Time for a new hobby?

I have no problems with time consuming and non-lucrative hobbies; blogging has become that for me --- a very enjoyable hobby with some great colleagues and lots of ideas. As a blogger I started off at thirty readers a day in the first couple of months to 1,000 readers a day, on average here, and have been successful in achieving some of my goals with blogging. It is enjoyable and rewarding, so I'll continue it.

It seems that Republican Jim Oberweis needs to conduct a review of his hobby of running for office -- it seems very stressful, expensive and unsuccessful, from the Chicago Tribune....

Rookie candidate Bill Foster scored a comfortable victory over Republican dairyman Jim Oberweis, who lost his fourth high-profile contest in six years, after an expensive and highly negative contest. [emphasis mine]

I recommend gardening or beer stein collecting, much more relaxing than losing races for office

Fungibility, food stamps and second best choices

While discussing the counter-cyclical empircal nature of the disability and early retirement systems with Gary Farber a couple of months ago, he discussed the road blocaks that are in the way of successfully navigating SSI disability. One of those road blocks is a very high initial claim rejection rate followed by a lengthy and potentially expensive appeals process that overwhelmingly produces approval for claims. He posited that this is a feature, and not a bug of the system:

"It seems to me a system set up for failure."

It's the basic model for most American welfare/aid systems: the goal is to be dysfunctional and inadequate enough to keep out/drive out most of the people who need it, so as to bring/keep down costs and juke the stats,

Poorly designed, difficult to navigate and unpredictable are a common complaint of the American social safety net. Private charity providers have the right to turn anyone away, providers funded by local governments are pro-cyclical in that they have money when the need is below trend and are making cuts when needs are above trend, and the federal system has been under a sustained thirty year ideological and management assault.

Programs very seldom are designed in first best manners. They are political compromises and reflections of values and beliefs that do not hold operational effectiveness or efficiency as an ultimate objective. American social welfare policy has long been colored by the dichotomy of the 'deserving or undeserving poor'. The deserving poor within this framework are those who are poor due to non-moral failure of their own; the crippled, the elderly, the young, the infirm, the cyclically or short term structurally unemployed. The undeserving poor are those who 'choose' to be poor through a moral or practical personal failing and thus do not deserve aid.

I agree in a Policy 101 manner with Megan McCardle that the most economically efficient anti-poverty program is cash straight up. Cash is fungible, it is widely accepted at a predictable par value, and it can be spent on almost anything. As Mona at Unqualified Offerings noted, non-cash offerings that are restricted stores of value and exchange such as food stamps can not be universally used; " I was forbidden by law from trading any of that value for things I required much more, like blood pressure meds, or gas money." Yes, there is definately a black market that is accessible to those who have good social connections within this mileau that can transform a given value of food stamps into a lesser value of cash, but food stamps are restricted money substitutes.

But let's go back to the American obsession with the deserving and undeserving poor for a moment and see if there is any plausible political demogaugic point that could be used against a pure cash outlay to the poor. Why we only have to go back to 1996 and see the effective railings against AFDC and its cash payment system to what a majority of the American political universe saw as too many 'undeserving poor.' Ronald Reagan ran successfuly on 'welfare queens in Cadillacs' who supposedly took cash payments through fraud and misused them. Cash payments of any sort to the poor are very prone to political risk.

So we enter the universe of second best choices if the intent of a program is to alleviate some of the effects of poverty and deal with a constrained choice that has a chance to gather significant political support. There are two basic options; the first is similiar to the stimulas option that is going through the House right now, make any program that aids the poor overwhelmingly aid the middle class and median voter. The cash rebates that are being debated will not be targeted to cash, credit and liquidity constrained individuals where there would be actual stimulas, but towards the middle class, and they are coming out of income tax base amounts and not the FICA tax base amounts. This is popular, but extremely expensive with minimal effectiveness in achieving the desired policy end on the basis of dollars spent or foregone. The other option is to restrict the fungibility of a near cash grant and target those benefits to the people who need them. And thus we have the idea behind food stamps and Section 8 vouchers.

We live in a constrained world where Pareto efficiencies, Pareto improvements, explict program outcomes, effectiveness and efficiencies are not the ultimate values that guide our decision making. Yes, Policy 101 is a useful tool set of basic bullshit detection, but we live in a complicated world where first best alternatives seldom present itself as the restricting assumptions that we make in Policy 101 do not hold in reality. Second best choices are often the best choices that we can make.

Wisdom of acting stupid -- Updated

Publius at Obsidian Wings is disappointed in Mitt Romney's decision to contort himself into a vaguely plausible caricature of an acceptable candidate to the GOP primary electorate, or at least a plurality there-of. I think Romney is making a smart straetgic decision within the context of an intermediate term losing dynamic for national Republicans.

Romney is a BS artist doesn’t bother me per se. I’m a political junkie – verbal excrement is a passion. With Romney though, it’s not merely that he’s full of crap. It’s the particular nature of his full-of-crapness that bothers me – that really bothers me.

To riff from Ross Douthat, Romney deserves more intense scorn because he’s one giant opportunity cost. He’s clearly the most competent, wonkish, technocratic, and I would even say smartest candidate. The now disillusioned Douthat claimed he could have been the “thinking conservative’s candidate.” Coming from what Bush lovingly calls Taxachusetts, he had the potential to be a compelling “purple” candidate in an election where purple seems to be chic.....

Romney’s actions make it clear that he thinks GOP voters are slobbering idiots. His mindless nationalism and phony idiocy seem more appropriate for Stephen Colbert than for a serious presidential candidate.

The Republican base does not want competent right of center technocrats, they do not want to look at healthcare access and affordability through any lense other than tax cuts/expenditures, and the base thinks Iraq was, is and will remain a good idea and template for future US foreign policy. There is no space in the Republican field for the candidate that Publius wants to see.

Instead this is symptom of the positive feedback loop that I have been keeping an eye on.

the non-Southern, non-movement conservative caucus in the 2009 Congress looks to be miniscule. The internal dynamics will produce leadership elections of hard liners and bomb throwers for a couple of cycles, marginalizing the party nationally and further increasing the institutional power of resource extraction, social and political reactionaries within their own caucus.

I was discussing the House Republican caucus in that post, but the basic dynamic is the same as the Republican circular firing squad forms up and starts blazing away. The internal base dampeners and shock absorbers either have been defeated in primary and general elections, defected to independents or Democrats, or have become marginalized and apathetic. Publius is expecting Romney to run and win the GOP nomination as a friendly to social conservatives Rockefeller Republican. That faction lost their fight in the Republican Party decades ago, and Romney is not an idiot in knowing that.

So pass the popcorn.

shamanic adds:

I saw on the news the other evening that Rush Limbaugh has been going after McCain and Huckabee as fake Republicans or something because they've been attracting independent and Democratic support. More evidence of circular firing squads and incredibly insular thinking. Democrats, meanwhile, are waging a very public battle between a candidate with firm appeal to much of the base and a candidate whose appeal stretches far beyond traditional Dem constituencies. This is an interesting race, and an interesting time for both parties.

UN Rights Envoy Suspects Gitmo Torture Cover-Up

By Cernig

Today, House Democrats voted to ban torture by U.S. interrogators and House Republicans voted to retain it.

Defying a White House veto threat, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to outlaw harsh interrogation methods, such as simulated drowning, that the CIA has used against suspected terrorists.

On a largely party line vote of 222-199, the Democratic-led House approved a measure to require intelligence agents to comply with the Army Field Manual, which bans torture in compliance with the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war.

The measure, part of a sweeping intelligence bill, passed amid a congressional probe into the recent disclosure that the CIA destroyed videotapes of al Qaeda suspects undergoing waterboarding, a simulated drowning.

Many countries, U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups have accused the United States of torturing terror suspects since the September 11 attacks.

President George W. Bush says the United States does not torture, but the administration will not disclose what interrogation methods it has approved for the CIA.

In threatening to veto the House-passed measure, which now awaits Senate action, the White House argued it would prevent the United States from conducting "lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists."

However, the UN's special envoy has a diferent opinion about whether these interrogations were lawful ,and said that he suspects the Bush administration knows it too.

A United Nations investigator said on Thursday he strongly suspected the CIA of using torture on terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, suggesting many were not being prosecuted to keep the abuse from emerging at trial.

On a visit to the U.S. detention centre in Cuba last week, Martin Scheinin, U.N. special rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism, attended a pre-trial hearing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver.

Scheinin said U.S. officials had told him that of the roughly 300 detainees currently held at Guantanamo, 80 were expected to face military trials for suspected crimes. Another 80 inmates had been cleared for release, he said.

No decision had been made to either prosecute or release the remaining 150, including many so-called "high value" detainees, he said. Some have been held six years without trial.

"There is not enough evidence that could be presented, even to a military commission chaired by a military judge. Partly there may not be evidence and partly the risk of issues of torture being raised is too high," Sheinin told a news briefing.

"Bringing them to court would bring to the court's attention the method through which the evidence, including the confessions, were obtained. So this is one further affirmation of the conclusion that the CIA or others have been involved in methods of interrogation that are incompatible with international law," he said.

Eighty out of over 800 detainees who have been held at Gitmo over the years are currently expected to come to trial. Over 500 have been released without charge by the U.S. So much for rightwing assumptions that everyone in Gitmo was a dangerous terrorist.

Scheinin, who is Professor of Constitutional and International Law at Åbo Akademi University and Director of the Institute for Human Rights also:

voiced concern at the recent revelation that the CIA had destroyed videotapes in 2005 that recorded al Qaeda suspects undergoing waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, which he said amounted to torture.

"The destruction of video tapes on CIA interrogations is one more argument that supports the contention that the CIA has been involved and continues to be involved in the use of interrogation techniques that violate the absolute prohibition against torture," he said.

Getting to 184 92 Yays

Spencer Ackerman at TPMMuckraker is digging a little bit deeper into the initial announcement on the Bush Legacy/Maliki self-preservation plans to establish permanent US bases and a small corps sized presence in Iraq for preserving the Maliki government after Bush is officially a dead duck and raises the ratification problem.

the Iraqi constitution stipulates that Iraq's parliament has to ratify any such agreement. And the Iraqi parliament is a lot more hostile to the idea of hosting U.S. troops indefinitely than the U.S. Senate is.

Take a look at Article 58, Section 4 of the Iraqi constitution. It stipulates that the Iraqi parliament shall ratify "international treaties and agreements by a two-thirds majority." ( UPDATE Cernig "just checked the Iraqi Constitution and I see no such provision. As far as I can tell, Maliki needs the support of a full 2/3rds of a simple quorum (1/2 of members actually in attendance)before the Parliament can approve Talibani to ratify a treaty. Then Talibani and both VPs (The Presidential Council) have to agree to do so. Maybe Maliki can convince the Sadrists and Sunnis to stay home that day..." So a combination of increased targetted violence, and inconvienent roadblocks would work) Whether or not President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki can finagle the deal so that it's not a treaty -- as Lute suggested yesterday -- it most certainly is an "agreement."

There is a legal, and customary way of avoiding the 2/3rds Senate ratification requirement for treaties, and that is by casting this agreement as an executive agreement. That just requires a 50%+1 majority in the House and Senate; C-SPAN illustrates the mechanics here:

An international agreement entered into by the President, outside of the treaty ratification process. To be implemented, it requires a simple majority vote of the House and Senate. Many agreements require subsequent implementing bills passed by both chambers before they can take force. Congress can express its opposition to any particular executive agreement by withholding the necessary implementing legislation....Recent examples of executive agreements include trade agreements, like NAFTA and GATT.

The relevant question is how does Maliki get to 184 "yays" if he wants to maintain the pretense of being a follower of the Iraqi constitution. The snarky question is how does he find less than 184 nay's.

The projected force of 50,000 to 80,000 US soldiers is there as both a tripwire force against any significant non-Turkish foreign incursions as the Iraqi Army remains designed to be a satrapy force, and as a counter-coup force. The five to ten US brigades would be the only politically loyal, reliable, and competent forces that Maliki can count on.

The Maliki government is currently being supported by a weak and disparate coalition of Kurdish parties, and the Shi'ite Dawa Party and SIIC/BADR Organization. The Kurdish parties are happy with an extraordinarily weak central government that does not have a monopoly on force as that allows the Kurds to possess de facto indepedence with a well organized and motivated militia force in the peshmerga. Badr seems to be losing in confrontations with the Sadrist JAM/Mahdi Army.

The US has done very little overtly to stop Turkish demonstrations against the Kurdish PKK, so I could see some Kurdish votes peeling off from Maliki's bare majority government right there. Both Sunni Arab nationalists, a/k/a the 'concerned local citizens' of the Anbar Awakening and the increasingly well organized Sadrist movement are strongly anti-US/anti-occupation. Since the entire point of permanent bases from the point of view of the weak Maliki government is to have a large US counterweight to the political/military power of both the Sadrists and Sunni Arabs, there are no votes for this proposal. So between some Kurds potentially peeling off, and the Sunni Arabs and Sadrists voting NO en bloc, that is the minimum blocking coalition before you start looking at other members of the 138 to 144 timeline for withdrawal bloc.

Even if this is seen as a fait accompli it won't accomplish much if one wants to believe the fiction that Iraq is a sovereign and constitutional nation

Hastert finally left

by shamanic

Last night. For real. And this time he meant it.

Sorry, his behavior is only annoying to politics geeks. If you aren't one and you're reading this, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who has hinted for months that he'll retire this year, retired effective 11:59pm last night and is no longer in office. Illinois will hold a special election on February 5 to fill the seat he vacates.

Dems Ensure Motion To Impeach Cheney Goes Nowhere (Updated)

By Cernig
Updated Below

According to The Swamp, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer will move to table Dennis Kucinich's to impeach Cheney on the basis that it would split the Democratic Party.

"[House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and I have both said impeachment is not on our agenda," Hoyer told reporters. "That does not make a judgment on that issue."

Kucinich, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has gathered 21 co-sponsors for the articles of impeachment that he first introduced in April. Seeing war with Iran on the horizon, the Ohio congressman now plans to reintroduce the measure this afternoon as a privileged resolution.

Kucinich alleges that Cheney misled Congress and the American public into the war in Iraq, and is trying now to mislead lawmakers and voters into a war with Iran.

"The Vice President is cherry-picking intelligence and selectively using facts in a manner that does not portray the complete picture," Kucinich said today in a statement. "The best option to prevent an unnecessary war with Iran is to impeach the Vice President, the lead cheerleader of the war."

Hoyer did not address the substance of the measure.

Hoyer has backing from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers who said ""If the speaker were to let this thing out of the box, considering the number of legislative issues we have pending, it could create a split that could effect our productivity for the rest of the Congress."

Like Republicans' recalcitrant, peevish obstructionism and a White House with a newly discovered fondness for the veto weren't already ending productivity already. Honestly, do any of these spineless clowns think they're going to be allowed to produce anything except rubberstamps for Republican wars while Bush and Cheney are still incumbents? Do none of them care that they're enabling criminals - not just to escape justice but to continue running their country?

Update For once, I agree with Captain Ed's conclusion on the Mukasky nomination (if not how he gets there). It fits perfectly to this issue too:

this exercise just confirms for the Democratic Party base that their Congress has assumed a mostly-supine position vis-a-vis George Bush. What an absurd piece of political theater. As Casey Stengel once said of the Mets, can't anyone in the Senate Democratic caucus play this game?

Indeed.

Update this one's an all-round victory for the Republicans. not only did the spineless wimp Hoyer indeed moved to table the resolution - and then got a shock as, half-way through the vote, Republicans started voting to force a debate and show up the spineless Dem reps for what they are - wimps without the courage to stand up for their convictions.

Midway through the vote, with instructions from the GOP leadership, Republicans one by one changed their votes from yes — to kill the resolution — to no, trying to force the chamber into a debate and an up-or-down vote on the proposal.

At one point there were 290 votes to table. After the turnaround, the final vote was 251-162 against tabling, with 165 Republicans voting against it.

"We're going to help them out, to explain themselves," said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. "We're going to give them their day in court."

Democrats countered by offering a motion to refer the proposal to the House Judiciary Committee for further study, effectively preventing a debate on the House floor. That motion passed by a largely party-line vote of 218-194.

where it will be quietly sunk without trace.

Cue massive hilarity and much back-slapping from Republican circles for making the Dem leadership jump through hoops so easily. As Captain Ed said earlier, "can't anyone in the Senate Democratic caucus play this game?"

Only 84 Dems voted against tabling then. I would like to thank them for some gumption on this issue. I'd also like to endorse Kevin Hayden's idea that the netroots "muster a chunk of change for Kucinich to send a message of approval to our Congressional leaders".

(Here's Kuchinich' speech today on his congressional website.)

Update 2 I just have to share this graphic, via Matt at Comments and originally from Democracy In Action. Says it all.

Senate 2008 Looking Better

With the announcement that Rep. Davis (R-VA-11) is dropping out of the Virginia Senate race, the field of seats that are strongly leaning to flipping to Democrats has doubled to two seats. Assuming no Macaca incidents, Virginia and New Hampshire are strongly positioned to flip to the Democrats, while Louisiana is the only state where a straight-faced argument can be made that the seat is favorted to flip to the Republican challenger.

Libby immediately before me raises an interesting point on these two seats from a liberal/progressive activist perspective ---- what type of Democrats will Warner and Shaheen be in the Senate? And if they are going to be consistent defectors on core values, what is the value from an activist perspective of supporting this type of behavior?

To the best of my knowledge both Gov. Warner and Gov. Shaheen are moderate, liberal wonky technocrats who have a firmly developped sense of the wind. On most issues this should be more than sufficient from an activist point of view as appropriate application of pressure and benefits should produce results on wide population, low salience issues in most cases except perhaps telecommunications policy.

But I digress a bit. Right now even with an ineffecutal majority, and lousy message dissemination system, Democrats are still playing on the electoral offensive. South Dakota is the next likely battleground seat currently held by a Democratic Senator and with the improving health of Sen. Johnson, and the lack of a challenge by popular Republican Gov. Rounds, the threat is significantly lower than challenges being generated in Colorado and New Mexico that right now are toss-up/slightly leaning Democratic. Tough races that can be won in Blue States occur in Maine, Oregon and Minnesota, as well as potential corruption fueled opportunities in Alaska for an unanticipated and unusual pick-up. After that tier of toss-up/break-evens, Republicans finally get a couple of low probability chances to run against entrenched Democratic incumbents.

The same dynamic is playing out in the House. In the House, more and better candidates are being recruited by Democrats compared to Republican efforts, fewer current incumbents are retiring compared to both the GOP's retirement woes and historical trend.

So going back to the question raised by Libby, how do we get either 'good' Democrats who will vote, act, and operate to expand progressive issue space on their own personal or political instincts OR at least create a strong incentive structure to get the desired behavior? Or is this even remotely possible on a regular basis?

Hastert resigning?

by shamanic

There are reports this morning that former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has notified friends and colleagues of his intent to resign later this year. No reasons are given in the stories, but CNN quotes a GOP aide as saying that Hastert is just "done with being a member of Congress."

A dozen open GOP seats

by shamanic

CNN rightly notes that the spate of Republican retirements from the House may make it impossible for the GOP to make up ground it lost in 2006. It's obviously way too early to make predictions about most seats, but that's a lot of wind in the face for a congressional committee whose fundraising has been pretty lackluster of late.

House Dems surpass voting record

by shamanic

No link because the Post's blog interface is basically unusable, but yesterday one of its blogs reported that House Democrats had just held the 943rd vote of the year, surpassing the previous record for most votes held, which if memory serves, was in 1979.

They bested the 1995 GOP congress' record in mid-September. Just a note on your "do nothing congress", and further evidence that the GOP's blocking stance in the Senate has been overwhelmingly effective.