Rare musical comments
Blues: I'm listening to the Martin Scorsese blues documentary on PBS as I type. What fun! Some earnest documentarianism, sure, although there were some good interviews. But mainly, there's a lot of great music. There was a fabulous clip of Booker T. and the MGs ... now it's the Beatles... and now, I have to admit, a pretty good Tom Jones solo. It'll be worth getting from the video store someday.

Gollum's Song: Finally saw "The Two Towers" last weekend: wow. It's been ages since I read the books, and quite a while since I saw the first movie, so I thought I might be blase about it. But no, I was moved all over again: by the "last stand" feeling, the resolve of the hobbits. And somehow by a particularly well done Gollum, a figure made (digital) flesh and blood quite convincingly indeed.

Buried among the credits at the end of the movie was a gem: "Gollum's Song," beautifully sung by Emiliana Torrini, lyrics by Fran Walsh, haunting music -- the basis of much of the movie score -- by Howard Shore. I'm no musician, but the minor key, unusual lyrics, and Torrini's "wronged," torch singer treatment makes it pretty remarkable, I think. There's an opera I would go to in that song, and that story.

Julie Andrews: Happened to listen to parts of an interview with Julie Andrews on the Diane Rehm Show today; lots of sound clips of one of the most beautiful voices ever. She also seems to be a very nice person.

One nice moment was when a dad called in (about 40 minutes into the show) to say, "I have a three year old here who desperately wants to talk to Mary Poppins." "Put her on the line!" Cuteness ensued, and there was nothing wrong with that.

As you might guess, our whole family will brook no argument on this: Mary Poppins is one of the most practically perfect movies ever made, in every way.

And now we return to the usual stuff I know nothing about. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:48:00 PM -- |  

 
George Will, humanitarian
Well, no.

My friend Brett Marston detects a whiff of hypocrisy in comparing George Will's recent CNN interview to a March 16 article of his for "This Week", "Iraq War May Save Lives". Marston characterizes Will's March 16 piece as "pushing the humanitarian angle, hard."

I guess I disagree. Will was comparing the effects of two policies with differing levels of violence: containment and outright war. He wasn't taking what I'd call the "classical pro-war humanitarian" position (think Bosnia, Kosovo, or Rwanda) of saying that the act of saving lives or toppling Saddam was in and of itself a valid foreign policy goal. Following Walter Mead's lead, Will took the position that war might actually save lives compared to containment; this was not implied to be the reason to go to war, however.

I'm sensitive to this distinction because it's similar to ones I made: the security risk I thought Saddam posed was primary; arguments about Iraqi casualties were secondary, but deserved to be weighed in the balance as at least not in themselves arguing against the war, since lives would be lost no matter which choice was made.

Thinking about the Iraq war
I'm uncomfortably close to the rest of Will's position, too: what's been uncovered WMD-wise so far is disappointing at best.

My support for the Iraq war was based on the premises that there were weapons -- or weapons programs -- to be discovered, that those weapons or programs would put Saddam in violation of Security Council Resolutions with teeth, and that the political support for the alternative -- containment -- was unraveling because of the very deaths Will was pointing out.

I think the war will have been technically justified by even scanty evidence of weapons development. But given the economic costs and (tragically unnecessary) political costs abroad and at home, it still may not have been wise if that's all the evidence shows.

I think Bush has at times expressed well what he was trying to do, most notably in the 2003 State of the Union speech:

"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."

I.e., Bush was not saying the threat was imminent, let alone that it needed to be. But Bush also allowed Cheney and others to way oversell the imminence of the threat. I don't know that most Americans would have insisted on an imminent threat after 9/11. I know I didn't. Maybe I should have. But I didn't.

The war was not to fight an imminent threat, but a terrible one. I felt it could and should have been characterized not as a pre-emptive war, but as a punitive one punishing Saddam's Security Council Resolution violations. Those resolutions, if violated, had to be enforced, imminent threat or no. The cost of wrongly letting Saddam be seemed much higher than the cost of wrongly attacking him.

But wrongly attacking is wrongly attacking, and unfortunately for my position, there is little evidence of violations yet. Perhaps there never were violations after all. So the gamble I supported -- despite the lack of direct evidence, and merely on the say-so of my President, his allies, and other country's intelligence services -- has apparently not paid off the way I thought it would, and there's a high price tag in dollars and lives I share responsibility for, in my own small measure. I'll support paying that price, and support caring for the veterans and their families who bear the brunt of that price. Like Will, I'll take some measure of satisfaction in the demise of a truly evil regime, and hope that what follows next in Iraq will be better.

With that, since I've apparently been wrong about much of this, I will resume shutting up about it. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:48:00 AM -- |  

 
Volunteer Tailgate Party
...is up at Brian Arner's blog, "Resonance." Check it out! Again, a few reactions:

RU-486: Based on a recent incident, Rich of "Shots Across the Bow" shares a waking nightmare about losing a daughter to the aftereffects of RU-486 complications. As a dad with a daughter, it was no fun to read, and I couldn't stop. But would losing a daughter this way be worse than or merely just as bad as losing a daughter to complications from a back street abortionist? Joanne Jacobs writes that

The campaign against RU-486 has been fierce because it would expand access and restore privacy. [...] RU-486 is not risk free. No drug is. But it has a better safety record than many other drugs that can be prescribed by any medical specialist, without dire warning labels. [...] The complication rate is very low, says Newhall. Only one out of 300 women needs help for excessive bleeding. "It's the same clinical picture as miscarriage,'' she says, and can be treated by any doctor who knows how to handle miscarriage.

If Jacobs (no standard issue bleeding heart liberal) is right, this is a relatively safe procedure -- made necessary for many women and their doctors by the stigmatization and even physical danger of alternatives. But I also realize that much of Rich's point is about parental notification, and I confess I'm of two minds about that.

Guns in Africa: Let's say SayUncle is right -- and I think he is -- that it's African governments, not Africans' guns that are more to blame for Africa's many troubles. Private gun ownership -- within a well regulated militia framework of some kind -- is a basic right, of course, and one with considerable value when governments aren't trustworthy. How does that apply to the United States, though? At some point, unless you're really willing to stretch an argument, the United States is a fundamentally different and better place than, say, Liberia or the Congo. And at some point, under-regulated private gun ownership can become a relatively greater threat than losing the 2d Amendment right to bear arms to unconstitutional government restrictions. I think we're past that point in this country.

"Living Wage" or "Union Now"? You Decide: Mike Hollihan writes about and against the "Living Wage" movement that has arrived in Memphis and elsewhere. I suppose I've absorbed enough microeconomic dogma over the years that I agree: artificial wage levels are, in principle, job destroyers.

On the other hand, who foots the bill to make up the difference between low wages and what's needed to get by? Assuming we don't want starvation in the streets, we the people foot the bill. In the California recall election, Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante charges that even companies as big as Wal-Mart are "underpaying their people and then as a result give them official documents to go and apply for food stamps and public health care. That's a burden that taxpayers can't afford any longer either."

Far from disagreeing on the factual premise, business leaders like Jack Stewart just reply,

"This is the wrong time to be talking like that. Talking about transferring more costs onto business when they're already struggling makes no sense."

So let's transfer the costs onto taxpayers? If "Living Wage" movements are all there is to combat that kind of logic, I'd reluctantly be on their side after all. Luckily, there's an alternative. Unfortunately, it's that bugaboo unionization, i.e., more evenly matched bargaining between wage payers and wage earners. But that's so passe -- even if it's arguably at least as "free market" as Wal-Mart's various business practices. Jim Hightower writes:

the average [Wal-Mart] employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart "full time" is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year. [...]

Thinking union? Get outta here! "Wal-Mart is opposed to unionization," reads a company guidebook for supervisors. "You, as a manager, are expected to support the company’s position. . . . This may mean walking a tightrope between legitimate campaigning and improper conduct."

Wal-Mart is in fact rabidly anti-union, deploying teams of union-busters from Bentonville to any spot where there’s a whisper of organizing activity. "While unions might be appropriate for other companies, they have no place at Wal-Mart," a spokeswoman told a Texas Observer reporter who was covering an NLRB hearing on the company’s manhandling of 11 meat-cutters who worked at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas.

I know: Mike wasn't writing about Wal-Mart. And he makes valid points, of course, among them the fact that higher minimum wages make bottom-rung jobs more attractive to illegal immigrants. I agree: at some point we have to choose between making the United States a de facto free market for North American labor, or making it a fair market for United States labor.

A decent economy can't just be about the number of jobs, it's got to be about the quality of those jobs and the lives they support. There's a balance to be struck -- and while I can't speak to the situation in Memphis, cases like Wal-Mart seem way out of alignment to me.

Not that it'll happen again soon, I guess: Let me also say that I really appreciated Mike's nice comment about my Genovese/slavery piece below.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:50:00 PM -- |  

 
TLV: Tax Loophole Vehicle
From the Washington Post's Al Kamen article A Hummerdinger of a Tax Loophole?:

'Allow me to introduce you to a fabulous opportunity,' Chris Thorpe, a sales representative for Hummer of Alaska, writes in a promotion letter. 'A tax 'loophole' so big you could drive a Hummer H2 through it! Imagine being able to purchase the #1 large luxury SUV in America today . . . and receive a deduction for the entire purchase amount from your taxes this year!'

'How is this possible?' Thorpe asks. 'Thanks to the Bush administration's recent economic stimulus package, small businesses and the self-employed are eligible to deduct the entire purchase cost of new equipment up to $100,000 the year of the purchase.' But these provisions are supposed to help farmers and small-business owners buy equipment to transport merchandise and haul stuff. No matter. 'The Hummer H2 qualifies for this IRS Sec. 179 deduction by its gross vehicle weight of over 6,000 lbs. Cars and medium sized SUV's don't qualify for this deduction,' Thorpe writes.

Sure enough, examples like this one in the IRS "Publication 946, How to depreciate property" agree:

The van weighs over 6,000 pounds. It is not a passenger automobile for the limits discussed under Do the Passenger Automobile Limits Apply? in chapter 5.

And presto: the business/investment use percentage is automatically 100%. (Scroll down to see the example Form 4562's line 26, column c.)

The 6,000 pound rule isn't new. It serves as the artificial distinction between passenger vehicles and "light trucks," a category that includes SUVs. Where passenger vehicles are treated with suspicion in the tax code -- you must be using it for personal in addition to business reasons, and are forced to rigorously account for such personal use -- light trucks are deemed business-use vehicles: no aggravating record-keeping required. Lobbyists managed to open the SUV tax loophole at the same time a passenger car loophole was being closed. In his 2002 book High and Mighty, Keith Bradsher describes what happened:

...The instant success of the minivan and the Jeep Cherokee prompted industry lobbyists to start paying special attention for the first time to gaining special breaks for light trucks so that they could be used as substitutes for cars, even luxury cars. [...]

...special treatment was given [in the 1984 depreciation law] to light trucks with a gross vehicle weight over 6,000 pounds, a category that encompassed almost anything built on the sturdy underbody of a full-size pickup. [...]

Drawing the line at a fully loaded weight of just 6,000 pounds was a clear victory for Detroit. Previous rules had allowed accelerated depreciation only for trucks weighing 13,000 pounds or more when empty, a stipulation that applied only to very large freight trucks. (page 73-74)

Bradsher goes on to describe how lenient mileage and emissions standards and luxury tax exemptions completed the picture of favoritism towards this new kind of "light truck."

What's new this year is the higher, $100,000 limit, enacted in Public Law 108-27, The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, and signed by President Bush on May 28, 2003. At prices in the $50,000+ range, you can see why Sales Representative Chris Thorpe is happy this happened: businesses can deduct real equipment expenses and their nice new Hummers. Whether the rest of us should be as enthusiastic is another matter.

To be clear, the tax deduction benefits only apply for small businesses and the self-employed. But that isn't exactly a small group of people, including doctors, lawyers, and myriad small business owners. And the point is, what is the point of artificially encouraging gas guzzler use in any way? Why build in collision safety advantages for taxpayers who can afford to splurge on a Hummer as a "business expense", and against taxpayers who can't? Why not at least make the personal use of over-6,000-pound vehicles as much of an issue as it is for under-6,000-pound vehicles?

Some suspect the answer is that this artificial market is one of the few areas American automakers have an advantage in: no other country I'm aware of has been stupid enough to encourage widespread passenger use of oversized vehicles the way ours has. But German and Japanese companies are entering the 3+ ton market now, too, so look for that advantage to evaporate over the next decade or so, too. Then all we'll be left with is the unnecessary emissions, gas consumption, and safety concerns these policies have helped create.


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UPDATE, EDITS, 7/6/04: This has proven to be a relatively frequently visited post. On revisiting some of the IRS links, I see that many of the ones I originally listed are now defunct; I've linked to the new locations on the IRS site, and left the old links as 'title= formerly at...' comments.

Importantly, the explanation of Public Law 108-27 (now?) has a boilerplate "Caution: The limits are reduced if the business use of the vehicle is less than 100%" throughout the text, and the example (now?) stipulates that the flower shop uses all its listed property, including (now?) an SUV, strictly for business purposes.

I should say, if it's not obvious by now, that I'm not a tax expert. For what look like more authoritative accounts, see this Forbes article or this Florida public accountant firm (Garcia & Ortiz) newsletter. The November 2003 Forbes article speculated that the SUV tax loopholes it identified might close soon. It remains true that there was a 2003 tax benefit to buying 6,000+ lb vehicles, and it remains true, in my opinion, that was dumb tax and energy policy. But I left out or didn't understand the important detail that that proof of business use may be needed after all. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:04:00 AM -- |  

 
No V-a-l-e-r-i-e p-h-o-t-o here, move along
Hello Google visitors! Due to words in the last couple of posts, I've unfortunately turned up high on the list in your search for the time being. Good luck! I've read she "has the looks of a film star," which is no doubt why you're interested. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:39:00 PM -- |  

 
CIA request for Wilson leak investigation: What took so long?
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UPDATE, 9/29, 5:30pm: Chad Orzel points out in the comments that today's Post answers my question:

CIA officials approached the Justice Department about a possible investigation within a week of the column's publication. Tenet's letter was delivered more recently.

Not quite an Emily Latella "never mind" moment for me, but close. Thanks, Chad!
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As is well known by now, the CIA has asked for a Justice Department investigation of who leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA connection to Robert Novak. In his July 14 column, Novak wrote:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.

Now the Washington Post has run a major story on Sunday detailing the lengths to which the leakers went to get their story out. Among the new information was that six other journalists were approached with the leak, not just Novak.

For those new to the story, here's a timeline maintained by Tom Maguire ("Just One Minute") since the issue became well known in the blogosphere several months ago.* For those wondering why all the fuss, it's simple: "outing" a CIA covert operative as such is a felony federal offense. The motive was to punish or discredit Ambassador Wilson following his public, vocal doubts about whether Iraqis had tried to procure uranium in Niger.

What still isn't all that clear to me is how strong the case is that the Justice Department will investigate.

(1) Is/was Ms. Wilson really a covert operative? Mark A. R. Kleimann, the other go-to blogger for this story, thinks this is a slam-dunk yes now that the CIA has asked for a criminal inquiry. But if Ms. Wilson was a classic James-Bond-type operative suddenly exposed to the glare of publicity, whose contacts around the world were sure to be shot the next day, etcetera, I'd think the CIA would have screamed bloody murder about five minutes after Novak's column hit the newstands back in mid July. What took so long?**

One answer, of course, could be that Tenet was under real pressure to spike the investigation, and only now feels bold enough or incensed enough to go on the attack.

But another explanation could be that this isn't the slam-dunk case it's cracked up to be. As Maguire puts it, the question may diminish to a discussion of the technical meaning of "covert." My sense is that she might just have been a specialist and analyst, who may have made some Jim Rockford style phone calls now and then, maybe even from a civilian office, but was basically thought of as an analyst: Jack Ryan, not James Bond. "Outing" her might then not be quite the heinous national security breach that is widely claimed.

Interestingly, Novak claims that he wasn't asked to spike the story when he contacted the CIA about that part of the story.

(2) Even if she was "Bond -- Jane Bond," would it necessarily be clear to a leaker that Plame Wilson was not a run-of-the-mill "operative"? Here the motive for the leak is worth considering. I doubt Karl Rove or whoever did the leaking said to him(/her)self "I snap my fingers at a felony conviction." It seems more plausible they thought they were saying "this Wilson guy was a nobody who had to get this job through his wife, who is some mid level peon over at the CIA."

(3) Careful reading of the relevant parts of Novak's column (see above) rewarded Bill Hobbs with the insight that senior administration officials in sentence 2 were not necessarily the sources of Plame's job description in sentence 1. (To my everlasting distress, I didn't pick up on that until I read Hobb's post today.) Note also Maguire's observation that Tenet buried the Justice investigation request as a Friday afternoon item -- not S.O.P. if you're trying to knife your White House rivals, more understandable if Tenet feels some CIA or other friendly heads might roll. On the other hand, Tenet may have just been sending a "see, I can still be gracious" signal.

Note also that in Novak's article, the CIA itself was the source that "its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him." Maybe that's not quite the CIA outing Ms. Plame Wilson as a CIA-counter-proliferationoid, but it's pretty close. I don't know whether that alone would be actionable too. There's a possibility that it won't be anyone in the White House "frogmarched out in handcuffs," as Ambassador Wilson so vividly daydreams happening to Karl Rove, but someone at the CIA.

Don't get me wrong. Seeing a guilty Rove, Rice, or some aide of theirs frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs would be righteous justice served and high entertainment for me, too. If all is what it appears, Daniel Drezner puts it well:

What was done here was thuggish, malevolent, illegal, and immoral. Whoever pedaled this story to Novak and others, in outing Plame, violated the law and put the lives of Plame's overseas contacts at risk. Compared to this, all of Clinton's peccadilloes look like an mildly diverting scene from an Oscar Wilde production. If Rove or other high-ranking White House officials did what's alleged, then they've earned the wrath of God. Or, since God is probably busy, the media firestorm that will undoubtedly erupt.

Let me make this as plain as possible -- I was an unpaid advisor for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, and I know and respect some high-ranking people in the administration. And none of that changes the following: if George W. Bush knew about or condoned this kind of White House activity, I wouldn't just vote against him in 2004 -- I'd want to see him impeached. Straight away.

I just don't quite see everything necessarily pointing that way yet. There's a lot to digest, and a lot of tea-leaf reading about "senior administration" vs. "government" officials, their names and their motives, so this may all look pretty underinformed to me, too, in a day or two. But having sat through the "sixteen words" nontroversy, I'm not confident of the media's (or the blogosphere's) ability to get anything right. And that includes me!



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* I'm relying pretty heavily on Maguire's timeline for links in this post, so consider them attributed to him.
** Brush With Greatness Department: Following up on a Maguire challenge, I tried and tried for about an hour on July 30 to break into a Washington Post "online chat" with Dana Priest and Vernon Loeb, to ask the question, "Has anyone at the White House or the CIA taken steps to determine whether national security has been compromised by the July 14 leak to Robert Novak that Valerie Plame Wilson (wife of Amb. Wilson of Niger/yellowcake fame) was a CIA operative?" At the end of the hour long chat, I finally succeeded, and Dana Priest -- coauthor of the big Sunday Post article -- answered:

Dana Priest: Last question. I feel certain they would do this as a matter of routine in a case like this. Thanks and talk to you next week. Best, Dana

There you go! I just want a small co-starring role in "All the Presidents Men II". (Hmm. "Certain". What did Priest know and when did she know it?) posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 AM -- |  

 
Verboten
Camp Catatonia has posted a p.h.o.t.o series of rusting, wordy "Verbot" ("Forbidden") signs in Zuerich, Switzerland. Individually mundane and annoying, the signs achieve a kind of poetic grandeur as a group, in a get-off-my-property-you-noisy-kids way. Ah, Zuerich!

A key to the signs:
(1) no bicycle and moped riding;
(2) especially stresses no unauthorized loitering or game playing by children;
(3) no walking or setting up [fuehren, aufstellen - ed.] vehicles of any kind (bikes, I guess);
(4) ditto, but adds "applies day and night, on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays" ... weekdays and nights are OK, then? :) ;
(5) unauthorized persons are forbidden to walk, play, lead or set up vehicles. Only renters and service people allowed;
(6) a 1939 sign that is specific that "games of any kind like hockey, hand ball, soccer, rolling hoops, etc." are forbidden.

Noting that the signs seem to imply you can go and get your own custom "Verbot" sign from a local judge, commenter "Imladhrim" proposes his own sign:

"The delivery of unwanted bills to this mailbox is forbidden as of immediately .. violations may result in a monetary fine in the amount of the bill."

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EDIT, 10/1: changed word to p.h.o.t.o to avoid misleading Googlers, see above. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:42:00 AM -- |