Kenya Devolves

Unfortunately, it looks like the situation in Kenya is not getting better. A second opposition leader was killed and even if this is true:

According to police officials and witnesses, Mr. Too, 39, spent the morning with Eunice Chepkwony, a policewoman who was dating another police officer, Andrew Moache. Mr. Too and Ms. Chepkwony were driving near the woman’s house on the outskirts of Eldoret when Mr. Moache pulled up next to them on a motorcycle. The police said Mr. Moache suspected his girlfriend was having an affair and was enraged to find her with another man.

Witnesses said that Ms. Chepkwony jumped out of the car and begged Mr. Moache not to kill them. He shot Ms. Chepkwony in the stomach and Mr. Too several times in the head. Mr. Too died instantly. Ms. Chepkwony bled to death in a hospital a few hours later. Police said they later arrested Mr. Moache while he was trying to flee.

it looks like the people don’t trust the government enough to believe it and so it has led to more riots.

More Mercury Pics

Here are a couple more pictures that Messenger took of Mercury (the first is in some color, the second is of the Caloris basin, one of the largest impact craters in the solar system):

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

3/12/2009 Update: the second picture’s link was broken and I fixed it.

More Mukasey

Mukasey is an idiot when it comes to waterboarding. Go look at TPM for a bunch of bits of his testimony, I especially like the one with Whitehouse:

WHITEHOUSE: Has that been done?

Has there been a thorough, independent analysis, under your administration, of whether or not any national of the United States is potentially in violation of Section 2340(a), as a result of…

MUKASEY: I don’t start investigations out of curiosity. I start investigations out of some indication that somebody might have had an improper authorization. I have no such indication now.

I would guess then that this is what he would say if the police found someone dead:

‘Should we investigate to see how they died?’

Mukasey: ‘We don’t know if the person was murdered, so no.’

‘But if we investigate. We might find that it was murder.

Mukasey: ‘I don’t start investigations out of curiosity. I have no indication now that they were murdered.’

The reason this is similar is that it’s known that people under US care were waterboarded and most reasonable people believe waterboarding is torture (the US military for one). This means there is an indication of a crime at the very least. His reasoning would apply to my case above also.

Obviously, he’s being deliberately obtuse here because he’s protecting people.

Update: He’s not just acting stupid in terms of waterboarding, look here also:

When Sen. Arlen Specter—concerned about seven years of vast new claims of executive authority—asks Mukasey whether, in his view, the president “can break any law he pleases because he’s the president—including, say, statutes banning torture,” as well as FISA and the National Security Act, Mukasey replies, “I can’t contemplate any situation in which this president would assert Article II authority to do something that the law forbids.”

“Well, he did just that when he violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Specter shoots back. Mukasey’s response? “Both of those issues have been brought within statutes.”

Specter is flabbergasted: “But he acted in violation of statutes, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Mukasey replies.

Note again the willful ignorance, Bush’s actions in terms of FISA and others is well known. The only reason Mukasey says that he doesn’t know is that it would cause problems: either someone would be prosecuted or there would be a court battle to see if Bush really is allowed to disregard laws.

Mukasey: I Can’t Say Whether Flaying Someone Is Torture

AG Mukasey must be better than Gonzalez was, but this is really stupid:

“Given that waterboarding is not part of the current program and may never be added to the current program, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to pass definitive judgment on the technique’s legality,” the attorney general said, speaking in the cautious way that his Senate questioners have sometimes found evasive and infuriating.

The anger of some committee members was further stoked on Tuesday evening, when in a letter to the panel Mr. Mukasey said that waterboarding was not clearly illegal and that perhaps it could be used again against terrorism suspects if requested by the White House.

Let’s see, cutting people’s fingers off, searing someone with a red-hot iron poker, boiling one alive, and many other things are not part of the current program–does he think he shouldn’t pass judgement on them also? What if it happens to a US citizen in another country? The extra stupidity is that US officials HAVE used waterboarding–wouldn’t it make sense to say if they committed an illegal act, since torture is illegal. In terms of whether it is torture, Senator Leahy gives the obvious response:

Mr. Leahy was contemptuous of that stand. “Never mind that we prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding Americans during World War II,” he said. “Never mind that this is the practice of repressive regimes around the world.”

And that doesn’t include the fact that the Army says it’s torture which may be Tom Ridge and Mike McConnell agree that it’s torture. I understand that Mukasey would have a hard time saying waterboarding is torture because that would mean people in the CIA and elsewhere should be prosecuted, but really couldn’t he at least take the trouble to think up something that made sense?

The article also has one bit of good journalism:

But a committee Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, came to the defense of the attorney general and the administration, saying that it was “an embarrassment” that the questions might create an impression that American interrogators have often engaged in waterboarding.

“That is not true,” Mr. Sessions said. The administration has confirmed that the technique was used on a few suspected Al Qaeda figures captured after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

See, is that so hard? Sessions says something that is obviously not true and the reporter notes that what Sessions said is not true.

Who’s Left?

Hmm, both Giuliani and Edwards are now probably out–as are Dodd, Biden, Richardson, Kucinich, Fred Thompson, Hunter, and Tancredo. We’re left with:

Democrats: Clinton, Obama, (Gravel -I haven’t officially heard he’s out, not that it matters);

Republicans: McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Paul.

It looks to be a two person race for both parties–this is obvious for the Democrats; for the Republicans, Huckabee could win a few more states but I don’t think much more than that and Paul will continue to get his 5-15% (in fact he has gone below 5% in the last two states).

Now I have to decide who to vote for. It will be a Democrat, but which of the two (I like some of the positions of Gravel, who supports gay marriage and wants to decrease defense spending, but not in others, he wants a flat tax, and since he is a marginal candidate he’s out)? My primary is February 5, so I have to decide soon but there’s not much space between the two. I suppose I could still vote for my higher choices even though they’re out (Kucinich, Dodd)–I assume they’ll still be on the ballot. Hmmm, anyone in MA still planning on voting for a candidate that is officially out?

Arlo Guthrie and Ron Paul

My respect for Arlo Guthrie has gone down, as he has now endorsed Ron Paul. It doesn’t mean I will now not like his music, I can and do separate the art and the artist, but it does mean I will respect him less as a person. I’m not sure Woody would like it, since he was very far left politically.

An interesting bit, here’s Woody on the copright of ‘This Land is Your Land’:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Signing Statements

In his state of the union, Bush said he wanted to work in a bipartisan way. It didn’t take him long to drop that, as he issued four signing statements to a bill Monday. If he wanted to act in a bipartisan way, he would have talked to the Congress before the bill was passed and discussed his objections–he didn’t. He also didn’t do the straightforward thing of vetoing the bill, because that would allow Congress to override. As usual, the signings were about executive power–they state that the bills infringe on his power as President, as if it’s up to him to decide the constitutionality of a bill. Oh yeah, what did he object to?

One section Bush targeted created a statute that forbids spending taxpayer money “to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq” or “to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”

…

The signing statement also targeted a provision in the defense bill that strengthens protections for whistle-blowers working for companies that hold government contracts. The new law expands employees’ ability to disclose wrongdoing without being fired, and it gives greater responsibility to federal inspectors general to investigate complaints of retaliation.

In addition, Bush targeted a section that requires intelligence agencies to turn over “any existing intelligence assessment, report, estimate or legal opinion” requested by the leaders of the House and Senate armed services committees within 45 days. If the president wants to assert executive privilege to deny the request, the law says, White House counsel must do so in writing.

Finally, Bush’s signing statement raised constitutional questions about a section of the bill that established an independent, bipartisan “Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan” to investigate allegations of waste, mismanagement, and excessive force by contractors.

He didn’t bother to explain why or how these sections were problematic, that would be what he would do if he had a problem only with the constitutionality of the bill–it would help Congress to pass a similar bill that he thought was ok. He didn’t, because he isn’t really for bipartisanship. What he means by bipartisan is ‘you agree with me’. He knows that there is little possibility of that here, so he doesn’t bother talking to Congress.

New World Order

Hmm, Kevin Drum links to this piece by Parag Khanna which has some interesting bits. I haven’t finished it yet, but this by KD made me think:

And on an offbeat note, I’m amused to see that the phrase “third world” has now lost its original meaning so completely that Khanna uses “second world” to refer to any country that’s poorer than France but richer than Bangladesh. I wonder if this will catch on?

I’m so used to thinking of poor countries as ‘third world’, I sometime forget that this phrase came out of the cold war–there was the ‘first world’ (the developed countries like the US, most of Europe, Japan, …), the ‘second world’ (USSR and it’s satellites), and thus the less developed countries were the third world. Now that Russia isn’t a superpower, the language doesn’t really make sense any more. Hmm.

Update: Here’s another word story. It seems that the new derogatory word for blacks is ‘Canadian’. Umm, yeah, that way you can make fun of blacks and Canadians at the same time–racists these days can be inventive (very stupid also, why Canada?).

Oops, this came via a comment by Amanda here.

Bipartisan

This ariticle starts from the premise that Bush wanted to be a bipartisan President, but 9/11 and Iraq changed him:

In calling last night for a bipartisan compromise on securing Medicare and Social Security, an international pact to reduce greenhouse gases, and greater action to diminish national dependence on foreign oil, Bush sought to exercise precisely the kind of results-oriented, nonideological leadership he promised in his 2000 presidential campaign.

The problem with this narrative is that the first thing Bush did when he came into office was to reinstitute the global gag rule, a deeply partisan act. Also, he did not act in a bipartisan way with Social Security–the assumption from his ‘bipartisan’ panel was that part of Social Security would be privatized, a very partisan assumption. From the beginning, Bush has acted in a very partisan conservative way. He might have SAID he wanted to compromise and act in a bipartisan way but that’s not the way he has operated the entire time he has been President. You would think that by now a political analyst would know that Bush doesn’t always do what he says.

Israel and Gaza

The more I think about it, the more the idea in this article makes sense (I looked at it here). The claim made in this article in the NY Times:

When Hamas blew large holes in Gaza’s border with Egypt, allowing thousands of Palestinians a chance to stock up on medicines, food and consumer goods, it also blew a large hole in the Israeli policy, backed by Washington, of squeezing the population of Gaza in the hope that they would turn actively against Hamas.

doesn’t sound right if you notice that Israel didn’t make a huge fuss over this. On the other hand, if you think Israel had two motives (squeezing Gaza and trying to make Egypt take responsibility) then it does.

Meat and the Environment

Hmm, this article in the NY Times shows that the old vegetarian screed against meat might have gone mainstream. Here are the main points about meat (all from the article):

• an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
• Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
• about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.
• Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.

About the only divergence from the vegetarian is this:

“In places where you can’t grow grain, fattening cows on grass is always going to make more sense.”

and this only works if the amount of meat consumed goes way down.

So let’s see, eating less meat will make people healthier, help the environment (both in terms of the local environment and global warming), reduce food prices overall (which helps the poor of the world), and reduce animal cruelty. Maybe there is a reason I became a vegetarian.

Selling Water in CA

This is just weird:

With water becoming increasingly precious in California, a rising number of farmers figure they can make more money by selling their water than by actually growing something.

Because farmers get their water at subsidized rates, some of them see financial opportunity this year in selling their allotments to Los Angeles and other desperately thirsty cities across Southern California, as well as to other farms.

“It just makes dollars and sense right now,” said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer who grows rice, wheat, and other crops in Northern California’s lush Sacramento Valley.

Instead of sowing in April, Rolen plans to let 100 of his 250 acres of white rice lie fallow and sell his irrigation water on the open market, where it could fetch up to three times the normal price.

I assume the reason the water is subsidized is to help out the farmers while keeping food prices low, so it makes no sense if the farmers sell the water rights. It would make more sense to just give the farmers money–the government and farmers would pay/get the same amount, but other water consumers would pay a bit less. I just don’t get it.

New Orleans Housing

Let’s see, a lot of the housing in New Orleans for the lower and middle classes were torn down:

Thousands of blue-collar workers like Washington who never lived in publicly subsidized housing increasingly have no place to live in New Orleans. The planned demolition of 4,500 publicly subsidized apartments is less significant to the future, policy experts say, than Katrina’s destruction of nearly 41,000 inexpensive rentals that once housed the city’s self-sufficient working class.

With no concrete plan to replace those apartments, some say the city’s economic base erodes with every blue-collar worker pushed out by higher living costs.

So what does the Bush administration do:

Amid predictions that affordable housing could be indefinitely out of reach for blue-collar workers, state and federal agencies offered landlords a subsidy to accept lower-income tenants.

The effort is falling short because landlords can get high rent in the post-Katrina free market without dealing with bureaucratic red tape. To date, there are only 550 of these subsidized apartments.

Long-term, the Bush administration has offered tax breaks to developers to build mixed-income housing. Two and a half years after the storm, little such construction is evident.

As you might have expected, they are trying to use the private economy to get it done. It hasn’t, so how likely do you think the Bush administration will try more direct government intervention? I know I’m not holding my breath.

Just Let Them Die

Wow this (via Mark Kleiman) is amazing in its callousness:

Every year, overdoses of heroin and opiates, such as Oxycontin, kill more drug users than AIDS, hepatitis or homicide.

And the number of overdoses has gone up dramatically over the past decade.

But now, public health workers from New York to Los Angeles, North Carolina to New Mexico, are preventing thousands of deaths by giving $9.50 rescue kits to drug users. The kits turn drug users into first responders by giving them the tools to save a life.

…

But Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, opposes the use of Narcan in overdose-rescue programs.

“First of all, I don’t agree with giving an opioid antidote to non-medical professionals. That’s No. 1,” she says. “I just don’t think that’s good public health policy.”

Madras says drug users aren’t likely to be competent to deal with an overdose emergency. More importantly, she says, Narcan kits may actually encourage drug abusers to keep using heroin because they know overdosing isn’t as likely.

Madras says the rescue programs might take away the drug user’s motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.

“Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services,” Madras says.

What makes this even worse (I know it’s hard) is that there is evidence that it might reduce the number of drug users. That’s right Madras made her statement with no evidence to back it up, I guess that’s the way Bush officials decide things: if it sounds right then go with it.

Resegregation

Here’s one of the reasons that affirmative action in some form is needed:

About one-sixth of black students and one-ninth of Latino students attend what Mr. Orfield calls “apartheid schools,” at least 99 percent minority. In big cities, black and Latino students are nearly twice as likely to attend such schools. Some two-thirds of black and Latino students in big cities attend schools with less than 10 percent white students; in rural areas, about one-seventh of black and Latino students do. Although the South was the region that originally integrated the most successfully, it’s beginning to resegregate, as in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district.

They note that the areas with the most problems are in the northeast and midwest. I don’t know about all the areas, but the reasons are probably similar to those in Boston. In Boston, the city is still to a large extent segregated, with the large majority of blacks in a couple sections. Combine this with the natural tendency of parents to want their children to go to a neighborhood school and you already have much of the explanation. These and the rest comes as a legacy of past racism: blacks live only in a couple sections because they were only allowed to live in those sections in the past (and there is still some redlining going on); because of past (and current) discrimination, the majority black sections are poorer, have more crime, and so worse schools; because of past discrimination (which affected the parents in schooling–children of parents with better education tend to do better) black students tend to have more trouble in school; when busing started in Boston many white parents either moved out to the suburbs or put their children into private schools (this lead to court ordered busing to the suburbs) which made blacks the majority in city schools.

The effects of discrimination do not go away in a generation (and court ordered busing started in 1970 or so in Boston), which is why this person, though right in some respects, misses the big picture:

“Segregation means people are being deliberately assigned to schools based on skin color,” says Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Falls Church, Va. “If it simply reflects neighborhoods, then it’s not segregation.”

Mr. Clegg questions some of the resegregation research, noting that the percentage of white students in schools is often going down simply because they’re a decreasing portion of the population. He also quibbles with the notion that an all-black, all-Hispanic, or all-white school is necessarily a bad thing.

“I don’t think that the education that you get hinges on the color of the person sitting next to you in the classroom,” Clegg says. “What educators should focus on is improving schools.”

Notice he just said that separate, but equal is ok. The problems with segregated schools is that they come about because of discrimination (mostly in the past, but somewhat currently) which means that the majority black (or hispanic) schools tend to be in worse neighborhoods and so tend to be worse. Also, if people are segregated it will be easy to fall back into the racist views (if a child very seldom interacts with people in another race, it’s easier to make them believe something bad about them).

Because much of the overt racism is gone, it’s easy to believe that it’s no longer a problem but the past effects of racism still play a very large part today and could easily lead to renewed racism in the future. And, of course, there is still a lot of racism around, it’s just usually not as obvious.

Pakistan and Kenya

Things had been looking up in both countries (the two main rivals in Kenya had met and Pakistan had said it would allow unrestricted access for voting monitors), but there’s been a bit of backsliding:

• violence has once again increased in Kenya and both sides are again taking a hard line.
• Pakistan now says that it will not allow international groups to conduct exit polls which could be used to see if the results were fair.

Gaza and Egypt

I was curious about the toppling of the walls on the border of Gaza and Egypt. Israel is trying to blockade Gaza to punish Hamas for the rockets launched into Israel and yet there has not been much of an outcry against this (and no action by the Israeli military). I think this article gives much of the explanation:

Israel, which occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, has since then clamored, intermittently and often privately, for Egypt to assume greater responsibility for the impoverished coastal strip, or even for Cairo to take control of Gaza. By breaking down the wall and sending Egypt a tidal wave of people pressed to stock up on everyday necessities, Hamas militants – who have been planning the break for weeks, according to local media reports – may have inadvertently brought Israel closer to this goal.

…

Although Israeli officials have registered disappointment with Cairo’s shortcomings in policing their border with the Gaza Strip, there has also been an equally palpable touch of relief in their words, as if the break in the wall effectively re-attaches Gaza to Egypt, which governed it until the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1967.

If Gaza is attached to Egypt then the problem of Gaza shifts to them (of course, Egypt wants no part of it). If Gaza was no longer part of Israel, then they would no longer be responsible for the border, they would be no longer responsible for humanitarian issues, and they would be freer to attack (since now it would be a foreign attack if rockets come out of Gaza). There are also downsides (given a more open border with Egypt, more weapons might make it into Gaza), but given the current situation that isn’t as big an impediment as it might have been.

Private Schools

The idea that Harvard now has an endowment of $34 billion(and 76 schools have endowments over $1 billion) and Phillips Exeter School has an endowment of $1 billion (and this is behind Kamehameha at $9 billion and Milton Hershey School at $7.8 billion) really bother me. It’s part of the splitting of the education of students in the US, more and more money is going to educate the ‘top students’:

Average expenditures per student for public schools, not adjusted for inflation, rose 28 percent, to $8,809, between the 1999 and 2004 fiscal years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

That compares with a 40 percent increase, to $20,233, for independent secondary day schools, and a 42.8 percent increase, to $14,300, for each elementary student at day schools. Spending by boarding schools rose 24 percent, to $37,566, in the five years that ended June 30, 2005.

This means that if you’re not one of the ‘top students’, you will be getting an inferior education (of course, if your parents are rich you are automatically a ‘top student’). And the problem is expanding–with the huge amount of money following these students, more schools are starting to focus on the ‘top students’. This is not a democratic idea and remember many (all? I think they’re all non-profit, but I could be wrong) are non-profits, so do not pay many taxes (many do make voluntary payments in lieu of taxes). To get an idea of the money here, Phillips Exeter has $1 million in endowment per student and Harvard has about $1.7 million per student.

I don’t have an idea of what to do (I don’t think Harvard should lose its non-profit status for example, although perhaps there could be an added category or more restrictions to remain non-profit), but the US is on its way to a crisis in education–the cost is going up faster than inflation and the gap between the best and average education is increasing.

Bush: It’s Not a Treaty Because I Say It’s Not

The Bush administration has been working up an agreement with Iraq to keep US troops there past the end of the year. Despite the fact that the agreement talks about security guarantees, which have never been made without a treaty:

 After World War II, for example – when the United States gave security commitments to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and NATO members – Presidents Truman and Eisenhower designated the agreements as treaties requiring Senate ratification. In 1985, when President Ronald Reagan guaranteed that the US military would defend the Marshall Islands and Micronesia if they were attacked, the compacts were put to a vote by both chambers of Congress.

Hmm, how to get around that:

However, Lute may have offered a clue to the administration’s legal arguments during the November press conference when he noted that “We have about a hundred agreements similar to the one envisioned for the US and Iraq already in place, and the vast majority of those are below the level of a treaty.” Johndroe, the White House spokesman, also mentioned the existence of such agreements in a Globe interview this week.

 A few people aren’t buying it:

But there is now also growing alarm about the constitutional issues raised by Bush’s plan. Legal specialists and lawmakers of both parties are raising questions about whether it would be unconstitutional for Bush to complete such a sweeping deal on behalf of the United States without the consent of the legislative branch.

“There is literally no question that this is unprecedented,” said Oona Hathaway, a Yale Law School professor who has written a forthcoming law journal article about the proposed Iraq agreement. “The country has never entered into this kind of commitment without Congress being involved, period.”

At a House hearing on the pact on Wednesday, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California and a former Reagan administration official, accused the Bush administration of “arrogance” for not consulting with Congress about the pact. If it includes any guarantees to Iraq, he said, Congress must sign off.

“We are here to fulfill the constitutional role established by the founding fathers,” Rohrabacher said, adding, “It is not all in the hands of the president and his appointees. We play a major role.”

and

Representative Bill Delahunt, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that what the administration was negotiating amounted to a treaty and should be subjected to Congressional oversight and ultimately ratification.

“Where have we ever had an agreement to defend a foreign country from external attack and internal attack that was not a treaty?” he said Wednesday at a hearing of a foreign affairs subcommittee held to review the matter. “This could very well implicate our military forces in a full-blown civil war in Iraq. If a commitment of this magnitude does not rise to the level of a treaty, then it is difficult to imagine what could.”

Saying something is true when it’s obviously not and trying to expand executive power are hallmarks of this administration, so I fully expect such objections to not matter very much. I guess we’ll see–the military aspect is to be negotiated July 31. I should note that the NY Times article has a unnamed ‘Senior Administration Official’ says that security guarantees will not be in the agreement, but we all know how much to trust the Bush administration and the Boston Globe article notes that the administration has not officially changed the plans announced in November which did contain security guarantees.

Huckabee, Wolfowitz, and Contractors

• Huckabee still thinks that there might have been WMDs in Iraq and they might have been sent to Jordan? And he is one of the frontrunners for the Republicans? I guess they don’t care much about foreign affairs.
• Let’s see Wolfowitz was almost completely wrong about Iraq, was disliked and forced out of the World Bank after a semi-scandal, so now he’s been picked for an arms control panel:

Wolfowitz will become chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, which reports to the secretary of state. The panel is charged with supplying independent advice on arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation and related subjects.

The portfolio includes commentary on several high-profile issues, including pending nuclear deals with India and North Korea and an offer to negotiate with Iran over its disputed nuclear program.

Makes about as much sense as most things the Bush administration does.

• Wasn’t Bush supposed to be the CEO president? So when he brought a huge expansion of private contractors to support the military, the Pentagon must have prepared for it first? Nope:

At the end of last September, there were “over 196,000 contractor personnel working for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness.

Contractors “have become part of our total force, a concept that DoD [the Defense Department] must manage on an integrated basis with our military forces,” he also said in prepared testimony for a hearing yesterday of the Senate homeland security subcommittee. “Frankly,” he continued, “we were not adequately prepared to address” what he termed “this unprecedented scale of our dependence on contractors.”

Stuart W. Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, and William M. Solis, director of defense capabilities and management for the Government Accountability Office, testified that not enough trained service personnel are available to handle outsourcing to contractors in the wars.