JustOneMinute

Something Good Came From The Iraq Debacle?!?

The NY Times prompts spilled coffee all over the Upper West Side with this guest op-ed:

The Arab Spring Started in Iraq

ON April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell to an American-led coalition. The removal of Saddam Hussein and the toppling of a whole succession of other Arab dictators in 2011 were closely connected — a fact that has been overlooked largely because of the hostility that the Iraq war engendered.

Them's fightin' words! To a Times audience, anyway. And Barack Obama is still trying to figure out whether Bush's surge was a success, so the possibility of a link between Saddam's overthrow and the broader collapse of Arab dictators is surely beyond his pay grade.

The author, Kanan Makiya, is an Iraqi ex-pat and:

...a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University and the author of “Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq” and “Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World.”

He also supported the 2003 invasion, but says this about the aftermath:

The first gulf war achieved America’s goals, but the people of Iraq paid the price for that success. They were left with international sanctions for another 12 years under a brutal and bitter dictator itching for vengeance against those who had dared to rise up against him, including Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. By the time of the American invasion in 2003, the Iraqi middle class had been decimated, state institutions had been gutted and mistrust and hostility toward America abounded.

Both the George W. Bush administration and the Iraqi expatriate opposition to Mr. Hussein — myself included — grossly underestimated those costs in the run-up to the 2003 war. The Iraqi state, we failed to realize, had become a house of cards.

None of these errors of judgment were necessarily an argument against going to war if you believed, as I do, that overthrowing Mr. Hussein was in the best interests of the Iraqi people. The calculus looks different today if one’s starting point is American national interest. I could not in good conscience tell an American family grieving for a son killed in Iraq that the war “was worth it.”

We didn’t know then what we know today. Some, including many of my friends, warned of the dangers of American hubris. I did not heed them in 2003.

But the greater hubris is to think that what America does or doesn’t do is all that matters. The blame for the catastrophe of post-2003 Iraq must be placed on the new Iraqi political elite. The Shiite political class, put in power by the United States, preached a politics of victimhood and leveraged the state to enrich itself. These leaders falsely identified all Sunni Iraqis with Baathists, forgetting how heavily all Iraqis, including some Shiites, were implicated in the criminality of Mr. Hussein’s regime.

Although I always feared, and warned in 1993, that the emergence of sectarian strife was a risk after Mr. Hussein’s fall, my greatest misjudgment was in hoping that Iraq’s new leaders would act for the collective Iraqi good.

Out with the evil, in with the beneficient? That was one of Bush's many miscalculations as well.

FWIW, here is a 2007 post ruminating on whether the Iraq result was a failure of conception or implementation. I think people who supported the inital invasion would prefer to fault Bush's lack of planning for the post-war reconstruction (I know I do.)

As to the notion that the Arab Spring took inspiration from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein rather than the election of Nobel Prize winner Barack Obama, well, maybe with the souring of Springtime in Egypt and the disaster in Syria the Times is looking for a way to Blame Bush.

The Gun Debate - Something's Missing...

The NY Times covers the political wrangling that led to Connecticut's new restrictions on gun rights. Yet I fear something is missing from their summary of the key parts of the bill:

The new laws include a ban on the sale of magazines carrying more than 10 rounds and requires registration of existing ones. It also includes an expansion of the existing assault weapons ban, requires background checks on all firearms sales and sets up a registry of weapons offenders.

But while gun-control advocates hailed the bill and gun supporters condemned it, the legislation did not contain some elements gun owners feared. It did not compel residents to surrender any existing weapons or magazines and included no limits on the quantity of legal firearms and ammunition residents could own.

And a bit later, in describing the process:

The leaders appointed a task force on guns, mental health and school safety, which comprised members of both parties. The guns subcommittee was led by Mr. Looney and Representative Craig Miner a fierce gun-rights advocate and a chairman of the legislative sportsmen’s caucus.

Gun-control advocates worried that a bipartisan approach would result in a bill missing the two most important items on the table: an expanded ban on assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines — the kind Mr. Lanza used in the shooting.

Wait, the two most important items were the bans on assault weapons and high clip magazine thingys? Adam Lanza was mentally ill (as were the infamous shooters at the Aurora theater, the Arizona shopping mall, and Va Tech, to note a few) - wasn't somehow linking background checks with expanded mental health reporting part of this puzzle? (As to how that expanded mental health reporting would have disqualified Adam Lanza's mother, who was purchasing guns legally after passing background checks, who knows?)

Not in Times World, which is certainly revealing although of course utterly unsurprising.

But since you ask, the Connecticut bill did include a few mental health wrinkles. Not enough to alarm advocates for the mentally ill, fortunately, but enough to irk them. However, the description of the changes on the State of CT website reads like an advocacy wish list:

Among its mental health provisions, the bill creates a 20-member task force to study the provision of behavioral health services in Connecticut and report to the legislature by February 1, 2014. It also requires the Department of Mental Health and Addition Services (DMHAS) to:

1. administer a mental health first aid training program, in consultation with the Department of Education (DOE);

2. implement an assertive community treatment (ACT) program in three additional cities (programs currently operate in Manchester, Middletown, New Britain, and Norwich); and

3. provide case management and care coordination services to up to 100 people with mental illness who are involved in the probate court system and are not receiving these services.

Finally, the bill requires the Department of Children and Families (DCF) commissioner, by January 1, 2014, to establish and implement a regional behavioral health consultation and care coordination program for primary care providers who serve children.

The bill makes various changes to the process for grieving adverse determinations (e. g. , claims denials) by health insurers. Among other things, it reduces the time health insurers have to (1) make initial determinations on requests for treatments for certain mental or substance use disorders and (2) review claim denials and other adverse determinations of such requests. It expands the role of and qualifications required for health care professionals who evaluate the appropriateness of adverse determinations. The bill also requires the Insurance Commissioner to seek input on methods the department might use to check for compliance with state and federal mental health coverage parity laws and report on these issues to the Insurance and Public Health committees.

How much any of that has to do with gun homicides I don't know. However, suicide prevention was certainly on people's minds. And the main background check change related to mental health is this:

Anyone who is voluntarily committed will now be prohibited from owning a firearm or getting a permit within six months. Similarly, the law signed Thursday extends the time a person who was involuntarily committed is prohibited from owning a gun from one year to five.

More on the mental health part of the legislative process here and here.

Not Rebuilding Trust In The Gun Debate

Obama spoke about both sides rebuilding trust in the gun debate. In other news, a Congressional "leader" prattles on about non-reusable high capacity magazines. My trust that Congressional Democrats have a basic understanding of the issues is not increasing.

And I see that the campus police were warned that Aurora shooter Holmes was homicidal and dangerous a month before his spree. My trust that our legal system will be reworked to respond with a bit more urgency to this sort of warning has not been enhanced by anything Obama has said. Actually, my recent experience has been the opposite - the liberal cheerleaders like to talk about gun violence as including suicides until the topic turns to the link between gun violence and mental health; then the talk is all about homicides.

And even there the evidence is described as murky at best. For reasons that IMHO represent a political viewpoint, violent mentally ill substance abusers are typically counted separately from the violent mentally ill and omitted from the violent mentally ill total. And prison surveys of the violent mentally ill overlook the fact that many mass killings are a murder-suicide, with no prisoner available to be part of a subsequent survey.

Our deference to and deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has not been widely discussed; this letter from Clayton Cramer is a vivid starting point.

The War On Women, Ongoing

They told Glenn that if he voted for Romney female politicians would be objectified rather than respected. And they were right!

President Obama assessed the beauty of California’s attorney general Kamala Harris, calling her “the best looking attorney general,” during remarks at a fundraiser in Atherton, California.

“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake.  She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country — Kamala Harris is here.”

Fox and Fiends gave him a pass and the NY Times couldn't find anyone quotable so they buried it in a Keystone story. Well, we know Obama and his team respect women so this will get a pass from the libs [OK, some but not all libs - Blue on Blue reported here.]. Symbolism only emanates from the Right.

SOOO HETERO... BuzzFeed rebuts Obama, whose hotness meter is clearly dated.

GAFFE INCOMING: From the White House transcript it is clear that Obama knew he was choosing to skate on thin ice, so he can't go with the "Totally Clueless" defense (my emphasis):

Second of all, you have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake.  She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country -- Kamala Harris is here.  (Applause.)  It's true.  Come on.  (Laughter.) 

And shouldn't we deplore what sounds like heightism in this shout-out?

We've got some elected officials who are doing incredible work -- great friends.  First of all, somebody who works tirelessly on behalf of California every day, but also works on behalf of working people and makes sure that we've got a more inclusive America -- a good friend of mine, somebody who you guys should be very proud of, Congressman Mike Honda is here.  Where is Mike?  (Applause.)  He is around here somewhere.  There he is.  Yes, I mean, he's not like a real tall guy, but he's a great guy.  (Laughter.)

For heaven's sake - Mike Honda is a not-so-tall Japanese American who maybe wasn't so well fed during his childhood in an American internment camp in Colorado.

Obama, Rebuilding Our Trust

The NY Times regales us with an account of Obama's gun control speech in Denver:

He waved toward the assembled officers and local politicians and added, “We’ve got to get past some of the rhetoric that gets perpetuated, that breaks down trust, that’s so over the top that it just shuts down all discussion.”

In contrast to some of his earlier, more emotional remarks about the impact of gun violence, the president portrayed the debate as one of a principled difference that needs to be bridged.

If he really wants to rebuild trust he could take a step in that direction by dropping his phony stat about 40 percent of guns being obtained without a background check.

Nor does it bolster his credibility when he tells a room of California's One Percenters that the Newton shooting was done with a semi-automatic weapon and then "corrects" himself to make it an automatic:

I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon -- by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly. 

Nor, since we don't lack for constructive suggestions, is it helpful for him to impute evil intent to his opponents, as he when he damns the Republican party with faint praise:

 I want to find some common-sense gun safety legislation that we can get done.  And I do believe that there are well-meaning Republicans out there who care about their kids just as passionately as we do. 

Uh huh. Some Republicans care about our kids but others just chortle maniacally when they read about mass shootings.

But let's give the President props for lightening a grim subject with a bit of comedy. We are back in Denver and he is extolling legislation to enhance background checks:

So this does work.  And, by the way, if you’re selling a gun, wouldn’t you want to know who you’re selling it to?  Wouldn’t you want to know?  Wouldn’t you want in your conscience to know that the person you’re selling to isn’t going to commit a crime?  (Applause.)

I bet they applauded! These background checks will predict future crime? I mean, I've read about these ubiquitous drones and seen Minority Report, so I guess the future is now!

Obama also delivered a lesson on the limits of the human imagination. Well, his, anyway:

How do you rebuild some trust?  And I told the story about two conversations I had.  The first conversation was when Michelle came back from doing some campaigning out in rural Iowa.  And we were sitting at dinner, and she had been to like a big county, a lot of driving out there, a lot of farmland.  And she said, if I was living out in a farm in Iowa, I'd probably want a gun, too.  If somebody just drives up into your driveway and you're not home -- you don't know who these people are and you don't know how long it's going to take for the sheriffs to respond.  I can see why you'd want some guns for protection.

Well thank heaven Michelle went to Iowa! I have not had that good fortune, yet I figured out the rural problem all by myself. Probably just dumb luck. Or reading the headlines.

 

 

Wait'll She Hears About The ObamaCare Subsidies!

The NY Times has been going on about Leaning In, in an attempt to solve one of the vexing problems of the 80's, to wit, why do women's wages lag that of men? The current collapse of working class male wages is of no concern to their audience, so we press on.

The latest offering examinies the ways in which the tax code penalizes working spouses. Old news, to be sure, so wait until these ardent libs put the ObamaCare subsidies under the microscope:

WASHINGTON — In a long-awaited interpretation of the new health care law, the Obama administration said Monday that employers must offer health insurance to employees and their children, but will not be subject to any penalties if family coverage is unaffordable to workers.

So a low-income worker will get a subsidy for his own health care but not the wife and kids. Or, the spouse could get a job and they could lose the subsidies. In addition to experiencing the tax woes described above.

And sociologists will puzzle over why working class marriage is ever less popular.

Pollsters Passing Time

Public Policy Polling looks for (and receives!) some cheap traffic by releasing a "How Dumb Are The Rubes, ANyway" survey of some of the great conspiracy theories of the current day.

Yeah, yeah, those Romney voters sure are maroons, aren't they? But my favorite Q&A got short shrift in the press release, which told us that

13% of voters think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, including 22% of Romney voters.

From the crosstabs we learn that 5% of Obama voters think he is the anti-Christ and another 8% aren't sure.

Well, I am not sure either. But I expect him to resurrect into heaven any day now, or at least Hawaii, and that should settle the question. Until the next survey...

 

 

Gun Magic, Or, More Fun With Numbers At The NY Times

The NY Times continues their contribution to a serious national dialogue on guns with these two old chestnuts. First, from a piece on the urgent yet faltering effort to expand background checks:

But no background check is required for about 40 percent of gun purchases, including those made online or at gun shows, federal officials estimate.

Federal officials who offer that estimate, including Obama, are getting Three Pinocchios from WaPo "FactChecker" Glenn Kessler. His gist - the 40% figure comes from a stale 1994 study and includes gifts and estate transfers. A better estimate is about 20%.

The Times then reprises the gun violence/gun homicides game, although more transparently than last time:

Report Links High Rates of Gun Violence to Weak State Regulations

By ERICA GOODE

Many states with the weakest gun laws have the worst rates of gun violence, ranking high on numerous indicators, like gun homicides and suicides, firearm deaths of children, and killings of law enforcement officers, according to a report to be issued Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress.

At least they mention suicides; the last time they ran this con they completely omitted the word.

Alaska ranked first in overall gun deaths, the report found, with 20.28 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 — more than twice the national average — followed by Louisiana and Montana, all states that prior analyses have judged to have weak gun laws. Eight of the states with the highest levels of gun violence were among the 25 with the weakest gun laws, the report found.

Yeah, yeah. The last report was ranking states like Montana high on gun violence based on a high suicide rate and a very low homicide rate. I am confident that the same pattern held up one year later. And if eight of the top ten are among the lower half of all states in terms of their laws, is that a stastically meaningful correlation? I would have thought pure chance would put five of the top ten in the lower 25. Where is Nate Silver when the Times needs him!?! [Per this binomial calculator, the odds of getting 8, 9 or 10 of the Top Ten states landing in the lower 25 are about 5.4% if the underlying process is 50/50. Put another way, if a coin was tossed for each of the top ten and each state coming up heads was put in the lower 25, there would be about a 5.4% chance of getting 8, 9 or 10 heads.)

Late in the story the fly in the ointment is noted again:

Dr. Azrael, of Harvard, noted that the factors that were driving gun violence differed from state to state — in states like Montana and Idaho, for example, the rate of gun suicides greatly outstrips the rate of homicides committed with firearms.

It will be interesting to peruse the study when it hits the intertubes. The lead tells us that low control states score high on "numerous" indicators, such as "gun homicides and suicides, firearm deaths of children, and killings of law enforcement officers". Yet I think we will find states like Montana ranking high on just one factor. The suspense mounts!

Should suicides be counted in the overall gun violence statistics? I would boldly say "No", and "Maybe". If the topic is making mental health part of a robust background check system, and denying guns to people judged to be at risk of suicide, then yes, the suicide rate is relevant. And there is evidence that the suicidal impulse can be transitory, so lack of access to something quick and decisive like a gun can have an impact on the suicide rate (1, 2, 3).

But when Obama et al start talking about gun control in terms of assault weapons and limiting magazine capacity, I think it is fair to note that the link between those factors and suicide is not firmly (or even vaguely) established. Are we facing a national crisis of suicides by people who shoot themselves sixteen time and then bleed out? I missed that report.

HMM: From the study, here are the Top Ten:

1. Louisiana
2. Alaska
3. Alabama
4. Arizona
5. Mississippi
6. South Carolina
7. New Mexico
8. Missouri
9. Arkansas
10. Georgia

Some of those states look legimately violent, not suicidal. And pardon my idiocy, but doesn't the Times mention Montana? I am seeing this on my screen:

Alaska ranked first in overall gun deaths, the report found, with 20.28 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 — more than twice the national average — followed by Louisiana and Montana, all states that prior analyses have judged to have weak gun laws. Eight of the states with the highest levels of gun violence were among the 25 with the weakest gun laws, the report found.

Yet Montana doesn't make the Top Ten for overall gun violence. So why is the Times leading with it? [This interactive map gives each state's rank in each category; in 2010 Montana was 3rd in overall firearm death rate and 3rd in firearm suicide rate, but 36th in firearm homicide rate. Its aggregate rank was 13, so it missed the Tragic Ten.]

Here are the criteria that went into the gun violence index:

1. Overall firearm deaths in 2010
2. Overall firearm deaths from 2001 through 2010
3. Firearm homicides in 2010
4. Firearm suicides in 2010
5. Firearm homicides among women from 2001 through 2010
6. Firearm deaths among children ages 0 to 17, from 2001 through 2010
7. Law-enforcement agents feloniously killed with a firearm from 2002 through 2011
8. Aggravated assaults with a firearm in 2011
9. Crime-gun export rates in 2009
10. Percentage of crime guns with a short “time to crime” in 2009

Obviously, a low-crime high-suicide state like Montana will score poorly on the suicide and overall death scale (and isn't that double-counting?) but not stand out in the other factors.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN: The overview of the CAP report tells us that "children" are 0-17 years old. Yet when I click to the fact sheet for Louisiana, I see that "children" are 0-19, which means a lot of high school grads (and dropouts) that have become gangbangers are still counted as children. OTOH, Alaska seems to be based on 0-17. Baffling. The footnotes spend me to the CDC, so my morning is coming undone.

BACK IN ALASKA: The CAP fact sheet says this about Alaska:

From 2001 through 2010 Alaska had the highest gun homicide rate among children ages 0–17 of any state in the country, at three times greater than the national average.

If I am handling the CDC database correctly, (IF!) there were 37 total firearm homicides from 2001-2010 in the 17 and under category; 18 of those were attributable to Alaskan Indians, who are about 15% of the population and show other signs of social breakdown (which probably hurt the violence against women stats as well).

Well. Even setting aside half the youth homicides, Alaska's rate would still be 1.5 times the national average. And apparently, by other measures Alaska's overall homicide rate is not a standout problem.

JUSTIFIED: Kentucky is 21? Get Raylan Givens on the line. And Texas is 23, which doesn't fit the image at all.

Obama Care Fail Delay

Just a speed bump:

WASHINGTON — Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees — a major selling point for the health care legislation.

The law calls for a new insurance marketplace specifically for small businesses, starting next year. But in most states, employers will not be able to get what Congress intended: the option to provide workers with a choice of health plans. They will instead be limited to a single plan.

This choice option, already available to many big businesses, was supposed to become available to small employers in January. But administration officials said they would delay it to 2015 in the 33 states where the federal government will be running insurance markets known as exchanges. And they will delay the requirement for other states as well.

The promise of affordable health insurance for small businesses was portrayed as a major advantage of the new health care law, mentioned often by White House officials and Democratic leaders in Congress as they fought opponents of the legislation.

Supporters of the health care law said they were disappointed by the turn of events.

Supporters are disappointed? Critics are confused! What about individuals, who were supposed to be buying coverage through state run exchanges and collecting generous ObamaCare subsidies. Is that also delayed?

Not yet - the individual exchanges parallel the small business exchanges but are officially on track, for now anyway.

 

 

Frack The Europeans, Or, The Next American Boom

The WaPo spreads hope and sunshine for the US:

European industry flocks to U.S. to take advantage of cheaper gas

German chemicals giant BASF, which operates the plant here, has announced plans for wide-ranging expansion in the United States, where natural gas prices have fallen to a quarter of those in Europe, largely because of American innovations in unlocking shale gas.

Among those most affected are energy-intensive industries such as steel and chemicals, because they use natural gas as a raw material and power source. With Europe lagging in energy production, manufacturers on the continent warn that a chain reaction could shift more and more investment to U.S. shores.

“It’s become clear, with the drop in gas and electricity prices in the United States, that we are, at the moment, at a significant disadvantage with our competitors,” said Gordon Moffat, director general of Eurofer, the main lobbying group for European steel manufacturers.

And there is a chain-reaction critical mass metaphor in play:

“It’s a very slow process, but it’s a continuous one,” said Harald Schwager, the head of BASF’s European operations, referring to the manufacturing outflow. “Once a customer of ours decides to build a new factory in the U.S., then this customer will request from us to be close by with our production. And so, over time, you see a self-accelerating process, which will move production into the U.S.”

Europe's Greens won't get out of the way, so Europe's only hope is that Obama can derail the US fracking effort in the next three years, although he hasn't been that obtuse yet. Or, they could back Andrew Cuomo for President in 2016.