Today's Daily Pundit Parade leads off with
David Ignatius, who has pored over "hundreds of pages of testimony gathered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in its review of the Bolton nomination", and provides for our benefit details that shed that bright, cleansing light that facts so often do.
More Ignatius, and more pundits below, including:
- Jonathan Chait on press obliging Bush's "personal accounts" language
- Mark Morford and Jay Bookman both hit BushCo hard on avoiding reality
- Scot Lehigh looks at Mitt Romney's falling poll numbers
- Paul Krugman on how private insurers pass the health care buck
- Alan Burdick delivers an Earth Day warning about invasive species
- The Daily Cartoon (must-see Ann Coulter Time cover toon)
And don't forget to drop in on
dhonig's Daily Pulse for a great survey of newspaper editorials and LTE's from around the nation.
The case against Bolton, exhibit A:
The "most damaging" episode revolves around Bolton's quest to paint Cuba as a WMD threat, and his run-in with what he called a "midlevel munchkin", Christian Westermann, the chief biological weapons analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
To appreciate the story, it's important to see Bolton and Westermann as Washington archetypes. Bolton is a political appointee who has made his career delivering broadsides at think tanks. Westermann, by contrast, is a career man. He served 20 years in the Navy, including combat time, before joining INR as a weapons analyst. He took his job as an intelligence gatekeeper seriously.
Bolton apparently gets really red in the face when experts do their job:
Westermann sent Bolton's proposed speech language about Cuban biowarfare efforts to the intelligence community for clearance the afternoon of Feb. 12, 2002. With it, he attached alternative language that in his view accorded better with the NIE. Westermann had frequently suggested similar changes for other colleagues and saw it as part of his job. But Bolton seemed convinced that it was a stab in the back. His chief of staff fired off an e-mail complaining about the alternative language and summoning the analyst to Bolton's office immediately. Westermann e-mailed back meekly that he had provided the same language a few months before for Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Bolton was enraged when Westermann arrived: "He wanted to know what right I had trying to change an undersecretary's language. . . . And he got very red in the face and shaking his finger at me and explained that I was acting way beyond my position. . . . And so, he basically threw me out of his office and told me to get Tom Fingar up there," Westermann testified.
Fingar at the time was acting head of INR and now has the job full-time. He testified that when he arrived, Bolton was still furious, saying that "he wasn't going to be told what he could say by a midlevel INR munchkin analyst," and "that he wanted Westermann taken off his accounts." To their immense credit, Fingar and his boss, INR chief Carl Ford, refused to cave to continuing pressure from Bolton to transfer Westermann. He's still on the job.
And what about the Cuban biological weapons program that had Bolton so exercised? In 2004 the intelligence community revised its 1999 estimate because it was even less sure that Cuba had any such effort to develop offensive weapons of mass destruction. In other words, the mercurial, finger-wagging policymaker appears to have had it wrong, and the cautious analyst who refused to be intimidated had it right.
Expect to hear Westermann's name a lot more in the next few weeks. I believe the facts about Bolton are only going to get more negative, and that it is going to be very hard for Voinovich and Chaffee to cast a vote to send his nomination to the Senate floor.
News media fealty to Bush framing
Jonathan Chait of the LA Times takes the news media to task for obediently accepting the change in political vocabulary foisted by Republicans in the national debate on Social Security:
Up until very recently, the notion of allowing workers to divert their Social Security taxes into individual savings accounts was universally known as "privatization." Its most fervent advocates called it that. (The Cato Institute, one of the earliest champions of privatization, established a "Project on Social Security Privatization" in 1995.) Bush himself used the term. So did Karl Rove.
Late last year, though, Republican polls found that the public reacted far more favorably to "personal" accounts than to "private" accounts. So, overnight, they banished talk of "privatization" and "private accounts," accusing any journalist who dared use the phrase that they themselves had used mere weeks before of insidious bias. When a reporter asked about "privatization" earlier this year, Bush scolded: "You mean the personal savings accounts? We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions." A reporter told PR Week magazine that the White House staff informed him that if he wrote "privatization," "you have signaled you're against the White House."
Under this sustained barrage, the media have slowly retreated. In the first stage, news reports began alternating the two terms. (NBC's Tim Russert went a step further, adopting his own phrase, "private personal accounts.") This exquisite show of evenhandedness ignored the fact that one phrase was commonly used by both sides for years on end, while the other had been cooked up weeks before by a partisan pollster.
The press ought to call Bush's bluff. Let him fill the press room with Gannon/Guckert sycophants while real journalists get back to reporting facts.
Feeling safer yet?
Mark Morford from the San Fran Chronicle blasts "BushCo" for canceling the release of its antiterrorism report when the data--excuse me--the facts didn't suit the neocons. Seems 2004 was a banner year for violent jihad:
BushCo kills what they do not like and fudges negative data where they see fit and completely rewrites whatever the hell they want, and that includes bogus WMD reports and CIA investigations and dire environmental studies and scientific proofs about everything from evolution to abortion and pollution and clean air, right along with miserable unemployment data and all manner of research pointing up the ill health of the nation, the spirit, the world.
In other words, if BushCo doesn't like what comes out of their own hobbled agencies and their own funded studies, they do what any good dictatorship does: They annihilate it. Now that's good gummint!
Let's be clear: The obliteration of the National Counterterrorism Center report merely goes to prove what so many of us already know -- that BushCo's brutish and borderline traitorous actions since they leveraged 9/11 to blatantly screw the nation have done exactly nothing to stem the tide of terrorism -- and, in fact, have, by most every measure, apparently increased the threat of terrorism. In other words, the world is a more dangerous place because of George W. Bush. Is that clear enough?
More fudging
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jay Bookman raises the same point of Bush trying to control perceptions by drawing curtains across unpleasant facts, not just with the Global Terrorism Report:
[Canceling the terrorism report] fits a pattern. When the number of mass layoffs announced around the country began to be a political problem, the Bush Labor Department simply stopped collecting that data.
When governors complained about inadequate funding, citing a document called "Budget Information for States," the White House stopped publishing that document, too. Spokesman Trent Duffy said at the time that the change was necessary to reduce the cost of "paper and producing another volume."
These days, more than two years into the Iraq war, the Bush administration still refuses to include the mounting costs of the war in its official budget, insisting that it be treated as an emergency expenditure. That way, the cost of the war isn't included in the official estimate of the federal budget deficit.
But Bookman asserts that a government that tries to "create its own reality" is not a strength, it is a sign of this administration's weakness:
If the money spent in Iraq isn't reflected in the official deficit figures, does that somehow make our budget reality any better?
If there are no pictures of dead American soldiers being returned to this country for burial, did they not really die?
If the White House promises Congress that a new Medicare drug benefit will cost no more than $400 billion -- and threatens to fire government analysts if they tell the truth, that the real cost will be closer to $530 billion -- does that mean taxpayers won't have to pay the bill of $720 billion, which is the latest reality-based estimate?
If study after study proves that abstinence-only education doesn't work and may actually backfire, can we pretend away the increased number of pregnancies, abortions and cases of HIV likely to result?
Romney poll numbers dropping
The Boston Globe's Scot Lehigh has been criticizing Massachusetts Guv Mitt Romney's flirtation with a White House bid, and now he has poll numbers to back him up:
If you don't think Mitt Romney made a mistake by testing the presidential waters earlier this year, check out these new polling numbers from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.
Question: Does Romney deserve to be reelected governor or is it time for a change? Deserves to be reelected: 33 percent. Time for a change: 50 percent.
By way of comparison, in a UMass-Lowell poll in late January, a few weeks before Romney went off to dip his toe in the presidential pool, 43 percent wanted to see him serve a second term, while 49 percent thought it was time for a change.
A 10-point decline marks a troubling slide for an incumbent who, despite his interest in running nationally, hasn't ruled out seeking a second term as governor next year. Here's another sign of trouble: Romney has slid to the mid-30s when matched against both possible Democratic opponents. In a hypothetical head-to-head against Attorney General Thomas Reilly, Reilly wins 44 percent to Romney's 36. In the last UMass-Lowell survey, the race was basically tied, at 45 percent for Reilly to 41 for Romney.
What went wrong? Self-inflicted alienation by making high-profile speeches out of state to conservative GOP audiences and ripping his own state's liberal voters.
The political damage is clear. To be sure, though Romney's polling decline has weakened his standing, his situation is hardly terminal should he decide to seek a second term. Still, the governor is fast learning the same thing that Democrats Mike Dukakis and John Kerry previously discovered: When you're from Massachusetts, it's no small balancing act to stay viable both at home and nationally.
Passing the buck on health care
Paul Krugman continues his series on health care reform with a look at one of--if not the biggest--factors in the disparity between the high price Americans pay for health care and the low return we get for our money:
The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don't appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it?
An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills.
According to the World Health Organization, in the United States administrative expenses eat up about 15 percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both public and private insurance are similar in other countries - but because we rely much more heavily than anyone else on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher.
Much of that 15 percent consists of the efforts by the private insurers to avoid the risk of sicker, "pre-existing condition" patients. If those patients don't have ready access to health care, they get sicker, take their problems to an emergency room and ultimately cost much more money.
Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.
Why do we put up with such an expensive, counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution.
This Krugman dude just keeps getting better and better! And he promises more on health care, so stay tuned.
Invasive species threaten Earth
No, I'm not referring to the latest Tom Cruise action flick, but today's Earth Day contribution from Discover editor Alan Burdick on the threat posed by species that aggressively invade alien ecosystems, with assistance from humankind:
Far from the minds of the founders of Earth Day 35 years ago, invasive species are a new kind of threat, wrought by nature against nature itself - albeit with an assist from humankind. The hazards of pollution and habitat destruction are comparatively easy to grasp. Invasive species impose a different variety of environmental changes - often subtle and slow to manifest, hard to forecast and challenging to combat.
At any given moment some 35,000 ships large and small are at sea, bearing our wants and needs - petroleum, corn feed, wood chips, automobiles - from one port to another. Ballast water is essential to that motion. Taken on to aid stability and propulsion, ballast water does for the modern cargo ship what sandbags do for a hot-air balloon. Unfortunately, it can also carry comb jellies from the East Coast to the Black Sea, Japanese sea stars to Australia, and voracious green crabs from Europe to San Francisco Bay.
Burdick mentions one example close to my Chicago home: the zebra mussel, which hitched a ride from Asia via ballast water in the 80's and is now overwhelming native species from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
The good news is that a bipartisan (you remember that word, bipartisan, right?) group of legislators is introducing a bill that will begin to provide funds and regulations to address this issue.
Daily cartoon
From Atlanta C-J's Mike Luckovich: