Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here for Part 1.

Some of these pages have been open for close to a year, but the one for policy shop Third Way is only a week or so old. Third Way, which describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan strategy center for progressives”, got a bunch of attention from Blogolia lately when it emerged that they’re the bozos responsible for Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller’s enthusiastic endorsement of immunizing the telecommunications industry from consequences for violating the law on behalf of the Bush administration’s surveillance state.

It was Third Way VP Matt Bennett who infected Rockefeller with one of the more dishonest talking points on the subject: that immunity is necessary to guarantee future cooperation from the industry when future presidents ask them for help. The argument got prominent play in Rockefeller’s generally stupid Washington Post op-ed on the subject, which was immediately and thoroughly debunked by Glenn Greenwald, among many others, with one of the primary points being that companies already enjoy immunity for assisting the government in its inquiries so long as they can show that they made a good faith effort to comply with existing law. But that’s not enough for the progressives at Third Way, where the law takes a back seat to corporate and governmental thuggery.

The group is also a big proponent of nuclear power, in favor of tripling the percentage of electricity now supplied by nuclear power plants. Even allowing for improvements in efficiency, we’re talking another 200 or more plants at an average cost of $5 billion—a trillion-dollar investment, minimum, in non-renewable, environmentally sketchy, corporate-intensive energy production. That’s pretty progressive. I’m for it so long as we can squeeze all 200 plants inside the Beltway.

Progressive. Here’s a list of Senate Democrats Third Way holds dear. See if you can spot one who qualifies as progressive. No luck? Try again with the House. Why look, they’re all Democratic Leadership Council drones; somehow none of the House Progressive Caucus members rallied to the Third Way flag. What’s in a word?

I started the last installment off with some commentary on health care, which is an arena of considerable interest to me not least because I can’t afford it. One of my favorite sources for information about health care is the World Health Organization’s Statistical Information System, which offers country by country comparisons of just about every imaginable data point on the subject. Did you know that Cuba has more than twice as many doctors per capita and almost as many nurses as the United States? Maybe that’s why the dirt poor country matches us in life expectancy despite a per capita annual cost less than 5% of ours.

This examination of Australia’s heavily-regulated and subsidized private health insurance industry provides some perspective on the Clinton and Obama plans for health care coverage reform. The Australians have gone to great lengths to guarantee that enough citizens will spend enough of their discretionary income on private insurance to keep the industry healthy, while at the same time attempting to regulate the industry sufficient to keep costs manageable for the insured and keep the companies from excluding the least profitable clients. The resulting Byzantine system is probably the closest approximation among industrialized countries to what the Democratic candidates envision, although the government provides baseline universal coverage for all regardless of income. The bottom line is that although private health insurance is viewed as necessary to help contain costs, there doesn’t seem to be any unequivocal evidence that it does so. And that’s in a country where the for-profit health care lobby is a midget compared to ours.

The Commonwealth Fund reports on state and regional disparities in the quality and cost of health care in the US. Among the unsurprising conclusions:

Across states, better access to care and higher rates of insurance are closely associated with better quality (Exhibit 3). States with the lowest rates of uninsured residents tend to score highest on measures of preventive and chronic disease care, as well as other quality indicators.

Four of the five leading states in the access dimension—Massachusetts, Iowa, Rhode Island, and Maine—also rank among the top five states in terms of quality. Moreover, states with low quality rankings tend to have high rates of uninsured. This cross-state pattern points to the importance of affordable access as a first step to ensure that patients obtain essential care and receive care that is well coordinated and patient-centered. In states where more people are insured, adults and children are more likely to have a medical home and receive recommended preventive and chronic care. Identifying care system practices as well as state policies that promote access to care is essential to improving quality and lowering costs.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald again, writing in The American Conservative about Rudy Giuliani’s authoritarian ways.

By the nature of the office, even the most excessively secretive, grudge-harboring authoritarian in charge of a municipality can only do so much damage. But the dangers posed by allowing such an individual to rule the most powerful nation on earth are boundless. And those general risks are greatly enhanced after eight long years of unprecedented expansions of government power and systematic erosions of virtually every check on executive authority.

A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office.

That kind of thing doesn’t really bother Republicans; if Rudy could have shed his abortion-loving, gay-friendly, cross-dressing anti-gun past, his utterly sincere toxicity probably would have earned him the GOP nomination. Instead, he wound up with the Fifty Million Dollar Man (and stuck me with Mike Huckabee).

23 years ago, Philadelphia police bombed the residential headquarters of MOVE, a group of impoverished revolutionaries with a history of bad relations with police and their neighbors. The bomb and the resulting fire killed 11 members of the group, including women and children, and ended up burning down another 60 houses in addition to the MOVE redoubt. I don’t recall why I was reading the linked collection of related stories, but it remains one of the more astounding modern-day examples of authoritarian psychosis.

Considerably more recently, a Time Magazine swamp denizen is shocked to find John McCain apparently suggesting that support for withdrawing from Iraq and opposition to The Surge is the same as not supporting the troops. Since “opposing us is treason” has been the Republican mantra since 911, the only startling thing here is that a writer for Time Magazine was apparently unaware that McCain is a Republican. McCain’s comments were actually a twofer, since they came in the context of telling lies about Mitt Romney’s alleged support for getting out of Iraq. The Straight Talk Express, ladies and gents. It’s coming to your town.

Research shows that the ideal length of copyright protection is at present 14 years and not, as Disney would have us believe, forever.

More research tells us that the September, 2007, appointment of a new comander for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is either a signal that Iran is shifting its defense emphasis to asymmetrical warfare in anticipation of a conflict with the US, an effort by Iran’s ruling clerics to marginalize president Ahmadinejad, or simply a routine changing of the guard.

In October of last year, Paul Krugman had harsh words for Angelo Mozilo, then still the CEO of Countrywide, the most prominent early victim/perpetrator in the housing bubble collapse. He notes (not exactly in these words) that the fallout from the debacle threatened to make Enron’s management look like small-time crooks of limited imagination, and remarks on the failure of Congress, regulatory agencies and corporations to learn anything from Ken Lay and company other than to think bigger.

The Guardian reported at the end of last year that Mr. Third Way, Tony Blair, was personally and deeply involved in obstructing the corruption and bribery investigation focused on UK defense giant BAE and Bandar Bush.

Blair wrote a “Secret and Personal” letter to [British attorney general] Goldsmith on December 8 2006, demanding he stop the investigation. He said he was concerned about the “critical difficulty” in negotiations over a new Typhoon fighter sales contract, as well as a “real and immediate risk of a collapse in UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation”.

Blair said these were “extremely difficult and delicate issues” but he knew that constitutionally “any intervention you make … must be your decision alone”. Politicians normally have no right to interfere in a criminal case.

Goldsmith again attempted to resist. He saw Blair three days later and said, according to the official minute, that “while he could see the force of [Blair's] points … he was concerned that halting the investigation would send a bad message about the credibility of the law in this area, and look like giving in to threats.”

Blair told him “higher considerations were at stake”. He also personally vetoed a proposal that BAE could plead guilty to lesser corruption charges, saying this would “be unlikely to reduce the offence caused to the Saudi royal family”.

During July and August of last year, someone decided to take a shot at shoehorning long-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi into the Iraqi prime minister’s office in place of the hapless but surprisingly tenacious current occupant, Nouri al-Maliki. The effort manifested itself in a series of vaguely sourced newspaper stories and a Washington Post op-ed by Allawi himself in which he advocated for al-Maliki’s ouster and proposed a two-year phased withdrawal of US troops. I had planned to write something about Allawi and the op-ed, which I mentioned in a mundanely prescient piece about the lack of resolve on Iraq among Congressional Democrats and the Democratic presidential candidates, and ran across this 2004 profile of Allawi in Time Magazine.

Iraqis have a strong sense of irony — every discussion about politics or economics in this country seems to begin with a sardonic or mordant observation: Isn’t it odd that a nation with the world’s second-largest oil reserves should also have mile-long queues at gas stations? Isn’t it strange that the Americans, who made such a big deal of Saddam Hussein’s treatment of prisoners, brutalized their own Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib? And so on.

So, it was entirely appropriate that discussion over the appointment of Iraq’s new interim government was laced with its own special irony: The two men at the top of the list announced Tuesday were just last month ranked bottom of a list of potential leaders — by their own countrymen.

A poll conducted in May by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies (ICRSS) asked Iraqis to rank 17 prominent religious and political leaders. Iyad Allawi, Prime Minister of the interim government that will take over administrative power from the Coalition Provisional Authority on June 30, finished in sixteenth place. Behind him, dead last, came Ghazi al-Yawer, who on Tuesday was named president of the interim government.

I generally enjoy reading Matt Yglesias, but this riff on Democrats and national security issues struck me as completely pointless when I read it back in December, which raises the question of why I left the page open for a month and a half afterward. I think it had to do with the comments.

And speaking of national security, the next open page is a story in the Guardian about Rich Barlow, a former CIA agent working on WMD issues who was drummed out of the agency and professionally ruined for trying to expose and derail ultimately successful efforts by US officials to help Pakistan develop nuclear weapons. It’s a particularly depressing example of how the US, and in particular the Reagan administration and its illustrious alumni in the current Bush administration, practically beg for blowback.

In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan. It was known the Islamic Republic had been covertly striving to acquire nuclear weapons since India’s explosion of a device in 1974 and the prospect terrified the west – especially given the instability of a nation that had had three military coups in less than 30 years . Straddling deep ethnic, religious and political fault-lines, it was also a country regularly rocked by inter-communal violence. “Pakistan was the kind of place where technology could slip out of control,” Barlow says.

He soon discovered, however, that senior officials in government were taking quite the opposite view: they were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan’s ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology. In the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance. It provided Washington with a springboard into neighbouring Afghanistan – a route for passing US weapons and cash to the mujahideen, who were battling to oust the Soviet army that had invaded in 1979. Barlow says, “We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn’t see eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the bomb.

How could any US administration set such short-term gains against the long-term safety of the world?” Next he discovered that the Pentagon was preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear bomb.

Barlow was relentless in exposing what he saw as US complicity, and in the end he was sacked and smeared as disloyal, mad, a drunk and a philanderer. If he had been listened to, many believe Pakistan might never have got its nuclear bomb; south Asia might not have been pitched into three near-nuclear conflagrations; and the nuclear weapons programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea – which British and American intelligence now acknowledge were all secretly enabled by Pakistan – would never have got off the ground. “None of this need have happened,” Robert Gallucci, special adviser on WMD to both Clinton and George W Bush, told us. “The vanquishing of Barlow and the erasing of his case kicked off a chain of events that led to all the nuclear-tinged stand-offs we face today. Pakistan is the number one threat to the world, and if it all goes off – a nuclear bomb in a US or European city- I’m sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan’s direction.”

This December, 2005, Financial Times story talks about changes in US tactics in Iraq—the “oil spot” strategy—as “Bush administration rhetoric has turned towards preparing the American public for a reduction in US forces in Iraq.” I thought the rhetoric was aimed at misleading the public into thinking that the administration was preparing to reduce troop levels, but maybe this is just an example of the differences between the British and American deployment of English.

From October of last year, Time’s speculation, now shown to be well-founded, that the Bush administration would soon be attempting to hammer out a long-term security agreement with the Iraqis. This was good reporting: the writer, Mark Kukis, spotted comments by an Iraqi official that signalled an effort to move from the current UN-mandated status of the American occupation to a bilateral US-Iraqi one. And sure enough it came to pass, complete with ineffectual protests from Democrats. Here’s Kukis then:

The comments by Iraq’s deputy foreign minister hardly caused a stir when they appeared Saturday in Asharq al Awsat, an Arabic newspaper published across the Middle East. But they are a strong indication of the depth of the Bush Administration’s military commitment to the region. “Iraq needs a new resolution to determine the shape of the relationship between the two countries and how to cooperate with the U.S. forces,” Labid Abawi was quoted as saying. “We will ask the Council to include an article that allows Iraq to enter into negotiations with the United States to reach long-term security agreements to meet Iraq’s security needs bilaterally.”

It all seemed to be standard diplo-speak, designed to set up a provision calling for lower numbers of U.S. forces. But a close parsing of the statement shows that Abawi and the government of Iraq are seeking to replace the existing United Nations–sponsored pact permitting U.S.-led forces in Iraq, establishing in its place a long-term, bilateral security agreement directly between Iraq and the United States. And while the proposed details have yet to emerge, similar U.S. agreements with other nations in the region — including Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — have all involved a 10-year “protection” period, at minimum.

And here’s Michael Hirsch in Newsweek a month or so ago, nearly three months after Kukis’s story:

In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: “We’re putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington,” he told reporters. “The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process.” The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush’s Iraq coordinator in the White House—in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

Most significant of all, the new partnership deal with Iraq, including a status of forces agreement that would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, will become a sworn obligation for the next president. It will become just another piece of the complex global security framework involving a hundred or so countries with which Washington now has bilateral defense or security cooperation agreements. Last month, Sen. Hillary Clinton urged Bush not to commit to any such agreement without congressional approval. The president said nothing about that on Saturday, but Lute said last fall that the Iraqi agreement would not likely rise to the level of a formal treaty requiring Senate ratification. Even so, it would be difficult if not impossible for future presidents to unilaterally breach such a pact.

Hirsch’s piece was the first in a donkey’s age to mention Iraq czar Doug Lute. He must’ve figured out the doggie door.

And finally, for now: Former Bush justice department official Jack Goldsmith wrote a harrowing book about his time on the inside, and David Cole provides an equally harrowing review of it in the New York Review of Books. It was Goldsmith who reported Cheney chief of staff David Addington’s succinct description of the administration’s approach to appropriating power: “We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.” As I’ve noted ad nauseum elsewhere, the only potential larger force, Congress, has energetically declined to act.

That’s it: only 20-some pages left to euthanize before I get my browser back.

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