In Berkeley, everything is "organic." The hippies who live here would have nothing less. Even the University of California at Berkeley is ramping up its food purchases to include more organic items.

What the hell does "organic" mean, anyway? It sounds like it means "good" or "healthful." But it depends on who you are; "organic" sort of means whatever you want it to mean. Like Orwell's example of "fascism" in his essay "Politics and the English Language," the word "organic" has been taken to mean something different from what it originally meant.

Let's start with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for food labeling. There are rules in place for what you can call food -- "organic," "fat-free," "low-fat," etc. These rules are written by either the USDA or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In this case of "organic," it is the USDA that controls what can and cannot be labeled that way.

According to the USDA's National Organic Program Labeling and Marketing Information, "organic" foods "must consist of at least 95 percent organically produced ingredients (excluding water and salt). Any remaining product ingredients must consist of nonagricultural substances approved on the National List or non-organically produced agricultural products that are not commercially available in organic form." There are other regulations and requirements for foods that are not themselves totally organic, but may be labeled as "made with organic ingredients." The USDA levies a $10,000 fine upon any person who knowingly mislabels a product as "organic" when it doesn't meet the above standards.

But the organic foods movement isn't just about food, as Stephen Shapin explains in a New Yorker article entitled "What Are You Buying When You Buy Organic?" The modern organic movement was as much about liberal politics and anti-capitalism as it was about food:

The organic movement that sprang up in America during the postwar years, manured by the enthusiasm of both the hippies and their New Age successors, supplemented [English agronomist Sir Albert] Howard’s ideas of soil health with the imperative that the scale should be small and the length of the food chain from farm to consumer short. You were supposed to know who it was that produced your food, and to participate in a network of trust in familiar people and transparent agricultural practices. A former nutritionist at Columbia, who went on to grow produce upstate, recalls, “When we said organic, we meant local. We meant healthful. We meant being true to the ecologies of regions. We meant mutually respectful growers and eaters. We meant social justice and equality.”

Buying organic is supposed to be about buying from a place that is local, where the profits go directly to the people growing the food, not to a nameless, faceless corporation like ArcherDanielsMidland. Buying organic is also supposed to be about food grown "naturally"; that is, without pesticides and without genetic modification. The organic movement operates using the same paradigm as the Romantic idealization of nature: nature is, in itself, virtuous, and humans -- or anything artificial -- is necessarily evil. The closer you are to nature, and the further you are from humanity, the more virtuous you become. The corollary for this axiom is that people who are further from man-made structures (i.e., without material wealth or societal power, which translates into "marginalized peoples") are necessarily more virtuous. People on the fringes of society -- farmers, children, the poor, and the insane -- are all virtuous because of their distance from human institutions. In the polar world of Romantic idealism, there are only two possibilities: being close to humanity or being close to nature. Being close to nature means, necessarily, being further from humanity, and vice versa.

The organic movement feels the same way. Food grown far from the impact of humanity is more virtuous than food grown by a large agribusiness using pesticides and genetic modification (did you ever think your food could be virtuous?) But the modern organic movement has abandoned this and, as usually happens, large corporations have seen money in a new trend and have capitalized (no pun intended) on it. Whole Foods -- the nation's number-one organic food chain -- would certainly not be endorsed by Berkeley's organic hippies if they knew some interesting facts. "[T]he company is as ferociously anti-union as Wal-Mart -- John Mackey, the volubly libertarian founder and CEO, has called unions 'parasites,'" writes Shapin. The nation's largest organic retailer fails the organic movement immediately by not staying true to liberal political principles, which would hold that the store should be unionized. Whole Foods is also definitely not your local, home-town grocery: says Shapin, "Last year, its total revenue was more than $5 billion and its gross profit was more than $1.6 billion. In 2004, according to the Financial Times, Whole Foods was 'the fastest-growing mass retailer in the US, with same-store sales rising 17.1 per cent quarter-on-quarter.'" Thus, the organic movement is no longer a "counterculture" movement; rather, it has become decidedly mainstream. Organic food is also no longer grown by moms and pops in the backyard and sold at the farmer's market: Earthbound Farm, one of Whole Foods' suppliers and the nation's largest producer of organic produce, grows its "organic" food "on giant farms in six different counties in California, two in Arizona, one in Colorado, and in three Mexican states. [...] By 2004, Earthbound was farming twenty-six thousand acres; its production plants in California and Arizona total four hundred thousand square feet, and its products are available in supermarkets in every state of the Union."

So, what's the problem with this? First of all, "organic" food was never designed to be mass-produced. It takes, on average, four times as many resources to grow organic food as it does "regular" food, since much of the crop is lost to pesticides and disease. Remember: organic growers cannot use pesticides and they cannot use genetic modification that might make a crop resistant to disease. This is why Earthbound needs so much space: to produce the same amount of food as conventional farming, they need to grow more food, with the understanding that much of it will be lost.

Corporations, though, don't like to do things -- and, indeed, can't -- do things on small scales. Organic is fine for individuals, but it stinks as a growth method for a nation or the world. There's as much an ethical dilemma in producing all the world's food organically as there is in nameless, faceless corporations producing all the world's food. Organic food is more expensive than regular food; what about the poor? The very people who are idealized and romanticized by the organic movement (at least, according to me, based on my reading of the organic movement and its relationship to the Romantic movement) can't afford organic food! Shapin hits on something about organic food that I've been saying for a long time:

Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn is what feeds victims of the African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers' market. Food for a "small planet" will, for the forseeable future, require a much smaller human population on the planet.

I'll refrain from re-stating my opinion that the sinister implication -- whether conscious or not -- of the "sustainability" movement is the requirement that most of the world's population die of starvation. But the point remains: the world's famine problems will be solved by pesticides and genetic engineering, not organic food. Thomas Malthus famously predicted that we would all starve in the twentieth century, since humans grow geometrically while plants can only grow arithmetically. He famously forgot the influence of technology that coudl allow plant growth to keep up with human growth. The organic movement negates that technology.

And, thirdly, modern pesticides and -- especially -- genetic engineering are harmless. Says Shapin:

According to Samuel Fromartz, ninety per cent of “frequent” organic buyers think they’re buying better “health and nutrition.” They may be right. If, for any reason, you don’t want the slightest pesticide residue in your salad, or you want to insure that there are no traces of recombinant bovine somatotropin hormone (rbST) in your children’s milk, you’re better off spending the extra money for organically produced food. But scientific evidence for the risks of such residues is iffy, as it is, too, for the benefits of the micro-nutrients that are said to be more plentiful in an organic carrot than in its conventional equivalent.

The organic food movement isn't "bad." For a person to eat organically is acceptable. For a whole group of people to try and foist organic lifestyles on the world is not. Behind the organic movement is a political movement. If you're going to have a political movement, then present it as a political movement, not something else designed to draw in supporters who would otherwise not support you if they knew what you were really up to. Second, I don't know how many "organic" supporters know what organic means these days. It means big companies like Whole Foods overcharging you for food that comes from a place you're just as unfamiliar with as the food that comes from Safeway or Kroger. I fail to see how organic food is necessarily better simply because it's "organic." And I hope that I can educate some organic-types who didn't know that their organic movement wasn't as close to nature as they thought it was.

Posted by Mark at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This just in! The Supreme Court ruled today that the Bush administration overstepped its bounds in instituting military tribunals for Guantánamo terror suspects (who were rounded up by civil authorities, not the military, and detained under civil law). Going even further, the Court said that Congress could not strip detainees of their rights of habeas corpus.

You'll recall that, in April, there were calls for Justice Scalia to recuse himself from the case, as he had made comments in a speech at the University of Freiburg in which he suggested that the Guantánamo detainees had no rights under the U.S. Constitution or international law.

Please read the court's opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 05-184. The Court was divided along predictable lines, with The Usual Suspects (Scalia, Thomas, and newcomer Alito) siding with the government and everyone else siding With the Terrorists. Chief Justice Roberts properly recused himself from the case, as he had previously ruled on it when it was on appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court.

The Court was quite divided, with the majority issuing three concurring opinions in addition to the opinion of the court. All three dissenters each wrote separate dissenting opinions. Here were the court's findings:

1. The Court rejected the government's argument that, pursuant to the ludicrous Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, "no court ... shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider ... an application for ... habeas corpus filed by ... an alien detained ... at Guantanamo Bay,” and therefore, the Supreme Court did not have jurisdiction to rule on the Hamdan case. The law was clearly passed to prevent the Supreme Court from making this very ruling and ensuring that Guantánamo detainees would never, ever see the light of day. The one loophole in this law is that the Detainee Treatment Act did not apply to detainees who currently had a case on appeal, as was Hamdan's case.
2. The Court rejected the government's argument that Hamdan should be dismissed based on a case in which the Court previously ruled that federal courts should normally not intervene in military court martials. Kennedy apparently noted something that the government hoped the Court would overlook: the analogy "is inapt because Hamdan is not a service member." Oops!
3. The Court said -- in these words -- that "[t]he military commission at issue is not expressly authorized by any congressional Act." Woot! Now we have a precedent from the Supreme Court calling into question the specificity of Congress' authorization in 2001. While the Congressional resolution authorized the president to use any means within his power to stop terrorism, omission is not endorsement. In order for Congress to authorize the president to do something, it had to mention what it was they authorized him to do. In order for Congress to give the president a power, they must specifically mention the power. Giving the president some sort of broad, general power to do anything and then saying that that in itself was a justification is stupid and what the Court might call "over-broad." Expect this philosophy to be used in future court cases against the government, and rightly so.


4. The Court noted that, even if the military tribunals were authorized by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the structure and procedures of those tribunals "violate both the UCMJ and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949."

Whew! That's a lot of reasons why the Bush tribunals are illegal, and why the government's attempt to stop the Courts from regulating those tribunals ultimately failed in this case. So, what are the other justices saying?

• Justice Stevens, concurring with the opinion and joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, observe that the military tribunals are illegal because "[t]he Government has not charged Hamdan with an 'offense . . . that by the law of war may be tried by military commission.'" The government charged Hamdan with "conspiracy," which "has rarely if ever been tried as such in this country by any law-of-war military commission not exercising some other form of jurisdiction, and does not appear in either the Geneva Conventions or the Hague Conventions—the major treaties on the law of war." Thus it is not appropriate to try Hamdan in a military court for an offense that the military would not try in a military court.
• These three justices agree that the procedures of the military tribunal violate international treaties, noting, "[t]he procedures adopted to try Hamdan deviate from those governing courts-martial in ways not justified by practical need, and thus fail to afford the requisite guarantees."

No doubt the Republican Spin Machine will label these five justices as traitors, terrorist-lovers, and "activist" judges for daring to suggest that President Bush doesn't have the broad power he asserted he did under the AUMF. Now, let's see the court take on some more Bush overreaches.

Posted by Mark at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush announced in a surprise press conference today that he would launch nuclear weapons against countries that the United States deemed too small.

"Small countries take up a good deal of space that could be used to better advantage by larger countries," he told the White House Press Corps today in the Rose Garden. "Large countries can do things more efficiently than small countries, and as a result, they waste fewer resources. It's called 'economy of scale.' Look it up. I have an MBA from Harvard, so I don't need to look it up. I already know. But you have to look it up. You don't know."

Later in the day on the Fox News Channel, anchor Brit Hume defended Bush's remarks. "It's high time countries like Micronesia, Fiji, and Monaco gave up their land and resources to somebody else. They're only standing in the way of progress. What is this, the seventh century? We're not nation-states anymore."

A source within the White House said that Bush came to the conclusion late on Saturday, when his computer's hard drive became full. "The president called in one of our technical experts, who showed him how to uninstall unnecessary programs and delete old files. The president was amazed by this ability to free up space on his computer, and wondered out loud to the technician if this would work to clear what he called 'the hard drive of the world.' According to the technician, he responded by replying, 'I don't know, sir. I'm just desktop support."

According to the source, Bush made an emergency phone call to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and asked her whether what he called "the hard drive strategy" would work. Dr. Rice replied that it was a very good analogy and suggested they implement the plan immediately. After securing Vice President Dick Cheney's approval, a team of speechwriters met Sunday morning while the president was at church to outline the plan for destroying the world's unnecessary countries.

A spokesman for Microsoft, manufacturer of Windows, the world's most popular computer operating system, said that the president had contacted Bill Gates, the company's chairman, to secure an endorsement. "Mr. Gates told the president that while 'the hard drive strategy' was a good strategy for computers, it probably wouldn't work in the real world," said the spokesman.

"We need to go further than just cleaning out the world's hard drive," said syndicated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh earlier today. "We need to clean out the world's RAM, which means dissolving the United Nations. We need to go back to a mainframe/terminal architecture, in which all nations get their orders from the United States. Our embassies will be like terminals. It will save the world's diplomatic and computing resources! What good is a computer when its different parts have different ideologies?"

Some world diplomatic experts questioned whether or not global policies should be formulated based on an analogy, but they were quickly dismissed by critics who said that they were just raising pointless issues because they want to see the terrorists win. "It's the same old thing you see with all these cretins," said syndicated columnist Ann Coulter. "These diplomatic eggheads in their liberal ivory towers want to make everything theoretical so that they can prevent the common man from understanding what's going on in the world. You know what's going on? Muslims are blowing up Christians and Jews, and these Commie wackos in their comfortable universities are cheering them on. They hate Christianity, they hate America, and they don't even like computers. They're against this computer analogy because they want to take us back to a time before typewriters, back when we were using pencil and paper. I think our university system has a corrupt header block, and we should re-initialize all of these professors to get rid of the corruption."

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow cautioned that the plan would take time to implement. "First, we need to scan the world to see what countries are too small. Then, we have to actually 'delete' them with nuclear weapons. It will take several months to assemble a team to scan the world, so I expect that the American people have nothing to worry about. I'm going to place this hourglass on the podium like so, and that will tell us when our scanning team is done scanning. If for some reason they encounter a problem, the hour glass will stop, and we'll have to start all over again. But I repeat that the American people have nothing to worry about in the near future."

Posted by Mark at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Al Gore's recent film An Inconvenient Truth has re-ignited the debate over global warming. Today, Slashdot posted a link to an article from Canada Free Press criticizing Gore's film.

One of the article's sources, a climatologist from Canada, says that one of the problems with Gore's film is that his experts are not climatologists:

Even among [the small fraction of scientists who actually work in the field of climate study], many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

On the other side of the coin, we have a 2004 article from Science magazine (also linked from Slashdot), which analyzed 928 scientific papers regarding climate change:

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

The "consensus position," according to Science, is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which states that human beings are modifying atmospheric constituents through the emission of "greenhouse gases," and that the increase in the Earth's temperature is due to these emissions. According to Science, we have a theory with two parts. The first part is an observation: the Earth's temperature is fluctuating now in a way that is different from how it fluctuated 50 years ago. The second part is a hypothesis about this observation: humans, through greenhouse gas emissions, are causing this temperature fluctuation.

Like evolution, global warming is a theory. Unlike evolution, there are global warming opponents even within the scientific community. (Within the scientific community, there is no one who doesn't believe that evolution exists; only outside of the scientific community is there skepticism.) The scientists who suggest that there's no such thing as global warming and that it's just a figment of everyone's imagination are most likely in the employ of multinational corporations which would benefit from looser emission restrictions. The scientists who are not affiliated with corporations or foundations, but are still skeptics, are of the opinion that we don't yet know enough about global warming to say whether or not humans are having an effect, let alone whether or not there is an effect. Accurate temperature records go back about one hundred years -- a fraction of a second in geologic time, which operates on a scale of millions of years -- but scientists have developed new ways of extracting core samples from ice caps to see how they have melted and re-frozen over the course of thousands of years.

What, then, is the truth regarding global warming? In the face of more convincing evidence, the answer appears to be, "We're not sure." Air pollution is visible outside our windows, but is this pollution causing a global climate change? And if humans are causing climate change in a negative way, is the change as dire as Al Gore might make it out to be?

Posted by Mark at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was alerted to the website theyrule.net by an FCB employee. The website uses Flash and the 2004 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) listings to show who sits on the boards of directors of some of the world's largest companies. It will then show you what other boards those people sit on, allowing you to view intricate maps of the interrelationships between directors of companies. It's interesting to see how incestuous the corporate world is, and it's also interesting to see what the connections are. (I viewed a web of the directors of the chemical company 3M and learned that four of the directors of 3M also sit on the boards of Boeing, Northrup, and Lockheed-Martin, the nation's largest aircraft companies.)

The website allows you to view popular searches (for example, the business interrelationships of the members of various presidential cabinets, or the relationships between the directors of Apple and Microsoft) and save the directories you create.

In addition to being a good time-waster, it's also very entertaining and informative.

Posted by Mark at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The inaugural entry of my third annual Bizarro Oprah's Book Club -- which reviews books Oprah would never have on her show -- is quite timely.

A Scanner Darkly by the late prolific science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, has been made into a movie that will come out July 7. Whether you know it or not, you've seen Dick novels and short stories as films before. Total Recall? Minority Report? Blade Runner? Paycheck? These are all based on Dick short stories or novels. But not all of them are good, and most deviate tremendously from their source material. Scanner, written for the screen and directed by Richard Linklater (who will use the same rotoscoping techniques he employed in Waking Life) looks to be bringing us, for the first time, a faithful adaptation of a Dick work.

But we're talking about the novel. Like most Dick novels, it's set in the future, in Los Angeles. This future isn't as unknown to us as the one from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as there are no androids, robots, or the like. But there is surveillance. Bob Arctor lives in an L.A. suburb and hangs around with a bunch of druggie friends. Unbeknownst to them, he actually works for the LAPD's drug unit, doing anonymous, undercover surveillance inside a "scramble suit," a device that camoflauges his voice and appearance so that no one will know he's a cop.

The drug of choice in this future time is something called "Substance D," a drug whose primary effect seems to be making its addicts go crazy. I can't say a lot about the rest of the story, because that would be giving away too much. But I can talk about Dick's epilogue.

At the end of his "drug novel," he says that the book is something of a euology to the various friends he lost to drugs. Dick grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s (and even went to high school with Ursula K. LeGuin), and as a result, did a lot of drugs. In his later years, he decides that drugs were probably not a good idea and offers a list of friends who died or were mentally crippled by drug use.

But Dick is not a moralizer, and he says as much. His epilogue, he says, is a moral statement in the tradition of the statements of Greek tragedies: it is a warning, not a plea. Dick doesn't plead with his readers not to do drugs; rather, he tells them that if they choose to do drugs, they should know that there will be consequences. This, he says, is something that no one told him and his friends back in the 1960s, and as a result, they got a lot of pleasure, but then they got a lot of pain.

Dick also says that he doesn't buy the notion that people can't help being addicted to drugs; all of his friends, he says, chose to do drugs, and in true Existentialist form, he says that they had to live with the consquences of their actions.

Dick died in 1982 from heart failure and lived with drug complications all his life. He was brilliant, but crazy. Allegedly, he said that the stories for his books were beamed into his head by aliens. But he has great ideas, especially the central idea from this book. The "scanner" in the title is a holographic scanner, like a futuristic surveillance camera. Arctor, watching himself on the playback of the scanner's recordings and losing his mind at the same time, wonders whether or not he can truly know himself, since he has no objective frame of reference. He hopes that the scanner can tell him about himself, but that's only if the scanner sees "clearly" -- if the scanner is able to penetrate him and his mind. Or, does the scanner see "darkly" -- does it only show his physical self, unable to penetrate into his mind? Is there no objective way to know who you are? How do you know when you've gone crazy?

Posted by Mark at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I had totally forgotten to blog about the issue of 'net neutrality, and then I read an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle today from Stanford University law professor and EFF boardmember Lawrence Lessig. Apparently, Congress will vote today on a 'net neutrality bill, and they could vote to either keep the Internet free, or create a "premium" tier of Internet, the content of which will be pay-only. Lessig explains:

Now Congress faces a legislative decision. Will we reinstate net neutrality and keep the Internet free? Or will we let it die at the hands of network owners itching to become content gatekeepers? The implications of permanently losing network neutrality could not be more serious. The legislation, backed by companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, would allow the firms to create different tiers of online service. They would be able to sell access to the express lane to deep-pocketed corporations and relegate everyone else to the digital equivalent of a winding dirt road. Worse still, these gatekeepers would determine who gets premium treatment and who doesn't.

As Lessig points out, practically everyone is against the idea of a two-tiered Internet -- except ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast. In a world of net neutrality, phone and cable companies lose, since they don't get the opportunity to charge for what they determine is "premium" content.

If you'd like to read the legislation, it is available via THOMAS, the federal legislation database. It is called H.R. 5252, the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006."

As an aside, I didn't know that bills were now available in XML. Awesome! Internal references are hyperlinks, so if some text refers to some other part of the bill, you can click on the link and go to that reference.

Posted by Mark at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

And I couldn't think of a better story to report on for my 500th entry! It's been three years and five hundred entries since I started this blog back in 2003. That's a long time.

The New York Times reports today that Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, is furious with Vice President Dick Cheney. In a letter sent to Cheney and the press, Specter revealed that the vice president intentionally kept him out of negotiations with other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- of which he is the chairman -- regarding the illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretaps of United States persons. Cheney and other Republicans on the committee apparently came to an agreement that no telecom company executives would testify in front of the Judiciary Committee -- a decision that Specter is unhappy with. He is one of the few Republican voices that dares criticize the Bush administration. In his letter, he said that "the administration is continuing warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is preventing the Senate Judiciary Committee from carrying out its constitutional responsibility for Congressional oversight."

If Cheney manages to threaten enough Senate Republicans, the other Republicans on the committee could vote Specter off the Judiciary Committee altogether. Specter has been critical of the administration's broad (and largely self-invented) assertions of executive power, which could get him into trouble with Cheney.

Last week, the Boston Globe revealed that Cheney's assistants personally review every piece of legislation that is scheduled to come before the president and check for any language that might limit the president's power. The assistants then recommend that the president add a "signing statement" in which he says that he refuses to abide by any law that limits his constitutional powers as president. It helps, of course, if you believe that the Constitution places no limitations on your presidential power, and therefore any legislative oversight at all (like the anti-torture amendment introduced by John McCain) is a limitation that the president won't abide by.

It should be noted that, in his five years in office, Bush has issued more than 750 "signing statements," more than every president before him combined. If a signing statement issue came before the Supreme Court, I'm quite confident that the Supremes would declare the signing statement's weight as law unconstitutional for the same reasons they declared the line-item veto unconstitutional.

Cheney is at the forefront of taking power from the legislature and giving it to the executive, whether through quasi-legal means, like signing statements, or through outright intimidation via Karl Rove. Specter has called him out on it; now how will the administration smear him? Will it suggest that he wasn't invited to meet with the vice president because, like Richard Clarke, he's "out of the loop"? (And, like Richard Clarke, when you're the chairman, it's hard to be "out of the loop" unless you're deliberately excluded.)

Zarqawi killed in Iraq

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terrorist group called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in an airstrike yesterday. This is good news. Osama bin Laden remains at large. This is bad news.

I wonder if warrantless wiretapping tipped the U.S. off to Zarqawi's whereabouts?

Posted by Mark at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Senate is scheduled to vote later this week on permanently repealing the estate tax. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-AL, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post last week in which he recommends the permanent repeal of the estate tax. Sadly, the editorial makes use of the same old falsehoods about the estate tax.

One of the arguments is that, while the super-rich can afford the estate tax, people on the cusp of wealth cannot. The oft-provided example -- and it is repeated by Sessions -- is that of the family farm. The farm has a monetary value, and when the farm is passed on after death, the value of the farm is taxed. But since the value of the farm's land isn't liquid until the property is sold, children who receive the land as inheritance must sell some of the land to pay the tax. As a result, many family farms have gone out of business because of the estate tax. Horrors! Sadly, however, this isn't true.

A Washington Post editorial from last year cited a Congressional Budget Office report on the estate tax. Sessions, in his op-ed, mentions that the estate tax "is one of the IRS's most painful taxes," "hits hardest at heirs of small-business owners and family farmers," and other superlatives. But he never mentions another interesting superlative: that it is the most exclusive tax. The CBO report estimates that there were between 4,641 and 5,308 estates owned by farmers in 2000. The Post reports, "The numbers that owed estate tax, the CBO found, were paltry, and the number without enough cash on hand to pay the bill even punier: In 2000, for example, just 1,659 farm estates had taxes due, of which 138 didn't report enough liquid assets to cover their tax liability," This is not a tax that most people are going to have to pay.

The estate tax is a tax only on the super-rich, as there is a $1.5 million exemption currently in place. In 2009, the exemption will increase to $3.5 million. In 2000, "only 300 farm estates in 2000 would have owed any tax at all -- and of those, just 27 would have a tax bill in excess of their liquid assets." Under the 2009 exemption, the CBO projects that "65 farm estates would owe taxes and 13 would not have enough cash to cover the bill."

Sessions even claims that the estate tax is bad for minority-owned business, and cites what is probably the most prominent example of a minority-owned business having to pay the estate tax: the Chicago Defender, which had to pay $3 million in estate tax when its founder died in 1997. Estate tax opponents try to appeal to minorities with this single instance of an African-American-owned business that faced a large estate tax bill, suggesting with this one piece of support that "death taxes are killing black businesses." As argument, this is poor: one incident does not a trend make.

You might expect the world's wealthiest people to be against the estate tax. Warren, Buffett, CEO of the investment firm BerkshireHathaway, has an estimated net worth of $42 billion. And he opposes the--

What a second. No, Warren Buffett is in favor of the estate tax! So is liberal baby-killer, terrorist sympathizer, and Cindy Sheehan puppetmaster George Soros! Are these guys nuts, or just nuts?

The estate tax places the burden of payment on those who can afford to pay. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have an estate tax; indeed, we would have no taxes. But the government needs to run somehow, and the $28 billion tax shortfall that would come from eliminating the estate tax needs to come from somewhere (we need all the money we can to fund stupid wars, illegal wiretapping, and bogus news releases about the Medicare prescription drug plan). Then again, if we cut government revenue, then we can shut the doors on departments we don't like, and we can say, "Well, we just didn't have the money." This sounds a lot less political than "I didn't like the department and I was looking for any way to kill it that I could."

Posted by Mark at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here in sunny California, today is the primary election, in which most people will be voting for candidates for their parties -- if they're registered with a party -- and ballot initiatives. A few lucky people will get to decide on real offices, like the mayor of Oakland. I was one of those lucky people.

How fitting that, a week ago, Rolling Stone published a feature story penned by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., titled "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" regarding the degree to which the Bush administration stole the 2004 election.

I have written in this space before that Bush did not steal the 2000 election; that was the by-product of poor litigation and jurisprudence all around. The 2004 election, however, was stolen by the Bush administration. In 2000, it was an issue of ambiguous ballot-counts: by some calculations, Gore would have won another recount. By other calculations, Bush would still have won. (Don't try and tell me that according to this one particular esoteric thing you read from some Democratic apologist, Gore definitely would have won; that's a pile of baloney. The truth is that we'll never know definitively.)

2004 was a different story, however, especially in Ohio, the tie-breaking state. Kennedy and some co-authors report that massive voter fraud occurred in Ohio, and the worst part of it that the fraud was perpetrated by Secretary of State (and Bush re-election committee co-chairman) J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell, a fervent Republican, did everything in his power (and some things outside of his power) to disenfranchise voters who might vote Democrat. The number of disenfranchised voters (and I use the word "disenfranchise" in its literal and correct meaning -- "denied the right to vote") was more than the margin separating Bush and Gore in Ohio.

Some fun facts from the story:

• "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots."
• "According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots."
• "According to a statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, 16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election officials, and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions on their registration cards. Statewide, the study concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent."

Additionally, the article details attempts by GOP operatives to discourage people from voting, illegal decrees from Secretary of State Blackwell that were designed to make it extremely difficult to register to vote or get a provisional or absentee ballot (including the enforcement of an archaic law requiring that voting applications not printed on eighty-pound card stock be rejected). GOP illegality ran the gamut from discouraging voters from coming to the polls by intimidation or creating long lines all the way to altering or destroying voter registration information.

Want to be more outraged? While Ohio state courts have, time and again, ruled these actions illegal, the point that Kennedy makes is that it is too little, too late: the election is over, and people are in office. Because Blackwell is in charge of state elections, there have been no investigations into this blatant corruption. Angry voters, aware of Blackwell's complicity in the theft of the 2004 election in Ohio, succeeded in getting an amendment to the state constitution placed on last November's ballot that would require future elections to be administered by an independent commission rather than the Secretary of State.

The amendment failed, however, and Blackwell is still in charge of elections; indeed, he intends to run for governor when Bob Taft's term expires in November. We've seen how he games the system when other people are running for office; how corrupt will this year's elections be when Blackwell himself is on the chopping block? Blackwell is even more conservative than current governor Taft, by the way. Taft did not endorse 2004's constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage because it could be construed to outlaw heterosexual common-law marriages, as well. Blackwell championed the whole thing and even boasts on his website that he "championed the passage of Issue 1, the Ohio Marriage Amendment in 2004."

Bob Taft began the project of destroying Ohio, and now Kenneth Blackwell would like to finish the job.

Posted by Mark at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)