URGENT: Save the Ryan White CARE Act
The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act

...addresses the unmet health needs of persons living with HIV disease (PLWH) by funding primary health care and support services that enhance access to and retention in care. First enacted by Congress in 1990, it was amended and reauthorized in 1996 and again in 2000. The CARE Act reaches over 500,000 individuals each year, making it the Federal Government's largest program specifically for people living with HIV disease.

...according to HRSA (Health Resources Services Administration), the agency that administers it. Among its many important programs are the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), and the Title IV programs specifically funding primary and specialty medical care for women, children, infants, and youth living with HIV/AIDS.

But as the 109th Congress expires, this crucial part of the U.S. public health safety net may be allowed to unravel by the Republican-led House of Representatives. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) sounds the alarm in an e-mail I received today:

This morning, the Senate passed the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act, a bill to reauthorize the Ryan White CARE Act. In order for this critical bill to pass, however, the House MUST consider the identical bill before it adjourns tomorrow. [...]

Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), who is chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has not yet agreed to put the bill up for a vote. Time is running out, and we need your help in convincing Chairman Barton that immediate passage of this program is critical for Americans living with HIV/AIDS across the country.

HRC points out that rather than a one-size-fits-all federal bureaucracy, the Ryan White CARE Act specifies a high degree of local control of the programs it funds, so that each community can design programs appropriate to its particular "PLWH" population. Accountability takes the form of detailed reporting about the numbers and kinds of clients served by each of the Ryan White programs.

This is a good, effective program that takes care of people and saves lives. If anything, its funding should be increased, not held hostage to the whims of House scheduling. HRC urges:

Call Representative Barton's office now at (202) 225-2002 and tell him how important it is that the Ryan White CARE Act be passed!

"I am calling to urge Chairman Barton to allow consideration of the Senate Version of the Ryan White CARE Act on the House Suspension Calendar. Americans across the country living with HIV depend on this program for access to life-saving treatment and care. The time to pass the Ryan White CARE Act is now."

Thanks for doing whatever you can.


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UPDATE, 12/7: Thanks to the aide who took my call; he told me "we're doing everything we can" to make the bill happen, but that the Senate version weakened the bill in Barton's view; they're trying to "work out the differences." I was not agile enough to ask just what the important differences were, maybe this will come out in the news -- or maybe you can find out.
UPDATE, 12/10: The House early Saturday agreed by voice vote to renew the $2.1 billion-annual Ryan White CARE Act. The Senate passed the bill earlier in the week after senators from New York and New Jersey dropped their opposition, accepting a compromise that settled months of dispute just as Congress adjourned for the year. -- Erica Werner, AP, via San Jose Mercury News. The issue had been cuts for those two states and for urban areas in general. New York still loses money compared to prior years, but funding allocations are re-evaluated in three years instead of five.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:22:00 PM -- |    

 
The House of Death

...while the eyes of the world have been largely averted, America's 'war on drugs' has moved to a new phase of cynicism and amorality, in which the loss of human life has lost all importance - especially if the victims are Hispanic. The US agencies and officials in this saga - all of which refused to comment, citing pending lawsuits - appear to have thought it more important to get information about drugs trafficking than to stop its perpetrators killing people."

-- "The House of Death," David Rose, The Observer (12/3/2006)

It's hard to know what goes without saying any more, but when an informant helps kill not one, but many people, all while wired, all known to the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, endangering at least one DEA agent in the process, and when another DEA agent who finally dares to complain about it is forced to resign, well then gosh, I don't know, maybe there ought to be an investigation or something. Among those who should be getting ready for a lot of testimony under oath:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

Johnny Sutton, US Attorney for Western Texas

Karen Tandy, DEA administrator

Julie L. Meyers, ICE Assistant Secretary

John P. Clark, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Operations

William J. Howard, ICE Principal Legal Advisor

Michael Nostrand, ICE (Acting) Office of Intelligence

John Gaudioso, ICE Special Agent in Charge

Raul Bencomo, ICE special agent handling the informant.

As Radley Balko writes,

"If true, this ought to be a scandal on par with Abu Ghraib."

Via Glenn Greenwald, who has also followed up today with more. Good work digging this up, U.S. news media! Oh, wait.


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NOTES: ICE personnel other than Bencomo via ICE "Leadership" page and October 2006 org chart.
EDIT, 12/6: "another" for "the."
posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:30:00 PM -- |    

 
The Sudan Screening Tool
In late September California joined Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey and Oregon in passing legislation divesting state funds from Sudan and the genocide it is committing in Darfur. The California legislation calls for "targeted divestment," which, as a coalition of Senators and Representatives explained in a November 22 letter to governors of the other 44 states,

...focuses on companies who contribute to government revenue, provide relatively little benefit to those outside Khartoum, and have not taken any substantial corporate governance actions on the Darfur issue. The model also requires a brief period of shareholder engagement with offending companies before divestment occurs, thereby providing the opportunity for companies to alter their operations. This approach to divestment helps maximize divestment’s impact on the Sudanese government, while minimizing harms to innocent Sudanese citizens, the nascent government of South Sudan, and fiduciary investment returns here at home.

(emphases added)

Divestment campaigns are already afoot across the country; here in Maryland, the University of Maryland adopted a resolution in June 2006 recommending divestment from 16 companies.

Meanwhile, if you have investments of your own, there's no need for you to wait. A Sudan Screening Tool has been co-developed by the Sudan Divestment Task Force and the socially responsible investment advice firm Invested Interests. A blog post at the firm's web site explains that the tool "provides visitors with a report detailing the names, dollar value and percent of total assets invested in offending companies. Sudan divestment data has previously been available only to large institutions. The Sudan Screening Tool allows for any mutual fund investor, approximately 57 million U.S. households, to actively participate in Sudan divestment."

For example, if you happen to own shares of the mutual fund Vanguard European Stock Index (VEURX), you'd search for that mutual fund by ticker symbol VEURX or in the alphabetic index. Then you'd specify how strict you want to be -- a broad screen capturing companies that may have some connection now or in the past, a focused screen of worst offenders only, or an intermediate "normal" screen. Choosing "3=focused", I click, and voila! I learn that VEURX currently has shares in Rolls Royce (oil field services), Alstom (power and transport), and Lundin Petroleum AB (oil).

If you're a direct investor, you may also want to request a list of companies that "warrant scrutiny." Some of the big names I recognized were Siemens, Alcatel (telecom), and Schlumberger (oil field services). Chinese and Indian oil companies round out the list (American companies have been forbidden from operating in Sudan since 1997). A sudandivestment.org e-mail accompanying the document requested that I not publish the list* and cautioned that it expires on January 1, 2007.

If you do decide to act on the Sudan Screening Tool information, the Sudan Divestment Task Force asks that you check with them first to learn if anything has changed about the company, and so they can recommend whether to proceed with divestment or join in continued shareholder engagement with the company or fund.

For a discussion and defense of Sudan divestment, see this November 23 interview with Smith College professor and Darfur activist Eric Reeves ("sudanreeves.org") on the PBS NewsHour.


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* Subsequent correspondence confirmed this to mean the full list.

EDIT, 12/6: The California law was passed in September, not this month. Link: "California Chronicle," 9/25/06.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:33:00 AM -- |    

 
To be Judge Posner must be to feel like a King
Writing at "Balkinization," Brian Tamanaha provides the latest introduction to evidence that Judge Richard Posner considers himself a judge apart, unbound by anything but his own desire to do what's best for everyone as determined by his mighty intellect. Tamanaha writes that despite Posner's prolific legal scholarship

...Posner’s most enduring legacy may well be to severely undermine the rule of law within the judiciary. Judge Posner is especially dangerous because he clothes his radicalism in seductively realistic and reasonable-sounding words—as if he’s just being a straight-talker, nothing new, nothing shocking.

Given his stature, his high judicial position, his compelling intellectual style, and the content of his ideas, it is hard to imagine that anyone could be more subversive to the rule of law than Judge Posner.

The occasion for Tamanaha's reflections was a recent debate between Posner and a University of Chicago professor, Brian Leiter, on what Posner calls "pragmatic adjudication." But the Posner quote that most struck me was old news, from a January 2006 online debate about the NSA warrantless wiretapping revelations with Harvard law professor (and former district attorney) Philip Heymann at the New Republic. Posner wrote:

You say that "First we have to address ... the defiance of legislated prohibitions and the absence of published standards and any known system of accountability to the other branches." Why first? The way I approach a case as a judge--maybe you think it heresy--is first to ask myself what would be a reasonable, sensible result, as a lay person would understand it, and then, having answered that question, to ask whether that result is blocked by clear constitutional or statutory text, governing precedent, or any other conventional limitation on judicial discretion. That is how I would proceed if asked to decide a case challenging the legality of the NSA surveillance program.

Tamanaha observes that this approach isn't rule-oriented, but outcome-oriented -- i.e., pragmatic -- and continues:

One should also recognize how extremely ambitious this task is. Security experts as well as lay people sharply disagree about what is a “reasonable result” in this situation. Decisions of this type rest upon many imponderables of both value (the importance of civil liberties) and fact (the usefulness of this program as compared to alternatives). The problem is not just that there will be great disagreement over what is a reasonable result, but that there is no demonstrably correct or best answer to this question.

There's something of a cottage industry watching Posner's development of a "whatever works -- for me" school of legal thought on national security. "Balkinization" lead blogger Jack Balkin noticed the quote right away; Marty Lederman discussed Posner's doubts that courts should even be able to adjudicate such issues; KipEsquire ("A Stitch in Haste") has several posts about Posner's "increasingly bizarre views" when it comes to weighing our civil liberties against his safety. (For Judge Posner's own civil liberties will always be sacrosanct in a way that mine will not.) And who can forget the Fafblog "Posner on the Moon" discussion of the circuit judge's first foray into blogging, in which the Medium Lobster followed steely Posnerian logic to its ultimate conclusion:

Even after factoring in the cost of exhausting earth's nuclear stockpile and the ensuing rain of moon wreckage upon the earth (200 and 800, respectively), the numbers simply don't lie: our one rational course of action is to preventively annihilate the moon.

This seems as good a time as any to mention Tamanaha's comment that the Chicago Council of Lawyers concluded in 1994 that “A very substantial number of lawyers believe that Chief Judge Posner routinely does not pay sufficient attention to the facts, or leaves out crucial facts, in order to reach desired conclusions….Chief Judge Posner feels less constrained by precedent, history, and the proper limits on appellate judging than, in the Council’s view, he should…"

Tamanaha concludes with a somewhat anticlimactic warning to "be wary of the pied piper of pragmatic adjudication." I'll go a little further than that: to me, Posner's rejoinder to Heymann ought to peremptorily disqualify Posner from further judicial advancement, if Congress intends for its laws to mean anything at all.

Indeed, it occurs to me that while it may not seem "fair" or "legal" to less keenly honed minds than ours, dear readers, simple prudence and pragmatism may dictate that we wiretap, impeach, arrest, convict, and imprison Judge Posner as soon as possible. Secretly, of course.


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EDITS, 12/5: "civil liberties" (will be sacrosanct) for "privacy"; Council of Lawyers finding attributed to Tamanaha. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:05:00 AM -- |    

 
Time to go
In the Huffington Post/Atlantic Monthly piece "Getting out of Iraq: What's the Right Idea When All Ideas are Bad?," James Fallows writes that the implications of the reported Iraq Study Group conclusions are changing his mind. All emphases as in the original:

My previous point had been: this war was a bad idea, carried out with near-criminal incompetence and irresponsibility. But — I said — even those who opposed the war could not pretend that the last three and a half years had not occurred. The entire United States, including critics of the war, had taken on a responsibility not to make things even worse for the people of Iraq. And as long as the evidence suggested that conditions would become even worse for civilians — that the car bombings would increase, the ethnic cleansing would grow more brutal, and everyone would have as much reason to curse the United States for the way it left as for the way it came in — we could not “just leave.” [...]

The findings of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, as related through obviously authoritative leaks, mark a shift in the debate — and a change in my mind. This is not because the group has come up with a “good” idea where everyone else has failed. (To be fair, its ideas don’t seem worse than anyone else’s either — and they usefully straddle the divide between “cut and run” and “stay the course” by saying that the troops have to leave, but without saying exactly what the timetable is.) Rather it is because of the implied conclusion on which the panel’s findings (as reported) are based: that things are not going to get better, and the time for cutting losses has come.

Among the very possible consequences are an immediate upsurge in violence, al Qaeda and its ilk infesting the Sunni provinces unopposed, and the prospect of having been chased out of a second Vietnam. But, writes Fallows,

If it is not in our power to prevent these disasters, then it is better to do as little extra damage to ourselves as possible before they occur. Sure, it is theoretically in our power to do more in Iraq. It’s just not possible in the real world. To start with: we’re not going to double the size of our military to sustain an open-ended presence in Iraq.

So the choice is between a terrible decision and one that is even worse. The terrible decision is just to begin leaving, knowing that even more innocent civilians will be killed and that we’ll be dealing with agitation out of Iraq for years to come. The worse decision would be to wait another year, or two, or three and then take that terrible course. If we thought a longer commitment and presence would lead to a better outcome, then the extra commitment might be sensible. But nothing occurring in Iraq in the last year has given rise to any hope that things are getting better rather than worse. (This, by the way, is the reason I have changed my mind: the absence of evidence that the chances for a “decent” departure will improve.)

In a piece about an anti-war demonstration I joined last year, I came to similar conclusions. But this post isn't a misguided attempt to one-up Fallows, whose Iraq reporting and writing has been extraordinary and prescient.* Rather it's to join him in concluding that it's time to go -- and to join others in publicizing the next major opportunity to demonstrate that's what Americans want: a January 27th rally in Washington, D.C., organized by UFPJ, "United for Peace and Justice."

Given the recent election, both the timing and the prospects of an attentive political audience are good, I think. I believe the organizers and most who will attend are aware (as ever) that they'll have a responsibility to present a serious and peaceful approach to a grim debate.

Withdrawing from Iraq will not end our responsibilities to Iraqis; at minimum, I agree with George Packer's article "Save Whomever We Can": we may not be able to do anything for the country formerly known as Iraq, but we can do the right thing for Iraqis who threw in with us -- get those who want out the hell out of there.

Any of us who once supported the war but have changed our minds should lead in acknowledging there's more we should do than that. Americans may not be ready for it, and the nomenclature will almost certainly need to change, but George McGovern's call in a recent Harper's for reparations, foreign aid in our enlightened self-interest, call it what you will, is one that we will need to consider and follow over the next decades. Our track record with Vietnam isn't promising, though, and maybe Iraqis will mainly just not want to hear from us for the next thirty years or so.

Meanwhile, if you agree it's time for us to go, act now to end the war. We'll succeed unless we quit.


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* Including The Fifty-first State, Nov. 2002 ; Blind into Baghdad (article), January, 2004; Blind into Baghdad (book) August 2006; The Unilateralist: a conversation with Paul Wolfowitz, March 2002; The Hollow Army, March, 2004. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Babel

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

I saw a singular and very affecting movie on Saturday: "Babel," directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu ("21 Grams") and written by Iñárritu and fellow Mexican Guillermo Arreaga. It's a hard movie to describe without telegraphing outcomes; the tag line "if you want to be understood, listen" is a good one, but doesn't do it full justice.

"Babel" reminds me a lot of the 2000 Steven Soderbergh movie "Traffic," about the interlocking fates of people affected by the drug trade and drug policy. In the case of "Babel," the inanimate thing touching every family's life in the story turns out to be a high-powered hunting rifle that comes into the possession of a Moroccan shepherd and his sons. Unlike "Traffic," though, this .270 caliber thing serves as a catalyst and symbolic indicator of tragedy and emptiness -- why was it there? why was its victim there? -- rather than the ever-present, looming cause of temptation and despair that cocaine is in Soderbergh's movie.

What remains the same is the sense that a global culture is failing everyone touched by it; what is different, on reflection, is that Iñárritu and Arreaga do, in the end, depict those failures falling unequally harder on the poor and relatively powerless. To this extent, it's maybe even an answer to "Traffic"; the American husband and wife (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, in nicely done performances), for example, for all that they face a supreme test in Morocco, are also in some measure responsible for another one faced by their children and nanny a few days later on the U.S.-Mexican border, one that winds up having consequences at least as serious as their own.

The movie is driven by tragedy (a mother's death, a child's, a baby's -- two as backstory, one as wrenching climax), near-tragedy, and the threat of tragedy. But it redeems its draining -- and I mean white-knuckle draining -- moments with deeply moving grace notes: people transcending barriers of incomprehension by unforgettable, simple acts of humanity, mercy, and love. A hashish pipe is given like a blessing; a father squeezes his naked, deaf-mute daughter's hand (played by Rinko Kikuchi in a really memorable performance); a marriage reconciles over a bedpan; a brother risks his life to surrender; a policeman hugs a desperately sad and lonely girl; two men share photos of their kids. And it also redeems those moments, in a way, with the "rage against the machine" and human folly it expresses without being strident about it. Internalized, institutionalized fear and exploitation; selfishness; the petty humiliations inflicted by authority: they grate all the more by contrast with their opposites. You can be like this, or you can be like that.

Aside from all this, it seems to me to be a visually exceptional movie; the director and his camera crews find beauty and recreate well-observed slices of life in the austere Moroccan desert, the neon Japanese cityscapes, the technicolor cities and countryside of Mexico. And the global electronic village, too: the serene beauty of a helicopter rescue flight is ended, jarringly, by the babble and crush of news teams signifying nothing.

You won't find an easy truth to distill from "Babel"; it's worth seeing because you'll wonder what it was about and what it's saying. After reading the Bible passage above, going back over the movie in my head, and at the risk of being trite, I'll offer a different tagline: all you need is love. Maybe not a bad message to spend an evening on.


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UPDATE, 12/13: David Denby (The New Yorker) is unimpressed: "My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies." Cate Blanchett talking to Roger Ebert: "In every scene, there is somebody who doesn’t understand what somebody else is saying. That puts the audience in the position of knowing more than the characters, because we can read the subtitles and they can’t." Almost every scene, but good point. Ebert describes the movie as a "powerful group of interconnected stories."

EDIT, UPDATE, 1/24/07: Rinko Kikuchi, not Yuko Marata; she was rightly nominated for an Oscar, as was fellow supporting actress Adrriana Barraza (the nanny), director Inarritu, and the film itself .
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:28:00 AM -- |