Shocked, I am Shocked!

From today's Washington Post. My guess is that the scientists who conducted this study probably also believe in evolution.

Praying for other people to recover from an illness is ineffective, according to the largest, best-designed study to examine the power of prayer to heal strangers at a distance.

The study of more than 1,800 heart-bypass patients found that those who had people praying for them had as many complications as those who did not. In fact, one group of patients who knew they were the subject of prayers fared worse.

The long-awaited results, the latest in a series of studies that have not found any benefit from "distant" or "intercessory" prayer, came as a blow to those hoping scientific research would validate the popular notion that people can influence others' health, even if the sick do not know that someone is praying for them.

Although many studies have suggested that praying for oneself may reduce stress, research into praying for others who may not know they are the subject of prayers has been much more controversial. Several studies that claimed to show a benefit have been criticized as deeply flawed. And several of the most recent findings have found no benefit.

The new $2.4 million study, funded primarily by the John Templeton Foundation, was designed to overcome some of those shortcomings. Dusek and his colleagues divided 1,802 bypass patients at six hospitals into three groups. Two groups were uncertain whether they would be the subject of prayers. The third was told they would definitely be prayed for.

The researchers recruited two Catholic groups and one Protestant group to pray "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for 14 days for each patient, beginning the night before the surgery, using the patient's first name and the first initial of the last name.

Over the next month, the two groups that were uncertain whether they were the subject of prayers fared virtually the same, with about 52 percent of patients experiencing complications regardless of whether they were the subject of prayers.

Surprisingly, 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for experienced complications.

Blue States

As seen today in Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Exit Strategy

We have created a mess in Iraq. We’ve freed a country persecuted by a brutal dictator and made it into a haven for terrorism and the training of jihadis. The Iraqis are living with a deteriorating infrastructure and facing a civil war, if what occurs daily isn’t one already. The costs to the US have been catastrophic. The major issue facing us is to determine whether we stay or go. The question is whether our presence is the only thing keeping Iraq from falling into complete chaos: will Iraq change from being Bleeding Kansas to Antietam? Or is our presence the catalyst that motivates the insurgency while allowing Iraqi politicians to act like politicians rather than statesmen feeling they are not accountable because they are not in control?

As much as I disdain the reasons that brought us into Iraq – false or misleading arguments ignoring reality, belief that a war would serve Bush’s re-election chances, and a desire to spend US resources so that they could then deny domestic programs not aimed at business or the rich, I believe precipitously pulling out of Iraq without creating a chance for the country to survive and succeed is wrong.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, and an articulate and knowledgeable foreign policy observer, proposed a four point program leading to our withdrawal that merits discussion. It puts stability in the region as the main goal instead of our fanciful claim of bringing freedom to the Middle East. It is promulgated by Iraqis and other interested parties and gets us out of being the sole actor trying to resolve the crisis without leaving a dangerous vacuum. Since Bush yesterday said that it would be up to subsequent president’s to get us out of Iraq this discussion will probably not happen within this administration.

In responding to a question from Margaret Warner on Monday’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Brzezinski said:

I think the benefits [to the US] have been, in fact, very few, beyond the obvious one: the removal of Saddam Hussein. But we have undermined our international legitimacy. That's a very high cost to a superpower.

We have destroyed our credibility; no one believes anything the president says anymore. We have tarnished our morality with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. These are phenomenal costs. And there's, of course, blood and money and tens of thousands of Iraqi killed.

So, in my view, the time has come to face all of this, to realize that staying for a prolonged period of time until some ephemeral victory is not the solution. It is time to leave.

And I think a four-point program could be implemented that would permit us to leave in a fashion that would not be a debacle: Ask the Iraqi government to ask us to leave, first of all. And some would ask us. Some have already asked us, in fact.

Secondly, concert with the Iraqi government on the date of our departure, so it's a joint decision, I would think in about a year.

Third, the Iraqi government then convenes a conference of neighbors, Muslim neighbors, who are interested in continued stability in Iraq and in helping to prevent a civil war from exploding.

And fourth, arrange a donors conference for the recovery of Iraq. We could do that. I think we'd be better off if we did it; otherwise we're stuck, and this is getting worse and worse. The region is becoming more destabilized and hostile to us.

Lest We Forget

Monday in a speech in Cleveland, President Bush talked about how optimistic he is about Iraq. The day before, Ayad Allawi, the former Iraqi Prime Minister said, "We are losing each day an average of 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is". In his speech, Bush touted the success in the town of Tall Afar and the lessons learned over the past three years. Today’s Washington Post discussed how the insurgents are returning to Tall Afar and how killings of Shia and Sunni inhabitants are on the rise.

This is a difficult conundrum. Who do you believe? The President of the US or a former Iraqi official living in Iraq? Bush or the Post? While wrestling with this difficult decision, I heard a report on yesterday’s NPR Morning Edition by Mike Schuster. It consisted of a series of public statements made by administration officials during the 13 months prior to the Iraq invasion in March 2003 and one on an aircraft carrier two months after the start of the war. Thinking that these might help in resolving the above problem, they are printed below. For the record, these are actual quotes, not paraphrases.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They can provide these arms to terrorists giving them the means to match their hatred.
President Bush in the January 2002 State of the Union Address

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies, and against us.
Vice President Cheney August 2002

We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Condileeza Rice Summer 2002

We know he’s been absolutely devoted to try to acquire nuclear weapons and we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.
Cheney Summer 2002

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
Bush Summer 2002

Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime’s good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble.
Bush September 2002 Speech to UN

We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making, in poisons, in deadly gasses. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high level contacts that go back a decade. Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one senior Al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year.
Bush October 2002 Prime-time speech

We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of Al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time. We know too that several of the detainees, in particular some high ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to Al Qaeda in chemical weapons development.
Rice Fall 2002

We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members including some that have been in Baghdad. We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior level contacts going back a decade and of possible chemical and biological agent training.
Donald Rumsfeld Fall 2002

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein has recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapon production. Saddam Hussein has not creditably explained these activities.
Bush January 2003 State of the Union address after UN inspectors had been in Iraq for three months without finding any WMD

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources, These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions backed up by solid intelligence.
Colin Powell February 2003 Speech to UN

I don’t think it is likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.
Cheney March 2003 on Meet the Press in response to a Russert question about what would happen if Iraqis saw us as conquerors

Your courage, your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other, made this day possible. Because of you our nation is more secure. Because of you the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.
Bush May 2005 Mission Accomplished speech

Finding that these quotations shed some light on whether any statement from this administration can be accepted at face value, and being in a quotation citing mood, I’ve turned to one of my favorite books The Oxford Book of Aphorisms for a few more apposite thoughts.

How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
Karl Kraus 1909

Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.
Machiavelli 1521-5

Stupidity does not consist in being without ideas. Such stupidity would be the sweet, blissful stupidity of animals, molluscs, and the gods. Human stupidity consists in having lots of ideas, but stupid ones. Stupid ideas with banners, hymns, loudspeakers and even tanks and flame-throwers as their instruments of persuasion, constitute the refined and only really terrifying form of Stupidity.
Henry de Montherlant 1930-44

People often manifest a diseased desire to express their will. A theory is adopted, not because the facts force it upon them, but because its adoption shows their power.
Mark Rutherford 1910

The province of philosophy is not so much to prevent calamities as to demonstrate that they are blessings when they have taken place.
Ernest Bramah 1928

The common excuse of those who bring misfortune on others is that they desire their good.
Vauvenargues 1746

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber 1940

US Terror Strategy

President Bush released an updated report on the US Terror Strategy yesterday. It reaffirms the doctrine of preventive war against terrorists and hostile states who have WMD. The key phrase from the report describes the report as “idealistic about goals and realistic about means." If only this were true. This administration has followed the exact opposite policy. We invaded Iraq based on idealistic visions of being met in the streets by flower throwing Iraqis. We ignored hard evidence of a society that had only avoided Civil War because of Saddam’s brutal rule and we spent no time planning the post-war administration of an entire country.

This administration also reversed the Clinton approach to dealing with the world. Clinton said we would work with our allies whenever we could and go alone whenever we had to. In contrast, the Bush policy was to do it ourselves whenever we could and rely on allies whenever we had to.

We now are faced with a real threat - unlike Iraq - from Iran, North Korea, and fanatical Islamists. But we are mired in Iraq, deeply in debt, and will be greatly strained if we have to marshal resources if escalation occurs in any of those areas. We’ve also managed to make it very difficult for our foreign friends to convince their people that following the lead of the US is wise, so although we now need our allies our ability to attract them is limited.

More Dubai

Admittedly watching President Bush getting beat up on this issue is agreeable. Half my readers disagree with my position, but I still can’t stay away from this subject. And so I am calling in heavyweight support and posting Thomas Friedman’s column in today’s NY Times. (P.S. Friedman’s second sentence does not apply to the Bush League reading public.)

When it came to the Dubai ports issue, the facts never really had a chance — not in this political season. Still, it's hard to imagine a more ignorant, bogus, xenophobic, reckless debate than the one indulged in by both Republicans and Democrats around this question of whether an Arab-owned company might oversee loading and unloading services in some U.S. ports. If you had any doubts before, have none now: 9/11 has made us stupid.

We don't need any more pre-9/11 commissions. We need a post-9/11 commission, one that looks at all the big and little things we are doing — from sanctioning torture to warrantless wiretaps to turning our embassies abroad into fortresses — that over time could eat away at the core DNA of America.

What is so crazy about the Dubai ports issue is that Dubai is precisely the sort of decent, modernizing model we should be trying to nurture in the Arab-Muslim world. But we've never really had an honest discussion about either the real problems out there or the real solutions, have we?

The real problem was recently spelled out by an Arab-American psychiatrist, Dr. Wafa Sultan, in a stunning interview with Al Jazeera. Speaking about the Arab-Muslim world, Dr. Sultan said: "The clash we are witnessing ... is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on the other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings."

The Jazeera host then asked: "I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?" Dr. Sultan: "Yes, that is what I mean."

Dr. Sultan voiced truths that many Muslims know: their civilization is, in many places, in turmoil, falling further and further behind the world in science, education, industry and innovation, while falling deeper and deeper into the grip of crackpot clerics, tin-pot dictators, violent mobs and madmen like bin Laden and Saddam.

President Bush keeps talking about Iraq and the Arab world as if democracy alone is the cure and all we need to do is get rid of a few bad apples. The problem is much deeper — we're dealing with a civilization that is still highly tribalized and is struggling with modernity. Mr. Bush was right in thinking it is important to help Iraq become a model where Arab Muslims could freely discuss their real problems, the ones identified by Dr. Sultan, and chart new courses. His crime was thinking it would be easy.

I don't know how Iraq will end, but I sure know that we aren't going to repeat the Iraq invasion elsewhere anytime soon. Yet the need for reform in this region still cries out. Is there another way? Yes — nurturing internally generated Arab models for evolutionary reform, and one of the best is Dubai, the Arab Singapore.
Dubai is not a democracy, and it is not without warts. But it is a bridge of decency that leads away from the failing civilization described by Dr. Sultan to a much more optimistic, open and self-confident society. Dubaians are building a future based on butter not guns, private property not caprice, services more than oil, and globally competitive companies, not terror networks. Dubai is about nurturing Arab dignity through success not suicide. As a result, its people want to embrace the future, not blow it up.

What's ironic is that if Democrats who hate the Bush war in Iraq actually had a peaceful alternative policy for promoting transformation in the Arab-Muslim world, it would be called "the Dubai policy": supporting internally driven Arab engines of change.

That's why Arab progressives are stunned by our behavior. As an Arab businessman friend said to me of the Dubai saga: "This deal has left a real bad taste in many mouths. I mean this was Dubai, for God's sake! You could not have a better friend and more of a symbol of globalization and openness. If they are a security danger to the U.S., then who is not?"

So whatever happens with the Iraq experiment — but especially if it fails — we need Dubai to succeed. Dubai is where we should want the Arab world to go. Unfortunately, we just told Dubai to go to hell.

Mark Shields

Mark Shields on NPR’s March 13, 2006 Morning Edition - This I Believe series of personal statements:

I believe in politics. In addition to being great fun, politics is basically the peaceable resolution of conflict among legitimate competing interests.

In a continental nation as big and brawling and diverse as ours, I don't know how else -- except through politics -- we can resolve our differences and live together. Compromise is the best alternative to brute muscle or money or raw numbers. Compromises that are both wise and just are crafted through the dedication, the skill and, yes, the intelligence of our elected politicians.

I like people who run for public office. For most of us, life is a series of quiet successes or setbacks. If you get the big promotion, the hometown paper announces your success. It doesn't add, "Shields was passed over because of unanswered questions about his expense account" or "his erratic behavior at the company picnic."

But elections have been rightly described as a one-day sale. If you're a candidate, your fate is front-page news. By 8 o'clock on a Tuesday night, you will experience the ecstasy of victory or you will endure the agony of defeat. Everybody you ever sat next to in study hall, double-dated with or baby-sat for knows whether you won or, much more likely, lost. Politicians boldly risk public rejection of the kind that the rest of us will go to any lengths to avoid.

Having worked on four losing presidential campaigns earlier in my life and having covered the last seven as a journalist, I admire enormously the candidate able to face defeat with humor and grace. Nobody ever conceded defeat better than Dick Tuck who, upon losing a California state senate primary, said simply, "The people have spoken…the bastards."

But I believe in politicians who are courageous. The first time I ever slept in the same quarters with African-Americans or took orders from African-Americans was at Parris Island in Marine Corps boot camp, and it was the political courage of one man, President Harry Truman, who ended the racial segregation of the U.S. military because he believed that fairness is at the heart of our values as a nation.

I admired the courage, too, of Ronald Reagan. In 1978, after voter initiatives discriminating against gays had prevailed in Miami, St. Paul and Eugene, Ore., a conservative-backed ballot measure in California to ban homosexuals from teaching in the state's public schools was favored to win until Ronald Reagan made the difference by campaigning successfully against it.

I believe in the politics that wrote the GI Bill, that passed the Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-devastated Europe, that saved the Great Lakes and that through Social Security took want and terror out of old age. The kind of politics that teaches us all we owe to those who came before us and those who will come after. That each of us has drunk from wells we did not dig; that each of us has been warmed by fires we did not build.

At their worst, politicians -- like the rest of us -- can be petty, venal and self-centered. But I believe politics, at its best, can help to make ours a world where the powerful are truly more just and the poor are more secure.

What a contrast from the avowed policy of the Bush Administration. Their goal was too win the election with 50.01% of the vote and govern as if the 49.99% don’t exist. Winning in a landslide was considered undesirable because they would then have had to compromise their agenda. And so we now have a President of the Republican Base rather than a President of the United States.

Goodbye Dubai

After criticizing Congress’s reaction to the Dubai ports deal (and the administration’s incompetence in supporting its position), I received some astute criticism from a reader that led me to reconsider and started me thinking about issuing a mea culpa. But fortunately procrastination carried the day and I did nothing. Now that Dubai Ports World is trying to extricate itself, and Republicans are falling over themselves trying to end their disagreement with President Bush, I’ve concluded that I was right to begin with.

This whole fiasco is purely politics. None of the politicians can think beyond the immediate political gain of being for “security” and by implication against the Arabs. If the situation is looked at with some disinterestedness, a number of questions arise that no one is considering.

Who operates American ports today?
Almost always large foreign companies usually aligned with the ship operators who also are rarely American owned.

If Dubai Ports World has to sell (or transfer) the American operation, what American company will be able to purchase it and have the experience to operate the ports?
Apparently there is only one American company, located in Seattle, in the top ten companies running American ports. They are a family-owned business and might be stretched beyond their capability if they have to add on New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, and New Orleans.

What message does this action send to the world?
The same one killing the Chinese oil deal last year did. We are all for globalization as long as it benefits us. We don’t like foreigners, especially from the Middle East. We’ll just blindly ignore our immense deficit, even though most of it is funded by these same countries we are stopping from investing in the US. If Dubai is insulted by our actions, and decides to make its planned large purchase of airliners from Airbus, rather than from Boeing – well we really hadn’t thought through the implications of our actions. Of course, we didn’t in Iraq so why should we start now.

Who is the enemy?
We can’t seem to figure that out with any kind of specificity. I thought it was Al Qaeda after 9/11 and still do. The Bush Administration thinks it is Iraq. Congress thinks it’s a company controlled by a friendly Arab country.

What is the real issue?
It’s Port Security! We have almost no security in our ports. Around 1% of the containers shipped into the US are inspected. The rest just get loaded onto trucks and shipped anywhere. These things are large enough to contain WMD of any description. Every knowledgeable person who has commented on this controversy has said port operation is the least concern of those worried about security.

Civil War in Iraq

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress today that despite a surge in sectarian violence in Iraq, the process of creating a stable government is proceeding satisfactorily. Rumsfeld was pressed to explain the U.S. military's plan to respond in the event that Iraq's sectarian violence grows into a full-fledged civil war. He said:

The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the — from a security standpoint — have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to.

“To the extent one were to occur”? Are these people living in a dream world? Maybe pre-war intelligence was vague and serves as an excuse for the terrible judgments made in bringing us into war and then failing to administer it in a way that would have avoided our current predicament. But we’ve been there for three years and ought to have a realistic view of what is happening in that country - and that is, at best, that the US military presence is the only buffer between an all-out Shia/Sunni civil war. It must be so ingrained after five years now that the Administration cannot bear to level with the American public but insists on painting a rosy picture to cover their actions or to justify their decisions later this year..

Robert F. Kaplan, writing in The New Republic on March 6, 2006 describes what is actually happening in Iraq. A few quotes give the flavor:

Not everything the U.S. enterprise touches here turns to gold. But everything it lets go of does seem to turn into dirt. With U.S. reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never fully restored to begin with, decays by the hour. Iraq's political arena, from which the Americans had no choice but to withdraw, has dissolved into something unrecognizable, carved up for sectarian advantage and without a center to keep its parts from spinning away. The insurgency continues to rage. Iraq's security forces still cannot operate on their own. And, as what was once a largely one-sided Sunni campaign of terrorism rapidly approaches something like parity (with the Shia taking up arms in their own defense), the likelihood of a civil war has surged.

As the war takes a sectarian turn, the United States begins to look, even to many Iraqis, like an honest broker, more peacekeeper than belligerent. Sheik Humam Hamoudi, one of Iraq's most powerful Shia and a leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), knows this better than most. And, although he complains that the Americans have placed undue restraints on the Shia-dominated security forces, he likens the effect of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq to "a child when he wants to walk and you ask him to play football." Absent the Americans, he says, Baghdad would be transformed into another Beirut.

Hundreds of miles to the west, in an Arabesque villa that rises out of the desert near the Syrian border, Sheik Abdullah Al Yawar--Hamoudi's mirror image in the Sunni community--echoes his concern. He worries that the same Iraqi security forces that Hamoudi claims the United States has muzzled operate with too little American oversight. He claims they have been running amok through his province, beating and arresting his constituents and chanting Shia slogans. "If the Americans leave," he warns, "there will be rivers of blood." In their own way, then, both sheiks see the U.S. military presence for exactly what it has become: a buffer--between Iraq's sects and between relative order and complete mayhem.

According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report published earlier this month, an interagency group of State Department, military, and contracting officials concluded that "critical infrastructure facilities constructed or rehabilitated under U.S. funding have failed, will fail, or will operate in sub-optimized conditions following handover to the Iraqis." Absent U.S. oversight, politicians from competing sects have transformed the ministries into personal fiefdoms.

If civil war comes to Iraq, it may be ignited as much by the [police] as by the insurgents. For Iraq's police are, to an extent not fully grasped in Washington, not police at all. As one of his parting acts in June 2004, CPA chief L. Paul Bremer signed Order 91, outlawing militias in Iraq. In response, thousands of Shia militiamen exchanged their street clothes for police uniforms. As they have gotten better at combating Iraq's Sunni guerrillas, the insurgency, at least in Baghdad and its southern outskirts, has weakened, with attacks declining since last fall. The only problem is that brutality is one of the tactics that achieved these results.

The Interior Ministry's extrajudicial antics first came to light last November, when U.S. troops stumbled across a torture chamber in Baghdad operated by Interior police. Every week brings more handcuffed and decomposed bodies discovered in garbage dumps, rivers, and hastily dug pits. "Scores of individuals are regularly detained in the middle of the night and without judicial warrant," a recent report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq says. "The rule of law continues to be challenged by the existence of militias and other groups who continue to act with impunity, confirming an urgent need for the State to assert control over its security forces." But these forces were never the state's to begin with. Unlike the Iraqi army, which operates in tandem with U.S. forces, the police recruit and operate locally, and, until recently, they did so largely free of U.S. supervision.

Just as the Americans create a buffer for Iraq's Shia by training and equipping their security forces to combat the insurgency, they're also building a buffer for Iraq's Sunnis, who increasingly rely on the U.S. military to keep those same forces in check. In areas like Salman Pak and Tall Afar, the once viscerally anti-American Sunni population has even turned to the Americans for protection.

At a base in central Iraq a few days earlier, two U.S. helicopters taxi to a halt near a C-130. The crew chiefs jump out and guide two rows of detainees, handcuffed and blindfolded, away from the prop blast. A detainee's fate, as I learned last year on stumbling across a similar scene in Baghdad, depends largely on his destination. The idea of prisoners begging to get into Abu Ghraib may seem like a stretch, but, more than anything else, they fear being turned over to the Iraqi security forces. They know the Americans probably won't kill them, and that, in all likelihood, they will be released in a few days.

The administration intends to draw down troop levels to 100,000 by the end of the year, with the pullback already well underway as U.S. forces surrender large swaths of the countryside and hunker down in their bases. The plan infuriates many officers, who can only say privately what noncommissioned officers say openly. "In order to fix the situation here," Sabre Squadron's Sergeant José Chavez says, "we need at least 180,000 troops." Iraq, however, will soon have about half that. An effective counterinsurgency strategy may require time and patience. But the war's architects have run out of both.

The Best and the Brightest

Kevin Warsh is a 35-year-old Harvard Law graduate. He worked for almost seven years at the investment banking firm Morgan Stanley in lower-level positions involving numerous rote tasks, such as overseeing the production of spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Warsh left Morgan Stanley in 2002 as an executive director, the level before one faces the critical sorting-out within the company's hierarchy. In 2002, Warsh married Jane Lauder, heiress to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune and daughter of longtime Republican contributor Ron Lauder ($165,000-plus to various Republican committees). That same year, he accepted a job on the staff of Bush's National Economic Council (NEC), where his portfolio included banking and financial market issues. His job there was to communicate the president's wishes throughout the government to all the relevant assistant secretaries in various Cabinet agencies and then synthesize their proposals.

Just another Bushie using his connections to be a part of the Bush Administration? Not by a long shot. In January 2006, President Bush nominated him to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Directors. No Ph.D. in Economics. Not only unknown to economists, but apparently not even remembered by officials in the Bush administration who would ostensibly have had contact with him.

Noam Schieber in the March 6, 2006 The New Republic concludes:

If you want to know what happens to an economy without a strong, independent central bank, just take a look at the economic performance of, say, Mexico over the last 30 years and see how you feel about it. Even the heyday of Reagan-era economic quackery didn't produce a Fed nominee as lacking in qualifications or experience as this one. The only way you appoint Kevin Warsh to a seat on the Federal Reserve board is if you have little respect for the practice of economic policy-making and you're not ashamed to admit it. But, then, we already knew that about George W. Bush.

Who Needs Liberals When Conservatives Will Do

Finding actions by the Bush Administration that are egregious, mean-spirited, misleading, and just plain wrong is an everyday occurrence. However, I realize that most of my sources are Democratic, or if you insist “liberal”. But we are not the only ones according to Dana Milbank in today’s Washington Post. Here are some extracts of comments from a forum conducted by the very conservative Cato Institute.

The first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett, author of the new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

Speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, author of the forthcoming "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back," called Bush "reckless" and "a socialist," and accused him of betraying "almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for."

Bartlett … began by predicting a big tax increase "to finance the inevitable growth of government that is in the pipeline that President Bush is largely responsible for." He also said many fellow conservatives don't know about the "quite dreadful" traits of the administration, such as the absence of "anybody who does any serious analysis" on policy issues.

Sullivan was on hand to second the critique. "This is a big-government agenda," he said. "It is fueled by a new ideology, the ideology of Christian fundamentalism." The bearded pundit offered his own indictment of Bush: "complete contempt" for democratic processes, torture of detainees, ignoring habeas corpus and a "vast expansion of the federal government."

"If Bush were running today against Bill Clinton, I'd vote for Clinton," Bartlett served.
"You have to understand the people in this administration have no principles," Sullivan volleyed. "Any principles that get in the way of the electoral map have to be dispensed with."

"The entire intellectual game has been given away by the Republican president," said Sullivan. "He's a socialist in so many respects, a Christian socialist."

Bartlett argued that Richard Nixon "is the model for everything Bush is doing." Sullivan said Karl Rove's political strategy is "pathetic." Bartlett said that "the administration lies about budget numbers."

"He is not a responsible human being; he is a phenomenally reckless human being," Sullivan proclaimed. "There is a level of recklessness involved that is beyond any ideology."

The Katrina Video

From today’s Washington Post:

Three days after Hurricane Katrina wiped out most of New Orleans, President Bush appeared on television and said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." His staff has spent the past six months trying to take back, modify or explain away those 10 words.

Given the lengthy time they spent trying to rationalize the 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about uranium in Africa, they should be highly experienced in this effort.

The release of a pre-storm video showing officials warning Bush during a conference call that the hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast posed a dire threat to the city and its levees has revived a dispute the White House had hoped to put behind it: Was the president misinformed, misspoken or misleading?

The video leaves little doubt that key people in government did anticipate that the levees might not hold. To critics, especially Democrats but even some Republicans, it reinforces the conclusion that the government at its highest levels failed to respond aggressively enough to the danger bearing down on New Orleans. To Bush aides, the seeming conflict between Bush's public statements and the private deliberations captured on tape reflects little more than an inartful statement opponents are exploiting for political purposes.

"This makes it perfectly clear once again that this disaster was not out of the blue or unforeseeable," said Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who has been critical of the handling of Katrina. "It was not only predictable, it was actually predicted. That's what makes the failures in response -- at the local, state and federal level -- all the more outrageous."

The Bush Presidency has been marred by repeated instances along these lines. It is increasingly difficult to believe that anything he says on any subject is accurate. The failure to admit error only exacerbates the situation. We now have a political environment in which half the population automatically discounts everything he says while the other half blindly accepts his every statement. Given the nationwide support Bush enjoyed following 9/11 this is a disheartening accomplishment.

Tom Toles in The Washington Post gets the final word:

Brazil Fights AIDS

Conservatives see the world as they would like it to be, rather than as it is, and use their political power to force their views on everyone . Sex is something that is supposed to happen within marriage (same-sex of course) and nothing should be allowed that will in any way encourage any other action So abstinence, rather than contraception, is the preferred policy. And they will pursue that stance in the face of its failure, regardless of the severe impact on people, whether that produces unwanted children or exposes people to illness and death. Today’s Washington Post reported on Brazil’s approach to countering AIDS.

A working partnership with prostitutes, [Brazilian] health officials say, is a key reason that the country's AIDS prevention and treatment programs are considered by the United Nations to be the most successful in the developing world. There are at least 600,000 people infected with HIV in Brazil -- but that is only half the number predicted by the World Bank a decade ago.

In Rio, free condoms were passed out like candy as part of a national goal to distribute 25 million of them before Carnival ended Tuesday. But the U.S. government strongly disapproves of such unorthodox methods. Two weeks ago, Brazil received a letter from USAID declaring the country ineligible for a renewal of a $48 million AIDS prevention grant. The United States requires all countries receiving AIDS funding help to formally state that prostitution is dehumanizing and degrading, and Brazil last year -- alone among AIDS aid recipients -- was unwilling to do that.

Brazil has more Roman Catholics than any other country, and the church at times voices mild complaints about the government's programs. But church leaders haven't pressed the issue. The idea of emphasizing abstinence as the basis of prevention efforts -- a stand the United States has officially adopted -- hasn't taken hold here.

"Brazil's sexual culture is very different from the puritanical tradition in the United States," said Sonia Correa, an AIDS activist in Rio who is also the co-chair of the International Working Group on Sexuality and Social Policy. "Our AIDS programs have also been radically different. The denial and the stigma that you find attached to sexual health issues in so many places isn't found in Brazil."

"It's strange, this attitude of the United States that says its way is the best, even in another culture that is completely different," said Gabriela Leite, 54, a former prostitute, who now runs an advocacy group for prostitutes. "If that's the way it's done in your culture, that's fine. But it's different here, and we'll do it our way."

When asked if she believes such an approach is a better way to battle AIDS than promoting abstinence, she said she was certain of it. She also said she has made a point of trying to persuade activists and officials in other countries to join Brazil in refusing to go along with U.S. ground rules, even if the United States is easily the biggest provider of funding help in the world.

Supporting prostitution is not the issue. Thinking our policies will change this fact of life is fantasy. But pursuing this conservative agenda to the extent that we will stop support for a program that has proven its success in decreasing AIDS is shameful and becomes another example of how the Bush Administration has diminished our image throughout the world..

Mine Safety Regulation

From today’s NY Times another in the continuing series of how the Bush Administration fails to exercise its regulatory responsibility in order to favor business interests at the expense of working people’s lives.

In its drive to foster a more cooperative relationship with mining companies, the Bush administration has decreased major fines for safety violations since 2001, and in nearly half the cases, it has not collected the fines, according to a data analysis by The New York Times. Federal records also show that in the last two years the federal mine safety agency has failed to hand over any delinquent cases to the Treasury Department for further collection efforts, as is supposed to occur after 180 days.

With the deaths of 24 miners in accidents in 2006, the enforcement record of the Mine Safety and Health Administration has come under sharp scrutiny, and the agency is likely to face tough questions about its performance at a Senate oversight hearing on Thursday.

"The Bush administration ushered in this desire to develop cooperative ties between regulators and the mining industry," said Tony Oppegard, a top official at the agency in the Clinton administration. "Safety has certainly suffered as a result." [An agency official] said delinquent cases had not moved to the Treasury Department since 2003 because of computer problems. He could not say when the problems would be corrected.

Also troubling, critics say, is that fines are regularly reduced in negotiations between mine operators and the agency. From 2001 to 2003, more than two-thirds of all major fines were cut from the original amount that the agency proposed. Before the January disaster at the Sago Mine near here, where 12 miners died, the operator had been cited 273 times since 2004. None of the fines exceeded $460, roughly one-thousandth of 1 percent of the $110 million net profit reported last year by the current owner of the mine, the International Coal Group.

Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said changes in the law were vital but so were changes in the agency. "If you don't have enforcement along with a strong law, then you don't have a law," Mr. Roberts said. "The current agency mentality is to cooperate with mine operators rather than watchdog them, and safety suffers as a result."

National Weather Service To Give Hurricanes Full Names

From The Onion Weekly Dispatch 2-27-06

SILVER SPRING, MD—The National Weather Service announced Friday that, in response to the increasing number of hurricanes, it is revising its naming system. "The hundreds of hurricanes we expect in the North Atlantic in 2006 will receive both proper and surnames," Max Mayfield of the weather service said. "In fact, tropical storms Alberto Fergus, Beverly Stenwick-Brown, and Chris Stubbs Jr. have already received names under the new system." After all possible first and last names are exhausted, storms will be given titles, beginning with Hurricane Assistant Accounts Manager Alexander Epps, CPA.