No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

At times Bush's responses to questions he is asked seem totally unrelated to either reality or to the question. Many of us wonder why that seems true.

Bush’s top deputies, when asked why President Bush’s decisions so often fly in the face of the facts, say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' This is a strong attraction to the Evangelicals, who believe that Bush is a messenger appointed by God to lead this nation. Bush believes this also. It is the source of his certainty that he is absolutely right in his decisions.

It is also the reason why he can’t explain what his three worst decisions were. He doesn’t believe there were any. God told him what was right, and he did it. There is no room for bad decisions if God told him what to do.

The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions.

Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House.

There is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.

For a truly excellent psychological analysis of Bush as President, see New York Times article by RON SUSKIND

posted by Richard at 7:48 PM

 

Bush failed to prevent flu, tried to lie his way out.

A great many things are produced better under unregulated free enterprise. It looks like Flu Vaccine simply isn’t one of them. Why is that?

Contagious diseases and illnesses can often be contained if the entire population is controlled so that the spread of the disease does from the ill to the healthy is limited or prevented. This makes Public Health a government responsibility. It applies to people without money as well as those with money. Influenza is one of the diseases this clearly applies to.

The problem is that the market for the flu vaccine is uncertain. It sells best when the flu is widespread and people are afraid to get it. If the vaccination program is successful, then the fear is reduced and people have better uses for their money than for a vaccine to an illness they suspect they won’t get.

A company’s profitability will suffer if it successfully produces a vaccine that prevents a flu epidemic. But if it produces too little vaccine to prevent an epidemic it can’t raise prices to increase profitability as the theory of free market economics would expect. If it does, it will be accused of “Price-Gouging.” The greater problem is that producing a vaccine in the most profitable amounts will guarantee that the disease remains to be dealt with again later. This is economically a good idea, but is socially very bad. Our laws very properly do not permit this.

Since producing a flu vaccine is a time-consuming, very expensive and uncertain process, Production of a flu vaccine is an unattractive market for a company to enter. See the Dallas Morning News Editorial below.

The Bush administration guaranteed a market to two companies and relieved them from legal liability for side effects caused by the vaccine. The guaranteed market is probably a good idea, but then the Bush administration dropped the ball by not regulating the production process. When you relieve a company from legal liability for the side effects of their product, then the government has taken responsibility for problems in the process. But George Bush takes responsibility for nothing.

None of Chiron's flu vaccine is safe

From Knight-Ridder News Service in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 16, 2004 by Seth Borenstein

A U.S. inspection, completed Friday, found that the manufacturing process was allowing disease-causing bacteria into the vaccine. The contaminant is serratia, a bacterium that can cause pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract and in cuts and wounds.

The contamination may have occurred during the filling of vials, which doesn't seem to have been done in a sterile manner, said acting FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford.

No flu vaccine aid from Canada is likely

From Knight-Ridder News Service in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 14, 2004 by Seth Borenstein and WILLIAM DOUGLAS

America's top health official and other experts said Thursday that getting more supplies of vaccine from Canada is unlikely.

There isn't enough time for U.S. regulators to approve a Canadian vaccine, and Canada doesn't have enough to spare, they said.

Vaccine Shortage: Risk, expense of production are too high From the Dallas Morning News, Oct 15, 2004.

Drug manufacturers no longer produce vaccines because it is risky and expensive to do so, and the potential rewards for such work are relatively small. A generation ago, at least a dozen manufacturers provided the annual U.S. supply of flu vaccine; today, that number is down to a mere two.

What's wrong with nationalizing flu vaccine production, putting the federal government in charge of this vital public health service? Many experts fear that concentrating this responsibility in government hands would lead to a loss of innovation and flexibility typical of monopolies.

One vaccine maker told Congress that it takes from five to seven years to build a vaccine production facility and bring it online.

In short, the Bush administration screwed up the process for getting a reliable, safe supply of flu vaccination, and Bush tried to lie his way out of it during the Debate last Wednesday night. We are probably very lucky that Chiron was producing the vaccine in England. The British caught the problem and stopped Chiron from distributing the product.

The Bush administration would never have known that the process was putting in dangerous contaminates because they refuse to regulate business, even those invloved in health protection. Or if they had accidentally learned of the problem, they would have ignored it and let the vaccine be administered as it was in spite of deadly side effects. Hey, what do the deaths of a few customers matter if telling others about them would reduce the profitability of one of the drug companies?

The flu vaccine crisis is just another failure by the Bush administration.

Do they have any successes?

posted by Richard at 6:06 PM

 

RNC does not think Bush can win a fair election

Of course, they had to call the Supreme Court into Florida to act without any basis to appoint Bush in 2000, so why should the Republican National Committee (RNC) think it will be better for them this year?

Here we have Paul Krugman's thoughts on the subject:

Block the Vote

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.
The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.
Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.
Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.
But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.
That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.
Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late.
Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.
The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.
Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast by blacks. And there's strong evidence that this spoilage didn't reflect voters' incompetence: it was caused mainly by defective voting machines and may also reflect deliberate vote-tampering.
The important point to realize is that these abuses aren't aberrations. They're the inevitable result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will persist until voters - whose will still does count, if expressed strongly enough - hold that party accountable.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

posted by Richard at 8:34 PM

 

Vote for Kerry and Save America

The best of the state-by-state election prediction sites I have found is “Electoral Vote Predictor 2004”. As nearly as I can tell it is an unbiased report of the results of the very latest state polls, and the “Votemaster” provides intelligent explanations and commentary. That includes good discussions of the limitations of his report, something you will certainly never hear from George Bush or Dick Cheney. I strongly recommend it if you want to keep track of the poll-driven predictions.

In fact, it clearly is providing information someone doesn’t want you to have. The Votemaster reported this today.

The site has had technical problems repeatedly in the past several days and has been down several times. I didn't want to discuss this, but I don't want anyone to think the problem was an incompetent hosting service. Just the opposite. The site has been subjected to a full-scale, well-organized, massive attack with the clear intention to bring it down. The attackers have tried repeatedly to break in, but the server is a rock-solid Linux system which has stood up to everything they threw at it and hasn't crashed since I got it in May. While our troops are fighting and dying to bring freedom of speech to the Iraqi people, there are forces in America who find this concept no longer applicable to America. I don't know who is behind this attack yet (although we are working it), but it is too professional to be some teenager working from a home PC. Given that all the hate mail and threats I get come entirely from Republicans, I can make an educated guess which side is trying to silence me, but I won't say. And I won't surrender to cyberterrorists.

Between the Sinclair group of TV stations, FOX lies, Washington Times and New York Post lies, the Swift Boat Liars for Bush lies, and the lies that Bush, Cheney and Rice told America to send us into an unnecessary war in Iraq, anyone who thinks that democracy in America is not under threat needs to wake up. There is no essential difference between the way Putin is centralizing government control in Russia and Bush is centralizing control of America in Washington.

We may still have the right to elect an honest American President instead of a power-mad intellectually challenged fool who wants to hand control of this nation to the corporations and his superrich friends. So go vote against Bush on November 2, even if you are in a state like Texas that he has locked up.

If Bush is reelected, then it is extremely likely that all of America will be “locked up” by the Bush forces from now on the way Texas is today.

Of course, if Bush is reelected we may not know for sure because honest reports of information like that given us by Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 will no longer be available, and the Supreme Court will reinterpret the Constitution so that such a dictatorship is perfectly legal.

Get out and vote against lies, tyranny and misgovernment. Vote for Kerry on November 2.

posted by Richard at 5:16 PM

 

A Description of Bush

This is from Andrew Tobias regarding the Second Presidential Debate:

THE COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE
“My opponent is a Massachusetts liberal,” President Bush has taken to saying at rallies. “I am a compassionate conservative.”

I don’t think it’s conservative to go to war when you don’t have to or to borrow half a trillion dollars a year from your children.

I don't think it’s compassionate to cut children’s health care – and I don't think it was compassionate of President Bush to execute Karla Faye Tucker.

Do you remember that case? Karla Faye Tucker committed a terrible crime when she was young; but in prison she became a loving, caring woman, a born again Christian. A number of groups and individuals – including the Pope – pleaded with then Governor Bush to spare her life – to keep her locked up forever, but not kill her, the first woman to be executed in Texas in more than a century.

People can legitimately disagree on this and do. But was Bush’s choice compassionate? Was it the choice his favorite philosopher would have made?

Tucker Carlson, the “right” wing of CNN’s Crossfire, profiled then-governor Bush for the premier issue of the now-defunct Talk magazine. He reported:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker's] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' "

"What was her answer?" I wonder.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."

“When I read that,” writes one well-known conservative, “I thought, ‘Please don’t let this man get close to any position of power – ever.’”

“I think it is nothing short of unbelievable,” Gary Bauer, was quoted at the time, “that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death.”

It’s not inconsistent with the memories of that Harvard Business School Professor people have been quoting. From Salon:

"He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that.”

. . . Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy."

. . . I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to class," Tsurumi said. "Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket, and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days. And I said, 'George, what did you do with the draft?' He said, 'Well, I got into the Texas Air National Guard.' And I said, 'Lucky you. I understand there is a long waiting list for it. How'd you get in?' When he told me, he didn't seem ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was entitled to all kinds of privileges and special deals. He was not the only one trying to twist all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the war."

Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war in which others were dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off."

Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion," he said.



posted by Richard at 6:33 PM

 

Who decided to disband the Iraqi Army?

The largest single blunder made by the Bush administration in Iraq was disbanding the Iraqi Army instead of using it to maintain the borders and internal security in Iraq. Newsweek addresses this today.

At the heart of the controversy is a still-unresolved dispute over who was mainly responsible for one of the biggest mistakes of Bremer's 15-month tenure in Iraq, one that is commonly ascribed to him. This was the decision in May 2003 to reverse the efforts of Bremer's predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, to put the ragged elements of the Iraqi Army to work. After Bremer formally disbanded the army, some disaffected soldiers were believed to have joined the insurgency, which still rages.

Administration officials said today that this decision was made on the ground in Iraq, rather than in Washington. Before the war, the plan was to get rid of Iraqi Army officers but use regular troops for security and reconstruction after Saddam's ouster. But Bremer “flipped that around,” said a White House official. He added that Bremer and his deputy, Walt Slocombe, made the decision by themselves.

But Bremer and Garner have previously indicated the decision was made in Washington. According to one official who attended a meeting that Bremer had with his staff upon his arrival in Baghdad in mid-May of 2003, Bremer was warned he would cause chaos by demobilizing the army. The CIA station chief told him, "That's another 350,000 Iraqis you're pissing off, and they've got guns." According to one source who was at the meeting, Garner then asked if they could discuss the matter further in a smaller meeting. Garner then said: “Before you announce this thing let’s do all the pros and cons of this, because we are going to have a hell of a lot of problems with it. There are a hell of a lot more cons than there are pros. Let’s line them all up then get on the phone to [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld.” Bremer replied: “I don’t have any choice. I have to do this.” Garner then protested further, but Bremer cut him off. “The president told me that de-Baathification comes before the immediate needs of the Iraqi people.”

This action was taken by Bremer with full knowledge of the White House and Don Rumsfeld, and is the direct cause of most of the casualties that have occurred to both Americans and Iraqis since then. They were warned in advance and did it anyway.

posted by Richard at 4:15 PM

 

Why did the Iraq occupation go so bad?

The war in Iraq simply isn’t worth the cost. The problems are obvious and were mostly predictable. The first is the fact that it is a diversion from the terrorist threat against America, bringing into question why we started it at all when we did. But this has been discussed at length. Now Fred Kaplan of Slate uses Paul Bremer’s recent revelations that he told the administration that we did not have enough troops to do the job to discuss the way it was handled and speculate a little on why it was handled that way.

From Slate:

The week's most stunning development may have been the revelation in L. Paul Bremer's remarks, before a group of insurance agents at DePauw University, that we never had enough troops in Iraq, either to secure the country's borders or to provide the stability needed for reconstruction. "The single most important change, the one thing that would have improved the situation," Bremer said, "would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout."

But Bremer's disclosure slams himself no less than Team Bush. Bremer, after all, was the man who ordered the disbanding of the old Iraqi army. This decision is commonly seen in retrospect as the administration's first—and perhaps most—disastrous move after the fall of Baghdad. If Bremer thought there weren't enough U.S. troops on the ground, why did he call for the demobilization of Iraqi troops (many of whom had not been loyal to Saddam—they didn't, after all, fight for him)? This is one of the war's great remaining mysteries. (Another is why we went to war in the first place, but that's another story.) Bremer almost certainly didn't make this decision himself; it had to come from higher up. But from where? My guess is that, ultimately, Ahmad Chalabi was a big influence. He was still counting on taking the reins of power in the new Iraq (he had the support of the White House and the Pentagon at the time), and he hoped to install his own militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, as the new Iraqi army. The old, Baathist-dominated army would have been in the way; it had to go.

Saddam Hussein was a major problem in the Middle East and the sanctions on Iraq were losing their effectiveness at keeping him from acquiring chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The invasion of Iraq was one option for resolving the problems he caused. The majority of the problems in Iraq today stem not from the invasion itself as from the utter incompetence with which the aftermath of the invasion was handled. The small number of America troops used, the lack of any plan for security after the invasion, and the disbanding of the Army and police forces eliminated security and allowed the insurrectionists the time and space to become organized and learn their trade.

Now the middle classes who were happy to see Saddam go and should have supported the occupation are leaving the country because it is not safe to live and work there. Robberies, kidnappings, murders, all of these things are occurring alongside the more telegenic car bombs, so the nation is being left to the radicals and the criminals. It is the failure to anticipate and deal with these problems that make Iraq the greatest indictment against the Bush administration.

When the history of this sad period is written, Ahmad Chalabi will be seen as a key influence in the most idiotic actions taken by the Bush administration, perhaps as much a disastrous influence as Vice President Dick Cheney.

posted by Richard at 8:55 AM

 

Proposals that Social Security be replaced by private (non-government) pensions are all sold by promising higher pension payments. They ignore the much greater risk that such private pensions carry. The New York Times has an article that demonstrates the problem.

From the article:

“Mr. Paulsen, 61, is just one of more than 500,000 Americans whose pension plans have failed in the last three years and been taken over by the federal government, leaving many without health insurance and some, like Mr. Paulsen - high earners who retire early - with pensions much lower than those they had counted on. “

Half-a-million retirees depending on private pensions in the last three years have found that non-government pensions have failed them. They now have only what the government will pay. This is a significant percentage of all retirees. Is this a satisfactory replacement for Social Security?

posted by Richard at 9:58 AM