Month: July 2007

Let There Be No Kings

During the constitutional convention, there was much debate over the impeachment clauses.

It was finally settled when Ben Franklin said that these provisions were not there, the only way to remove a President who was attempting to install himself as king would be assassination.

Bush is now claiming that if the president wants it, it’s not contempt.

So he is claiming, as Nixon did to David Frost, and as Stalin and Mussolini did, that if he orders it, it is legal.

Impeach Dick Cheney today. Impeach George W. Bush tomorrow.

And the Winner in the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Category………

This is just whack. These guys are impersonating an officer because it’s convenient.

Your Republican morality at a glance: Laws for the but nor for me.

Romney aide’s bogus badges: Sources detail ‘illegal’ security tactic
By Casey Ross/ Exclusive
Boston Herald Reporter
Friday, July 20, 2007 – Updated: 12:21 PM EST

In an apparent violation of the law, a controversial aide to ex-Gov. Mitt Romney created phony law enforcement badges that he and other staffers used on the campaign trail to strong-arm reporters, avoid paying tolls and trick security guards into giving them immediate access to campaign venues, sources told the Herald.
The bogus badges were part of the bizarre security tactics allegedly employed by Jay Garrity, the director of operations for Romney who is under investigation for impersonating a law enforcement officer in two states. Garrity is on a leave of absence from the campaign while the probe is ongoing.

A campaign source said Garrity directed underlings on Romney’s presidential staff to use the badges at events nationwide to create an image of security and to ensure that the governor’s events went smoothly.

….

Talking Turkey

There is a lot of talk about the “shocking” victory of Recep Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey’s elections.

Some are touting this as proof that democracy can occur amongst a predominantly Islamic population.

Some are arguing that Turkey is beginning a slide towards theocracy.

Neither is accurate.

There are Islamic countries that have maintained democracys, just not Arab ones, and Turkey is not Arab.

As to the victory of Erdogan, it has very little to do with Islam, or Islamism, and much more to the very basic fact that, absent some sort of major crisis, people vote for government that works.

The secular parties in Turkey have been, at least by western standards, extraordinarily incompetent and corrupt.

Edrogan ran promising competence and relatively clean government, and he has largely delivered.

Whatever concerns that the electorate has, this outweighs the concerns of the population about a possible move toward Sharia law in the long term.

I would note that the same phenomenon is why Hugo Chavez wins elections, despite being far more alarming in some significant ways than Erdogan.

If people want to turn Chavez out of government, what they really need to do is to show that their interest is governance, not divvying up spoils.

Blowback from the Blackberry Case Continues

Significant patent reform is heading down the pike, and the Supreme Court has already made changes with its Teleflex ruling, and now Congress is weighing in.

Patent Fight Pending
Brian Wingfield, 07.20.07, 6:00 AM ET

Remember the patent dispute surrounding the BlackBerry wireless device? Last year a communications catastrophe was avoided when BlackBerry maker Research in Motion agreed to settle with NTP over a patent infringement lawsuit.

….

This glosses over what happened. NTP was shaking down Blackberry using an injunction as a threat. When they got an injunction against all non-government service, Blackberry responded that they could not separate the business, and that they would comply by shutting everything down in the US.

Blackberries are used by 90% of congressional aids, most of the White House Staff, and most of the Supreme Court clerks, and a lot of congressmen and perhaps a few of the Justices too, so when this happened, they all freaked, and started talking to each other about a fix.

NTP blinked, not Blackberry, and so they settled for far less than they were originally demanding, but the damage had been done. The political establishment is now aware that IP has run amuck, and this bill is an attempt to fix this.

I do not believe that it goes far enough. I believe that the special patent court, which views everything as a nail since all it has is a hammer, should be abolished, and I believe that the bar for injunctive relief should be set much higher, but the fact politicians are finally seeing this as a problem is a very hopeful development.

Denmark evacuates Iraqi employees and their relatives – International Herald Tribune

I read this story about Denmark evacuating Iraqi employees and their relatives in the IHT.

If the US behaves in a historically consistent matter, we will leave the tens of thousands of translators and other Iraqis hanging out to dry, where many will die, and more will become stateless refugees.

This is distressing for both ethical reasons, these people have risked their lives for us, and for pragmatic reasons, each time we do this, it makes it more difficult to recruit members of the indigenous population to help us.

The fact that we do not allow anyone who has already risked life and limb to help us entry into the US is largely an artifact of bigotry, and to be fair, the US military is far worse about this than the State Deartment, which is already making noises about getting its employees into the US.

Does Privacy Sell?

I just read this story aboutAsk.com devising an aggressive privacy policy. It was couched as a way to compete with Google.

I’ve also heard about Microsoft doing the same (in the case of the Borg, however, I won’t trust them to follow through).

This is not an outbreak of corporate ethics, but rather an attempt to capitalize on a perceived weakness of Google, the Elephant in the room, regarding privacy.

My guess is that this will not make a big difference, and we’ll see relaxation of the new policies over the next 18-24 months.

A new Twist on Peer-to-Peer: Telephone Service

A company called Ooma has a new setup to make VOIP work. It will the phone lines of its subscribers to actually complete phone calls

While this is presented as reducing completion charges, the real reason for this is that it is a way of avoiding the frequently infernal machinations of the incumbent local service providers.

The baby Bells are absolutely bone headed about this, because they do not want to see real competition in their markets.

Stars and Stripes: Democrats move to rein in use of private contractors in Iraq

It’s about bloody time.

Democrats move to rein in use of private contractors in Iraq

Mideast edition, Friday, July 20, 2007

The Senate’s nine freshman Democrats announced a new effort Wednesday to rein in the use of private contractors to rebuild Iraq and to do an array of war-related jobs normally assigned to the military, The Virginian-Pilot reported Thursday.

According to the report, the group will ask Congress to create a “Commission on Wartime Contracting” that would assign auditors already employed by the federal government to ferret out waste and mismanagement in the more than $300 billion Iraq reconstruction effort.

This has been an ongoing scandal. Whether it’s the dangerously unaccountable mercenaries from groups like Blackwater, or KBR serving substandard food provided by slave laborers, this war profiteering has been a national disgrace.

Bush Now Claims that He is King

Bush has now forbidden the Justice Department from pursuing contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials if executive privilege has been invoked.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.”

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”

“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

Impeachment investigations trump executive privilege. This is why proceeding should start against both Bush and Cheney tomorrow.

Pelosi and Reid will Ram Through Ethics Legislation

The legislation has been stalled because the Republicans have refused to appoint Republican members to the conference committee. The Democratic majority leaders have now decided to use a little used parlimentary maneuver to short circuit the foot dragging.

Basically, it comes down to the House and Senate Democrats working out the minor differences between the bills on their own, and then passing identical bills through both houses.

Identical bills mean no conference committee.

Where the Net Really Makes a Difference

The first place that I noticed the net making a difference in real life was when I moved to Baltimore, and I found out how much easier Mapquest made it for me to find a home where I wanted, because I knew were each address was instantly.

It’s now entering politics, where you have someone setting up a searchable database of Debra Jean Palfrey’s (aka the DC Madame) phone records.

You have also found this in the turnaround of massive document dumps by the Bush administration on the US Attorney scandal, frequently in a matter of hours.

The ability to being hundreds, if not thousands, of people together to do the scut work of investigative journalism has the real possibility being a major game changer for journalists, particularly those who don’t have the resources of the NY times behind them.

Newspapers and the Chop Shop Mentality of Private Equity

Alan D. Mutter gives us the lowdown on the damage done to newspaper as an insitution by Private Capital Management (PCM).

These folks are best known for forcing the liquidation of Knight-Ridder, and have been dumping their media holdings for quite some time (see pic).

That being said, Mr. Mutter missed the big picture, which is that most private equity functions as the equivalent of a chop shop. They part out businesses, or destroy the aspects of those businesses that made them valuable in the first place, in order to make their profit.

The current “crisis” in newspapers is less a function of declining ad revenues and readership than it is is the increasingly low quality product that is being produced to satisfy Wall St. investors.

This is How You Apologize if You are Mensch

Brian Caplan offers an apology.

EconLog, Mea Culpa: How I Succumbed to Anti-Foreign Bias, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty

Mea Culpa: How I Succumbed to Anti-Foreign Bias
Bryan Caplan

A high fraction of immigrants are young, low-skilled, Hispanic males. Given these demographics, I long assumed that immigrants would have relatively high crime rates. While I kept this problem in perspective, I took it for granted that increased crime was a genuine drawback of immigration.

I was wrong.

A fascinating NBER Working Paper (earlier, free version here) by Kristin Butcher and Anne Piehl shows that, despite their demographics, immigrants are drastically less criminal than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants have one-fifth the incarceration rate of natives. Yes, natives are incarcerated at five times the rate of the foreign-born:

Let’s be clear, the error here is minor, as he is pro large scale immigration, he was arguing for this in spite of what he thought were crime issues, which is far more benign than what Lou Dobbs done.

I tend to be closer to Dobbs than I am to Caplan, though for economic issues (I don’t believe that there are jobs Americans won’t do, just jobs they won’t do for pennies.