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Yglesias

Another Round on Israel’s Human Rights Obligations

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 22, 2009 at 4:44 pm

This is really maddening. I wrote here that irrespective of how bad Hamas or Hezbollah may be Israel has an obligation to abide by international humanitarian law and that Human Rights Watch is correct to highlight credible allegations of violations of international humanitarian law. In response, Commentary’s Noah Pollak attributed to me a whole range of improbable-sounding and vile beliefs, so which I simply reiterated the point that irrespective of how bad Hamas or Hezbollah may be, Israel has an obligation to abide by international humanitarian law. I noted that many credible allegations had been raised of such violations and included a link to a B’Tselem report to that effect.

Pollack “responds” to my post with the observation that B’Tselem is critical of the UN Human Rights Council and also has some disagreements with the Goldstone report. But so what? I never mentioned the UNHRC. I’ll add that Richard Goldstone himself has criticized the UN Human Rights Council’s handling of his report. We can all agree—me, Pollack, Goldstone, B’Tselem, etc.—that the UNHRC’s record on Israel is not a good one*.

That said, I’ll circle back around to the point: Israel has obligations under international humanitarian law and human rights norms, obligations that it appears to have violated, and these obligations stand regardless of crimes on the part of Hamas. This observation has prompted a lot of ad hominem attacks, and a lot of smokescreens and huffy rhetoric, but basically nothing in the way of substantive defense.

I note that the argument has nothing in particular to do with Israel. When it comes to the United States of America, liberals generally think the US has human rights obligations and obligations under international humanitarian law. We think that part of being “the good guys” on the world stage is that we are obliged to do the right thing even if our adversaries don’t. Conservatives disagree with this—they think starting wars and brutalizing detainees, for example, are good ideas—and see human rights as basically a concept that should be opportunistically deployed for geopolitical advantage, and then cast aside the first time you want to start copying Chinese torture manuals. But American liberals who think the US should abide by human rights norms aren’t “anti-American.” Nor are American Jews who think Israel should abide by human rights norms “anti-Israel.”

Economy

AHIP’s Two-Faced Campaign Unravels: No ‘Comfort To The Enemy’ Vs. ‘Committed To Bipartisan Health Reform’

By Lee Fang on Oct 22, 2009 at 4:21 pm

For months, ThinkProgess has documented how the private health insurance industry has waged a duplicitous, “two-faced” campaign to kill health reform. Because the industry understands that the public views it in a largely negative light, the industry presents itself as proactively working hand-in-hand with legislators to produce reform. However, behind the scenes — using attacks from front groups, allied politicians, think tanks, lobbyists, and right-wing media — the industry is coordinating a massive effort to kill all reform.

As Congress approaches a final vote on health reform, the industry is having difficulty concealing its underhanded campaign. USA Today reports that Karen Ignagni, the President of the insurance industry trade group AHIP, fired off a letter reminding Democrats that despite releasing a deeply misleading report last week slashing the Senate Finance health bill, her companies are still “committed to bipartisan health reform”:

“You don’t turn against reform simply because people have declared you’ve turned against reform. That’s not what we’re doing.“

The self-conscious letter stands in stark contract with what Ignagni’s own lobbyists said today at an AHIP conference. According to the Huffington Post, Steve Champlin, a lobbyist for a firm representing AHIP, declared bipartisan health reform dead and urged GOP lawmakers to refuse to help pass a bill:

“There is absolutely no interest, no reason Republicans should ever vote for this thing. They have gone from a party that got killed 11 months ago to a party that is rising today. And they are rising up on the turmoil of health care [...] So when they vote for a health care reform bill, whatever it is, they are giving comfort to the enemy who is down.”

Private insurers have already been caught using a stealth lobbying firm to send employees to rowdy town halls (and radical tea party events), sharing lobbyists with slash-and-burn anti-health reform attack groups, and paying a number of conservative pundits who regularly appear in major media outlets to slam health reform. Almost immediately after AHIP issued its “hatchet job” report against the Senate Finance bill, Republican lawmakers began parroting the report’s talking points verbatim. The candid slip by Champlin today, whose firm has been paid hundreds of thousands by AHIP, underscores a larger effort by insurers to derail reform, even bills without robust measures like the public option.

Click here for ThinkProgress’ research page on the health insurers’ campaign against reform.

Update

The Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney reports that AHIP is now distancing itself from Champlin’s comments.

Yglesias

Feaver Flashback

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 22, 2009 at 3:58 pm

091002-obama-mcchrystal-hmed-8a.h2 1

It can’t be said often enough that the decisions the Obama administration is facing on Afghanistan are a direct result of the Bush administration’s exceedingly poor policymaking. I think very few people believed in the winter of 2001-2002 that we’d be sitting here in the fall of 2009 talking about what strategy shifts were necessary to prevent defeat in Afghanistan. The reason very few people believed that is that most people believed the Bush administration could win. Those of us who believed that were proven wrong. So bad on us. But worse on the Bush administration! I find it mind-boggling that the architects of this disaster are so eager to offer backseat commentary on Obama’s handling of it. And yet, here’s Peter Feaver late of the NSC blogging away and Dick Cheney is giving speeches.

At any rate, this might be a good opportunity to revisit Feaver’s March 2004 Washington Post op-ed in which he said that the thing that proved Bush was a good president was his handling of Afghanistan. “Viewed in hindsight, the Bush-Rumsfeld military plan looked brilliant,” he wrote “but at the time it was highly controversial and decidedly risky.” And Bush took the risk! “Would a less stubborn commander in chief have pursued the risky war plan that ultimately toppled the Taliban and put al Qaeda on the run? The record of the ’90s suggests otherwise.”

And yet here we are over five years after that still wondering how to deal with the mess left behind by this “brilliant” war plan.

Politics

Health care coalition premieres powerful new pro-reform ad highlighting medical bankruptcies.

By Victor Zapanta on Oct 22, 2009 at 3:50 pm

Americans for Stable Quality Care has just released an emotionally-evocative new ad on health reform, calling attention to the plight of millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans who suffer through medical bankruptcies. Watch it:

ASQC is a pro-reform coalition primarily composed of health care interest groups that are in favor of reform — including the American Medical Association and PhRMA.

Related Posts

Climate Progress

Report: Burning Coal And Oil Kills 20,000 Americans A Year

By Guest Blogger on Oct 22, 2009 at 3:49 pm

Our guest blogger is Jonathan Aronchick, an intern with the Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress.

PollutionThe burning of coal and oil is killing 20,000 Americans each year, a new Congressional report has found. After the Senate completes its work on health insurance reform, it will have the chance to pass major legislation to further improve our nation’s health, with the Kerry-Boxer Clean Energy Jobs Act. The National Research Council (NRC), an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently found that the United States is paying a heavy price in health and lives lost for its dependence on fossil fuels. In the newly released report, “The Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” the NRC explores the “externalities” of energy use, costs that are not factored into its market price. Requested by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the report monetizes these unseen energy costs at $120 billion annually by tracing the full cycle of our energy use—extraction, development, deployment, and waste:

Based on the results of external-cost studies published in the 1990s, we focused especially on air pollution. In particular, we evaluated effects related to emissions of particulate matter (PM), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and oxides of nitrogen (NOx), which form criteria air pollutants. We monetized effects of those pollutants on human health, grain crop and timber yields, building materials, recreation, and visibility of outdoor vistas. Health damages, which include premature mortality and morbidity (such as chronic bronchitis and asthma), constituted the vast majority of monetized damages, with premature mortality being the single largest health-damage category.

Shockingly, the NRC’s estimates for the death toll of a school bus worth of Americans every day are very conservative — a 2004 report by the Clean Air Task Force estimated 24,000 people died prematurely due to coal pollution alone.

Most of the hidden costs of energy use come from coal-fired electricity generation ($62 billion a year) and motor vehicle transportation ($56 billion a year). The NRC did not take into account the cost of global warming pollution, including only the estimates for some of the non-climatic costs imposed by our energy use, specifically those costs related to health, agriculture, and built infrastructure. Although other pernicious side-effects of our dependence on dirty fuels — such as ecosystem disruption, mercury contamination, and national security risks — were examined in the report, they were excluded from the final cost figures.

Comparatively, the report shows that renewable energy such as wind, solar, geothermal power costs us very little in external damages. If we cannot direct our use of energy towards those forms that do not carry hidden burdens, we better hope that Americans have good health insurance.

Media

Beck Capture

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 22, 2009 at 3:14 pm

367px-Glenn_Beck_Book_Tour_cropped 1 1

Dave Weigel had an interesting post this morning about the problems a political movement runs into when it lets itself be led by charlatan media personalities:

The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk about this stuff. But Beck and the others don’t let them talk about this stuff. For the past few months, they have moved the discussion onto fantasy terrain, accusing the president of reaching for dictatorial powers and surrounding himself with “radicals” who want to destroy capitalism. [...]

And remember, one of the huge political mistakes of 2005 was the Republican decision to do a full-court press on an issue that had come from conservative activists and pundits: the fate of Terri Schiavo.

You can see some of this at work in the very interesting GQR report on “The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans”. Basically they contrast the worldview of self-identified conservative Republicans with that of Obama-skeptical people who don’t self-identify in this way. To cast the distinction in broad terms, the Obama-skeptics worry that Obama is failing—that his efforts to create jobs aren’t working, that his reforms of the health care system won’t improve access to quality care, etc.—whereas the conservative Republicans worry that he’ll succeed. They believe, à la Beck, that the Obama administration is pursuing a secret agenda aimed at the deliberate destruction of the United States. Focusing on this rather outlandish claim makes it difficult to get in touch with the more banal worries of the marginal voter.

The overarching problem, I think, is that while it may be tactically helpful to have allies in the media who’ll lie about your enemies, it’s a big problem when you start believing too many of the lies. Beck and others on the right have, for example, convinced a lot of people that Cass Sunstein is a dangerous wild-eyed in a way that will make it difficult for the Obama administration to elevate him to any higher positions. Given that Sunstein is, in fact, actually pretty conservative for a Democrat and also a plausible Supreme Court justice this campaign has been, objectively speaking, a victory for the left.

Security

Gibbs Responds to Cheney: He ‘Seems To Have Forgotten His Role In The Last Seven Years Of Afghanistan’

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 22, 2009 at 3:05 pm

Last night in a speech to the Center for Security Policy, Vice President Cheney attacked President Obama for “dithering” on whether to add more troops to Afghanistan. “[T]he success of our mission in Afghanistan is not only essential, it is entirely achievable with enough troops and enough political courage,” said Cheney.

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, in 2008, the Bush administration rejected the request for 30,000 more troops from Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul. “There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in an interview after he was fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.”

In today’s White House press briefing, Gibbs referenced McKiernan’s troop request to hit back on the emptiness of Cheney’s accusations:

GARRETT: So that was a specific reference to McKiernan’s request that said that specific troop request was not taken seriously.

GIBBS: It wasn’t — Whether it was taken seriously or not, it wasn’t filled. I assume since it wasn’t filled, it was not taken seriously. Maybe they filled unserious ones and didn’t fill serious ones. That’s a fabulous question for the Vice President, who seems to have forgotten his role in the last seven years of Afghanistan.

When Fox News reporter Major Garrett then asked whether it was “proof of unseriousness to not necessarily agree with a request for troops submitted by a commander in the field,” Gibbs replied:

GIBBS: No. I’m simply saying, I think it’s interesting what the Vice President is suggesting the President isn’t acting on is what the previous administration didn’t act on, right? [...]

Help me understand the rationale how one goes from half as many troops as are now in Afghanistan under his watch, to 68,000, to now wanting an additional 40 [thousand], when you didn’t want the additional troops that President Obama approved. I mean, how do you go from 68-plus, when you didn’t want 34-plus? How — Do you — It defies some modicum of logic to get “I didn’t want to go from 35,000 to 65,000, but I want to go from 65,000 to 100,000.” Fuzzy math.

Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

Climate Progress

NRC: Burning fossil fuels costs the U.S. $120 billion a year — not counting mercury or climate impacts!

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 22, 2009 at 3:01 pm

Coal wall

A new report from the National Research Council examines and, when possible, estimates “hidden” costs of energy production and use — such as the damage air pollution imposes on human health — that are not reflected in market prices of coal, oil, other energy sources, or the electricity and gasoline produced from them.  The report estimates dollar values for several major components of these costs.  The damages the committee was able to quantify were an estimated $120 billion in the U.S. in 2005, a number that reflects primarily health damages from air pollution associated with electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation.  The figure does not include damages from climate change, harm to ecosystems, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security, which the report examines but does not monetize.

As the Senate gears up to discuss clean energy legislation this fall, the Senate may have””despite its awareness””another healthcare debate on its hands.  If we cannot direct our use of energy towards those forms that do not carry hidden burdens, we better hope that Americans have good health insurance.

The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently found that our current level of energy use is costing us a lot more than our environment””it is also costing us our health. In the newly released “The Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” the NRC explores the external costs of energy, costs that are certainly not factored into its market price.  Requested by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the report reveals that there are substantial “hidden” costs to our energy production and use, primarily reflected in damages to human health. The report monetizes these unseen energy costs at $120 billion annually by tracing the full cycle of our energy use””extraction, development, deployment, and waste. These costs result in the death of 20,000 people each year“”10,000 due to coal alone.

Read more

Politics

After Twitter shuts down GOP accounts impersonating Dems, party complains of ‘free speech’ infringements.

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 22, 2009 at 2:39 pm

fail-whale Twitter has shut down 33 fake accounts created by Connecticut Republicans meant to impersonate Democratic state representatives. According to the Hartford Advocate, the GOP scheme was designed “to send out posts under the Democrats’ names mocking the liberal tax-and-spend bastards.” Twitter strictly forbids impersonation “intended to mislead, confuse or deceive others” on its site. However, the state GOP chairman is now complaining that Republicans’ “free speech” rights are being violated:

“That’s unfortunate,” was state Republican Chairman Chris Healy’s response when told of Twitter, Inc.’s decision. “I’m not quite sure what the issue is, other than that the Democrats were successful in stopping free speech.”

Healy’s party may have suffered a setback with the loss of its Twitter campaign, but Republicans are still operating the 33 Web sites they created using the names of those same Democratic lawmakers. As far as anyone knows, this is the first time any state party has used such a tactic to mock its state opponents.

Healy is also claiming that Democrats are protesting the fake sites because they’re just jealous: “They didn’t think of it first, so that’s why they’re whining.” But political communications experts say that the sites are clearly unethical and “deceptive.”
(HT: Blue Mass Group)

Economy

CNBC: Paymaster Must Make Pay Comparable ‘Across The Industry’ Or Bankers Will Go Work At The DMV

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 22, 2009 at 2:30 pm

Today, Kenneth Feinberg, the administration’s special master for compensation, plans to announce that the seven companies under his office’s watch must cut pay packages for their top 25 executives by about 50 percent, including a 90 percent reduction in cash salary. Feinberg also plans to “curtail many corporate perks, including the use of corporate jets for personal travel, chauffeured drivers and country club fee reimbursement.”

An executive at one of the seven companies told the Wall Street Journal that “the terms came as a shock,” and that the restrictions “were clearly much worse than what had been anticipated.” And of course, CNBC, which never hesitates to defend bailed-out bankers and their sky-high bonuses, went to bat for the banks once again, arguing that Feinberg should make pay comparable “across the industry,” lest some bankers take such exception to their pay cuts that they go work at the DMV. Watch it:

CNBC also managed to blame the falling value of the dollar on Feinberg’s decision. But if Feinberg really applied compensation levels comparable to other Wall Street banks, his restrictions would be rendered moot, as Wall Street pay is headed for a record high this year, eclipsing the previous highs from 2007. (For the record, the average DMV employee makes $35,000 per year.) Goldman Sachs alone has already set aside $16.7 billion for compensation.

And this gets at the limitations of the administration’s action. While I think it is entirely appropriate that Feinberg crackdown on the pay at these seven companies, they represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with Wall Street’s pay structures.

As Nomi Prins wrote, “by simply tying compensation caps to the TARP program (a year late), Feinberg and the Obama administration are completely ignoring the rest of the $14.6 trillion federal bailout and subsidization of the banking industry, which has helped propel many key banks to 2007 levels of compensation, unfettered.” And as evidenced by Goldman Sachs analyst Brian Griffiths’ comment yesterday that we must “tolerate” income inequality “as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Wall Street doesn’t seem too interested in changing things on its own.

The Fed took a step towards reform today, seeking comment on compensation formulas that would defer payment over a longer-term. Indeed, what has to happen — by regulation if necessary — is that a large percentage of any particular pay package needs to be tied to the long-term performance of the firm. This, along with a resolution authority that ensures that banks can fail without bringing down the rest of the economy, will correctly align incentives going forward, and hopefully help to prevent another situation in which Wall Street bankers run to the federal government for aid and then use that aid to line their own pockets.

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