Would you give your medical records to a search engine?

Google thinks you will..

(LA Times)

Google Inc. opened a free website that manages patients' medical records online, part of a plan to make users more loyal by adding services.

Patients can upload medical records from other organizations, enter their own data and search for information on health conditions, said Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president.

Not sure how keen I'd be on that. I'm sure they have a privacy policy - but it likely contains language that says it can be changed at any time.

Updated: Having looked at their privacy policy, they have the right assurances in there:

(Google Privacy Center)
Please note that this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Policy changes).

(Google Health)

You are in control of your information

1. You control who can access your personal health information. By default, you are the only user who can view and edit your information. If you choose to, you can share your information with others.
2. Google will not sell, rent, or share your information (identified or de-identified) without your explicit consent, except in the limited situations described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when Google believes it is required to do so by law.
3. You can completely delete your information at any time. Such deletions will take immediate effect in your account, and backup copies of deleted information may persist for a short time. Since deleted data will not be restored, you may want to print information before deleting it.

Still - that's a bit of data I'd like to see encrypted up to the ying yang before I post it online.

Once again, the hype comes first...

...the facts show up after the guests have gone home.

(H/t to CJR) The LA Times pokes holes in the current "Homeowners are defaulting! Homeowners are defaulting!" myth:

But there's a major problem with all this talk about the phenomenon of solvent homeowners "walking away": There doesn't appear to be any hard evidence that it's actually happening.

When pressed for the number of borrowers who could afford their mortgage payments, major banks and lender groups could not produce numbers figures.

eh?

So what's all this crap we've been reading? You mean to tell me that major media affiliates are just going along with the flow and not checking their data?

Bankers... do you have an explanation for this? Uh, that'd be no.

Nor could the Mortgage Bankers Assn., the leading trade group for housing lenders. Spokesman John Mechem said he believed that walkaways by homeowners who could afford their payments were "becoming more prevalent." But he said that was based on "anecdotes we're hearing from our members and what we're reading in the newspapers."

Cripes, are there any reporters in our media outlets? or all you just a bunch of spoon fed parrots?

Emptywheel quote of the day

From her post referring to Rep. Tom Davis' (R-VA) frank assessment of damage to the GOP brand:

...transparency kills Republicans in the same way sunlight kills vampires.

Har!

Yes, I know there are perfectly reasonable conservatives out there, some of whom self identify as republicans - they just never seem to be holding the levers of power, now do they? No, I think some sunlight would do the republic good - even if all it did was drive the vampires into hiding.

Jump

Okay, so E and I were two weeks behind on BSG.

We finally caught up tonight.

All I got to say is

Damn.

Next eppy can't come fast enough.

Rev. Hagee: still faking it

A good amount of press attention went to Sen. McCain's unfortunate supporter, Rev. Hagee's recent expression of regre for calling Catholocism the "great whore."

A good amount of press attention went to Sen. McCain's unfortunate supporter, Rev. Hagee's recent apology for calling Catholocism the "great whore."

Televangelist John Hagee apologizes to Catholics
- Yahoo News

Catholic League accepts Hagee apology
- Boston.com

Hagee apology good enough for Catholics, not DNC
- The Hill

and on and on...

But it's the same damn thing as before. Another Fallwell. "Sorry if you took offense." Nowhere does the word apology appear in his statement. [Full text of Rev. Hagee's letter to William Donohue PDF (via Very Important Stuff)]

I don't have skin in the game, but Catholic America does, and Anthony Stevens-Arroyo thinks it's a load.

...Hagee’s two-page apology used the mealy-mouthed expression of regret for "any comments that Catholics have found hurtful,” rather than the complete recantation called for?

Stevens-Arroyo also takes issue with Wm. Donohue asserting the mantle of Catholocism and claiming that the Hagee remarks "case closed" -

The Catholic League is not the “All Catholic" League. It is not official Catholicism: still less does it speak for each and every one of the nation’s 60 million Catholics. As someone who once endeavored to work with the League, I was disappointed to learn that it is run out of a single office by a single ego. So, while I find newsworthy the recent exchanges between the League’s president, Bill Donahue and Evangelical pastor, John Hagee, they don’t amount to dogma.

So there. Hmmph.

Kevin, when you're in a hole - stop digging.

Wow, right wing radio nut gets absolutely pummeled by Chris Matthews.

(H/t to TPM)


Holy cow does James make a fool of himself. All he had was his talking points, and nothing else.

If Chris would do this more, he might almost become likeable.

You tell 'em, Russ

Sen. Feingold (D-WI), lays out the threat that Secret Laws pose to American Democracy:

...Perhaps the most notorious example is the recently released 2003 Justice Department memorandum on torture written by John Yoo. The memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003, the law that the administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And that law was essentially a declaration that the administration could ignore the laws passed by Congress.

The content of the memo was deeply troubling, but just as troubling was the fact that this legal opinion was classified and its content kept secret for years. As we now know, the memo should never have been classified because it contains no information that could compromise national security if released. In a Senate hearing that I chaired April 30, the top official in charge of classification policy from 2002 to 2007 testified that classification of this memo showed "either profound ignorance of or deep contempt for" the standards for classification.

I wonder where those strict constructionalists on the right are on this one? Probably too bitching about how state judges struck down an initiative statute that was in conflict with with their state constitution to notice.

To Sen. Feingold's concerns I would add the application of security to muzzle litigation, or (as I'm inclined to believe) hide back room indemnification of the Telecom industry.

Laissez faire? Not so much...

CJR's the Audit spotlights another great article over at the NYT:

Freddie Mac, one of the nation’s largest buyers of home loans, announced a fresh wave of bad news Wednesday, disclosing losses that were smaller than expected only because of accounting tactics that minimized the effects of bad loans.

“It’s clear we have not yet hit bottom in the housing market,” Richard Syron, Freddie Mac’s chief executive, told analysts.

Yet investors cheered the results anyway, and pushed the company’s shares up by more than 9 percent, to close at $27.25.

CJR picks out a home run quote:

“Both [Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae] are clearly going to be insolvent by the end of the year, but everyone knows that Congress will do anything to keep them afloat, because if Fannie and Freddie go under, the entire global financial system will melt down,” said Christopher Whalen, a founder of Institutional Risk Analytics, an independent research firm. “These companies’ earnings don’t matter. Their accounting hardly matters. People buy the stock because they believe the federal government will bail them both out if things get really bad.”

Why do you care?

What Does Freddy Mac Do? (via Slate)

The company is a key player in the secondary mortgage market, which means it purchases mortgages from banks. Freddie Mac then bundles together several thousand such mortgages into a tradable security and sells the package to an institutional investor.

Say you just obtained a $200,000 mortgage with a fixed rate of 5 percent. There's about a one in six chance that your bank will turn around and sell that mortgage to Freddie Mac, which in turn will package it with thousands of other mortgages with similar rates. That collection, which may be valued at $500 million or more, is converted into a bondlike security and sold to large investors who prefer relatively safe, steady assets.

[snip]

The idea is that banks will use the money they obtain from selling mortgages to fund additional mortgages; the system has increased the nation's home-ownership rate. Also, the hope is that banks will feel more comfortable offering mortgages for homes in low-income areas, since they know they can turn right around and sell the mortgage to Freddie Mac. (Freddie Mac does not purchase mortgages over $322,700 in value.)

What Does Fannie Mae Do? (via Motley Fool) Sorta like a chop shop. But legal.

It works this way. Let's say that you get a mortgage on your new home from Wells Fargo Bank (NYSE: WFC). Wells Fargo, like any bank, has limitations on how much money it can lend as a function of its asset base. If your loan sits on Wells Fargo's books, it constricts how much the bank can loan. But if Wells Fargo sells the rights to Fannie Mae, it turns that loan back into cash, which it can then go out and loan again. You keep making your loan payments to Wells Fargo, and it passes these funds on to Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae makes money because it can borrow funds at a lower interest rate than you can. So instead of a single loan tying up Wells Fargo's capital, it can turn around and make multiple loans all from the same original capital base. This, the theory goes, increases banks' willingness to loan in good times and in bad.

[snip]

Fannie Mae provides a guarantee to these investors that they will receive timely principal and interest payments, no matter what happens with the underlying mortgages. If there are large numbers of defaults, Fannie Mae will have to make the investors whole. If there is a massive crash and defaults overwhelm Fannie Mae, it has an ace in the whole: your tax dollars. Even though the company's debt offerings clearly state otherwise, the financial markets believe that Fannie Mae's status as a government-sponsored enterprise implies that the government will provide full faith and credit for Fannie's debt. It is for this reason that Fannie Mae maintains a AAA credit rating, even though at a 78:1 debt-to-equity ratio it is levered many times what is allowed international banks. (Debt is defined as mortgages on its books plus the value of its guarantees.)

Remember those (formerly AAA-rated) CDOs that were eating Merril Lynch alive? Those are the kind of products that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac sell.

While I'm confident that there are many flavors of these types of investments - any bundle of mortgages is going to have the same Achilles heel: a nationwide drop in real estate prices.

Bear Stearns was bailed out after getting hit hard by Mortgage Backed Securities. Looks like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are going the same route - and with Wall Street banking on the bailout, you have to believe the Fed has no choice.

I'm no fan of the economy going in the tank to preserve the purity of laissez faire - but once again: if the consequence of bad investing is getting billions of government dollars, what the hell is the incentive to invest wisely?

Yet another backdoor handout for Wall Street.

I'll have what he's having...

Also via CJR (discussing a recent Bill Moyers piece):

Journal correspondent Rick Karr asked viewers to consider a hypothetical cardiac patient—a sixty-seven-year old man in a high stress job with a history of serious heart problems. The man has had four major heart attacks and a quadruple bypass; he has atrial fibrillation and needs a defibrillator to keep his heart on track. That man, says intensive care nurse Geri Jenkins, might have a hard time getting new insurance if he needed it.

The man, it turns out, is not a hypothetical patient, but [Vice President] Cheney, who has Cadillac coverage that buys Cadillac care simply because he is an employee of the U.S. government. He cannot be denied health insurance no matter how serious his heart condition; he can pick the best hospitals and the best doctors, and, according to the nurses, Cheney is alive today because of that care while many other people with similar conditions are not. The nurses have launched a CheneyCare ad campaign in newspapers and on the Internet, designed to make the argument for a radical change in America’s health care system—a change that would allow everyone to get the kind of care that saved Cheney’s life. Their ads declare that if Cheney were just a regular American, he’d probably be dead by now.

[snip]

On the Moyers program, DeMoro argues that there should no double standard. “We as the public pay for Dick Cheney’s care—Why is the government not providing the same type of care to all Americans?” she asks. And indeed, that is a key question neither the candidates nor the media have discussed during the campaign so far. Health care equity rarely comes up.

I feel sick...

CJR:

Higher deductibles and co-payments and skimpier benefits have become the new coin of the realm in the insurance world, and people are writing their own checks for medical care once covered by insurance.

NYT:

The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited or that they cannot afford their own share of medical costs.

[snip]

It just keeps eating into people’s income,” said James Corbin, a former union official who works for the local utility in Tucson.

Mr. Corbin said that under their employer’s health plan, he and his co-workers are now obliged to pay up to $4,000 of their families’ annual medical bills, on top of about $1,600 a year in premiums. Five years ago, they paid no premiums and were responsible for only about $2,000 of their families’ medical bills.

“That’s a big jump,” Mr. Corbin said. “You’ve just lost a month’s pay.”

USAToday:

Is a little coverage that much better than none at all?

Often called "limited medical benefit plans," the policies can cost far less than traditional insurance. But they cap what insurers will pay toward medical care, with the skimpiest plans covering as little as $1,000 a year. Some have daily caps, such as paying a few hundred dollars a day toward hospital coverage. Traditional insurance, by contrast, generally covers most medical expenses in a given year, after deductibles and co-payments.

Insurers say limited-benefit policies — once mainly sold to the self-employed or others who buy their own insurance — are gaining interest among employers with low-wage, part-time or contract workers. National companies such as McDonald's, the Hair Cuttery salons and Friendly's restaurants offer such coverage to their workers, as do many smaller businesses.

and CJR again (commenting on a weak interview by Fortune magazine of Aetna CEO Ron Williams:

Williams, for instance, compares uninsured Americans to bank robbers. No kidding:

Today we all pay for the uninsured. If an individual sticks up a bank and walks off with $25,000, there are consequences. If someone who really could have had an insurance policy consumes $25,000 worth of health care, everyone else pays for that.

[snip]

Forty-seven million Americans are uninsured. And Williams dismisses 30 to 33 million of them as easy to cover without any tax credits or subsidies: people who are eligible for
government coverage but haven’t signed up, college kids, non-citizens here legally, and
people with household incomes over $75,000.

How would these people get coverage? Williams doesn’t say, and, of course, Fortune doesn’t ask. But the implication that with the poor covered by the government every one else can afford to pay for themselves is flatly false.

Take a look at Aetna’s own price list. Aetna’s policy for individual family coverage in New York City costs more than—get this—$33,000 a year.

So a salary of $75,000—which, by the way, is well over the city’s median income —isn’t going to get it done, is it, Fortune?

....

A White Rose who lived

In Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, he describes the tragic nobility of a person named Sophie Scholl. Ms. Scholl was a student in Nazi Germany who agreed to help her brother and his friends distribute leaflets denouncing the regime of Adolf Hitler.

Nazi Germany being what it was, this was a capital offense. Sophie's inexperienced comrades called themselves the White Rose Resistance. Being young, they took terrible risks and were caught.

Clive James describes Ms. Scholl being offered survival by her Gestapo interrogator. He informs her that her brother and friend cannot be saved, but that she could be spared if she renounced the White Rose and their message. It's easy for anyone to imagine being brave in that circumstance - but put yourself in that room. Imagine this choice is your entire universe:

Sign this piece of paper, or go to the guillotine.

Sophie didn't hesitate. She chose the guillotine.

Her Gestapo interrogator was so affected by her bravery that he told this story to others- it's the only reason we know what happened.

I cannot help but be affected by stories like that, but tragic martyrs give you a hollow feeling. They were right, but being right did not save them. Recorded in history as a posthumous I told you so.

Point is, when it comes to tragic heroes, there's a fine line between being inspirational and being a cautionary tale.

---

Today, my sister in law passed along the obituary of someone who, like Sophie, was unflinchingly noble to the very end. The difference with Irena Sendler is that she lived to be 98.

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker in Warsaw when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of the city, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Sendler, imagining "the horror of life behind the walls," obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a nurse, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis had become clear, Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close friends -- a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women -- and began rescuing Jewish children.

She saved over 2,500 people. Kids mostly. Yeah, yeah, Shindler's List II. Seen this movie.

No.

Not this movie:

Most of the children who left with Sendler's group were taken into Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend's garden.

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried.

Think of that. She's 33 years old, alone, and in the custody of the most monstrous human beings on the planet.

It is one thing to march to a swift end. It is quite another to stay silent through torture, when each day of silence is rewarded with another day of torture - for three months.

Yet she keeps silent. And she makes it out alive.

And when the war is over she digs up those bottles of names and goes looking for the children so she can keep her promise to their parents.

This language is bankrupt for a word to describe her.

Follow through

A commenter reminded me to look into whether or not Brown County was following up on their promise to pursue child enticement and drug charges against (former Brown County GOP chair) Donald J. Fleischman.

Apparently, they are. He's to be arraigned in June of this year.

Shame on me for doubting.

I dare you to make sense of these

via the Penguin:




Umbrella...? Mozzarella?

Give them an inch...

With the Supremes greenlighting stricter voter registration criteria in Indiana - it's nice to see that the GOP is wasting no time in trying to make it harder to vote:

The battle over voting rights will expand this week as lawmakers in Missouri are expected to support a proposed constitutional amendment to enable election officials to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote.

[snip]

State Representative Stanley Cox, a Republican from Sedalia and the sponsor of the amendment, said that the Missouri Constitution already required voters to be citizens and that his amendment was simply meant to better enforce that requirement.

“The requirements we have right now are totally inadequate,” Mr. Cox said. “You can present a utility bill, and that doesn’t prove anything. I could sit here with my nice photocopier and create a thousand utility bills with different names on them.”

Rep. Cox is right, of course - but he's omitting the reason in person voter fraud is not a problem.: somebody has to show up with those utility bills and try to vote.

It's the difference between me owning a gun and using it to go rob a bank. Only in this case, the bank would be empty because there is no profit in individual voter fraud.

I mean ask yourself - what does the person who commits voter fraud get? Nothing. In exchange they risk jail time.

Now, it's certainly possible that some shadowy group could pay people to commit voter fraud - but in order to sway an election, you'd need a sizable group of people. Sizable groups of voters who don't exist will show up as an anomaly in voting records. Hey, we had 800 more voters this year from this polling place - that's odd...

Sizable groups are pure poison for secret plans. All it would take was a few people who said "this man paid me this much money to vote for candidate x" and the whole plan will start to fall in on itself. If the conspirators are supplying the bogus utility bills, they've created a paper trail that points back to them - it's just ridiculous.

It doesn't help that there's a definite hype factor to the coverage of this issue.

Look at this bit from the 2005 inquiry into voter fraud in Milwaukee:

Inquiry finds evidence of fraud in election
Cast ballots outnumber voters by 4,609

Investigators said Tuesday they found clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person.

My God! Clearly fraud is running rampant! Conservatives are furious - their guy only lost Wisconsin by 11,000 votes. We should crack down on voter registration, it's the only way.

Except - buried down in the later paragraphs of this same story, you get to the truth of the matter.

4,600 cases of fraud? No.

...city officials have been unable to account for a gap of about 4,600 votes, with more ballots counted than people listed as voting.

So this number could represent outright fraud, but it could also be sloppy record keeping or incompetence. Given the sorry state of Milwaukee public officials, I'd be inclined to believe they were incomptent. In any case - this is not an individual voter registration issue. People at polling stations were supposed to show up with their paperwork, and someone was supposed to keep those records.

Records were not kept. This is a problem with election officials, not voters.

If records were kept and those records indicated that voters had committed fraud, that would be another matter.

But wait - felons voted!

Reviewing information it had access to, including a computerized list of people recorded as voting, the newspaper identified at least 278 felons who illegally voted statewide, though the vast majority came from within the city.

Yes, they did - but in Wisconsin felons some felons can vote, and some can't. Felons who don't know which group they are might show up by mistake. That 278 number is statewide, and how many votes were cast statewide? Just under three million.

And there's this - the article goes on to say that having a drivers license requirement would not prevent felons from voting.

So the felon who shows up to vote in a new precinct and registers to vote needs to be checked against a database that determines if they are an eligible felon. Whether or not they have a drivers license is irrelevant.

But, there were 100 cases of fraud!

Once again: three million votes cast. Even if all of these cases were out and out fraud - and not just boneheads out at the polls, you're talking .003% of the vote.

I'm not sure a problem of that magnitude merits asking all voters for ID, or proof of citizenship.

Yet we have 19 states pushing for more aggressive voter registration laws. Missouri might get theirs passed in time for the November election. All will increase the burden for all voters in the name of decreasing a problem that doesn't exist (PDF).

You want to increase election audit rigor? Fine, but stay the hell out of my way when I go to the polls.

The artillery of thought will not be silenced

CJR pointed me to Ezra Klein's discussion/review of the Kindle and its effect on books and reading.

The take away for me - the screen is nice:

One look at the screen, though, and you forget that everything around it seems to have been an afterthought. The Kindle uses a technology known as E Ink, which deploys negatively charged black particles and positively charged white particles to create something that looks, and acts, startlingly like paper. There’s no reflection in the sun and no discernible flicker on the screen. Compared to traditional LCD screens, whose light and flicker force your eyes to constantly strain and refocus, this is a profound advance. It’s almost calming to look at.

-but the book ain't going away any time soon:

Moreover, there’s an added risk to using the Kindle: if you drop a book, it doesn’t break. If you drop your Kindle, your heart catches in your throat till you examine the damage. If you drop it in the bathtub, you’re out $400.

[snip]

At the end of the day, the true advances won’t come in the Kindle, but in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors shape the evolution of the device.

Right there are the two most important aspects of all of this.

1) the delivery vehicle must be as durable or as cheap as the book (and preferably both), and;

2) that the success/failure of the Kindle device is only relevant as it stimulates the development of content that takes full advantage of the electronic format.

I'd imagine the breakthrough device would be something that would allow you to access your file wirelessly, search/read/annotate at will - for long periods of time - and is cheap enough to be replaced for less than the cost of a printed book. It would allow me to subscribe to revisions, later editions - annotations from the author or critics I requested. Books would link to their source material, and forums for discussion and questions.

Kindle is none of these things, but is likely to be the first casualty in the struggle to find one. It's a necessary step - and I'm glad that Amazon is taking it - but we're nowhere near the tipping point to move away from printed books.

That's not an insult, just my opinion that replacing something (even supplementing) what is essentially the DNA of civilization is going to take decades if not centuries.

Look at digital cameras. We sell a lot of digital, but we haven't quite managed the transition of how people store their pictures. Sure there's a lot of good software out there, but having pictures on a computer at home is not quite as useful as having them printed out so you can show your family or your office buddies.

These things are still possible, but there's inertia in transitioning between how we expect to see them, and how we can actually access them. Tech is trying to fill the void- and printers are madly trying to make it even simpler than last time - but we're not quite there yet.

I suspect the electronic book will be the same for a very long time. There are many upsides - but they will be the playground of the early adapter- while the bulk of human content sits on shelves - like it always did.

What's driving up the price of gas?

Damned if I know, but it's for sure you'll never find out if you listen to the networks. Reading the recent batch of their stories (and watching their broadcasts) you can almost hear their collective shoulders shrug:

Headlines simulated

ABC News: Gosh, prices are really high. So high, even NASCAR fans are affected.

CBS News: Gas prices went up, fast. Why? How should we know?

NBC News: Oil prices surge. It could be the weak dollar, or Turkey, or Nigeria. Iran maybe? Hell, your guess is as good as ours.

I'll give NBC News credit – they at least have a story debunking the gas tax holiday and their story provides some speculation (albeit without any context or supporting facts – "X happened, but how much of the market does X affect? Has X affected the market in a similar fashion in the past?")

Here's Nieman Watchdog on the same topic – they may not have all the answers, but at least they are asking the right questions:

10 tough questions on oil and gas prices

Twenty or thirty years ago, a rising oil price could be counted on to eventually bring more oil into the market. Not so today. The question is why,

[snip]

Gas prices are most politically relevant because they are a sharp pain that voters will be feeling this summer and fall, before they vote. All three candidates (and even President Bush) seem to "get" this. But the summer holiday for the 18.4-cent federal excise tax on gasoline proposed by Clinton and McCain will not, in the view of the experts and the media, do much more than slightly numb the voters before their wallets are amputated.

[snip]

While crude prices are a factor, most experts would agree that tightly limited U.S. refinery capacity is also a big factor in pushing domestic gasoline prices higher.
Less easy to answer: why is refinery capacity limited and what can be done about it?

Some numbers: In 1981, there were 324 refineries with a total capacity of 18.6 million barrels per day, according to the EIA. As of 2007, there were 149, with a capacity of 17.4 bpd.

It is no secret that the industry deliberately shut refineries (PDF) to improve profits in recent decades. Industry says it is now building new capacity at existing plants – but despite rising prices and growing demand, refineries are again cutting back their capacity-building plans.

Okay, it's a little too easy to say "gosh, those multinational oil corporations are driving up prices" but how's about some news coverage that at least explores the question of why we have less than half the refineries we had a quarter century ago? – or why market collusion (like we saw in the California energy crisis) can be eliminated as a suspect? – or at the very least could someone identify the barriers to finding out this information?

Listen to Mother

Normally, I'm not a big fan of Mother Jones magazine, but their latest issue has some great stuff in it.
(H/t to CJR)

The Seven Myths of Energy Independence

Myth #1 Energy Independence Is Good

...What's not to like about energy independence?

In a word, everything. Despite its immense appeal, energy independence is a nonstarter—a populist charade masquerading as energy strategy that's no more likely to succeed (and could be even more damaging) than it was when Nixon declared war on foreign oil in the 1970s. Not only have we no realistic substitute for the oceans of oil we import, but many of the crash programs being touted as a way to quickly develop oil replacements—"clean coal," for example, or biofuels—come at a substantial environmental and political cost. And even if we had good alternatives ready to deploy—a fleet of superefficient cars, say, or refineries churning out gobs of cheap hydrogen for fuel cells—we'd need decades, and great volumes of energy, including oil, to replace all the cars, pipelines, refineries, and other bits of the old oil infrastructure—and thus decades in which we'd depend on oil from our friends in Riyadh, Moscow, and Caracas. Paradoxically, to build the energy economy that we want, we're going to lean heavily on the energy economy that we have...

And that's just #1.

MJ lines queues up a bunch of sacred cows and hurls them bodily into the meatgrinder.

Up next? Myth #2 Ethanol Will Set Us Free

Good stuff - dig in.

The most basic metric of a friendly nation...

...would be if they pursue criminal sanctions against residents who kill your citizens.

That is - the state controls the administration of violence within its borders. Someone in that country decides to kill visitors from other countries - the state will pursue the offenders and capture or kill them.

By this standard - Yemen is pretty worthless as a friend:

Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.
(via DangerRoom)

Read the whole mess on MSNBC, it really does get worse.

And this is an example of a battle against Al Qaeda that should be fought - and won. We don't need to bomb Yemen - we need to stand on their heads until they lock these guys up. I'd say extradite, but Gitmo and Iraq have made an already tough sell pretty much impossible.

Yemen is Pakistan on a smaller scale and without nukes. A history of hosting bad guys and a government with questionable motives. Getting results in Yemen is absolutely vital to our success against groups like Al Qaeda.

The lack of media coverage doesn't necessarily translate into a lack of action in the region, but clearly our sideshow in Iraq cannot help us with our necessary work in places like Yemen.

100 years, with an asterisk

Here's McCain's golden soundbite:

(via CJR)

Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years…

McCain: Maybe 100. [crosstalk] We've been in South Korea – we've been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for 50 years or so, that'd be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’d be fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaida is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

The attack ads will gobble up the easy pickings- "100 years" and fine, whatever. He said it, then said 1,000 or a million years would be okay, and then he's putting a big fat asterisk on the end of it.

It's not American presence; it's American casualties

100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 – this part of the quote is the one that illustrates how McCain is not dealing with this question.

digby asks exactly the right question:

Why aren't Dems just saying, "Why should Americans stay in Iraq for a hundred years under any circumstances? Let's assume McCain meant that we should stay there indefinitely once the violence has ceased. What right would we have to do that? Aren't they a sovereign nation? Why should Americans pay for that?"

To this I would add my own all-but-screamed question: In what fantasy world will we spend decades or centuries or millennia in Iraq without there being American casualties?

And a more substantive follow up: Given that none of the goals of our Iraq policy (WMD, denying a haven for terrorists, preventing the deaths of Americans, preventing nuclear proliferation) have played out - what policy decisions will McCain offer that will increase the value of our policy or lessen its cost?

Put simply: why is this war worth what we are paying for it?

McCain vs. Bush vs.... a carrot?

Okay, this one had me laughing pretty hard.



(H/t digby)

Take the Bush McCain challenge!

(Heads up: the site's gonna want your email address halfway through so they can keep pinging you with updates - so be warned.)

The carrot quiz comes after the email form - I think it's worth it.

Okay, that's embarrassing...

Pity the lead graphic designer over at Britain's Office of Government Commerce.

Why? They have produced this logo:




So... what's the problem?

Well, somebody turned it on its side:

So, Bill.. y'mind coming up to my office - and bringing all your things with you?

Shut. Up.

Blogs don't have segues, so here goes:

(H/T to Val, via Fortune)

AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone

When the 3G iPhone is introduced this summer, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone sales partner with Apple, will cut the price by as much as $200, according to a person familiar with the strategy.

This has tongues wagging over at the NYT:

The $199 iPhone? Something’s Missing From the Picture

...But as reported, there are some bits of the story that don’t make sense. Fortune wrote that AT&T will offer the subsidy to people who buy the phones in its stores, but not to those who buy in Apple stores. I can’t imagine that Apple would want to sell iPhones for even a dime more in its stores than in another store. (Apple keeps exceedingly tight control over its pricing.)

And there is no underlying economic reason for AT&T to offer anyone an incentive to buy the iPhone in its stores. No matter where you buy your iPhone, the only way to use it legitimately is on the AT&T network, which requires a two-year contract. What’s more, Apple has a much greater incentive to get people into its stores — where it can try to sell them Macs — than does AT&T — which has little more to offer than the odd headset and case.

Strange, but then - unless the plan becomes cheaper and the contract term becomes shorter - I'm pretty sure this item will be moot for me.

But they're so sleek, so shiny... No!

I'll Fly Away

Mom's going to Scotland. Today.

She's been fretting about it - I've been cheering for her. Gramma had a bad fall recently and Mom's been grappling with guilt over leaving vs. bailing out of a trip she's been planning for ages.

She'd finally gotten through to Dad's sister and brother - gotten some good discussion of the situation and felt good enough to get on her plane.

Scotland. I'm green with envy. Got the boy all pumped up saying SCOOT-lund! in the best brogue the boy can manage. I'd planned on taking the boy through her itinerary on a map.

Jen's keeping me in the loop on Gramma, Mom's texting her status to me:

Apr 29, 05:24 pm
Headed 4 london. Mom

London. I'm tempted to ask her to buy me an Arsenal scarf. She's told us she can get text messages - but then she was told this by AT&T - so there's almost no chance that she can.

One unsettling aspect of her departure: In the event the worst happens and Gramma passes - Mom had asked me to book her a flight up from Atlanta on the same day she comes back to the US. I've booked flights for mom exactly twice before - both times because she was in the storm zone and had no way to do it herself.

Surfing possible flights plays on my imagination to the point that, having established that there are ample opportunities out of Atlanta - I quit and go for a walk around the office to shake it off.

It doesn't work.

Post storm, the airports were insane. On top of everything mom had been through - the airlines had decided to be - well, airlines. She was told her carry-on weighed too much, or was the wrong size, or needed inspection or something - so would she mind opening it and re-distributing her items among her other bags?

Mom has a pretty good look that says My manners are the only thing keeping you alive right now. I imagine she gave the guy this look and opened her bags.

On top of the clothes in her carry-on was Dad's folded flag.

Airline guy sees it and stops. He closes her bag and says "That's okay, m'am we'll take care of you. Don't worry about it." And he gets her through the line and never says another word.

Even now, all this time later - I'm still a mess just from writing that.

But I had help this time.

Jen called at 11:27 pm - and my family doesn't call, much less call in the wee hours.

Unless it's bad.

Gramma passed away at 11:00 pm. She'd been having trouble breathing. Too much fluid in her system, lots of things. Age.

I'm like I was with Grampa - I'm just hollow thinking about it. There's no there.

But Mom. Right now, she's on a plane, asleep headed for her big adventure - and she doesn't know. This I can picture, and its just too awful.

Mom's flown up for Gramma's episodes over and over. Talked with her all the time.

After this latest fall, Mom couldn't get through to her - nurses or Dad's siblings kept interposing themselves.

Mom's big adventure in Scotland - and on day one she'll learn that Gramma died five hours after she boarded her plane.

I miss Gramma - but I'm grieving for Mom.

Top 10 List

(Via CJR)

In an unsigned editorial, the [Los Angeles Times] today urges the three presidential candidates to “challenge reporters who dwell on gossipy or tangential subjects to ask instead about issues voters care about it.” Ten such questions follow.

Read the ten questions. Ask yourself how different the ABC debate (or any debate in this campaign) would have been with questions like that.

CJR spells it out in their windout:

...the fact that ABC News didn’t ask those kinds of questions wasn’t because it’s not possible to do so. It’s because the network chose not to.

Exactly.

Unforgivable...unfixable...unbelievable

Although I know this world will eventually top this, it's hard to imagine how:

This is quite possibly the most appalling crime I can imagine:

A 73-year-old Austrian man has confessed to imprisoning his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathering her seven children, police have said.

[snip]

A reinforced concrete door was built into the wall that separated the "dungeon" from the house and electronically locked - the code known only to the suspect, who provided his captives with food and necessities, police said.

Three of the children were kept in the cellar with their mother and had never seen daylight, police told a news conference.

Wha..? What-?

....

Gen. Odom on the Surge

We keep hearing over and over again about how the surge is working, how violence is down and how life in Iraq is getting better.

After all, the Sunnis are now on our side - that's has to be good, right?

(Frm Director of the NSA under President Regan) Gen. William Odom begs to differ:

(via Nieman Watchdog)

Their break with al Qaeda should give us little comfort. The Sunnis welcomed anyone who would help them kill Americans, including al Qaeda. The concern we hear the president and his aides express about a residual base left for al Qaeda if we withdraw is utter nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al Qaeda if we leave Iraq.

[snip]
Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment. At the same time, this deal protects them to some degree from the government’s troops and police, hardly a sign of political reconciliation.

Now let us consider the implications of the proliferating deals with the Sunni strongmen. They are far from unified among themselves. Some remain with al Qaeda. Many who break and join our forces are beholden to no one. Thus the decline in violence reflects a dispersion of power to dozens of local strong men who distrust the government and occasionally fight among themselves. Thus the basic military situation is far worse because of the proliferation of armed groups under local military chiefs who follow a proliferating number of political bosses.
This can hardly be called greater military stability, much less progress toward political consolidation...

When it comes to Iraq, this same administration that blocks medical coverage for underinsured children has always had one fall back solution: throw money at it.

• Iraq economy needs a boost? Carpet bomb them with cash. We'll worry about receipts later.
• Political cost of large troop deployments too high? Send in the high priced mercenaries. Never mind we pay them ten times what we'd pay our soldiers. Politically, it's free!

And now: Sunni extremists got you down? Write them a check! We can re-brand them as the Sons of Iraq - the shinier, happier gunman for a new Iraq!

If you pay them enough, and give them enough weapons, you can get them to bump their other enemies ahead of yours in their sh!tlist. Sooner or later, they'll get back to killing Americans, but by then it'll be some other administration's problem.

This is hardly news, but can we finally have an intelligent discussion of what is and isn't happening as a result of the surge?:

Rev. Hagee: Opportunist, Coward

I've tried to resist the urge to think about Rev. Hagee's comments on Hurricane Katrina.

After all, there's an endless supply of nut jobs who retroactively claim recent events validate their world view. This guy's just the flavor of the month.

But here's the recap:

(via Media Matters)

September 18, 2006 (twenty days after Katrina)

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are -- were recipients of the judgment of God for that.

The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing.

I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

At this point - Hagee's pulling a Falwell: he sees a massive human tragedy, brandishes it like a bat, and swings at people no one will stand up for: homosexuals.

As these remarks have no visible cost to him - he does not equivocate: He believes that [Hurricane Katrina] was, in fact, the judgement of God against the city of New Orleans.

Fast forward to this year. Hagee now has a powerful political friend in John McCain, and Sen. McCain is starting to get questions about Hagee's big mouth.

The cost of his 'judgment of God' remark has gone up. He apparently doesn't want to reverse himself totally - but he wants to soften things a bit:

(via The Dennis Prager Show)

April 22, 2008

Hagee: What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God. In time, if New Orleans recovers and becomes the pristine city it can become, it may be in time be called a blessing. But at this time it is called a curse

Prager: Right but, wh- what you are saying, and, and I want to just make it clear – that there is a divine hand in, in these natural acts and you see the divine hand in the hurricane that hit, that hit New Orleans

Hagee: If God is almighty and God is all-powerful, God controls everything. If God does not control everything, he is not God. So the answer to that is, yes.

Prager: Right. The, the, ah, the only question - and this is not a challenge as much as my own theological question to that, if - this is really Dennis speaking, not, not, you know, not wh- some official… questioner – but if that’s the case, so that would hold true for the earthquake in ah– and the tsunami - the earthquake in southern California, the tsunami that hit the, that hit Indonesia…Is that - so, is there any natural disaster that is not the result of sin?

Hagee: Well, I’m not saying that it’s the result of sin. I’m saying it’s the result of God’s permissible will. Ah, you, you cannot say that everything on the earth that happens is sin. Ah, it was carried in a newspaper that there was going to be a massive homosexual rally there the following Monday, ah, but – and, and I believe that, uh, homosexual marriage is sin and I believe it’s an abomination because Moses said it was. But it is, it is wrong to say that every natural disaster is the result of sin. It is a result of God’s permissive will, but who – no man on earth knows the mind of God-

Prager: Right, but in the case, alright, but– Did NPR get – is this quote correct, though that in the case of New Orleans, you do feel it was sin?

Hagee: In the case of New Orleans, their plan to have that, uh homosexual rally was sin. But it never happened. The, the rally never happened.

Prager: No, no, I understand. Alright. Alright. Ah, no, I’m only trying to understand that in the case of New Orleans, you do feel that, that God’s hand was in it because of the sinful city.

Hagee: That it was a city that was planning a sinful conduct, yes.

Prager: Okay. So, that, that one is the only one, I think, frankly, it’s the only one they can get you on, because people don’t like to, to, ah, hear that sort of thing…

A less than artful delivery of his talking points: "no man knows the mind of God," gay marriage is an abomination, and the permissive will of God allowed Katrina to hit New Orleans. The city "was planning a sinful conduct," you see.

I'm sure that's a great comfort to the grandmothers who drowned in their attics.

Of course, this is not enough to silence the media hounds. Nor will it put a smile on Sen. McCain's campaign staff (after the week they've had).

'God Smote America' is right up there with 'God Damn America.'

The price of that sentiment just keeps getting higher.

And so - just today - Rev. Hagee is said to recant (via a statement issued through his public relations firm, no less) what he was so certain of, back when New Orleans was still underwater:

April 25, 2008

...ultimately neither I nor any other person can know the mind of God concerning Hurricane Katrina. I should not have suggested otherwise. No matter what the cause of the storm, my heart goes out to all who suffered in this terrible tragedy. There but for the grace of God go any one of us.

Gone are the thundering pronouncements of Hagee's moral compass. Hell, even Hagee didn't show up - he folded by proxy.

Forget his small mindedness, forget even his homophobia - Hagee deserves scorn for the same reason as Falwell: He showed his stripes when he thought he could get away with it - now he's slinking away and hoping we won't notice his footwork.

No matter what the cause of the storm...

...

Oh, I see you all right-

Dirtbag.

Where Am I?

(H/t to E, and to Zack Patton over on the 13th Floor)

Kudos to the keepers of the Atlas of Strange Maps, for bringing us cartographical oddities like:

the [map] that plots different regions of South Carolina based on the main condiment used in BBQ sauce -- tomatoes, ketchup, mustard or vinegar and pepper.
There are two fantastic maps based on music -- one showing each state in proportional size based on how often it gets mentioned in country music songs, and another mapping out the area codes mentioned in the rap song "Area Codes," by Ludacris.

And they even have my favorite map of all - the Minard Map. A map that is only strange by virtue of it being so brilliant.


I remember finding that map in a graphic design brochure and I cut it out and have saved it ever since. Way cool!

Homebody

Here's an idea whose time has come: Subscribing to home delivery of household products.

Amazon's Subscribe & Save service allows you to set up standing re-orders of items you buy on a regular basis (trash bags, detergent etc.)

I'm scoping out the price break to see if this is economical to boot, but if the price is close - there's a big opportunity to save time.

...And the Front Ranks Died

In the movie Sword of Gideon, there's a moment when the young Israeli spy tells his father that he is going to become an assassin for his country. The Munich Massacre has just happened, and this would-be killer is clearly hoping his dad will be proud of him.

Instead, his dad cuts him off at the knees, saying telling him his country may need him now - but that won't always be the case. "They ruined my life," he tells his son, "and as God is my witness they'll screw you, too."

Reading the sad tale of CIA operative Bob Lady - you almost wish his dad had tried to dissuade him as well (H/t digby):

Lady...was the CIA’s base chief in Milan, Italy, and nominally in charge of a February 2003 agency operation to snatch an al Qaeda suspect off the city’s streets.

[snip]

But the snatch turned into a public relations nightmare two years later when Italian authorities announced they had eyewitnesses and indisputable evidence tying the CIA to the crime.

So last week 26 Americans, most of them CIA employees, went on trial in Milan for kidnapping, albeit in absentia and to little notice here. They are fugitives from justice, with international warrants issued for their arrests.

[snip]

[Mr. Lady] and his wife loved Italy so much they bought a house in the foothills of the Alps and retired there in 2004.

Months later an urgent call came, warning Lady to get out of Dodge — don’t even pack.

The cops were on their way.

Tipped off, the Ladys successfully fled the country. But they left behind a bonanza of evidence in their dream home...

[snip]

...it’s hard to be too sympathetic for his plight.

Except for this: He was abandoned on the field.

The CIA has disowned him. It hasn’t provided him a lawyer, or helped him pay for one. Lady is on his own.

Answer the F-ing question!

(Via Emptywheel and Elsinora of the DailyKos)

Fmr. US Attorney General John Ashcroft gave a speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois yesterday - and established exactly why current government officials do not stand for public questioning.

Elsinora: ...This other document is a section from the judgment of the Tokyo War Tribunal. After WWII, the Tokyo Tribunal was basically the Nuremberg Trials for Japan. Many Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture. And among the tortures listed was the "water treatment," which we nowadays call waterboarding...

John Ashcroft: (interrupting) This is a speech, not a question. I don't mind, but it's not a question.

Elsinora: It will be, sir, just give me a moment. The judgment describes this water treatment, and I quote, "the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach." One man, Yukio Asano, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor by the allies for waterboarding American troops to obtain information. Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country--exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do--do you believe that his sentence was unjust?

John Ashcroft: (angrily) Now, listen here. You're comparing apples and oranges, apples and oranges. We don't do anything like what you described.

It gets worse - read the whole thing, or just Emptywheel's tidy excerpt.

Parallax View

There's a face on Mars!

Wow, this face must have been built by intelligent life, so there must be aliens on Mars! I mean, I know this one photo isn't proof, but wouldn't it be cool if there were aliens on Mars? Lots of people think there are aliens on Mars!

Oh wait:


I guess there isn't a face on Mars...

...


Wow, Obama flipped off Sen. Clinton!


Wow! Does this mean that Obama is losing his temper? Some people say he's too hotheaded to be the President. Maybe the campaign is getting to him, maybe he can't take the pressure!

Oh wait:
I guess he didn't flip off Sen. Clinton.

...

Look! A box that used to contain the body of Christ...!

(H/t to CJR)

Lock Them Up

CJR finds another NYT article that grabs your attention:

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’

The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners.

Now, the fact that we lock up lots of people isn't any big news - I can recall when our prison population surpassed that of China and Jon Stewart sarcastically exclaimed, "We're number 1!"

It's the first part of that sentence that kind of jumps out at you: We're 5% of the world, but we still have more prisoners than anyone else. Not only are we locking up more people than China (a country with four times our population) but we are locking up a lot more. Around 700,000 more than they do.

Why the hell is that?

Read on and find out.

Pirates!

Okay - here's a forced update to my world view: Piracy is alive and well.

(H/t to DangerRoom)

Pirates captured a luxury yacht last week off the Horn of Africa. They took 30 hostages and demanded a ransom.

The French government obliged with two million dollars, and the ship and crew were released.

Then, the French took their money back.

An hour after the pirates had accepted a $2m (£1m) ransom and released the yacht and its 30-strong crew, they were attacked on shore by French military helicopters.


[...]

Naval captain Christophe Prazuck, the spokesman for the French military chiefs of staff, said: "There were four helicopters involved. A sniper [in a Puma helicopter] shot out the motor of the pirates' four-wheel drive vehicle. A second helicoper [a Gazelle] then landed nearby, allowing the six pirates to be arrested under covering fire from two other [Gazelle] helicopters. We are absolutely sure that there were no collateral victims."

[...]

France intends to put the six men on trial for piracy in a French court. At least eight other pirates are believed to have escaped.

Yeah! Take that, you pirate-guys!

But wait! There's more! (Via DR and the Daily Dispatch)

SPAIN worked yesterday to try to win the release of a fishing boat hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia with 26 crew members aboard.

[...]

Spanish media reports said the pirates were demanding money and had fired a grenade launcher at the fishing boat before boarding it, but the Foreign Ministry would not confirm either detail.

Spain has sent one of its frigates after the pirates, and is spooling up diplomatic efforts to release the hostages.

And yesterday, a UAE vessel was seized by pirates before the Somali security forces stormed the vessel and took it back.

Weird.

I'm curious how piracy even works in an age with Satellite imagery and telecommunications. It's not like you've got anywhere to run to.

Separated at Birth

(by way of G-Spot)

Two photos, separated by decades - and little else.

Dukakis - 1988:

Bush - 2003:


'shame we couldn't have gotten this photo before the 2000 election - then these photographs might have one more thing in common...

What Cease Fire?

The Long War answers:

The Mahdi Army cease-fire is all but dead, as the Mahdi Army has openly resisted the Iraqi government's attempts to assert control in Sadrist strongholds in Baghdad, Basrah, and the South. Sadr admitted his political movement issued orders to attack both US and Iraqi troops and has called for Iraqi soldiers and police to desert their units.

It's hard to know where to be on this issue. On the one hand - US and Iraq have needed to take this guy out for a very long time. Earlier restraint has come back to haunt them as Sadr has spun his earlier confrontations with the army as victories.

In that mindset. They should flatten him. The idea that another armed power will hold territory within a country's border is just an anathema to a modern state. The state controls the administration of violence within its borders, period.

On the other hand, I don't know that another Fallujah (which is what it would take) is something that will help things at this point. You surround these urban centers and pummel the Mahdi army into dust - you are going to kill a lot of Iraqis.

Sadr is believed to be in Iran, so no matter how well the battle goes there's no chance you take him out. You can reduce his militia's fighting strength - but it's not clear that these losses would be hard to replace. If his self styled army was composes of highly trained fighters, it would take time to find replacements - but it sure appears that the bulk of these forces are just men with guns. Easy to lose, easy to replace.

To me, that's Iraq in a nutshell. Two bad choices. Which to take?

Gutshot

In usability, you are not supposed to have pride of ownership. You make something, you show it to the user and the user shows you what you really should have built.

In forward thinking companies, you are allowed to build what the user asks for – or at least a reasonable accommodation between the needs of the business and what the user asks for.

The overall principle is that usability will prevent the company from building the wrong thing.

For the past two years, I have been working to design something that is now out in the hands of end users. It has undergone limited, formative tests which identified a number of issues, but the actual build was never tested in any real environment.

Pity.

When rolled out to the user base, the hue and cry was loud enough to bring the deploy to a screeching halt. Improvements were shoved in and a number of enhancements were added – but there was an overall issue with screen design that will not be solved with out a complete unmaking of the current design.

Understandably, the clients are unhappy.

In the ideal word, the build would be tested in a full environment to diagnose user issues with the current design. In full blown usability, time would be taken to determine what is going wrong and where.

There is no time.

The determination was to be made by an email survey, and the early returns are in. The users have spoken: make it like the old system.

This is, of course impossible, for a number of technical and business reasons – but people want what they want.

The net result of all of this is that the existing design will be chucked in favor of a cobbled together replica of the current system's interface.

Being in usability, I should be happy that the users are getting what they've asked for. But it's hard to be happy when essentially, we've failed at our primary function:

We have built the wrong thing.

No Free Lunch

(H/T to TPM)

Okay - George Will spells out the Fed bailout spree in terms I wish more progressives would adopt:

The Fed has no mandate to be the dealmaker for Wall Street socialism.

And this gem:

If Congress cannot suppress its itch to "do something" while markets are correcting the prices of housing and money, Congress could pass a law saying: No company benefiting from a substantial federal subvention (which would now include Morgan) may pay any executive more than the highest pay of a federal civil servant ($124,010). That would dampen Wall Street's enthusiasm for measures that socialize losses while keeping profits private.

Hell, yeah. If the Fed has to save the economy, they should do it, but whatever entity gets saved should pay its pound of flesh. Heads should roll, investors should take a hit and then maybe lessons would be learned.

Maybe if Wall Street knows they can't run crying to the Fed so easy, they might rein in their riskier ventures and start being responsible.

Yes men

Shocked - and yet somehow, unsurprised:

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

We've seen government agencies paying for faux news content pushing pending legislation, and were long past expecting honest statements from cabinet members on any controversial policy - but somehow I'd have expected better from the DoD.

I mean, it's bad enough for the government to scour the earth for like-minded, independent partisans and ask them to defend government policies. It's quite another to round up a group of partisans, tell them what to say, and pretend their commentary is objective.

In political campaigns, they call this astroturfing (the creation of the appearance of grassroots support) - and while we've seen the DoD stoop that low before, this new revelation goes to show this isn't the result of over-eager underlings in the Pentagon - this is high level policy.

The goal was - as the NYT so aptly put it - was to create "a kind of media Trojan horse" which could deliver tainted goods without revealing their origin.

When you can't debate honestly in the public forum - it's the sure sign that your cause is a loser.

Late edit: there's also this bit, which nicely illustrates why the DoD's strategy worked so well for so long - the media is happy to be spoon fed:

...almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.
“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.
Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.
“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

When the networks cannot be bothered to even ask their analysts "gosh, you keep getting this inside information - wherever does it come from?" then they just pave the way for anyone who tries to manipulate them.

Yet another failure for the fourth estate.

Later edit: The reaction of the networks was also telling:

CBS News declined to comment...
NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures...
ABC, said ... military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists...
A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in [the NYT] article.
CNN, [while requiring analysts to disclose outside income sources, does not provide] written, specific ethical guidelines...for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Holy freaking crap...

Did you see BSG this week??

Aaaaaaaaaaagh!

Late Edit: Spoilers in the comments. You were warned.