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Where is Obama going on torture and war crimes

Monday, January 12, 2009

Most commentators I’ve read interpret Obama’s statements yesterday regarding torture, in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos, pretty much put paid to any notion that an Obama government will go after the evildoers. That’s likely true, but we shouldn’t give up hope quite yet.

Here’s the exchange:

OBAMA: We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering (ph).

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, no 9/11 commission with Independence subpoena power?

OBAMA: We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation’s going to be to move forward.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, let me just press that one more time. You’re not ruling out prosecution, but will you tell your Justice Department to investigate these cases and follow the evidence wherever it leads?

OBAMA: What I — I think my general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people’s lawyer. Eric Holder’s been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he’s going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past.

There’s a couple of things about this that give us hope. First, Holder has this to say about torture:

“Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution,…We owe the American people a reckoning.”

Obama did go out of his way to defer to Holder. But another consideration is this. If you were Obama, and you fully and absolutely intended to go after Bush and his cronies for each and every criminal act of the last eight years, how would you have answered that question? If you explicitly stated your intention, you would give Bush just the opening he needs to pardon each and every one of them to spare them from “politically motivated” persecution. Were I Obama, I’d keep my powder dry until I was safely in the White House, and Bush was safely out.

So there’s a glimmer of hope. All that being said, I must admit I’m not hopeful.

The idea that we should put these things behind us is, of course, absurd. The next Administration inclined to lawlessness will draw no other conclusion but that it can act without restraints because there will be no consequences. These people are not deterred by the threat of disapprobation. They wear it like a badge of honor. Only the threat of hard time is likely to stop them.


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Drug companies and doctors

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Check out this article at the New York Review of Books (Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption). It’s a review of three books about the way that drug companies market their product, and of the corrupt relationships between doctors and drug companies. It’s difficult to summarize. Read it now, since I think you can only read current articles on the site. The review (written by a former Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine) documents the following points, among many others:

  • Doctors, particularly prestigious doctors, have been paid for advocating the use of prescription drugs for conditions (such as childhood bi-polar, a growth disease) for which the drugs have not been approved. They can do this because once a drug is approved for any use, doctors are free to prescribe it for any condition, though the drug companies cannot market it for any but the approved purpose. However, they can pay huge consulting fees to doctors who advocate for those uses.
  • Drug companies have created new diseases to fit the drugs they create (Shyness, for example, is now “social anxiety disorder”, for which you should be medicated.
  • The doctors who perform clinical tests are conflicted, and the tests are designed to achieve favorable results.

I’ve really only scratched the surface. Here’s an illustrative paragraph that interested me, since I have so many clients who take the medications mentioned.

Many drugs that are assumed to be effective are probably little better than placebos, but there is no way to know because negative results are hidden. One clue was provided six years ago by four researchers who, using the Freedom of Information Act, obtained FDA reviews of every placebo-controlled clinical trial submitted for initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. They found that on average, placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs. The difference between drug and placebo was so small that it was unlikely to be of any clinical significance. The results were much the same for all six drugs: all were equally ineffective. But because favorable results were published and unfavorable results buried (in this case, within the FDA), the public and the medical profession believed these drugs were potent antidepressants.

The review puts most of the blame on the doctors, on the theory that the corporate corrupters are just being corporations, and calls on doctors to reform themselves, because otherwise the government “will step in and impose regulations. No one in medicine wants that.”.

Maybe no one in medicine want that, but the rest of us should. Just as the capitalists are just being capitalists, so the doctors and researchers are just being human. Most, if not all of these abuses could be easily remedied with a little judicious governing. For example, it would have been a lot harder for GlaxoSmithKline to market its drug, Paxil, as a cure for a made up disease (Social anxiety disorder), if it hadn’t been legal for it to advertise (The article discusses a giant ad campaign designed to boost “awareness” of social anxiety disorder and Paxil). Remember the good old days when drug makers couldn’t advertise to the general public? I’ve seen ads telling people to ask their doctors about certain drugs without even telling the viewer what the drugs were for. If such ads were banned, like cigarette ads, then one giant abuse would be ended. Unscientific studies, at least in the approval process, could be stopped by requiring all such studies to be carried out by government labs or researchers with whom the government contracts directly. The companies could be required to fund the research, but not pick the researchers. Any outside study could not be considered in the approval process. Don’t want drug companies making payments to doctors? Ban it, or at least remove the tax deduction for any such payments. In fact, most of the problems appear to be rather easy to address on a theoretical level. Political will is another matter.

Parenthetically, there’s indirect evidence here that doctors don’t spend as much time worrying about lawsuits as they claim. I’m referring to the practice of prescribing drugs for conditions for which the drugs have not been approved or proven effective.

Consider the clinical trials by which drugs are tested in human subjects. Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinical trials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive—that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk—the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative. Drugs are approved only for a specified use—for example, to treat lung cancer—and it is illegal for companies to promote them for any other use.

But physicians may prescribe approved drugs “off label”—i.e., without regard to the specified use—and perhaps as many as half of all prescriptions are written for off-label purposes. After drugs are on the market, companies continue to sponsor clinical trials, sometimes to get FDA approval for additional uses, sometimes to demonstrate an advantage over competitors, and often just as an excuse to get physicians to prescribe such drugs for patients. (Such trials are aptly called “seeding” studies.)

It’s hard to believe doctors would prescribe in that fashion if they were constantly worried about lawsuits.

Update: Today a sort of inverse proof that judicious government can solve these problems, as injudicious government has just attempted to exacerbate them. (Via Majikthise from Reuters)

U.S. health officials finalized guidelines that allow pharmaceutical companies to tell doctors about unapproved uses of their medicines, a practice opposed by critics of industry marketing.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines allow manufacturers such as Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) and Merck & Co (MRK.N) to distribute copies of medical journal articles that describe unapproved uses. The action could help companies expand the markets for medicines and medical devices.

The move, announced a week before Republican President George W. Bush leaves office, puts in place a policy that drew objections from congressional Democrats and drug-industry critics when it was proposed last year. Opponents say it will allow promotion of uses without adequate testing.


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Another Connecticut Blog

Sunday, January 11, 2009

My wife and I subscribe to the American Prospect, in which today I found an article by Sharon Butler, a professor of visual arts at Eastern Connecticut State University. The University is a bit north of here, but safely ensconced in our largely ignored Eastern part of the state. I enjoyed the article (subscription required to read the whole article), about the prospects for art in the age of Obama. I particularly enjoyed her take on the current exhibition at the Guggenheim, about which I expressed my own thoughts a few weeks ago. I said:

The other main attraction consisted of a collaboration of artists that, according to the museum’s website:

Working independently and in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the discrete aesthetic object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding in its physical and temporal parameters.

I have no reason to believe they did not succeed in their artistic endeavors, as I have no idea what the above means. Mostly the fruit of their efforts consisted of slogans written on the wall, or hanging from the ceiling, many of which made no sense whatsoever.

Ms. Butler says the exhibit in question was a perfect exemplar of art in the age of Bush:

Nowhere in the art world has this collective despondency and resignation been more starkly revealed than in a recent Guggenheim Museum exhibition lethargically titled “theanyspacewhatever.” Ten relational artists — that is, those focusing on how people and communities interact — who made it big over the past decade were commissioned to collaborate with curator Nancy Spector on installations that would occupy the museum’s five spirally arranged floors. Much of the show featured empty space, and Douglas Gordon’s faux-sage existential notions stenciled across the walls (“You’re closer than you know,” “Nothing will ever be the same”) seemed calculated to convey the profundity of banality and vice-versa — a Bushian notion if ever there were one. Perhaps the conceptual high point of the exhibition was Jorge Pardo’s maze of cardboard-screen partitions unevenly perforated with vaguely alien shapes, which made viewers yearn for it all to be over.

She’s right about the cardboard, but it beat the empty space by a mile:

I plead not guilty by reason of lack of notice to taking unauthorized pictures. We took the elevator up and worked our way down. The sign barring cameras was, so far as we noticed, only on the first floor as you enter the spiral. We only saw it as we exited.

But I digress (do I do anything else?). The main reason for writing this post is to let my readers know that Ms. Butler has a blog, and since she is from our neck of the woods, and since she appears to be a good leftie, i thought I would point you to it. It’s called Two Coats of Paint, and you can reach it at the link, or from the blogroll at the right. It’s about art, mostly, though she does hit on politics. Here’s her take on Bush’s official portrait.


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10 More Days

Saturday, January 10, 2009


via Tom Tomorrow


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Legalities

Saturday, January 10, 2009

One must wonder if the Democrats have given any thought to the implications of the position they are taking regarding the Burris appointment to the Senate. At this point, they are clinging to the claim that a gubernatorial appointment isn’t legal until it is certified by the Secretary of State of Illinois. The Illinois Supreme Court has already ruled that this claim is bogus, and that pesky little document, the Constitution, doesn’t lend the argument much support. The Seventeenth Amendment seems clear:

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of each State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

For better or worse, and we can all agree it’s for the worse, Blagojevich is the executive of Illinois. The constitution didn’t give a veto to the Secretary of State, and the Senate can’t impose additional requirements. It’s not within their powers.

But let’s think a little bit about this. Let’s accept the Reid/Durbin argument for a moment. That means that the Illinois Secretary of State does have a veto over the governor’s selection. It also means every other Secretary of State in any other state has a veto over his or her governor’s selection. The Secretary of State is not always a member of the same party as the sitting governor. Consider Colorado’s situation. It happens that the former Republican Secretary of State won election to the Congress, and the Democratic governor has the right to name a replacement. But, what if the Republican had lost his election? Do the Democrats contend that he could have vetoed the Salazar replacement by refusing to certify the selection? After all, they are relying on a Senate rule that appears to require such a certification, not on any peculiar quirk of Illinois law. Do they really think it’s a good idea to let a partisan Republican Secretary of State frustrate a Democratic governor? As things stand now, Obama can’t appoint any Senator from a state with a Republican governor (sorry, Chris). If the Democrats get their way, any Senator from a state with a Democratic governor and a Republican Secretary of State will be scratched from the list of potential appointees.

This is one of the reasons we are supposed to follow the law. It may be convenient to bend it in our favor in a given situation, but refraining from doing so lessens the chance that it will be bent against us in the future.


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Econ 101

Saturday, January 10, 2009

This pretty much sums it up:


Thanks to the folks who passed this on to my wife, who passed it on to me, who probably had it passed to them from someone else.

(Click on the image to see a larger, readable version)


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Friday Night Music-Los Lobos

Friday, January 9, 2009

Once again, thanks to a reader/Liberal Drinker, who suggested this performance. A great band.


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A new local blog

Thursday, January 8, 2009

We live in an old (1791) house. Sometimes things gradually go wrong, and it takes us a while to realize we have been living with something for a long time that really ought to be fixed. Then, six or seven months later, we actually get it fixed. Today was one of those days.

The light fixture in our downstairs bathroom had three bulbs. It was installed about three years ago, and almost immediately one bulb stopped working (it wasn’t the bulb, it was something in the fixture). Sometime in the last few months, another bulb stopped working. Around the first of the year, the last bulb started to give out, so we sprang into action. We figured, that in addition to dealing with the emergency situation, it might be a good time to get a number of other long deferred electrical problems fixed, like the light in the upstairs bathroom, which showed signs of emulating its downstairs cousin.

We have a friend, a good Democrat, who’s a contractor, and we called him to recommend someone to do the work. He brought a fellow to the house today, and wouldn’t you know, he’s got a blog. Doesn’t everybody? Unlike yours truly, he writes about something he knows something about: energy use in our daily lives. He just started posting toward the end of December. Check him out at Helios at Home.

By the way, he does good work. Our fixture with the pull cord is no more, we now have a functioning light and a wall switch. This may not sound like much to you folks with 20th century homes, but those inhabiting relics from the 18th century may understand.


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Deliver us from Harry Reid

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Democrats have a real problem with Harry Reid. Right now we can see the pattern being set for weak, ineffectual, vacillating “leadership” of the Senate, which will inevitably lead to a failure to pass and implement Obama’s programs. The same people who rolled over to give Bush, an unelected President, carte blanche for eight years will join the Republicans to cripple Obama in the early going

First, let us pause to consider where Reid chooses to make a stand. Whatever you think of the Burris appointment, the fact is that there is no legal way that he can be refused a seat. Posturing prior to the appointment was acceptable, but posturing now makes no sense. It is particularly depressing that the Democrats can’t simply come forward and say that the law is the law, like it or not, and that Burris gets the seat. He’s an odd duck, but from all appearances, far superior to what passes for Senators from most of the red states. Reid has managed to make a bad situation far worse by fighting a battle that he must inevitably lose. He will inevitably have to back down, something he’s actually pretty good at, but Burris may be the first Democrat that’s ever made him do it.

Meanwhile, we have the spectacle of Harry Reid, the long time Bush enabler, signaling that he will by no means be enabling Obama:

Reid stated, “I don’t believe in the executive power trumping everything… I believe in our Constitution, three separate but equal branches of government.”

“If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him. … I do not work for Barack Obama. I work with him,” he said.

Those are actually very laudable sentiments. Who can disagree? Harry may even have endorsed them during the Bush presidency, but if he ever talked the talk, he never walked the walk. Somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to actually face down the man he says was the worst president in history. Unfortunately, there’s little doubt that he’ll walk the walk now, frustrating Obama while continuing to roll over and spout his “It takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate” nonsense whenever the Republicans decide to be obstructionist, which will, by the way, be always.

The Democrats and Obama have about a 6 month window of opportunity to prove that they can govern effectively. The Republicans are going to try to shut that window, but they needn’t go to a great deal of effort. The Democrats, with Reid in the “lead”, will shut it for them.

Reid, by the way, also believes that poor Ted Stevens should be spared jail time. According to Reid, poor Ted just didn’t understand that we’re living in a different world from the graft ridden one in which he rose to power, and that he’s been punished enough. As far as I know, so far he’s only lost an election. I’ve probably lost more elections than Stevens. Maybe I should get some get out of jail free card for a crime of my choice.

I hazard a prediction: every major piece of legislation proposed by Obama will die or be maimed in the Senate.

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Caroline Kennedy’s candidacy

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

By no means am I a Caroline Kennedy partisan. I will lose no sleep if she is not appointed to the Senate. Nonetheless I’m a bit mystified at the heated opposition her “candidacy” has generated in certain corners of the blogosphere, particularly at Firedoglake. In the latest piece on the subject, “Eli” argues that a potential Senator needs some minor league seasoning before hitting the big time:

The record shows that making the jump to the big leagues without any experience is not a recipe for prolonged success. Mike Morgan,the only one of those four players who sustained any kind of career, did spend two years in the minors after a terrible start. There is value to seasoning and experience, especially when it comes to high-pressure jobs like United States Senator or, yes, major-league pitcher.

In truth and in fact, plenty of people have made perfectly good Senators without serving time in the minors. It really isn’t like baseball. Baseball is harder. Just ask Jim Bunning, who had to retire when he lost his fastball, but who satisfies his constituents as a Senator, despite his senility. Moreover, if memory serves, Firedoglake was a big Lamont supporter, about whom the same argument was made by Joltin’ Joe (to extend the baseball analogy) Lieberman.

I can understand the anti-dynasty argument, and I’m sympathetic to it, but it seems that the anti-Kennedyites are becoming a bit rabid on this subject.


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