Category: Political

This is from an interview in Grist with Chris Mooney, author of the Republican War on Science. The interview has a great quote about the way that “he said/she said” journalism leaves the press open to puppetry by interested parties. The quote applies to any topic, not just the abuse of science. (I haven’t read Mooney’s book, so I don’t have an opinion on it).

Here’s my real fear when it comes to the press. Suppose there’s some mainstream scientific view that you want to set up a think tank to challenge — to undermine, to controversialize. Suppose further that you have a lot of money, as well as an interested and politically influential constituency on board with your agenda. In this situation, it seems to me that as long as you are clever enough, you should be able to set your political machine in motion and then sit back and watch the national media do the rest of your work for you. The press will help you create precisely the controversy that lies at the heart of your political and public relations strategy — and not only that. It will do a far better job than the best PR firm, and its services will be entirely free of charge.

The New York Times has the scoop on piles of suspicious findings in the $1.5 billion in Hurricane Katrina reconstruction contracts.
More than 80 percent of FEMA contracts were awarded without bidding or with limited competition. The largest deal was $568 million in contracts for debris removal landed by a Florida company that was a former lobbying client of Mississippi governer Haley Barbour. What better deal than to promote your lobbyist to have purchase signoff authority?
The second best deal is to have the buyer’s ex-boss be the lobbyist. Two contractors, the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton are represented by Joe M. Allbaugh, the retired head of FEMA who recommended his college buddy Brown to take over when he left to lobby for reconstruction contracts.
The contracting practices are starting to smell like fish in a freezer with the power out.
Meanwhile, Time hunts for more Mike Browns.

The Project on Government Oversight has been tracking the story.
The latest juicy tidbit: the administration’s top procurement official, David Safavian, had been working on developing contracting policies for the Katrina relief effort. He was arrested for obstructing an investigation by the GSA’s Office of Inspector General. Safavian allegedly helped lobbyist Jack Abramoff aquire GSA-controlled property the Washington, D.C., then lied about it to the investigators.
Laura Rozen is collecting reports on the Safavian investigation.

The Louisiana reconstruction has the potential to be a vast cesspool of corruption. Hopefully some investigative journalists smell one-in-a-lifetime muckracking opportunities and will be following the money.
Here’s one bad smell: “A bill introduced in the House [last week] by Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Tex.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) would waive rules for congressional notification of certain no-bid purchases”.
And another: The LA times reports that “Senior officials in Louisiana’s emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste, mismanagement and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina struck. And federal auditors are still trying to track as much as $60 million in unaccounted for funds that were funneled to the state from the Federal Emergency Management Agency dating back to 1998.”
One of the few good things about the D/R fingerpointing is that the Democrats will be keeping an eye on the Feds and the Republicans will be keeping an eye on the locals.

Yesterday, the House decided not consider an amendment to the Patriot Act which removed the secret searches of libraries. The measure that passed by bypartisan majority earlier today. The House bill extends the notorious Section 215 for 10 years, allowing the FBI to search business records, library records, bookstore records, medical records, commercial purchase records without probable cause.
However, you can compensate with civil liberties schwag:
Handy fourth amendment totebag, protected in theory from searches and seizures. Now sold out, but you can ask the seller to make more.

Disappearing civil liberties coffee mug:

According to this AP story, the FBI has amassed thousands of pages of records about the ACLU, Greenpeace, and other civil rights and advocacy groups.
If nothing else, the FBI is proving the case of critics concerned about expansion of domestic police powers to investigate terrorism. Of course, it’s probably easer to investigate the ACLU, which has offices in the phone book and leadership that makes regular media appearances, than to investigate Al Qaeda sleeper cells.

Belated kudos to the superb series by Ezra Klein comparing the health care systems in various other countries, including Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Japan.
Klein’s serices brings clarity to a subject that is usually treated with a mix of ideology, and mind-numbing, detail-encrusted jargon.
The analysis shows that the US is getting a bad deal with our current health care system. The US spends more than $5,000 per person on health care, despite not covering 43 million citizens. Japan covers all of its citizens for $2,000 per person. Germany covers 90% of citizens through its public program for $2,817 per person. Canada covers all of its citizens for administrative costs that are 1/3 of the US costs per capita. The higher costs in the US don’t buy better health. The US comes out worse in measures of preventable premature death.
The systems are structured differently: France has three programs for different occupational groups. Japan has three programs for big business, small businesses, and the retired or self-employed. The programs in Britain and Canada are separate from employment. They also treat private insurance differently. Britain, France, and Germany allow supplementary private insurance, while Canada prohibits it.
They differ in the level of choice: Britain and Canada use a gatekeeper system, where a patient needs to first go to a general practitioner and get a recommendation to a specialist. Japan does not limit hospital or physician choice, and in most cases does require a gatekeeper. Neither does France, although they are moving to a primary doctor system.
The ill-fated Clinton plan was based on the German system. German health care is funded through employer contributions, with half the money coming from the employeer and half from the employee. Germany has different “sickness funds”, specializing by region and occupation, which compete for members. Germany spends $2,817 on health care for its citizens compared to $5,267 for the US.
When the Clinton plan was up for debate, I looked unsucessfully for a clear explanation of how health care systems worked. Ezra Klein has done an amazing job showing the structure of health care systems. And he links to his primary sources, so the diligent can check the facts.
If you want to grok health care in a few short posts, check out Health of Nations.

As reported by Scoble, Microsoft is again in favor of the bill that bans discrimination against gay people in housing employment. (though it’s too late for the Washington legislative session this year).
The reversal was prompted by widespread complaints by Microsoft employees and media coverage, after the story was broken by The Stranger, an alternative newspaper in Seattle, and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog. So much for the lobbyists’s boast that nobody would notice.
In a memo posted on Channel 9, Microsoft’s online forum, CEO Steve Ballmer explained why Microsoft is taking a position on a public policy question:

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An airport security guard doing the pull-aside on Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield says that we’re now restricted to two books to carry on airplanes.
So now you can tell terrorists because they’re reading too many books? Or the government thinks that people who don’t read will be more susceptible to idiotic pseudo-security.
This needs a little bit of investigation and if true, a lot of mockery.
UPDATE: Apparently, a poorly trained security guard was confused between books of matches and books for reading.

The last post was about tools and techniques to give more power to “bottom-up” organizations, and enable top-down organizations to get more done by empowering members. I see the pyramid getting flatter (or more arrows feeding into the network nodes), but I don’t see hierarchy disappearing for two reasons: attention and television.
The first reason is attention. In a complex society with a thriving democracy, most people can only commit a fraction of their time to civic activity. Organizational structures need to reflect hierarchy of commitment in attention and time — from people who’s willing to learn a bit and vote, to people who are committed volunteers, to people who have full-time public sector jobs.
Representative democracy takes the attention limit into account — there’s a relatively small number of people who are delegated to do the public’s business full time. These representatives are chartered with soliciting public input and making decisions.
There are alternate models of representation that are more democratic, but the representative structure demains. In the model of deliberative democracy promoted by Tom Attlee and others, deliberation is conducted more along the lines of extended jury duty. A group of ordinary citizens is chosen. They focus a significant amount of time studying and deliberating an issue, and then make a decision. This model used in the British Columbia project to choose a voting method.
The process of educating government decision-makers — lobbying, that is — can certainly be more democratic than it is — well-trained volunteers can get a lot done, at least on the state and local level. But there’s a practical limit to the number of people who can pursue face-to-face lobbying as a vocation or avocation.
The other source of hierarchy is television. Television is in persistent decline, but remains the single most effective means of political persuasion. It is conventional wisdom that in an election, television generates 48% of the voting decisions, and field get-out-the-vote activities get the last 3%. TV ads are extremely expensive, and the arts of ad polling and message-testing are in the hands of a small handful of wizards.
Young people (ages 18-34) use local tv news and the internet more than national news and newspapers for information according to a Carnegie study. The study reports that “the Internet, is number one among men, high-income groups, and broadband users.” According to the survey, young people say that the Internet, by a 41-to-15 percent margin over second ranked local TV, is