: Via Hot Air, prosecutors withdrew the warrant, citing the charges are “without basis”. Strange indeed since Sweden leads European nations in rape statistics at about 23 for every 100,000 and were violent crime has increased 200 percent since 2006. So the question is just how much probable cause did the Swedes need, or was the judge “called off”?

Something isn’t right at all about this. Nevertheless it may not be necessary to nab him anyway. I’m fully expecting the US to draw up formal charges in the weeks to come.

One of the few dissenting views I’ve read about WikiLeaks that was not based on fear and loathing:

I find it odd that disclosure in itself has become a kind of performance. And I use the word ‘performance’ carefully, because performance is a kind of artifice. While all journalists love to obtain forbidden or secret documents, these don’t become a substitute for the primary job in hand, which is explaining the world, and this is performed by the journalist. It requires analytical skills at both ends of the chain - with the reader also making rational choices, and joining the dots. Leaks typically provide the seed for a scoop, maybe a great scoop, but they don’t join the dots.

Pat Garofalo wins headline of the week. Why not tell it like it is?

That Gulf oil eruption isn’t just going away, much as we’d all love to turn our attention away from the mess.

TBogg gets serious:

No, he just treats citizens who are against the mosque for what they are: low-information emotionally-stunted dipshits who are being whipped into a frenzy by fearmongering cowards who have always counted upon the gullibility and bloodlust of the mob.

You hear that, Republican Party? You’re getting taken over by… longtime Republican party supporters, former RNC staffers, major corporate interests, right-wing economists, old white populists, and former Republican elected officials!

Paul Krugman gets to the heart of the matter: “Central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue … are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.” Prairie Weather adds: “Isn’t that precisely what’s happening — what’s been happening since we elected that cruel, ignorant Aztec, Inc. chief, Ronald Reagan?” Meanwhile, Annie Lowrey on the human cost of long term unemployment.

Hat trick from three different authors at Naked Capitalism:

• Yves Smith
• Rajiv Sethi
• George Washington

From the same site, this from Steve Waldman. Ambiguous date in original, I believe the correct one is September 15: “On September 10, 2008, Lehman reported 11% ‘tier one’ capital and very conservative ‘net leverage’. On September 25 15, 2008, Lehman declared bankruptcy.” In other words, it was the picture of health on the first date and five days later in bankruptcy. Big financial firms don’t have tangible assets, all they have are exceedingly complex and in some cases purely theoretical algorithms for valuing their bets. All of which is no more substantial than a puff of smoke if people decide they no longer have confidence in them.

Words I never thought I’d write: Be sure to check out this must-read article by Peter Beinart.

Leftover links. Watch this if you can. And Omar Khadr’s trial was suspended for a very odd reason.

I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Josh Mull:

When something like this happens in Pakistan, we completely lose our s**t and call them a failed state, a tyrannical dictatorship, a collapsing nuclear-armed time bomb full of apocalyptic religious fanatics and corrupt, out-of-touch plutocrats. When it happens here, it’s called a “media blitz.”

On Monday U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy ruled in what Carol Rosenberg described as a “heavily censored 28-page ruling” that Guantánamo detainee Adnan Abdul Latif was to be released. While he was locked up at least four years longer than necessary, it still is good news. Another captive has been freed and the inmate population there has been reduced by one. For as happy a turn of events as this is for Latif, though, it is a small part of a very gloomy picture.

Most obviously there is the case of fellow Guantánamo inmate Omar Khadr. His military commission reads almost like a caricature of a Kafkaesque show trial. Colonel Patrick Parrish, the presiding judge, allowed “confessions” produced by the threat of violence. He also allowed Evan Kohlmann, a comically unqualified layman, to testify as an expert in al Qaeda while conveniently ignoring that Kohlmann’s knowledge (such as it is) has nothing whatsoever to do with Khadr.

Even the details have a police state feel. Sketch artist Janet Hamlin was prevented from merely drawing outlines of the jurors, so her pictures have the strange (and chilling) depiction of numbers in the jury box where human beings should be.

Beyond Guantánamo, there was the report this week of what the New York Times delicately described as “the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies.” America is now secretly engaged in intelligence and military operations in over a dozen countries. On tactics alone this seems disastrous. Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan - yes, that John Brennan (though see here) - describes using a “scalpel” approach to the bombing campaigns.

Historian and author David Mets has described (pdf) the many euphemisms applied to them over the years, including “strategic bombing,” “tactical airpower,” “surgical strike.”. The continual need for re-branding suggests that maybe it is not perfectible in the way forever promised. Precise language is periodically recycled because the current term of choice is constantly being discredited by the ultimately crude nature of air warfare.

There are other issues too. Could CIA drone pilots be classified by other governments as illegal enemy combatants under the same logic America has used to justify its “all the world’s a front” approach? If operators were captured, wouldn’t America have trouble objecting if they were mistreated - held for years without charge, coerced or tortured into telling their captors what they wanted to hear, having it used as evidence in a hastily convened military tribunal?

The long term implications are easy to see as well, because we are already getting a good look. The Jerusalem Post reported that reserve Israeli Defense Force officer Eden Abergil “posted photographs from her compulsory service on Facebook, showing her with detained Palestinians who were handcuffed and blindfolded”. A Facebook group was created for her supporters:

Members of the group also added photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal, with the caption: “This is what Americans do to Iraqi soldiers - Guys, can we really compare?!! Eden only took a picture next to them - she didn’t humiliate them or anything.”

Every country has its bad actors and is capable of falling into the grip some kind of irrational frenzy. Even some of those America maltreated have a certain sympathy; on being released from Guantánamo Lakhdar Boumediene was almost astoundingly generous: “‘The first month, okay, no problem, the building, the 11 of September, the people, they are scared, but not 7 years. They can know whose innocent, who’s not innocent, who’s terrorist, who’s not terrorist,’ he said. ‘I give you 2 years, no problem, but not 7 years.’” We can no longer plead such trauma, though. That is why the show trials and secret bombings will not be over when the last verdict is read or the rubble stops bouncing. They are destined to become part of the global imagination. No matter how much we insist with exasperation that it’s old news, we will be stuck with it.

UPDATE: Lambert sends along this link. Depressingly on point.

Scott Horton on the depressingly cynical logic behind the Guantánamo show trials: “You can count on it that the convening authority will not get around to announcing the actual sentence until sometime after the midterm elections in November.”

WikiLeaks has been harshly criticized in some surprising quarters. Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, Amnesty International and Reporters with Borders have all weighed in. I’ve read their opinions and respect them, I admire their work and I’m almost always in their corner. I disagree with them on this one, though. WikiLeaks is acting as a check on the government in the way newspapers were originally intended to.

Looks like the site has some more documents almost ready too. I look forward to their release.

We need distributed whistleblower sites like WikiLeaks because of nonsense like this (via).

In southern Alabama back in late May, my PhD student’s ant samples were taken away by a US Fish and Wildlife officer at a publicly accessible state Wildlife Management Area because our project hadn’t been approved by Incident Command (also called the Deepwater Horizon Response Unified Command — which is a joint program of BP and federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, assembled to respond to problems related to the April 20 blowout).

We’ve had similar experiences in south Louisiana, where our research trip was halted after driving more than 150 miles to a study site. On the way to our sampling sites in Grand Isle, LA, were turned away by a sheriff’s deputy blocking the road who said that he was told to allow no one who wasn’t associated with BP or NRDA to pass that point. We’ve also been blocked by the Wisner Trust, one of the largest private land owners of marsh habitat in Louisiana, who in the past allowed LSU researchers access to their property. The lawyer representing the trust indicated that they are coordinating over 700 different people associated with BP and NRDA and that they simply cannot approve access for anyone else.

It is just so wearying to have to point out - in America, in 2010 - that equating Islam with al Qaida makes as much sense as equating Christianity with the KKK. Adam Serwer, responding to Andy McCarthy’s claim that “Islamists (not just terrorists but the whole Islamist movement) mean to change us in very fundamental ways,” writes:

Of course terrorism has changed “us” in very fundamental ways. Between the gutting of due process for terrorism suspects, the endorsement of torture and a massive expansion of the surveillance state, we’ve seen one “defeat for freedom” after another, cheerfully abetted by people like McCarthy who possess a conditional commitment to the rule of law whenever Muslims are involved.

I didn’t expect building a mosque on the former site of a coat factory would end up requiring the president to weigh in; obviously my radar for which wingnut lunacy will take hold is a little off. So maybe International Burn A Qu’ran Day is going to be a big hit; Commenter Cammie Novara pointed to some great reasons to participate!

So Louie Gohmert, where did the previous generation of terror babies go? Wouldn’t our implacable foes in the Mideast have launched this sinister plot back in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini when America was the Great Satan?

In all the crazy there was a really nice moment where Anderson Cooper showed the kind of skepticism towards anonymity that almost never seems to happen in Washington:

COOPER: No, I will take a legitimate former FBI agent who actually offers evidence. If you can present that person, let us know off-camera, we’d be happy to talk to them off-camera. But so far, you have presented nothing.

GOHMERT: I talked to that FBI agent, I promised him I would not reveal his name.

COOPER: Well, that’s convenient…

Google and Verizon demonstrated why net neutrality has been such a hard fight. The funny thing is, there are legitimate issues related to traffic prioritization. For instance, a VOIP phone call like one made over Skype is a lot more sensitive to interruption than, say, a page load. If your call drops enough packets it either becomes frustratingly, unusably latent or just goes away all together. I could see the argument for prioritizing VOIP as a way to give the ordinary user a better experience. (The devil is in the details though - prioritize VOIP and you give others incentive to spoof their traffic to look like VOIP, and how do you sort that out?) That’s not what is happening here though. It’s just a couple of enormous companies telling the rest of us to trust them.

Raw Story: “A federal grand jury has added an additional indictment to a former Blackwater employee involved in the murders of two Afghan civilians in May of 2009”. As the story notes, Blackwater mercenaries were charged with manslaughter in a 2007 Baghdad killing, but a judge dismissed the case. Don’t get your hopes up, in other words. Stories like this may be having an impact in other areas, though.

Glenn Greenwald:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of our mammoth Surveillance State is that the bulk of its actions are carried out not by shadowy government agencies, but by large private corporations which are beyond the reach of democratic accountability. At this point, perhaps it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity — with a public division and a private one. In every way that matters, the separation between government and corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes to the Surveillance State. Indeed, so extreme is this overlap that when Michael McConnell was nominated to be Bush’s Director of National Intelligence after serving for a decade as Vice President of Booz Allen (prior to which he was head of the NSA under Bush 41 and Clinton), he told The New York Times that his ten years of working “outside the government,” for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the nation’s intelligence functions. That’s because his Booz Allen work was indistinguishable from working for the government, and therefore — as he put it — being at Booz Allen “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left.”

As the NSA scandal revealed, private telecom giants and other corporations now occupy the central role in carrying out the government’s domestic surveillance and intelligence activities — almost always in the dark, beyond the reach of oversight or the law. As Tim Shorrock explained in his definitive 2007 Salon piece on the relationship between McConnell, Booz Allen, and the intelligence community, in which (to no avail) he urged Senate Democrats to examine these relationships before confirming McConnell as Bush’s DNI: “[Booz Allen’s] website states that the Booz Allen team ‘employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel.’ TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.”

Prairie Weather emailed me “Obama, Bush, and the Geneva Conventions” by John B. Bellinger III. A good read.

It’s possible - possible - that Tuesday will provide one of the most important domestic policy achievements of the Obama presidency. James Pethokoukis: “The key date to watch is August 17 when the Treasury Department holds a much-hyped meeting on the future of Fannie and Freddie.” Via.

I admire the way Republicans can channel their outrage very precisely for political gain when a less sophisticated approach might hurt traditional GOP allies. Darrell Issa has the latest work of craftsmanship: “‘Lost in the debate over how best to legislate the aftermath of the financial crisis has been the necessity to conduct an inward examination of the too-cozy relationship between government enterprises and private industry,’ Mr. Issa said.”

Ezra Klein, performing his function: “it seems to me that the importance of Warren’s nomination is being dramatically overblown.” Compare to his repeated claims that the public option was a relatively minor part of the overall health care debate. His function is to characterize Obama policies that rouse the left as wholly acceptable liberal goals, while characterizing progressive aims as unworthy of all the fuss. And he argues it the same way too - it’s not a big deal, so liberals should drop it. As opposed to - it’s not a big deal, so the administration should placate the silly old liberals.

Ted Frier on the late sociologist Eric Hoffer:

He theorized that the fanaticism and self-righteousness at the heart of all mass movements are rooted in self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity. His most important insight may have been that all mass movements are essentially the same in terms of the kind of personalities attracted to them and the benefits they confer on committed members.

Therefore, said Hoffer, it is much easier for a fanatical Nazi to become a fanatical Communist even though those two belief systems are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, than for either to become a mainstream liberal. Hitler’s propaganda chief said the same thing.

Geeks are dinosaurs. Ah, my bones are creaking.

I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Mary Elizabeth Williams:

On Thursday I spent several hours at Sloan-Kettering, answering questions and filling out forms. I sat in a waiting room full of quietly frantic-looking people watching “Deal or No Deal” and availing themselves of the free coffee. A young woman in lace knee socks, plaid miniskirt, and Led Zeppelin T-shirt typed lazily on her phone. I don’t think her peach fuzz hairstyle was a fashion statement.

Next week, I am going back to have a portion of my scalp removed, and flesh from either my neck or my thigh grafted onto it — we don’t yet know which. Apparently the surgeon likes to wing it, skin graft-wise. I will wake up with a ping pong ball-size permanent bald spot, and a badass scar that I intend to go around telling people I got in Desert Storm. I am going to have lymph nodes removed and biopsied. And then, my new cancer doctor tells me, once we get the results from all that, we can begin my “treatment.”

Congressional sessions have been in the news twice this week, and in both cases Republicans were opposed. Tuesday’s special session and the prospective lame duck session were both the object of bitter complaints. Neither was surprising: conservatives have a long running hostility towards the very idea of governing - along with a romanticized, sepia-toned vision of a golden era of citizen legislators. There is a corresponding impatience now, an irritation with the stubborn refusal of the country to run on auto pilot.

Lamar Alexander gave the most punchy expression of this idea in a 1994 speech titled “Cut Their Pay and Send Them Home” (the Heritage site notes with sublime understatement: “Archived document, may contain errors”). As he envisions it:

Congress could: Convene on January 3rd, just as it now doe s, pass the authorization bills to help the government run, and go home early in the baseball season. V Come back Labor Day, pass the appropriations bins and any other urgent legislation, and be home by Thanksgiving. Cut the pay of Members in half and mWa l the rules that keep them from holding real jobs and leading normal lives in their home towns.

He further notes, in words that I believe all schoolchildren should be forced to memorize, “Tim notion is that a part time Congress of community leaders makes a be= government than a ftdl-bm Congress of cum politicians.” More seriously, he quotes Kay Bailey Hutchison’s endorsement: “It’s a great idea. We should cut our pay and send ourselves home. It is the kind of Congress the framers imagined.”

The idea that being a legislator is not a real job, and that those engaged in lawmaking do not lead normal lives, is a powerful bit of right wing iconography. They prefer to think of lawmaking as something a level headed, common sense ordinary working American could do in his spare time. Anything that adds complexity or draws the process out is the product of greedy, underhanded special interests. There is a deep reluctance to acknowledge, for instance, that rival power centers that may require a more active government than the one envisioned in the founders’ agrarian world.

Characterizing it that way also constructs a tightly circular logic that justifies their failed laissez-faire approach: Private industry can regulate itself, so no intervention is required. Because government is kept away, it does not have the knowledge to effectively address any problems that arise. When the financial system melted down we were told that the fools and thieves who wrecked the economy in the first place had to be in charge of fixing it because it was incomprehensible to everyone else. When BP unleashed a volcanic eruption of oil in the Gulf we were told only they had the technology to address it.

Perhaps if Congress would not voluntarily hobble itself that argument would be a little harder to make. If representatives had to be in the capitol from Monday through Friday fifty weeks a year (oh heck, let’s be generous employers and make it forty eight) maybe they would put the extra time to good use. Sure, they might just spend more time on frivolous or counterproductive measures. There is, though, a possibility that they would spend some time becoming knowledgeable on important issues before they develop into crises.

Three day work weeks only provide more time to raise money from lobbyists. Recesses are increasingly used for virtual town halls or highly scripted encounters in which impromptu interaction is almost entirely ruled out. The former could just as easily be done from the capitol, the latter by a capitol office coordinating with a well trained local staff. Maybe if enough staff were forced on them - and in some cases “forced” is probably the right word - they would become more engaged in wide ranging issues of governance.

In addition to beefing up staffs and extending their hours, we could emphasize a renewed commitment to professional legislators by substantially bumping House and Senate salaries. Reducing the gap between legislators and lobbyists would also make the revolving door a little less lucrative. Yes, it would be wonderful for the pure spirit of public service to motivate them, but their pay should be commensurate with the importance of their work.

It also would announce a new anticipation of seriousness. If they are in session much more often, and paid very well for it, then it will be harder to justify having lobbyists write legislation or declare an issue too complex. For over a generation the mantra has been to expect less; it’s time to change that, and to tangibly signal it. Pay them better, and make it clear that representing their constituents is their real job.

I didn’t post last Sunday and have been largely offline this weekend. So I’ve mixed some older links in and included lots of quotes.

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

Every major development from the Obama administration on human rights or civil liberties has been negative. The latest? A promising legal team has completely fallen apart and now wants to expand its warrantless surveillance capabilities. Adam Serwer:

Having acted irresponsibly with the surveillance power it already has, and blocked reform that would have made the government more accountable, the Obama administration now wants even more power to violate the privacy rights of American citizens. When it comes to national security, there’s nothing like failed government performance to justify giving the government more power.

Scott Horton:

Good literature already exists about the German Democratic Republic, in many ways the “model state” for the Soviet Empire. The massive state security apparatus of the GDR, focused on the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (“Stasi”) may ultimately have encompassed up to 10% of the working population of the country (PDF) in its network of agents and informants (“inoffizielle Mitarbeiter”). This massive burden on the GDR’s economy contributed heavily to its inefficiency; in the name of state security, it degraded the quality of life for the entire nation. Yet the Stasi world is miniscule compared to the new system introduced after 9/11 in the United States. What are the consequences of this burden for the United States, and what is the concomitant payoff?

It’s hard to not connect this kind of violence with the eliminationist rhetoric of the right.

Barry Eisler (emph. supplied):

NPR wasn’t objecting to my argument (Nineteen Eighty-Four’s political warning is relevant today); they were objecting to my evidence (Tom Friedman et al’s mistakes are disposed of as though via a memory hole; NPR and other named organizations are using government-approved Orwellian language).

Abuse of prisoners happened. But apparently, only at Abu Ghraib, not at Bagram, not at Gitmo, not at firebases where detainees died. And the names of those contractors?

[snip]

the miracle of modern MSM editing presents the downsides of contractors as largely disembodied chaos rather than security contracts getting doled out for reasons that have nothing to do with security, rather than contractors abusing their quasi-immune status to engage in really counterproductive crimes.

Marcy:

this is the fruit of demanding anything less than full accountability for Bush’s crimes. Bush gamed the system of Congressional oversight and yet Congress refused to call actions conducted without sanction illegal. With Congress having done that, why should Obama treat Congress as anything but more kabuki?

I always thought Peter Orszag was basically a DC budget wonk and not much else. Turns out even the goddamn economists inside the Beltway are unitary executive freaks too.

Three great quotes from three different posters at First Draft.

• Adrastos: Film editing isn’t some new fangled thing, it’s been around since the days of DW Griffith.
• Virgo Tex: No one at that level of political power listens to Fox or Breitbart and falls for it. Fox News manipulating a story? Andrew Breitbart lying? Gosh, who in the White House press office would expect that?
• Athenae: You can only get played so many times before people stop blaming Andrew Breitbart and start blaming you

Some funnies. I missed this from DougJ (via) a few months back: “Why not just hire a hooker to dress up as Sarah Palin and beat you with a riding crop?”

James Wolcott: “Near the end of this amen session, O’Reilly asked Brit if it was too much to say that Fox News had become the number one news force in America and Brit said, No, that is not too much to say. And so we had the manly spectacle of two highly paid Fox News mouth organs agreeing that their network was the bestest.”

The incompetence runs deep, the secrecy never diminishes and the bailouts never end.

More Adam Serwer, who has become one of my favorite bloggers:

There are a number of things about Senator Jim Webb’s op-ed “The Myth of White Privilege” to dislike, starting with the fact that one of the awesome things about the existence of white privilege is that you can be part of a body like the U.S. Senate, which has a total number of zero elected black members, and write something titled “The Myth of White Privilege” without anyone batting an eyelash.

Goldman: “It’s OK to make shitty deals but not to write about them.” You know, that’s probably not the kind of reform most of us had in mind.

Richard Stengel deserves to be permanently banned from practicing journalism. Greg Mitchell:

In Time’s mission to really “illuminate what is actually happening on the ground” has it ever put on its cover close-up images of 1) a badly wounded or dead U.S. soldier 2) an Afghan killed in a NATO missile strike 3) an Afghan official, police officer or military commander accepting a bribe from a Taliban war lord.

Britain has done better than America at owning up government duplicity in the run up to the Iraq war, but that’s grading on a pretty generous curve. In absolute terms they aren’t doing too brilliantly.

Leftover links. Steve M:

A lot of people, especially those of Boomer age and older, just can’t get past the notion that this history will repeat itself exactly. Hate to break it to you, but that ain’t going to happen with regard to Afghanistan. The public is numbed by this war, not infuriated. We just think it’s never going away. The right supports the war even if that means backing Obama, and the anti-war movement is invisible, so there’s no mainstream sense of opposition. That’s why the Wikileaks documents aren’t the Pentagon Papers, and Russ Feingold won’t be Eugene McCarthy.

I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Atrios:

you could come up thousands of other ways to spend $100 billion all of which would be almost infinitely better than invading their countries and caressing them with our freedom bombs if we cared about the women and children of the world.